Chapter 21: The Short and the Long of It

–Part One–

It Wasn’t My Time

The DELE A2 guidelines stipulated that we were to have 12 minutes to prepare for the 12-minute “oral expression and interaction skills” part of the exam, which is composed of three parts: delivering a monólogo about a topic, describing a photo, and engaging in a dialogue with the examiner/entrevistador (interviewer). My registration instructed me to arrive at the test site by 6:30 in the evening to prep before the exam slated for 6:45, and when I arrived at 6:20 the place was quiet and practically empty — the opposite of the morning’s hive of activity.

I was instructed to wait in an area nestled under the landing of the building’s large staircase where there were two massive arm chairs that looked like they belonged in a cigar club. I sat across from a man decades my junior who looked bored, not nervous. From behind my masks, I sent a wistful smile his way. Nothing came back.

6:30 p.m. came and went. We were behind schedule.

But a few minutes later, we were ushered into a small classroom by a petite, birdlike woman who proceeded to talk very rapidly and flutter around the room flapping papers; if anyone was going to restore the morning’s bountiful nervous energy, it was she. If I understood half of what the morning proctor said, I only understood a quarter of what this woman was saying. Bored man now became fluent man as he chatted easily with fluttering woman.

When I had imagined this moment, I had not imagined this. I had expected to be handed three laminated sheets — two with topics and related questions and one with a photo — plus some blank paper on which to jot down notes. I assumed I’d have 12 minutes of relative silence to make my selection and then sketch out outlines. I had imagined a tranquil setting, perhaps a cubicle in a hushed hallway or vestibule or room.

But I was not left in peace, and I longed for the quiet of the area under the staircase.

I took a seat at one of the tiny student desks. I sat quietly — what could I say, after all? Trying to be on my best behavior, I wondered when they would shut up and when I would be given the information I desperately needed — a topic and a photo. By my watch, I had nine minutes left.

Fluttering woman finally came over to me and thrust four sheets of paper in my hands. Before I could even finish reading the sheets, she was back, and didn’t look so small anymore. I felt her looming, casting a large shadow over my endeavor in that tiny desk. “¡Elige!” She wanted me to choose my first topic. I stuttered some version of “¿Puedo quedármelos todos hasta que termine? (“May I keep all [the papers] until I am finished?”) “¡No!,” she replied. I had to give at least one sheet back to her now. I suppose she was trying to do me a favor so that I would not waste precious time deliberating, but this back-and-forth was also eating up valuable time.

I glanced at fluent man. He looked bored again. And why not? His new friend was gone, dealing with a problem. I thought of the morning proctor, too substantial to flutter, and wondered how she’d be governing this proceeding.

For the speaking exercise, my choices were to speak about my best friend or about doing chores around the house. In the span of seconds, I thought about whether at my age I actually had a best friend other than Kate, my wife. But how could I even begin to describe Kate? And would I be able to keep my composure in doing so? We had been through so much this year alone. I then thought about the vocabulary words I needed to use to rack up descriptive points and considered talking about a friend in Brooklyn who had actually been the topic of one of my essays in Spanish class. Then, I thought, “Will Kate’s feelings be hurt if I don’t pick her?” Gone were Kate’s — and Hernán and Irene’s — reminders that the exam is NOT about substance. It literally is about the accuracy of the vocabulary and sentence structure. Then I remembered that Kate’s exam was immediately after mine. If Kate had the same examiner, and the examiner knew we were married, what would the examiner think if I picked Kate as my best friend and Kate picked someone else (even if it was for smart test-taking purposes)?

I chose the second topic: household chores.

Chores were a central part of each COVID confinement day. I had even blogged about Spaniards and their cleaning supplies. Kate had just been doing chores like a madwoman hours before the oral exam. Surely I could talk about chores. Now I was down to seven minutes.

Fluttering woman was back. I rejected the best friend paper.

I turned my attention to the two photographs, and fluttering woman again instructed me to ¡Choose quickly! But the instructions for the DELE exam said that we were to be given a photo, not that we were to choose between two photos. I wasted another 15 seconds wondering whether I should bring this to fluttering woman’s attention. If she was being generous, it was lost on me as I glanced at my watch and started to panic. One photo featured two women, one with a camera, looking up at a building. It looked like a European street and they looked like tourists. Surely I could describe this. Why, it was practically a photo of Kate and me!

