Flora & fauna

The leaves turn here, in patches, at the same time as the orange trees bear fruit & the olives begin to be harvested. Palm trees tremble in pale, weak sunlight. Oranges ripen fat & plump next to bare branches. Autumn.

In honor of Santa Catalina de Alejandría, 4th c. martyr & patron of philosophers & students, who is symbolized by the palm, the sword, & the rueda dentada, iced sardines are roasted whole, scales & heads, on flat griddletops with sea salt, & the entire city climbs to the summit of the mountain next to the castle to eat them on her feast day with their fingers. You eat them over bread to soak up the oil, boned & peeled.

To the east:  hills greening in the early winter rain, the pass that is called gap-tooth, the beginning of the Sierra Máginas. To the west: the city, all of Jaén huddled around the base of the single mountain, the hilly olived countryside like a rumpled bedsheet.

Obama, or “el presidente negro” [El País]

Headline from EL PAÍS, 5 days after the election.

I.

I typed this on 5 NOVEMBER, 7:35 p.m. Woke up this morning later than I would have normally, like on Christmas when I was younger, when I’d lie half awake and feel the weight of the stocking at the foot of the bed & go back to sleep on purpose, to prolong that feeling of suspension. Had the heel of a barra de pan with nutella & a banana & watched the news with the sound off in the predawn darkness. It was an hour after midnight in the U.S. The first thing I saw on Canal Uno was a blue map of the States, a tally in the corner, a whopping number, a landslide electoral tally. I changed channels & saw Obama speaking, his lips moving, a Spanish announcer dubbing in the words. Then I turned the television off & put on my coat & took an orange from the bowl in the kitchen & walked to the bus station, to go to school.

I remember very clearly walking to school the morning after the election, while the sun rose behind the buildings & the Sierra Máginas & the garbage men gathered in ranks on the corner of the Gran Eje & Avenida de Barcelona, & thinking to myself how inevitable & relieved I felt, how unambiguously proud. By then it was probably an hour after midnight on the East Coast, midnight in Chicago.

And to all those watching tonight from beyond our shores, from parliaments and palaces, to those who are huddled around radios in the forgotten corners of the world . . .

By the time I got to school, many of the teachers had heard. I got pats on the back & thumbs up in the teachers’ lounge. The woman working in the caféteria said my morning coffee was on the house. Kids ran through the halls yelling, “O-ba-ma!” One man came up, shook my hand, said very carefully in English, “Congratulations.” One or two expressed blunt surprise that he had made it alive. I listened to the acceptance speech streaming over the internet & actually cried at one point – kind of welled up. The sheer, profound relief that I could possess a basic expectation of competent governance, intelligent decision-making, eloquent speeches – that whatever else happened, things wouldn’t run aground, there wouldn’t be rampant criminality, abuse, circumvention, arrogant power. This relief, more than anything else, had me shaking, my thousands of miles away.

ii.

It goes without saying that remembering this kind of emotion, even less than three weeks later, feels distant. You want to be analytic about it. But there it is: factually. And it’s a fact, too, that Spain, like Europe generally, rejoiced, congratulated, or at the least took for granted Obama’s inevitable victory over an opponent whose name few could remember or cared about. Long after I was nervously rewatching debates & a thousand various opinions in prose my teachers were pretty well convinced that he’d win the election.

All well & good. But at the same time, & amidst all of this jubilation, it’s hard sometimes to reconcile the happiness here with Spanish racial attitudes, which are complicated in that they live completely outside the framework we’re accustomed to operating in back in the States.

Spanish lacks synonyms – negro/a, (black), stands in for a race, and also exists, as in that great body of 19th c British literature, in a thousand colloquial expressions as catchall term for bad, unlucky, suspicious. A joke, told to me before the election: Sí gana Obama, será un día negro en America; sí gana McCain, será un día negro para el mundo.

Literally, “If Obama wins, it’ll be a black day for America; if McCain wins, it’s a black day for the world.”

The word alone is a little weird to say out loud for an American English speaker. What’s worse is the way that it’s routinely conflated with bad, unpleasant, suspicious,  - a kind of rhetoric racism that simply isn’t recognized in Spain. Where, for instance, any Asian person is chino/a - no differentiation - as in the old woman who visited the school café the other day & was introduced to me and said, “Paraces un poco chino, ¿no? En los ojos.” Clearer: Your eyes make you look kinda chino.

