Chapter 24: Back to the Wall

After a long hiatus, I recently decided to start playing tennis again. It is the game I love most, and I had missed it very much. But before I dared to set foot on a court and embarrass myself, I needed to practice. Perhaps if I could dazzle potential hitting partners with expert strokes, they’d overlook my inexpert Spanish. Any wall would do.

So I went exploring. I discovered that not far from our apartment in Madrid is a large public sports complex chock-a-block with tennis courts, padel courts, and Basque pelota courts. It even has a row of five weather-resistant ping-pong tables. I looked for — and was thrilled to find — that the complex also has walls to practice hitting against.

It is often said that tennis is a lonely game. In singles, at least, you are on your own, battling it out gladiator-style against an opponent, no coaching allowed. As a child and young adult, long before the expressions “I got this” or “hold my beer” took hold in the American vernacular, tennis gave me a sense of self-reliance and confidence. And when that confidence was unwarranted, losing carried its own important lessons.

Hitting against a wall, however, is truly the more solitary pursuit. And it is one I have relished in Madrid. It gives me time to think and requires no Spanish language skills. I have named the walls at the local facility the “Bad Wall” and the “Good Wall.” The Bad Wall, shorter, wider, and sandwiched between two buildings on a well-trodden path, is actually not that bad. Still, misfired balls roll over its top edge, skid up a portion of chain link fence, and either get stuck there or pop up and land somewhere unknown. The Good Wall is near the ping-pong tables. It is about fifteen feet high and is winged by two shorter walls. Errant shots are not a problem on the Good Wall, but missed swings are; the balls go rolling right into the feet of the ping-pong players, requiring a quick dash, “¡Ay disculpe!” and retrieval. Both walls are painted a hue somewhere around Crayola green, and I marvel that, in this land with a color palette so different from that in the U.S., tennis backboards are painted the same color in both countries.

On the Good Wall, I practice all of my strokes, including serves. I whack away, taking immense pleasure in the echo produced by the tennis ball within the three walls. I am pleased that, after years away from the game, my fifty-eight-year-old body can hit the ball with such pace.

I glance at my shadow splayed fully before me in the morning sun. It looks slender and young. I skip to pick up balls that fly past me before they reach the ping-pong players.

I feel graceful, like Evonne Goolagong. I feel strong, like Billie Jean King.

All of the words that my tennis instructors used to say to me come flooding back:

“Head down.”

“Watch the ball into the strings.”

“Don’t drop your wrist.”

“Back before the bounce.”

“Hit the ball on the rise.”

“Don’t admire your shot.”

The admonition not to admire one’s shot is one I associate most with my father, my first tennis teacher. Whether I was often caught flat-footed, or whether he just liked to use that line because it offered his child a nugget of wisdom for life beyond the court, I don’t know. But on my first day out, battling a Madrid backboard that returned my every shot, I was transported to a very different backboard in a very different place and time, when I was so young that my shadow erased nothing.

I was nine years old, and it was the worst time of My Very Privileged Childhood. My family had moved that September from a suburban idyll in which all I needed to do to find playmates was to go out our front door and scan the streets. Summer evenings in my old neighborhood were spent playing spud, kick-the-can, and whiffle ball until humid darkness descended. It was where I had my first real confrontation with my own mortality, tumbling over the handlebars when my bike pitched against a rock as I barreled down an empty hill near the practice grounds of the volunteer fire department.

Though only four miles northwest, our new home, a very large 1950s colonial, was worlds away. It sat on a short spur of a street off a very long road fit for the driveway of a robber baron whose land it surely once was. Our tiny street that dead-ended into woods was much safer to play in, but there was no one to play with. It was ill-timed and too much house. My mother was overwhelmed — and angry. My parents’ ferocious arguments about my father’s unilateral decision to buy that house were poorly concealed.

But my parents did agree that some sports therapy was in order — at least for me. So, they hired a man to help erect a homemade wooden tennis backboard on one end of the rectangular driveway, bounding still more woods and a gully. We painted it chocolate brown, not green, and we added a white line to mark the height of a net. I can still remember the particular swirls on the gray cement circles where each supporting beam of the backboard was held in place. As I waited for the cement to set, I had the sense that — while it was no substitute for a neighborhood — the backboard was going to play an important role in my life.