I chose the photo of people in a supermarket.

Well, not exactly a supermarket. It was more like a Costco or BJs warehouse store, no place I had ever been in my Spanish life of small stores and old-fashioned market stalls. I thought perhaps I could leverage the chores vocabulary and say that people were buying cleaning supplies. Suddenly I realized that I couldn’t recall the utilitarian word we had learned in class that could cover both warehouse and department store — almacén, but before I could change my mind again, the fluttering woman was back, demanding the paper.

I handed her the pair of women and kept the supermarket.

I had perhaps four minutes left. I stared at the blank scrap paper and back at the two sheets I had ¡Eligido!

As to the photo, I’d have to wing it. There was no time to remember — much less jot down — vocabulary words.

Nor was there time to draw the time-saving oval diagrams Kate and I’d practiced with Hernán in lieu of bulleted outlines for the monólogo. Luckily, the “chores” paper had a list of questions but, before I could read them, fluttering woman was speaking again. She either said we had to answer all of the questions, or she said they were just questions to guide us on what to cover in our “speech.” No matter. I was not going to have any time to outline anything. The list of questions would be both my guide and my outline.

Despite being irritated that I didn’t actually have 12 minutes to prepare, fluttering woman’s announcement that it was time to go to the examination room didn’t come soon enough.

I was directed down a narrow, very white hallway. I would have been more relieved than surprised if the walls been padded.

A door opened, and a face I recognized popped out. My entrevistador was an entrevistadora — the substantial morning proctor was my interviewer.

She looked exhausted.

While I had been eating sandwiches, watching Kate do chores, and dancing around the apartment, the proctor had been on duty, conducting 12-minute oral exam after 12-minute oral exam.

–Part Two–

My Dirty Dozen

In the instant it took my former proctor, now interviewer, to motion me to enter, I flashed back to our interactions that morning. I hoped that I had handed her my envelope gently. I hoped that I hadn’t seemed rude when I dashed to the front of the room to get a seat closer to the speakers. I knew I wasn’t one of the people who groaned and complained when she said it would take eight weeks to get our results. I hoped that, one on one, I’d understand more of what she said than I had that morning. But none of that would be good enough, as we were not alone.

Sitting at a table at the back of the small room was another woman who looked alert and well-rested, perhaps more coiled than hunched. Before her was a large handwritten grid with dozens of boxes, along with numerous pens and pencils; all that was missing was a green accountant’s visor. This “analytical” examiner was responsible for 60% of the assessment, and she would be keeping score — tick by tick of the boxes — while 40% would be determined by my interviewer, the exhausted proctor from the morning session. My success depended a lot on the tired interviewer but my destiny hinged very much on the pencil strokes of language accountant lady. It felt wrong to turn my back on her but this was the format, and I sat down at a small table facing the interviewer.

There was no clock in the very white, very bare room. I lay my mostly blank scratch paper on the table, but I decided against removing and placing my watch there too, thinking that perhaps it would be interpreted as criticism.

I had no trouble understanding the interviewer’s ice breaker: “Ha sido un díá largo” — “It’s been a long day.” This would either be helpful or disastrous. “Sí, gracias,” I responded, figuring I should be thanking her for what she was about to endure.

Her first question was, “What are you doing here?”

I was wondering the same thing.

I had read that examiners try to relax examinees with some pleasantries, but this question had the opposite effect. I imagined “IMPOSTER” emblazoned not on my forehead, but on my surgical mask. My face grew hot.

“I’m a student,” I replied. She looked at all 56 years of me unconvinced. Then it dawned on me. I might feel 25 and I might be reliving anxieties from my youth, but Kate and I were the oldest people we had seen all day.

“But why are you here in Madrid?”

“I live here.”

The interviewer looked utterly perplexed.

“And what do you do?”

I had rehearsed this, and the words came tumbling out in what I thought was good enough Spanish: “I quit work in March. I am here because my grandfather emigrated to the U.S. from Spain. My wife and I have traveled all over Spain and love everything about Spain, and we are studying Spanish at two schools.” I named the schools, but wondered — too late — if this had been a bad idea as the interviewer likely worked for a competitor. “We hope to stay,” I added, hoping she might take pity on me.

I am not a reliable narrator for what comes next.