Or an old Catholic teacher at my school: The center of town is like Chinatown! There’s more chinos than españoles – I don’t know why they all had to come out all the way here.

Cheap or shoddy goods are chino. Bad weather, mala suerte, misfortune – negro, negro, negro. There is surely something about the way the headline returns el presidente negro directly to Africa that speaks to this conflation – but then again, isn’t it pretty straight news? After all, his victory was a big deal in Kenya too. 

iii.

All of this is complicated further by pure nativism; Spain’s relationship to northern Africa is roughly the same as the States’ to Mexico – frontiers, borders that are the focus of hysteria over an impermeable national identity, worries over language & culture, thinly disguised racial terror. To the extent that Spain as a nation has a cultural identity, it is in part Spanish, & in part a vision, like many European nations, of an Occidental culture synonymous with civilization, which I always can’t help but thinking of the arrival of Conrad’s narrator to the “city that always makes me think of a whited sepulchre.”

My compañero de piso & his friends from the pueblo watch, for example, news reports about Africa with a kind of distant, undifferentiated fascination. “Things,” I might say in Spanish, “are pretty bad in the Congo right now. I read an article in the Times about it. Especially for women, there’s an epidemic of rapes that’s only beginning to be addressed.” And my roommate will respond, yeah, things are bad in Africa, you’re right.

In local city schools here in Jaén, North African students are mostly ignored, left in the back of the classroom, & actively discouraged from participating, doubly so if they’re not yet fully integrated into Spanish. They are looked at as problem kids from the moment they enter – this according to auxiliares who work in those schools.

I can’t speak for my kids, because out of the approx. 70 children I teach directly I can count on the fingers of one hand those who were born outside of Bédmar or Garcíez, the smaller pueblo whose kids are bussed here (the high school is less than a decade old), or perhaps the provincial capital. I have one kid not born in Spain – a 13 yr. old from Lithuania.

Andalucía is homogeneous; your identity as a Spaniard is one that’s apparent – an ocular proof. Language, too. And if you’re Spaniard – people remark sometimes, approvingly, that I look moreno, that my accent is castillano – you’re fine.

It seems to me that Obama, as in the States, as with many exceptional racial figures, is perceived by the world in a different light than, say, the North African street vendors who spread their wares in blankets on the Plaza de la Constitución without permits & have to gather them up or be rousted when the police come. There’s a double consciousness at work here, too. But I don’t know. I’m not sure I have the vocabulary or the insight to say.

iv.

None of these declarative statements sit well with me; I want to equivocate. The teacher who drives me to school every morning was talking to me about an auxiliar from Britain at her last school, a black woman who’d left late in the semester because she’d been terribly homesick. She was great, she told me, with the kids. A good teacher. But so homesick. Her family came to visit twice in two months. She cried all the time. But she was very good while she was here. She had a beautiful singing voice – of course, claro. La voz negra, ¿sabes? Como todos.

To which, well – what do you say to that? Like the other things you’re given, you nod silently, you make a little sound in the back of your throat, you take it, another piece of information, you swallow it, & you continue living in the culture, you eat what everyone eats, you try to hold your fork the same way, you imitate the pronunciation & memorize folk sayings & after you pour the olive oil on the tostada in the morning & spread the tomato you take the knife & break the golden top of the bread to let the oil soak in so that it doesn’t spill over your hands, like everyone else.

Judgment you reserve for a little later. This, at any rate, is what I’ve seen, to the extent that I’m able to see.

 

_

Other longer stuff:

Teaching - Féria - Hometown tourism – Cultural differences

Peppermint frappé

Update: The censored Franco-era film that I recall in fragments to this day (& wrote about vaguely on the anniversary of his death) is Peppermint frappé (1967), & while I remembered the mint-green colored drink & the pogo-stick dream, I forgot completely that it’s not a stand-in for a bedroom discovery scene, but for his jealous voyeurism, because the entire film revolves around the bookish, buttoned-up main character’s obsessive – & eventually murderous – desire for the blonde, English-speaking wife of his blustering & typically masculine Spanish friend, who he confuses for a woman he falls in love with at sight in the beginning of the film. 