That brown backboard of my childhood was unforgiving because it wasn’t very high. And there were those woods. And the poison ivy. At a time when I was getting too old for my imaginary friend and my big brothers were getting too old for me, the backboard was my best partner. The backboard and I played for hours on end that fall, into the winter, and for the rest of my childhood.

But it was also during one of those lonely hitting sessions that I came to realize that this exceptionally affluent setting would not be part of my adult life. There was of course the wealth aspect, which I would never be able to replicate (and which I was not destined to inherit). But it was also about longing for a different kind of life. My remarkable parents had overcome their hardscrabble childhoods to amass the status symbols of financial success, and I loved, admired, and liked my parents as people. But, despite the pressure to follow in their footsteps, I wanted something else for myself.

That’s not to say that there haven’t been times during my adulthood when I’ve wondered whether I should have prioritized achieving my parents’ level of financial security. But living in Madrid has done wonders to erase the preoccupations and neuroses of my former New Yorker self. I now happily go off to the public wall in my Madrid neighborhood to hit tennis balls whenever I can. As we advance further into autumn, the shadows are getting longer on the cement. My shadow is taller and skinnier than it was in the summer, but it is even more fleeting — crowded out and then bumped off the court before noon by the shadows of an adjacent apartment building and nearby trees.

On a recent morning, I headed to the Good Wall, where I discovered that it was already in use by another player. I smiled to myself, recalling that this was never an issue at the lonely brown wall of my childhood, and I was happy to now be surrounded by community. I headed to the Bad Wall. There, a courtly, gray-haired gentleman was steadily hitting. He slid to his right, graciously allowing me to share the space. I introduced myself, and he said his name was Fernando. Fernando kept me honest. No more walking over to my bag under the guise of needing a sip of water but really to check my phone. No more lazy strokes. No more taking the ball on the second bounce. The thuds of Fernando’s and my tennis balls fell into a steady call-and-response that was pleasing to the ear.

Suddenly, I heard a hum of voices with unmistakable South-of-the-Mason-Dixon-Line American accents. I looked over my left shoulder as a steady stream of people walked by, single-file, in this most untouristy of places. My eyes locked with those of a blonde fifty-something woman.

“Hi y’all! — I mean, ¡Hola! — Excuse us,” she chirped.

“No pasa nada,” I replied with a smile from behind my sunglasses. I was a little giddy at the thought that perhaps, just maybe, I had been mistaken for a Spaniard.

Moving with a little extra bounce in my step, I returned my attention to the wall. Fernando was still hitting steadily. I got back in the groove.

Moments later, in my peripheral vision, I saw a young man approaching me. He was carrying a padel racquet and asked me in Spanish where the courts were. At least that is what I thought he asked.

“Por ahí,” I answered, in the best accent I could conjure while pointing energetically “over there.”

“Okay, thank you,” he responded in barely-accented English before pivoting to his left and walking away.

I glanced at Fernando, who already knew that I am definitely not Spanish. Mercifully, he acted as if he had heard nothing.

I briefly wondered how to say in Spanish “don’t admire your shot.” Head down, I went back to the wall.

©2022 Kay Diaz

Chapter 23: What Will We Eat in August?

“Will you be closed in August for vacation?” I asked the woman behind the counter at the artisanal bakery. She looked like both an artist and a baker.

In March of 2020, having moved to a new apartment in Spain with nothing to sleep on or eat with, my wife was singularly focused on trying to acquire the bare necessities of life in the middle of the COVID-19 lockdown. These included things like dishes, bedsheets, and toothpaste. My priority, on the other hand, was locating the best bread in Madrid.