All I clearly remember was that I started having trouble breathing. The surgical masks suddenly felt suffocating. For all of my preparation, it had not occurred to me to practice this part of the exam wearing masks — an inexcusable failure on my part. My breathing was by turns getting shallower and quicker. It was if my atomized words were competing in the airstream with the other particles getting trapped in the masks’ fibers.

The interviewer handed me the photo I had chosen earlier.

As I described the people standing in line at the grocery store, I became very conscious of my voice and how gravelly and barely audible it sounded to me. I wondered how language accountant lady behind my left shoulder could possibly hear me. I wondered if she’d give me some double-mask benefit of the doubt. At least I was keeping her safe. I said that I couldn’t see exactly what was in the shopping carts (a word I mumbled a bit on purpose because I couldn’t remember if it was carrito or carreto) but listed some possible food items to rack up some vocabulary points. I described the lighting, the floor, and the shelving. I described the people’s clothing. I said one of the men looked bored.

The interviewer prompted me, “What is the man going to do now?”

“Pay!” I replied. “They are in line to pay.”

“And then what?” I replied that it looked like the store was not in the city so they would be driving home. She nodded. She had thrown me a lifeline, and I had caught it.

I didn’t want to leave the safety of the store but it was time to move on to my monologue on daily housework.

Here is where I really froze. Perhaps it was that I suddenly felt like a fraud twice over. Kate had retired two years before I, and in those two years had done 95% of the housework. I grew up in a family that tackled chores together. I had a father who’d vacuum and mop, not just rake leaves and clean gutters. I like cleaning well enough, but only perhaps because I don’t often do the most difficult chores. Kate skillfully, if not enthusiastically, tackles truly hard jobs that my mother did, like washing walls. Kate is not only an expert test-taker. Kate is an expert cleaner.

So when, not four hours earlier, Kate had been scrubbing the top of our armoire while I held the ladder and wondered whether I should be cramming, I could have been reviewing related vocabulary words. And while this wasn’t what maestra Irene had in mind when she said the examiner is not going to know the truth of what I said, I professed how much pleasure doing household work is because “you can see the results” and it is “sanitary.” But then I turned an acceptable word for mop, mopa, into a verb “mopar” (wrong), and feared that I’d mess up the distinction between washing things, limpiar, and washing clothes, lavar, so instead I mentioned how happy I was that we have a washing machine, lavadora. I think I did remember the verb for “to scrub,” fregar, and said that I scrubbed the sink. At some point I decided that I had better give credit to Kate, so I said that she is a chef and that I help her make dinner and clean the plates afterwards.

Now my breathing and nerves were really getting the best of me. I thought I might not be able to go on. I know this sounds absurd. The fact that I had been a litigator for 30 years and had spent time as a teenager in speaking competitions is the tragedy crowding out the comedy. But neither of those experiences was the wellspring of strength that I now conjured. Instead, just when I thought I would have to throw in the (dirty) towel, I remembered the time I froze in a piano recital because I had lost my place in my beginner’s song. My fingers had felt disconnected from my brain. I tried to think, but I could not. I glanced at my piano teacher and the children and their parents. I cannot not do this, I told myself. I started over and got through it.

I was 47 years old.

If I could withstand that humiliation, I told myself, I can power through this exam.

I got through my monologue, but it was not with the soft voice that I sometimes deployed confidently with obstreperous witnesses when I was a lawyer. This time my soft voice was one of terror. I have no idea how the language accounting lady heard me, or even if she did.

Now it was time for the “role play.” The interviewer explained that she and I were supposed to be roommates shopping for things for our apartment. I decided to stick with the chores theme and said we needed cleaning supplies. I blurted out that I thought we should go to a chain store in Madrid called Carrefour because I was trying to establish some credibility that I was functioning and spending money in Spain. Being in the midst of a pandemic, I said we should purchase lots of Sanytol — the Spanish Lysol. The only other thing I remember is that the interviewer asked me how much we should budget for our cleaning supplies. I said I thought we needed 15 Euros to start. That fact that the amount was too low flashed through my mind, but then I remembered that this was Spain, not expensive New York City. And, besides, the true prices didn’t matter . . . did they?

It was over. As I got up and turned toward the door, I had to face language accounting lady and her huge chart, which felt embarrassing after my humbling performance. I mustered a smile and wished her a good weekend.

I waited outside for Kate. Her test was next and in the same room with the same examiners. She didn’t have a much easier time than I. Kate described her own exam experience as feeling as if there were three of her in the room: herself and two clones floating above her commenting to each other about what she was saying. I told her that I had felt like a set of Russian nesting dolls chattering reverberantly and suffocating behind my masks.