I couldn’t find the dream sequence on youtube, but I did find this, which, in its extended shots & general psychadelic craziness is really the next best thing. My favorite part’s at around the 2:10 – 2:50 mark, when things kind of climax: the camera is tracking around them in circles without cutting, Pablo is doing the potato masher, Ana/Elena starts quoting Romeo & Juliet in English, the singer’s screaming about a “mystery man,” peppermint frappés are poured in earnest, and you can practically see the snapped rose wilting on Julián’s lapel -

Little things

I was in a good mood this afternoon for no particular reason, so in the spirit of Jackie’s admonition the last time I went listmaking, here’s a list of little things that have been making me happy recently:

A stack of blue & red checked airmail envelopes I bought for just ,50 céntimos.

Getting my first roll of 35mm developed, & having some of the pictures come out, even though I didn’t rewind it correctly & I exposed half of the roll.

The box of Navidad dulces, cookies, & miniature pastries flavored with almond slivers or orange peel that my school’s jefe de estudios bought & left out in the teacher’s lounge.

This sublime & ridiculous vermouth commercial, aired nonstop for the last month or so, in which George Clooney – in my Andalucían television? – inexplicably appears with a pencil-thin sevillano mustache to say a single word in Spanish.

My weekly bag of clementines.

The music that the local talk radio station plays during my early-morning car ride to school to start the news break, sung by what sounds like muppets backed by a syncopated juke joint piano & handclaps, the words to which are basically, Hoy es martes! Son . . . las ocho! and there are some handclaps & more Spanish and then the littlest muppet asks, “En Canarias?” and a basso-voiced news announcer replies, “En Canarias: las siete,” & the muppet replies, “Ah, vale.”

The sevillano hip-hop playing at a pretty sweet bar off the Plaza de Los Batalles last night, the flow of which was reminiscent of old-school N.W.A.

Getting away with singing this song with my 7th graders while I played the guitar, to teach long & short vowel sounds.

Having an excuse to play Ella Fitzgerald & Louis Armstrong’s “Let’s Call the Whole Thing Off,” for the same reason. And: Not being able to explain the meaning of the word “saspirella.”

Fresh bread.

Cheap espresso.

Sunlight.

Today in history

On this day in 1975, Francisco Franco, dictator in Spain for 36 years, died. He died on the same day as had José Antonio Primo de Rivera, founder of the Falange, who had been captured during the Civil War & executed in prison & was subsequently turned into a martyr of the regime.

[See Sandy Holguien's guest post on the Spanish Civil War at The Edge of the American West, linked above, from which I've stolen the "On this day in . . . " format].

Franco was toasted near the end of his life by President Richard Nixon, who said on his death, “General Franco was a loyal friend and alley of the United States. He earned worldwide respect for Spain through firmness and fairness.”

Symbols of Franco’s government, such as the national flag he inaugurated with the Imperial Eagle, are banned by law as of last year. Newspapers over the last few months here have been covering attempts by the judge who indicted Augusto Pinochet, Balthazar Garzón, to open an enormous case trying Franco & 44 of his top aides for disappearances & mass executions during the civil war. This includes finding the unmarked mass grave of the poet García Lorca, shot by fascists. [It looks as though the case won't go national, & will be parceled out by local courts.]

Meanwhile, a new sketch-comedy show on la Sexta, Generación D.F. (después de Franco)- that is, the dissolute youth born after 1975 – is advertised alongside a new biopic about the general’s last days, & his death. Yesterday night on “Sé Lo Que Hicisteis,” which is a kind of news-comedy program, a video sketch featured a disheveled, delusional Francoiststanding vigil outside the monument to his tomb & carrying on a conversation that went something like, General? General! You can come out now! Whenever you’re ready. Ok. Ok, I’ll just be waiting right here.

So, what do I say on a day like today? At the least: When you see graffiti on those whitewashed stucco walls like Fascism is a disease whose cure is a bullet in the head, on a day like today you begin to realize that “fascist” is more immediate & specific invective here than in the States.

I’m trying to think of comparisons – a television program in Russia that routinely redubbed televised speeches of Stalin, for example, to comedic effect – but I can’t. Most of the really horrifying stuff that the regime did – using the FalangeForeign Service to kidnap children from Republican parents abroad, for instance, or presiding over a decade of famine & irrational economic medievalism – happened during the 30s and 40s, and because Franco was in power so long, he had an opportunity to mellow & become familiar in a way that I can’t really find a precedent for.

