Remembering how to paint in Spanish
Lost in Spain; found a little bit again in Colombia: why learning a language really is like riding a bike.
I left my Spanish in Madrid’s Parque del Buen Retiro on an obnoxiously beautiful day in May.
The spring semester had just come to a close, and the other American students in my study abroad program had all seemingly gotten the memo. There was a patch of grass in the park next to the cedar trees where we sat for hours, listening to the same mariachi band circle around us playing incessant loops of Cielito Lindo.
The music and the sunlight beat down on us with such consistency that I was momentarily pulled into a lull of eternity. I think I remember reading somewhere once that most dreams only last a few minutes, even though you can live an entire lifetime within one.
In New York, Spanish occasionally enriched my experience with the dabbing on of a few alternative shades. In Colombia, it was the majority of the palette.
That afternoon was deceptively forever-like; a snapshot of me at the height of my Spanish-speaking ability at the end of my five months living in Madrid. It took about that long for my linguistic muscle memory to start doing some of the heavy lifting for me, and probably about that long for my Spanish to wither away from disuse once I returned to the States.
The road to monolingualism is paved with good intentions to continue practicing your second language after it stops being a major necessity.
That’s the story of how I forgot my conjugation tables over the next six years. “Hay que mantener (you have to maintain it),” I remember Alex saying. We met in Madrid and continue to be best friends, but she took her own advice to heart much more than I did. She went on to study in Buenos Aires and ended up working for a Latin American art gallery here in New York City. Meanwhile, I doubled down on my career writing in English for the internet.
That’s the story of how she wound up taking the lead for us both when we traveled to Colombia together in 2015, six years after we’d met in Madrid. We had dozens of interactions each day with the locals, and some required a Spanish of a deeper complexity than I could easily muster.
For every relatively successful interaction I had, there were one or two ridiculously awkward ones.
If you’re reading this and waiting for me to tell you that I was speaking more comfortably by the end of my trip, you’re right. But the road I traveled was inefficient, indirect, and looped like cursive handwriting.
The first person we had a sustained conversation with was the cab driver who drove us from the airport to our temporary home in Cartagena. We laughed as we whipped along the seaside carreteras and talked about our plans; where we came from. We also talked about how we’d both come to speak Spanish so well. I was pleased with the compliment, and with how much more I remembered than I previously assumed.
But for every relatively successful interaction I had, there were one or two ridiculously awkward ones. Alex and I soon had a punchline that became the sitcom refrain of our trip: “stupid gringa!” we’d say in unison every time one of us obliged to an impromptu salsa dance with a marginally safe stranger at a neighborhood festival, prompting several Colombian grandmas to surreptitiously warn us to be more careful. Or every time one of us realized we were in the children’s stall at the Bogotá airport, only to shrug and go through with using the miniature toilet that was roughly one foot off the ground. Or every time one of us tried (and failed) to lighten the mood at the clothing store in Medellín by joking about her big butt with the sales ladies. For the record, that was me in all of those cases.
On our flight home, we compiled a definitive list of “stupid gringa” moments. And while both of us contributed, the linguistic episodes were largely my domain.
At the Castillo San Felipe de Barajas in Cartagena, a large fortress that offered epic views of the city below, I stuttered through an exchange with another visitor who couldn’t understand why I’d want to photograph the sleeping dogs instead of the skyline. “Yes, there are views, but there is also dog,” I managed in my stilted Spanish (Hay vistas, pero también hay perro). Nos vimos, I added for good measure, suggesting “we’d see” how the pictures turned out. What I actually said was: “We saw each other.” He abandoned that interaction before I did.
At one point, I was asked for a kiss. I rebuffed him politely: Los besos no son para extranjeros (“kisses are not for strangers”). He looked more confused than dejected. Recounting the episode to Alex, I was reminded that extranjero means “foreigner,” not “stranger.” Minus six points for accidental xenophobia.
I stumbled through an interaction with a bookstore employee in Medellín and immediately deferred back to Alex: “Wait, what did I just say?”
The gaffes stayed with me (largely because they’re documented in a list), but what arguably stayed with me more was the immediacy with which a dormant language could spring back to life as soon as I needed it to.
In New York, Spanish occasionally enriched my experience with the dabbing on of a few alternative shades. In Colombia, it was the majority of the palette.
When the colors you rarely use become the totality of what you’re working with, you find ways to create something meaningful out of your lack of finesse. I’m pretty sure that crude, sloppy brush strokes can still garner respect in the art world of life. If anything, they’re currently selling for millions of dollars to a wealthy patron.
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