Our self-assessments made one thing clear: we had failed. Unlike a beginner’s piano recital, there would be no pats on the back for effort. The only thing that kept us from bursting into tears was our numbing state of shock.

There would be no dancing tonight.

©2021 Kay Diaz

Chapter 20: Danger and Delirium

When I found out that the Spanish proficiency exam would be on the morning of September 11, I sighed. As much as we love Madrid, New York is never far from our minds.

We set three alarms but awoke before the first one rang. Kate prepared a sturdy breakfast of eggs, jamón, and toast. To summon a feeling of competence and show some respect to the proctors, I donned a suit jacket from my days as a lawyer. We packed our sharpened #2 pencils for the multiple-choice parts and the pens we had carefully selected for the essays: Uni-ball Eye for Kate and Uni-ball Signo for me. On the advice of our friend Clinton, a Brooklyn doctor, we took time to put on, adjust, and tape our masks — two medical-grade each. And on my way out the door, I grabbed two talismans from other friends back in New York: a string of Greek worry beads from Fay and a wedge of crystal from Trinh.

When we arrived at the test site, a hulking building on a too-narrow sidewalk, we were met by an array of people of all shapes, sizes, and shades shifting nervously from one leg to the other, passports in hand, double-checking their registrations. I did not hear the hum of British accents I was expecting; perhaps Brexit-loathing Britons were lined up this morning in the Costa del Sol near Gibraltar, but they definitely weren’t here in Madrid. Then again, a work crew was jackhammering the sidewalk across the street, and hearing anything was a challenge. Abandoning my former vocation rooting out municipal fraud and waste, I wished the road crew would take a coffee break and never come back.

We showed our passports at two different security points and were then ushered into a ground-floor classroom where we were directed to the very back. We were elated that no one would be behind us breathing COVID vectors in the direction of any rear-facing gaps in our masks.

But much to our disappointment there were no adult-sized desks — only row upon row of tiny student armchair desks, each bearing a uniquely numbered yellow Post-it note. Perched on top of the face-down exam papers was a single eraserless pencil next to a hacked (chewed?) remnant of a once-square eraser. Not wanting to touch the pencil or the eraser, I wriggled into the seat hoping I wouldn’t knock either onto the germ-ridden floor. I told myself to get over it — and fast — as it was 8:53 a.m. and the exam was starting in seven minutes. Still, I wondered if I’d get in trouble for reaching into my bag for my own pencil and eraser. Unsure, I squirted sanitizer on my hands and considered the horrible smudges the eraser would make if I doused it too. I glanced nervously at the other examinees successfully folded into their little desks. They were decidedly not a meter apart.

Then, GRRRAHKKAKKAKKAKKKAGRRAHKKKAKKAKKAKKKA KKAKKAKKAKKAKKAKKAKK came streaming into the open window. The road crew was energetically not taking a coffee break. Our proctor appeared. She was a substantial woman of substantial height with substantial amounts of frizzy gray hair. She spoke only Spanish, and I caught only half of what she was saying. Others seemed to understand her every word, and even ask her questions at a rapid, well-accented clip. It then dawned on me: they’d probably been living in Spain for a minimum of ten years, the normal path to citizenship. The test has no curve but I found myself uncharitably thinking they were going to ruin it anyway. I also noticed some people taking peeks at and others unabashedly reading the test booklet before the exam started.

“Just worry about yourself!” Kate’s harsh whisper startled me, echoing words my late father, also a several-time valedictorian, had said to me often. I questioned whether Kate’s enjoinder extended to worry about the test-takers whose masks dipped below their noses.

“¡Empezad!” cried the proctor. That, I understood; the test had begun. And so I dove into the reading comprehension — my comfort zone since third grade — eagerly filling in the 25 bubbles without a hitch. I didn’t even notice the jackhammer.

When the proctor, who now was looking kind and maternal in her substantiality, announced that time was up, I was almost feeling content. Instead of proceeding to the next section of the exam, however, she paused the proceedings to hand out large envelopes on which we were to write our addresses and seat numbers (her visual aid on the whiteboard proving helpful for this task). She said that our certificates would be mailed to us in the envelopes, which we passed up front. It was either a nice vote of confidence or an unwitting act of cruelty.