Most vividly, I remember watching a Spanish film from the 60s in my third year high school class called . . . something about peppermint, I think, and learning that because of censorship, the cinema had resorted to elaborate allegory – in this case, a man had fallen asleep downstairs & had a dream about a little girl jumping on a pogo stick, the sound of which was dubbed over by the sound of jouncing bedsprings, because his wife or novia or whatever was upstairs with a different man, and this dream was meant to symbolize what in a more direct film culture would have been a simple storm-into-the-bedroom discovery scene.

I still get the feeling that every time someone swears on Spanish television or talks openly about sex there’s a little charge, a kind of feeling of triumphant reversal.

I’m not really equipped to quantify the impact of a four-decade fascist dictatorship in guise of monarchic regency, and the years of civil war that preceded on Spain – I feel like I can barely talk about it. It’s too big. Something is there for a half century, a fact of life, immovable, and then it disappears, & thirty years later, more, you can feel the effects even if you don’t really know how to say what’s happened.

Vocabulary lessons

Reading Raymond Chandler’s The Long Goodbye in Spanish: a good way to find out that esposas means not just wives, but handcuffs.

Going to a gay bar called El Toro, featuring low lighting, a drag show, pictures of bulls made of words, & orange or green walls, with an Estonian girl, a Bulgarian, and an Austrian volunteer for a Spanish advocacy group that gives out boxes of condoms in red pleather wallets: a good way to find out that, in certain contexts, entiendes? means not, do you understand me? but rather, do we understand each other? As in, Are you gay, or what?

A vegetarian couple from Mexico I met at a dinner party (I bonded with them over our being fellow americanos) taught me the Spanish-Spanish word for gringo, too, but I’ve already forgotten.

Pop music

You come to a country, lacking all aesthetic paraphernalia, all evidence of personal taste - books, pictures, houseplants, iPod playlist. As a cultural naif you have to swallow many things more or less whole, suspending judgment. If someone offers you cured meat, hashish, an invitation to a concert, a racist opinion – take, eat. Generally, you lack even the means to argue back. You don’t know the language well enough yet.

This goes for trash television & pop music as well. I expose myself to a higher dose of popular culture here than I ever would in the States; I don’t know any better. Take Latino 40, for example, the music video channel, which my roommate plays more or less constantly in the apartment. I asked the opinion of the art teacher at my school (who, for my Emerson audience, keeps asking me who’s playing when I plug WERS into the teacher’s lounge, & approves). He just snorted at & laughed.

And then he turned the car radio (we were driving into the city at the time) to “good” music. Not that, as he told me, Jaén is exactly a mecca for radio & art. But Radio 3? Better, he said. Better.

Nena Daconte’s new single, though – even he has to admit it’s catchy. It’s played on Radio 3 and Latino 40. That, kids, is what they call a crossover hit. And if it’s stuck in my head, well then, at the very least you’re going to know what I’m talking about.  See below:

Disposable film

For the last two years, I’ve kept a yellow disposable Kodak squirrelled away, virtually unused, in a succession of cardboard boxes, a green file cabinet, a desk drawer, and, afterwards, in a series of suitcases & bags & pockets after I fled Boston.

I used up most of the remaining film in my last two months in Boston, and during my first two days in Jaén. I only managed to have it developed yesterday: pictures I didn’t remember taking, from a camera I wasn’t sure worked, perhaps damaged irrevocably by the half dozen airport x-rays it had been through, the metal detectors, the altitude – or perhaps by my poor photography; my ignorance of lighting, exposure, framing.

They are none of them great photographs. But there is a certain power in holding in my hand a fragment of my past, a happenstance. I can remember now taking each of these pictures – all of them marginal moments, brief gestures – leaning against a stainless steel bartop in the Lower East Side where a friend used to work & writing down book recommendations on a napkin; a street in my neighborhood on the way to the T after a rainstorm [dig up, by the way, William Trevor's short story "After Rain" if you can, to approximate the feeling this photograph gives me]; hiking up to the unused, scummed over & leafy pool above a hotel in a desolate stretch of highway outside the city to find a view, briefly, with my last frame of film.

None of these are central moments – except insofar as they are made so, by their commemoration. They become a synecdoche for the rest of the experience, the unsayable things, the meat of it. What matters about what I actually lived through usually doesn’t make it into pictures. Not the kind I take. But the picture can remind us.

