With every passing minute my Spanish is worse. Luckily I have little pride and am glad I can bring such raucous laughter to the locals. I communicate more with flailing of arms than verbal articulation. On the bright side, I think my comprehension is improving because I didn’t hear anyone ask if I showered with my dromedary which — I’m not kidding — I’m sure happened yesterday.
We heard from Doí±a Justa (the woman who does housekeeping here) about Hurricane Stan’s devastation of Atitlí¡n and the highlands. She also told us about the volcano in the eighties that destroyed her village and left her family homeless, living under a tarp for three years.
We slept late and didn’t wander into Antigua until late afternoon. On La Calzada de Santa Lucia we stopped at the post office to buy stamps. They didn’t have any. On to the bank which was guarded by submachine-gun-toting men so young they should’ve been holding squirtguns.
We braved the fringes of the mercado, where M decided she wanted a pupusa (cost: 5 quetzales, or about 80 cents). She ordered hers from a teenaged girl who, once paid, started into a coughing fit and, with the hand that received the coughs, gave M’s pupusa loving pats before handing it over. I decided to buy mine a few stalls down. I wished I could wash my hands before burying them in pupusa since I’d just handled grossly dirty money, but M reassured me: “Your hands are cleaner than the pupusa.”
It soon became clear to both of us that some remedial Spanish would do us good, so we signed up for classes starting on Monday. To qualify we had to take a Spanish test (I failed) and answer a handful of questions, presumably about our learning style. There were several I found it inadvisable to answer:
- Do you write on napkins in a restaurant?
- Do you talk to yourself?
- Do you like to feel the texture of drapes and furniture?
After a meal at La Fonda (where someone famous had eaten) I accidentally asked the waiter for a date instead of a check.
We walked through dark but busy streets and looked at the Christmas lights at the bustling parque central, where I made the mistake of stopping to sit on a bench. Within seconds a young boy emerged from the dark to shine my shoes. Now that I think about it, I don’t know why I said no so automatically. Just because my shoes were suede didn’t mean they didn’t need shining. And the two or three quetzales he charges mean nothing to me and something to him. Maybe I’m trying not to feel; the poverty here is stunning.
When he continued to jab a finger toward my shoes, I tried some unsuccessful Spanish on him and, when that didn’t work, I tried to ignore him. But even after several minutes he was undeterred. When I next glanced up at him I saw a look of such pure hatred in his 10-year-old eyes that it scared me. I was confused and sobered at its origin, though I suspect I may understand part of what he was thinking. It was time to go home.
A cab driver named Alfredo drove us, patiently trying to comprehend my incomprehensible Spanish only to reveal he spoke far better English. In the dark street I couldn’t get the key to open the porton so Don Alfredo helped by shining his headlights on it. Once we got safely in, tired and overwhelmed, we triple-locked ourselves in the house and went to sleep.
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