While I was grateful to Kate for the sheets and toothpaste, it was my discovery of one of the best bread bakeries in Madrid — where the master bread-makers turn out rustic sourdough baguettes with crunchy crusts that give way to a tangy and chewy-but-airy interior — that brought true comfort to my new life. Unfortunately, it also brought anxiety: those perfect baguettes were often sold out within an hour. My last thoughts as I drifted off to sleep each night were about how to map out my morning to make sure I got to the bakery before the baguettes were gone.

“Yes,” replied the woman.

“I understand,” I said, “But what days in August?”

“All of August,” she patiently replied, without a hint of the smugness that her American customer probably deserved.

The name of the bakery is Panic. And panic set in.

I ordered six baguettes for July 31.

Pen in hand, the woman looked down at her ledger. But as I started to give my very common surname, my predilection for worst-case-scenarios kicked in. I imagined a long line of very Spanish Díazes snaking down the block, and our hard-ordered bread mistakenly landing in the wrong hands. I gave the woman my wife’s very uncommon surname: A-D-A-M-I-C-K.

My father, who maintained that he never went hungry during the Great Depression, nonetheless had a particular scarcity quirk: he hoarded bread. When I was about nine, he even bought an extra freezer that he kept near the garage door. There, he stored loaf upon loaf of Italian bread, stacking them like logs.

Alas, our tiny Madrid apartment precluded the addition of a chest freezer. I would have to carefully ration my six baguettes to last an entire month.

In Spain, August begins around July 15, when the closed-for-vacation signs start appearing on store fronts and display windows. They are in all manner of styles, reflecting the personalities or the bank accounts of the proprietors. Some appear to be hastily handwritten, black felt-tip pen on any paper found lying around; others are computer-generated beauties printed on card stock.

Frequently, the signs convey sheer elation. I recently noticed a restaurant’s chalkboard, normally used to promote the menu of the day, proclaiming in a very neat and excited hand: “CERRADO POR VACACIONES ¡Nos Vemos Pronto!” Vacation was underlined four times in a decorative curve. The rest of the board was festooned with a beach ball, a palm tree, and a sun.

I doubt that they will be returning pronto.

Other signs are very matter-of-fact. One of my favorites reads:

CERRADO POR VACACIONES

DEL 1 DE AGOSTO

AL 31 AGOSTO

(ambos inclusive)

DISCULPEN LAS MOLESTIAS

These are responsible store owners who care about their customers. They are not gloating that they are on vacation for an entire month. This is Europe, after all, and a month’s vacation is normal. They are simply apologizing for the inconvenience and reassuring us that they will be back. And even though September 1 falls on a Thursday, they are promising that they won’t add on another long weekend at the end. At least we can be grateful for that.

I find myself wishing that the out-of-office email messages back home in the U.S. had half the clarity of these Spaniards’ signs.

By now, our third summer in Madrid, we have learned to start planning early for the summer vacations of our neighborhood shopkeepers. “What will we eat in August?” we discuss over breakfast on the Fourth of July. Days later, we begin the ritual of asking the shopkeepers for details about their August plans. We do our best to look genuinely interested as they describe the small towns where their extended families gather or the beaches where they will sun themselves day after day. What we really want to know, though, is when they will leave and when they will return. We have meals to plan.

Of course, obtaining this information is not without its challenges. First of all, we are still nowhere near proficient in the Spanish language. Second, there are many such conversations to be had because of the sheer number of small, specialized food purveyors in Madrid. If you want to buy fish, you go to a pescadería. For fresh produce, you shop at a frutería. Meat will be at the carnicería and, of course, the most important of all — bread — comes from a panadería. For us, that means a seemingly endless number of conversations about August in a language we still struggle to speak. Fortunately, madrileños are famously patient, and a sure way to their hearts is to talk about food and vacations.

Adding to our challenge is the fact that we are very picky shoppers. We know exactly which frutería within a few blocks has the best lettuce and which one a block from there has the best Spanish bananas. There is even a store that sells only tomatoes, and we know when only those tomatoes will do. We know which butcher has the darker lamb similar to that which we buy in the States, and which butcher will grind together the beef and pork we select for tasty burgers. We know which fishmonger has the best clams, and which one will clean the calamari and save the ink-sack for us in a secure wrapper. We know which poulterer has the eggs with creamy orange yolks and the most flavorful chicken. We know which shop has the best cheeses from the north of Spain and which carries Italian staples. We know when to venture farther afield to our old neighborhood because a vendor there has the best nuts and dried fruits at the best prices. And when we are missing Asian food, we know which markets have bean sprouts and dumpling wrappers.