To have only one object, one image, a coincidence, that becomes a talisman & a memory – something I can pin above my desk – however faded – retains a concrete power that swamps the infinite replication of digitality, tweaked, comprehensive. A mute feeling of, These fragments I have shored against my ruins.

I am not unaware that using a school scanner to replicate, digitize, these fragments is in some sense a contradiction in terms. As is a digital collection of writings that claims ‘analogue’ life.

[And if you're at all interested in these questions as regards photography in specific, Errol Morris has a really excellent series of essays posted to a blog at the New York Times, called Zoom.]

But there it is. Here are three fragments, shored up:

NEW YORK CITY -  September, a week before I left.

BROOKLINE, MA – Fall 2006

JAÉN, SPAIN – Day 3.

Olives, & pedagogy

“If they don’t come to class,” a teacher said to me yesterday of my students, on the way back to Jaén, driving down a two-lane highway that winds through the hills & is choked by olive trees, “the older ones, at least – it’s because they’ve gone to the olives.”

Kids in Bédmar, my pueblo of three thousand or so, skip school to pick up partwork in the groves that surround the town and make up almost three quarters of the land area of the province, collect pay in cash and use it to buy what matters when you’re maybe 16: a car, a bottle, something to huff or pop or smoke.

“Here, in the pueblo,” the art teacher told me in a garden with lemon trees & two dogs while his painter friend showed me his workshop and we listened to 70s Afrofunk, “the kids have no cultura.” It wasn’t just that the area was poor & rural. “All they know is this,” he said, & gestured towards the olive trees carpeting every hillside around us.

i.

Andalucía does not have a narrative, as we do in the States (modified now by our own rural problems) of flight from blighted inner cities, of urban poverty. When I arrive back in Jaén at quarter to 3, the streets of the city throng with schoolchildren – public, private (this invariably means Catholic), the private school kids in a dozen different uniforms of every type, one of which incorporates boat shoes and powder blue sweaters. Families live in cities in droves. When the city ends, it ends directly – one moment you’re in the cathedral district, you pass through a wall of Franco-era housing developments, and five minutes later you’re on a road that looks like the mountain sections Highway 33 in Ojai Valley. No orange trees, though – this isn’t Valencia.

It’s not that there aren’t exurban developments – the ubanizaciones to the north of Jaén, the prefab district called Las Fuentezuelas to the west – but in Andalucía there is nothing comparable to the immense voting bloc & social construct that is suburbia in the United States, and none of the symptoms: immense Cold War interstate highways, front lawns, backyard grilling of hotdogs, fetishization of home ownership, baseball, an in-country population that was formerly enslaved & then kept out of the mainstream for another century.

The difference, instead, is seen as urbanized modernity vs. rural past, between having cultura and being, as I’ve heard said of pueblos more than once, cerrado. And the rural past is part of living, generational memory – I’ve seen the pictures. My kids know they’re not in the center of the world. What do you do when you know that? It eats away at you, drives you – or you stop caring.

I think. What do I know?

ii.

My instituto, like all Spanish secondary schools, covers the four years of obligatory public education (ESO, educación secondario obligatorio) – the equivalent, in the States, of 7th to 10th grade. After 16, my students take a test and are either bussed to a different instituto in Jódar that has the bachilerato(Baccalaureate) in which they take intensive college preparatory classes for two years before going to the university, or they go to vocational schools or to work. University is not the middle class socialization project it is in the States, common, taken for granted, and unspecialized. Courses begin to focus on major during the bachilerato, and you begin your principle field of study upon entering; because subsidized, tuition is also a fraction of what it is in the States.

When I ask my 2º or 3º de ESO kids what they want to be when they grow up, the boys almost invariably say mechanic – otherwise, rock star, footballer. The average of three or four whipsmart girls per section in the front row want to be doctors, lawyers, or English teachers. The other girls - hairdresser, PhysEd teacher, actress. By 2º de ESO the smart boys have learned, generally, not to show it.

My instituto, being a pueblo school, is small – two sections per grade, 15-20 students per class. The sections are listed A and B, and the Spanish educational system doesn’t seem to be shy about tracking. My A sections are generally better behaved, more attentive – and almost all girls. Part of this, of course, doesn’t have to be tracking – it’s enough to put people in a B section and treat them like they’re going to misbehave.