Now it was time for listening comprehension, the part maestro Hernán gave us the imperative to pass with room to spare if we were to survive this trial by fire. Unfortunately, the jackhammer had started again. GRRRAHKKAKKAKKAKKKAGRRAHKKKAKKAKKAKKKA KKAKKAKKAKKAKKAKKAKK. Our proctor was apologetic. Whatever the language barrier as she continued her explanation, it was clear to me that we had a choice: we could have the windows open and risk failing because we couldn’t clearly hear the recordings on which we were being tested; or, we could have the windows closed and risk a lack of COVID-preventing air flow and die. Whatever the proctor heard in the commotion that ensued, she opted for closing the windows. Perhaps she reasoned that a sufficiently clear broadcast of the listening exercises would be immune from immediate challenge while causation related to any transmission of COVID could be debated for years. But then she turned on the A/C, and this presented its own problem: a noticeable hum. Moreover, I worried that it was it actually blowing virus particles more efficiently to the back of the room where we sat.

The proctor motioned to some empty seats toward the front of the room and invited anyone who cared to do so to move up. I’d been nursing a clogged ear since we landed six months before and, thinking that for once in my life I’d be savvy about test-taking, I bolted to the front of the room, plopped into a chair closer to the speakers, and plunked down my answer sheet and exam book. But not only had I abandoned Kate, I had also abandoned my common sense, as it meant that now there was someone behind me to breath those aerosols forward. I pressed my hands to the sides of my masks and thought that perhaps I should have augmented the tape with some toothpaste caulk.

Suddenly, my anxious thoughts were interrupted by the sound of a familiar voice.

It was the same baritone we had heard in dozens of practice exams instructing us to answer a total of 25 questions over the course of 4 auditory exercises in 40 minutes. But hearing is not the same as listening, as anyone who is married can attest.

“You do know that you can’t get lulled into passively listening and then thinking you will be able to answer the questions like a native speaker, don’t you?” Kate had warned (reminded?) me at breakfast. “You must be hyper-alert and translating,” she continued.

And so I was, and I did. I felt almost content again with the first two exercises — train announcements, advertisements, radio clips. I easily gleaned the necessary information because each audio clip was short and played twice. But then, the third exercise — a conversation — began without the usual pre-instruction and sample audio I remembered from the practice exams, time I would use to read over the answers in advance. In a flash, the first listen was over and I had no clue how to answer the six questions, which were configured in a matrix: Did Pablo say it? Did Paula say it? Or did neither say it? I experienced equal parts relief and anguish that I couldn’t glance over at Kate. But because I was thinking of Kate, my mind went straight to the math: Six questions equaled 24% of the test. If I got zero correct, my odds of passing were virtually zero. Then I remembered her morning warning against getting lulled into thinking I could understand the recordings without translating. But now I had no time to translate.

I took a deep breath, visualized myself as more Spanish, and listened to the conversation a second time. I gave it my best shot. From what I could tell, it was between two coworkers, one just back from vacation and another who hadn’t vacationed in a year. I knew that wasn’t good enough. Then, either by providence or by having married sinfully well, I remembered another of Kate’s test tricks: when in doubt about two answers, fill in the same bubble for both questions to increase the odds of getting one correct. I did so, and hoped it would work. Pencils down, I gathered my answer sheet and booklet and returned to the chair next to Kate.

The proctor shooed us out to prepare the room for the third and final part of the morning’s festivities: writing. When we returned, the pencils and pathetic erasers had been collected and replaced with old-school Bic Cristal pens. The Bic Cristal may be iconic, and it may be the world’s best-selling pen, but it is a pen that Kate and I had both considered and emphatically rejected when arming ourselves for the exam. We gave each other a resigned smile and doused the pens with sanitizer.

Soon I was back in my comfort zone for 45 minutes. The first assignment was a godsend: write a short essay about your use of mass transit. I wrote about the subways of New York, and I couldn’t resist dipping a bit dangerously into my time for the second assignment, which was to respond to an email from a friend. The friend had been sick and wanted to know about a party she had missed and when we could get together now that she recovered. This was a little too on the nose in COVID times. I remember little about what I wrote, except that I struggled to achieve a balance in conveying sufficient worry for my imaginary friend’s unspecified illness and meeting my obligation to cover all the required points with correct grammar and spelling. I wrote that the party guests were nice, the food was good, and yes, let’s get together at Café Comercial next Saturday at noon.

