Call Me Charlie

Issue 326

You guys,

It was Thursday morning and I made my way to Borneo Coffee—my normal routine before Spanish class.

Borneo has the best chipas, chocolate croissants, chocolate chip cookies, and coffee, but what I really love about the place is that when I walk through the door I can practice my Spanish. The baristas smile at me and let me take my time and lightly correct my verb conjugations when I speak of anyone but myself.

I had no interest in learning Spanish when I arrived in La Barra. Sam was the one who’d been practicing with Duolingo for the year leading up to our trip. More power to him, I thought. The only language I had any interest in learning was French, because that was the language I learned in middle and high school. I’d always loved the French language, how I could read a full page of text out loud, and though I might not know what it meant and could never master the guttural, back-of-the-throat “r” sound, I loved the nasally vowels, the rhythm of the words as they blended together, how I had a knack for knowing which letters were silent.

After two weeks of living in Uruguay, when I felt a longing to connect with the locals and couldn’t, it only re-affirmed my desire to learn French—not Spanish. I wouldn’t be able to communicate with the people here for three whole months, but somewhere down the road we’d probably spend time in a French-speaking country, and that’s what I would optimize for. When I signed up for the group Spanish lessons—a last-minute decision, two days before they started—it was to learn the bare minimum so I wouldn’t look like a total idiot in public, so that I could at least communicate a little, just enough to get by without Sam by my side.

At the market I went to each week I befriended Paco, who spoke no English. Most days I said the same things: Quiero juevos grande, por favor. Quiero bolsa, por favor, but in the last few weeks, because I’d been learning bit by bit in class, I thought of things I could say in the moment before I said them. “Aqui una mas mesa,” I said one day, trying to say, “Here one more month,” but as he looked at me with a slightly confused expression I remembered that mesa was table. I tapped the counter to show I knew I got it wrong. “Not mesa,” I said.

“Si, mes!” he said.

The sentence was pathetic—caveman speak—it should have been “un” instead of “una,” and it should have been “mes mas” instead of “mas mes,” but Paco understood. We were together, on the same planet, in his world of Spanish—I was a member of his community.

Every Thursday, I attended class with five other parents for an hour and forty-five minutes. We met at the hub with our teacher, Pietro, a young 20-something teddy bear of a man who was sweet and smiley and stylish and reminded us that Spanish was hard and it takes time and we were all doing great, but also kept us in line when too many people were talking at once, or we had gotten off track, and he fully expected our attendance and for us to complete our homework. One week he overloaded us with twelve pages of a written assignment. It took me three days and approximately six hours to finish it. Instead of my usual writing in the early morning hours, I did Spanish homework. “This is ridiculous!” I said to Sam one morning.

“I thought you wanted to learn Spanish,” Sam said, sipping his coffee. “This is good.”

At some point during the cohort, my feelings about learning Spanish had shifted. The more I understood the more I wanted to understand. The more I spoke the more I wanted to speak. Sam walked over and looked over my shoulder, staring at the sentences. I could see him coming up with the answers in his head.

“Man, this is hard!” he said.

I hadn’t been in school for eighteen years. The sensation of cramming was uncomfortable. My classmates were already giving up or flat-out refusing to finish the homework, but I knew the kind of student I was, that I could not show up to class with an unfinished assignment. Instead of looking up the answers in the back of a textbook, I consulted Google Translate and ChatGPT. Was this cheating? It had to be cheating, which was not the kind of student I’d been in school. But in my school days I also never cared about learning the material. I only cared about the grade. Here, at 41 years old, living in South America, I wanted to speak and understand Spanish. I trusted that the overload of new vocabulary and writing of sentences would somehow stay with me, and by the end of the packet, there were words and phrases stuck in my head that I didn’t know before I started. Siempre, nunca, a veces. Juntos. Esta nublado. Las luces, trabajar. Todos los dias, esposo, en serio. So much of it didn’t sink in but some of it did. After six hours of homework I had a small arsenal of new vocabulary.

I walked to Borneo later that morning, my completed homework stapled together and tucked into the folder in my backpack. After I ordered an iced latte and two chocolate croissants, I did something I’d never done before. I went off script. I told the two baristas behind the counter that I was learning Spanish, and I loved it, and it was the highlight of my trip. I didn’t know how to say “highlight”, but everything else I searched for in my head and found the Spanish words I wanted to say. The young man and woman, who also liked to practice their English, nodded at me and smiled and the woman put a hand to her chest and said that that made her so happy. “Your Spanish is very good,” she added. “Most Americans who come in here don’t even try.”

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Until next week,

Charlie