Because it’s a small school, and because of the newness of the bilingual initiative, my students vary in level from those who have had private tutors & understand every word I say to students who have been moved in from  French class this year and who have never spoken English before in their lives, who don’t want to learn English, and who are being made to take the class to satisfy a government requirement.

This is especially true in 2º y 3º, where there are always at least three or four kids who will sit in the back corner & expect to be left alone. If you talk to them – in Spanish – they’ll tell you No entiendo right back, say No hablo íngles, and then break off eye contact and stare into space. One kid in my 2ºB made a little gunpowder firecracker rolled up in paper in the back one day & got kicked out of class; there are also the folded papers that go bang when you push air through them by waving them in the air, balls of paper to throw, chairs to tip over, and best friends who get into little slapping fights when they invariably sit next to each other.

There are also undiagnosed learning disorders & disabilities that the school can’t otherwise serve. It’s tough to be precise about this because I have no formal training, but you can kind of sense when a kid’s being disruptive, talking uncontrollably, or can’t help but get up, and it’s something that the teacher has learned to ignore or to remind him gently about instead of get angry at him for.

As an auxiliar – an assistant who is not supposed to be in the classroom without a teacher, though in practice I teach for the full hour with the teacher sitting at the desk – they know I don’t grade them or have any real disciplinary authority. Depending on the kids, this can make the arrival of the tall, dark young foreigner with the strange accent & the bag of language games exciting – a holiday from homework – or exciting! – a holiday from having to behave!

The English teachers at my school generally can’t speak English – oral fluency was not stressed in Andalucían schools until very recently, which is part of the reason I’m here – and so classes are conducted largely in Spanish, assignments are written and corrected in writing, and both aural comprehension & the ability to speak are almost nonexistent – except where I act to change this.

This means both that classes are used to being taught in Spanish & can’t speak English out loud, or are embarrassed to do so. That said, the Andalucían public classroom is an almost constant hum of kids talking to each other and answering in Spanish questions posed to them in English. When I go online to look at the vast, infinite reservoirs of variable quality that exist for teachers and students of English as a second or foreign language, many of the notes, written for teachers in Japan, Korea, and China, address the problem of getting students to talk in cultures that have hierarchical modes of address & overdisciplined, silent pupils (a generalization, unavoidably).

This is not my major difficulty. To say Andalucía is a discursive culture would be to understate the case. That’s part of the problem – these kids know how to talk your ear off, they live in a culture that values being able to talk face to face, and when they encounter a language where they can’t do that & haven’t been taught how, the degree of difficulty is enough to make them give up all together.

As I can attest, if someone is talking to you in a foreign language, it requires real concentration to understand & parse; especially in my first couple of weeks here, if I was tired in the morning, or it was late at night & I’d had a few drinks, or if I hadn’t had my coffee yet, without trying hard the Spanish around me could become a kind of accented white noise. This happens to me with the Spanish talk radio my teacher puts on in the car at 7 in the morning or so when we’re driving the rural highway towards the rose-fingered dawn.

My kids deal with this too – more so, because the language they can understand is in the air alongside the English. My first couple days, I lied to them about speaking Spanish, said I only knew how to speak English – this was an attempt to force classroom immersion. The funny thing was, I could tell this to the kids, and then while explaining something, slip a Spanish word in, or answer a question in English that they asked me in Spanish, and they wouldn’t notice that I was speaking a different language – none except the really sharp ones, the bright ones. As far as they were concerned, someone was talking nonsense to them, until suddenly, out of the blue, a little voice whispered a word in their ear that made sense, that required no effort, that they knew.

iii.

It’s difficult to imagine secondary education in Spain for the American reader until you see, in black & white, the differences: High school does not exist in Andalucía. From 11 to 16, you attend secondary, and then maybe you go to the bachilerato, work your ass off, and go to the university to study one of the professions (doctor, lawyer, professor), or the conservatory to study the arts. Otherwise there are two-year vocational training schools. There are no sports in Spanish schools – no jocks, no lettermen, no cheerleaders, no raffles for new varsity uniforms, no college teams to have questionable scholarships & communications majors for. Sports in Andalucía are community-based – every town & pueblo has its local youth fútbol team, and it continues like that, club sports, up through the divisions. No high school car culture, no parking in parks overlooking the city to make out, and, with a drinking age of 16, no fake IDs or house parties.