Pens down.

Kate and I shuffled wordlessly out of the classroom with the others and returned to the narrow sidewalk where the ordeal had begun. It was 12:30. We were due back for the orals at 6:45 and 7 p.m., respectively.

On the walk home Kate helpfully asked, “Did you notice that the answer-key bubbles for the multiple-choice questions went across the page by each exercise, and not up and down?” As if I hadn’t understood the significance, she added still more helpfully, “Did you fill it in correctly?”

“Of course I did!” I spat out, convincing no one, while my stomach did a somersault.

Then, I volunteered, “Well, I thought I did okay except for the conversation between the coworkers,” regretting it the second “coworkers” left my lips in case I had gotten that wrong too. To my relief, Kate readily agreed and said she had the same feeling about being more rushed than in the practice exams. This made me feel better, even if I felt guilty that it was coming at Kate’s expense . . . though not too guilty because I was still irritated by the answer-key scare she had given me.

When we got to the apartment, I collected myself while Kate made tuna salad. It was a comforting throwback to lunches of my youth with all its attendant test-taking. We didn’t talk a lot, and Kate repaired to the bedroom after eating. Then, as I washed the dishes, I heard the sound of paper ripping and crinkling and went to investigate. Kate was removing the dozens of sheets of paper she had taped to the armoire. Down came the verb conjugations. Down came the indirect and direct objects. Down came the demonstratives and miscellaneous grammar rules.

But Kate didn’t stop there. She dragged the ladder from the utility closet in the kitchen into the bedroom, climbed it, and then peered over the top of the massive armoire. Silently and compliantly, I followed her, gripping the tippy ladder and handing up rags, paper towels, and cleansers as she dusted and scrubbed. Looking up at Kate, I wondered if I should be cramming for that evening’s oral exam. But Kate slid down the ladder, lifted the bed’s pneumatic spring and threw notebook upon notebook into the storage space beneath. As far as she was concerned, it was done. Cramming for the orals was pointless.

I gave in to the spirit.

We moved from work to play. And soon we were dancing around the apartment. We blasted the 5th Dimension’s Aquarius/Let the Sunshine In, Dionne Warwick’s Then Came You, Stevie Wonder’s You Are the Sunshine of My Life, Miriam Makeba’s Pata Pata, and a dozen other odes to joy.

We circled and sashayed around each other. We did head nods and head bobs. We careened with airplane-wing arms. We did jazz hands and cross steps. We shimmied and shook. We swung each other. We held each other. We clung to each other. We were delirious.

We had done no such thing since our wedding day, and here we were — more than eleven years later — taking a similar leap of faith together in Spain. Soon it was 6 p.m. — time to leave for the final and most difficult part of the test: the orals.

©2021 Kay Diaz

Chapter 19: Keep it Simple, Stupid

Peering at us through the Skype screen, bookcase behind his right shoulder, our new teacher Hernán reminds me of a bespectacled Ralph Fiennes — gentle and cerebral, kind but with a touch of remove. We explain our situation with the fast-approaching DELE A2 exam to maestro Hernán in our faltering Spanish. Hernán takes seriously what we have to say about Trump, and gets right down to business. He screen-shares our textbook, which is divided into six units: work; people and housing; shopping and dining out; health, hygiene and diet; studies and culture; and hobbies, trips, and means of communication.

Hernán is not going to leave anything to chance. And he does not like our chances. He instructs us to do listening practice exams every day. We are not to miss a day between now and the exam. We must practice excerpts from news programs, radio ads, answering machine messages, and conversations between two people.

They are not easy.

I’ve already had four months to practice this with our kitchen radio. But when I turn it on, I still hear: “¡Buenos días! AHORAVAMOSESCHUCHARDEUNAUTORQUEGANÓUN PREMIODELITERATUREELAÑOPASADO.”

To make matters worse, answering some of the DELE exam questions about the recorded conversations requires selecting a photo that purports to depict what took place. These pictures are not worth a thousand words. So, for example, if you made out that María told José that she was just visiting her daughter who had a baby, and you chose the photo of a tall white building that looked like a hospital for the “location of conversation” — like I did — you would be wrong. The correct photo is a nondescript block of apartments; you should have been alert to the clues that the acquaintances bumped into each other on the street. Hernán calls these trampas — traps.