To aid us in remembering exactly when our untold number of vendors will be away, we use a huge wall calendar — the kind that autobody shops and insurance brokers used to give away in the States decades ago — given to us last Christmas by our favorite produce vendor. It’s taped inside a closet door where, along with the phases of the moon, we obsessively track the vacation schedules of our shopkeepers. Alas, there are so many to keep track of that the circles, lines, and scribbles make little sense no matter how many different colored pens we use.

What will we eat in August? This being our third August in Spain, the knowledge that we survived the first two has done much to ease our uncertainty this year. So far this month we have eaten well and plenty, even if it has meant walking a few more blocks to find an open shop. Rather than dread the inconvenience, we are grateful to be living in a country where people actually take the long vacations that they worked and saved for all year.

Starting next week, our shopkeepers will begin to return from their trips, and they will regale us with stories of their adventures. We will do our best to understand what they’re saying, knowing that we can always make up for our limited vocabulary by asking to see their cellphone photos.

As for our own vacation, we will be taking one in late September. We doubt that our shopkeepers will miss us as much as we have missed them.

©2022 Kay Diaz

Chapter 22: Future Conditional

As we made our way home from the DELE A2 exam on our “walk of shame,” the numbness subsided enough to both commiserate and comfort each another. We felt that if we could turn around right then, walk back to the testing center, and do the orals over — even without prep and even with a new set of topics — we would have done much better. And with just that small bit of distance from the experience, I believe we would have. But upon this silver lining of optimism was a layer of tarnish that could never be rubbed out.

In the days that followed, the role play part of the exam — in which the interviewer and I were supposed to be roommates shopping to set up our new apartment — would play over and over again in my mind, and I’d wonder why I’d stupidly clung to the cleaning theme. I now had new roommates from hell, always lurking about, never leaving: the daily household chores that we could not escape under COVID-19 lockdown taunted me. The countertops, the floors, the dishes, the laundry all took their turns mocking me. “Try narrating this, Ms. Tareas del Hogar — or should I say ‘Ms. Household Chores’ so you know I’m talkin’ to you?” they’d jeer.

Nor was there any relief in leaving the apartment. There are cleaning-supply stores everywhere in Madrid, often in the most unexpected places. Imagine exiting Carnegie Hall on 57th Street in Manhattan but, instead of the Russian Tea Room, you see an ornate leaded-glass display window chock-a-block with every cleaner your contractor/repair person/mother told you to use for your floors/countertops/oven/shower tiles plus countless other foreign brands you’ve never heard of. It was impossible for me to escape the constant reminders of my linguistic failings.

Before the week was out, I signed up to re-take the exam on November 14.

Kate and I made a marriage-saving decision that she would not retake the exam with me. Instead, she volunteered to support me in my quest, whether by quizzing, cooking . . . or cleaning. After all, Kate couldn’t apply for citizenship until I first obtained mine, so her need to pass the DELE A2 exam was years away. However much it made sense to go through the ordeal together the first time, we knew that to try to do so again would fray us. We were emotionally exhausted, and we had to prioritize.

Like a bird that goes off to die alone, I went off to study by myself. I didn’t want to talk to anyone about the exam, not even Kate. I deleted Twitter from my phone and installed Toggl, a time-tracker. I reviewed all the DELE A2 materials on my computer and all the DELE A2 books in my possession. As penance, I bought an official Spanish grammar book, studied all 28 lessons, and answered 1,473 questions, grateful the publisher had decided against an even 1500. I started to retake all of the audio practice exams.