These are my challenges: No pedagogical culture of spoken or aural English; classroom management, as symbolized by little firecrackers and maybe by the sullen kid near the window whose notebook is decorated with swastikas; my own lack of formal experience; - but maybe most important, a class full of kids, many of whom aren’t going to college, who will terminate their formal education at 16, pick up partwork in the olive groves, get jobs as mechanics, electricians, hairdressers, maybe half of whom have never traveled outside of Andalucía. Why should they think to care about English?

On the other hand, I have my compensations. Roughly half of my classroom hours each week are with 1º de ESO, the only year to be fully bilingual at the insituto, in its first year of bilingual education. I teach music & natural sciences for 50 minutes, once a week each; two sections of 1º Íngles (A & B), and a Thursday afternoon class called activadades en íngles, where, my Emerson readers will be happy to know, I usually put on WERS streamed online in the background.

Fully bilingual classes started only this week, so pedagogy is being worked out live on the ground. Last week, I acted like a zombie, a pirate, a princess, & a werewolf for my Halloween mime guessing game, and threw out my back on Thursday with my ninja impression. There are blocks of text recognition to match to the correct picture of the planets in natural sciences. Today I sang the “Do Re Mi” song from The Sound of Musicand tried to explain what a “pun” is. Every week, I make news headlines in 26 pt. Georgia Bold for the English corner posted on red construction paper at the top of the stairs.

My kids in 1º de ESO, despite everything I’ve written so far, are uniformly a pleasure, and well-behaved to an extraordinary degree, & better at English than anyone else in the school.

On the eve of the elections

A week ago I came across these passages in both of my editions of García Marquez. I couldn’t think of a better way to commemorate the elections at a distance of 12.000 km. The first part is in Spanish; the second picks it up from the last sentence & continues in English. Banning public gatherings & prohibiting the sale of alcohol appears to be a common feature of international democracy – at the least, not just fictional South American elections in an indeterminate past, but those in Thailand a few weeks ago as well. Needless to say, Americans, in our infinite wisdom, don’t abide by this. I myself plan to be soused out of anticipation & worry, waiting for the results, & hoping perhaps that García Marquez’ gypsies will come back to town in an uproar of pipes & kettledrums, returning at last with their miraculous inventions: telescopes, flying carpets, magnetism, alchemy, whiskey, & just governance.

Seis soldados armados con fusiles, al mando de un sargento, llegaron y sino que fueron de casa en casa decomisando armas de cacería, machetes y hasta cuchillos de cocina, antes de repartir entre los hombres mayores de veintiún años las papeletas azules con los nombres de los candidatos conservadores, y las papelitas rojas con las nombres de los candidatos liberales. La víspera de las elecciones el propio don Apolinar Moscote leyó un bando que prohibía desde la medianoche del sábado, y por cuarenta y ocho horas, la venta de bebidas alcohólicas y la reunión de más de tres personas que no fueron de la misma familia.

Gabriel García Marquez, Cien años de soledad, p. 121-2

On the eve of the elections Don Apolinar Moscote himself read a decree that prohibited the sale of alcoholic beverages and the gathering together of more than three people who were not of the same family. The elections took place without incident. At eight o’clock on Sunday morning a wooden ballot box was set up in the square, which was watched over by the six soldiers. The voting was absolutely free, as Aureliano himself was able to attest since he spent almost the entire day with his father-in-law seeing that no one voted more than once. At four in the afternoon a roll of drums in the square announced the closing of the polls and Don Apolinar Moscote sealed the ballot box with a label crossed by his signature. That night, while he played dominoes with Aureliano, he ordered the sergeant to break the seal in order to count the votes. There were almost as many red ballots as blue, but the sergeant left only ten red ones and made up the difference with blue ones. Then they sealed the box again with a new label and the first thing on the following day it was taken to the capital of the province.

“The liberals will go to war,” Aureliano said. Don Apolinar concentrated on his dominoes. “If you’re saying that because of the switch in ballots, they won’t,” he said. “We left a few red ones in so there won’t be any complaints.” Aureliano understood then the disadvantages of being in the opposition. “If I were a Liberal,” he said, “I’d go to war over those ballots.” His father-in-law looked at him over his glasses.

“Come now, Aurelito,” he said. “If you were a Liberal, son-in-law or no, you wouldn’t have seen us switch them.”

García Marquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude, p. 99-100