Not a class goes by when Hernán doesn’t scrunch his mouth a bit before warning us about Las Trampas, and not one of these times goes by when I don’t think Trump-a and shoot Kate a worried look.

In keeping with her customary practice, Kate scours the internet — this time, looking for YouTube videos and podcasts that can help us with our Spanish. She finds three talented Spanish teachers. One is an American whose tagline is “learn Spanish from somebody who speaks your language.” And he does speak my language: he failed high school Spanish. The second is a Andalusian university professor who speaks entirely in slow, repetitious Spanish while doing ridiculous things so that his viewers feel less ridiculous themselves. This teacher warns against overstudying so as not go crazy. But he isn’t teaching directly to the DELE A2 exam, so we do go crazy — and Kate keeps looking.

She discovers podcastsinspanish.org, the brainchild of two DELE examiners, Bea and Reyes, who hold short conversations about everyday things — making a cake, throwing a party, going to the beach, and the pros and cons of WhatsApp. Sometimes Bea interviews her very small child, Amanda, which is both adorable and about our speed. Bea and Reyes become a daily fixture in our lives. We commit ourselves so much to these podcasts that we start referring to these two women as if we know them. “Bea would say this,” and “Reyes would say that,” we’d remark to each other while shopping. Despite our newly-forged imaginary friendship, we have no idea what Bea and Reyes even look like; they are wizards behind a studio curtain.

Meanwhile, our real teacher, Hernán, teaches us business correspondence etiquette in Spain and drills us on writing mock restaurant reviews, both the sort of thing that may be on the DELE exam. While I think of the Skype screen as a barrier of sorts, Hernán perceptively asks us on several occasions, “¿Estáis deprimidas?” (“Are you depressed?”). But he pushes us forward in a way that is at once calm and demanding. When he wants us to remember a word or a grammatical point, he raises his index finger and calls out “¡Ficha!” — meaning, this is important and you’d better make a flash card! We each hold up a file card to our respective screen cameras to show him that we are obedient students.

But soon we are buried in fichas, so I start using an app called Anki to create electronic flashcards. Ignoring the advice of the Andalusian YouTube instructor not to overstudy, I quickly amass over 11,000 digital flash cards.

Back in class, Hernán begin to prepare us for the extemporaneous speaking part of the exam by giving me three minutes to discuss my favorite book. I drone on for eight.

After class, Kate walks to the kitchen blackboard and writes:

LISTEN

THINK

TEST TRICKS

LESS IS MORE

She then writes “KISS = Keep It Simple, Stupid.” on a pink Post-it note and affixes it to my computer.

Then she says, “If I knew half the vocabulary you know, I wouldn’t be worried about passing this exam. But you go on and on, needlessly introducing so many errors that they are going to deduct points. Did you see Hernán on the screen, or were you too busy showing off? He looked positively stricken. If you keep this up, you’re not going to pass this test, Kay.”

I write on a yellow Post-it note, “It’s not what you know; it’s what you can do.” My vocabulary memorization is like a parlor trick. But what good is that if I can’t use the words to form fluid sentences?

At that point I should have said to Kate, “Thank you. You’re right.” After all, she was only trying to rescue me yet again.

Instead, I accused Kate of being obsessive compulsive and told her that she reminded me of childhood classmates who’d complain that they were going to fail and then earned a perfect score.

“I am going to do better than you, but I shouldn’t — THAT is my point,” said Kate.

I decide that I will apologize to Kate . . . someday. But for now I suggest that we supplement our classes with additional tutoring that focuses solely on the oral part of the exam. We contact our former teacher Irene, now busy with a demanding new job, who unhesitantly agrees to Zoom with us an hour each evening as soon as she finishes her long workday.

But, despite having two professional tutors, I’m still struggling. One day, while haltingly describing my favorite kind of vacation, Irene says, “Kat-ryn, you don’t have to tell the truth. This is a language test, not a topic test.” I feel liberated hearing this, but I am embarrassed that I didn’t realize it on my own.

After two more weeks of fifteen-hour study days, our last day of class with Hernán finally arrives. He smiles and says, “I think you are both going to pass.” Perhaps thinking of me, he adds, “If you don’t, it will be so much easier to pass on the second try.”

That same evening, at the end of our last class with Irene, she says, “I really think you are both ready. I really think you are going to pass.”

And with that, we futilely resolved to get some sleep.

©2021 Kay Diaz