Back home in the U.S., the headlines blazed “Trump Won’t Commit to Peaceful Transfer of Power if Loses,” and the disastrous first debate proved that four years after he’d stalked Hillary Clinton on stage, neither the media nor debate commission would tame him. On my November calendar, two ominous deadlines were circled; they felt too far away and yet perilously close. Election Day was a constant reminder that Kate was depending on me to get my Spanish citizenship, and Exam Day represented the lap I would have to successfully complete before passing the baton to her.

In early October, I was coaxed out of my shell by my new friend Pilar’s husband, Eusebio, who offered me a place to study in an unused room in his rented office suite. His generosity enabled me to reorient myself. Going off to Eusebio’s office each morning, which was only two blocks from Kate’s and my apartment, was like going to work — something I’d happily thought I’d left behind when I retired but now found myself relishing. I outlined topics, memorized key vocabulary that might come up in the orals, and practiced my verb conjugations. And during breaks, I had a great colleague. An athlete, with an at-ease-but-ready-to-spring-into-action energy, Eusebio spoke fluent English but challenged me with intermediate Spanish. Our exchanges on politics and economics, books and music made me long for a future in which I too could express more abstract ideas in two languages.

But as I continued to study and the calendar pages continued to flip, the confidence I had expressed on the walk home from the exam with Kate began to flag. I googled “Is there a limit on the number of times you can take the DELE exam?” (Answer: No.) I redoubled my efforts on listening exercises, as that was where I needed a high enough score to compensate for the orals.

Although I wasn’t quite ready to call in the reinforcements of my former teachers, Irene and Hernán, I knew I had to do more, and answered a “my Spanish for your English” ad on a virtual bulletin board in Spain, LingoBongo. This was way out of my comfort zone. But with the encouragement of my first chat — charlar — partner, an accountant in his mid-forties named Zid, I stepped further out of my comfort zone and posted my own ad. Soon I was inundated with so many chat requests from people of all ages, professions, and locations in Spain that I had to create an Excel spreadsheet to keep track. I spoke with grad students, engineers, a computer programmer, a lawyer, and two people who were temporarily unemployed. The conversations — intercambios they are called, a half hour in Spanish and a half hour in English — were surprisingly easy, owing to the geniality of these Spaniards and perhaps the loneliness of lockdown. They were a forgiving bunch because not one of them spoke English as poorly as I did Spanish. My easiest conversations turned out to be with Roberto, a young man less than half my age who worked full-time in the aerospace industry while studying for a master’s degree. I chuckled when his mother came into his room to tell him dinner was ready, and I wondered if she was as surprised as I was that her son was chatting with the likes of me and not playing video games in his leisure time.

When Biden was finally declared the winner of the election, our Spanish friends cheered as loudly as we did. They knew the stakes all too well, even as we discussed the continuing challenges of the anti-democratic Senate, systemic racism, and Trump supporters armed to the teeth.

Still, getting past the first circle on my November calendar was a positive outcome for the world and relieved some of the pressure I was feeling about the exam. I allowed myself to say to Kate, “Maybe we’ll get two good pieces of news this November. Maybe we’ll find out that we passed the September exam!” And that felt so good that I added, “If I passed, maybe I’ll get a red-and-yellow stripe in my hair or a windmill tattoo!”

But what wasn’t feeling good was the escalating COVID rates in Spain. New cases per day were double what they had been in March, and Madrid was among the worst regions. The pride I experienced in the spring and early summer over our new country’s stoicism and strict adherence to the lockdowns had given way to dismay over the pandemic fatigue and attendant carelessness that was obviously setting in. When we walked outside, we felt like giant pinballs ricocheting from side to side in the narrow streets in order to avoid the ubiquitous smokers with their masks down. We read about dance clubs operating illegally. I began to wonder if the improving political situation in the U.S. meant that I didn’t have to return to a dangerously crowded exam room so soon. But I resolved to retake the exam the following week as scheduled because Kate and I both knew that the future of the U.S. was still a question mark.

It had been more than eight weeks since we had taken the exam in September, and there was still no word from the Cervantes Institute about our results.

By November 10, four days before I was to retake the exam, I was despairing. I had made it this far and had no interest in catching COVID now.

I emailed La Directora of one of our Spanish-language schools and asked her whether she could make an inquiry of the Cervantes Institute, focusing on the COVID situation as an extraordinary circumstance that might merit releasing the September scores before the November exam. She readily obliged.

We waited.

I continued to study as best I could, including a last-minute Zoom session with my former teacher Irene to practice the orals — both of us wearing masks.

The next day, at 11:32 a.m., as Kate sat in the bedroom reading and I sat at the kitchen table studying, I heard the ping of an email alert. The subject line read “Diplomas DELE.” It was the Cervantes Institute announcing the “calificaciones,” the qualifications from the September exam. I was afraid to open the attached PDF.

“Kate?” I called. “Check your email. It’s Cervantes.”

“I passed,” said Kate. She was subdued, and I knew this was out of well-placed concern for me.

I was so relieved. I had never seen Kate as miserable as she had been studying for that exam — the worst of her life, she had said at least a dozen times.

I opened my PDF.

“NO APTO” — literally, “unsuitable” — appeared in 24-point type, extending along the entire width of a scoring matrix. I had failed.

My stomach did a somersault.

I wasn’t in shock, so much as I didn’t want to tell Kate. I couldn’t really argue with such a result.

But then I glanced higher on the screen to more closely examine the page, and I could see that something was amiss.

On the right side of the scoring matrix appeared the letters NP under the auditiva, the listening section. The section I had heeded Hernán and Kate’s advice about, practicing listening to radio announcements, train announcements, airport announcements, voicemails, and conversations over and over for hours, for days, for weeks.

NP. It wasn’t spelled out, but I knew what it meant in English or in Spanish: Not Present.

I called Kate into the kitchen.

“You know it was because you changed seats for that part of the exam,” she said, without missing a beat as she looked at the screen over my shoulder.

Forget my stomach. Now my body was spinning in some vortex down a drain. I thought I was going to pass out.

We pored over the PDF some more. I had eked out a high enough score on the orals so that all I needed was 16 correct answers out of 25 questions on the auditiva to pass the whole exam. That knowledge buoyed me. The feeling of helplessness crushed me.

This time, I didn’t email La Directora of our school. I picked up the phone.

I wailed rhetorical question after rhetorical question at the poor woman: “Why would I return six hours later to take the orals if I was a no-show for the listening? What kind of masochist would do that? Doesn’t Cervantes have quality control to see that that makes no sense?” And then I proclaimed, “I’ve never been a no-show in my life! In all my schooling and all my years as a lawyer, I never even handed in or filed a paper late. It may be ugly, but I always show up and I always get the job done!”

“Slow down, please,” pleaded La Directora. “Everyone assumes I am fluent in English because I own a Spanish-language school but I am actually not. Send me the sheet and I will call Cervantes.”

And so began another wait.

“The Cervantes Institute is not your enemy,” a blogger had stated on one of the many websites I had consulted about the exam. It was sure feeling like an adversary or, at best, a hapless ally.

I didn’t know what to do with myself as the hours ticked by. Kate used the time by finding a photo of me at age four — wearing corrective lenses — and inserted a cartoon speech balloon, “Do I look like a kid who would skip an entire section of an exam?” This cheered me. We sent it to La Directora.

At 4:48 p.m., I received another email from Cervantes. It stated that it had “detected an incident” with my qualifications. I opened the attached PDF to find a document worthy of Isabella and Ferdinand, citing royal decrees and laws. My heart skipped a beat.

I calmed myself and continued translating.

The document went on, “upon reviewing your qualifications, an error has been corrected in the reading of your answer sheets.”

Buried at the end of a paragraph was the statement that I had “achieved a qualification of APTO.”

I had passed the auditiva with room to spare. I had passed the whole exam. I would not have to return to the crowded classroom to retake the DELE A2 exam as I had long feared. I will never know the journey my answer sheet had taken or why I had ever been designated “NP.”

That evening, Kate said, “I’m never taking another exam as long as I live.”

I put on my corrective lenses and responded, “Tomorrow I think I’ll sign up for the Spanish driver’s license test.”

©2021 Kay Diaz