Here’s something I hate: getting out of bed. You could give me a million reasons to get out of bed and I still won’t do it. And it’s even worse when my alarm goes off at six a.m. and I know that it is minus three degrees in my room and there’s an icy floor waiting for my toes. On mornings like that, the only way for me to hoist myself out of bed is to remind myself that if I don’t move now I will miss the train that will get me to class on time, causing me to lose my job and my only source of income, thereby setting off a chain of events that will lead to me standing outside a homeless shelter waiting for a plastic cup of coffee from a harried-looking Missionary of Charity.
Heaven forbid.
Every morning I had to hold that image in my mind while I quickly stepped into my jeans and splashed water on my face, threw my makeup in my bag and scrabbled around looking for my keys, wasting another ten minutes, then ran helter-damn-skelter to the metro station and propelled myself down the stairs.
All the while I tried not to stop and ask myself the question, “Does this scene look familiar?” Wasn’t this exactly what I came to Spain to avoid? If anything, hadn’t my situation gotten worse? I was getting up earlier to commute farther to make less money by working harder than I did before. What had happened to running away with the gypsies?
It was Tuesday morning, and I was late for class with Andrés. It was dark and the only other people on the street were wandering drunkenly home after a night of partying. I raced down the station stairs and put my monthly pass through the metro turnstile. I ran forward, expecting the metal spoke to move, but instead I just got a big thump in the stomach and a red light flashed to say my ticket wasn’t valid. I tried again at the next machine and again the red light came up.
I could hear the train pulling into the station. I thought about jumping the gate, but there was a ticket inspector in the booth, so I darted over to him and told him there was something wrong with my ticket. The inspector ran my ticket through a machine to check that it was okay, then calmly stepped out of the booth and walked me back to the turnstile.
I could hear the sound of the doors closing as the train prepared to leave the station. I was going to be late again. The inspector calmly opened the gate for me to pass through. He smiled at me and said in English, “Don’t worry, be happy.”
Don’t worry, be happy? Didn’t he understand I was going to be late for work? How could I not worry?
I’m not good at not worrying. It’s easier for me to get out of bed than to stop worrying. In fact, worrying about the consequences of not getting out of bed is the only thing that gets me up in the first place.
Taking it easy, relaxing, being in the moment are things that I appreciate in theory but that don’t seem to have any practical application in my life. I get the beauty of being in the now, but even that idea stresses me. Should I be in the now, now? Like, now? I think I’m missing it. Was that now? Oh, now? I can’t do this, I give up. That’s pretty much how it works for me. When I think about taking it easy and not worrying, it’s always as a future project that I will get to after I’ve dealt with all the things I need to worry about first. And during those first few weeks in Madrid, it wasn’t like I didn’t have enough to worry about.
I knew that worrying wouldn’t solve my problems, but I couldn’t help it. I felt like I was always walking on the edge of catastrophe, like a tightrope walker without a safety net. Sometimes I felt invigorated by my new life, but more often than not it was just overwhelming.
That was why I found it so refreshing to be around people who were relaxed about life, like Mariela, who worked in the café where I went for breakfast every morning after my first English class. Mariela was a Venezuelan woman with two daughters who was doing a part-time hairdressing apprenticeship. She had black hair with purple streaks that was cut into an asymmetrical bob, and had a mischievous smile that was never far from her lips. I didn’t know that she was Venezuelan at first, and when I asked her if she was Spanish, she gave me a long look, then threw her head back and hooted with laughter. “Una negrita como yo?” A little black girl like me? she’d said, laughing at my ignorance.
Mariela’s boyfriend was an artist who made a living doing caricatures of tourists in the Plaza Mayor. He also came to the bar every morning for breakfast. One day he drew a caricature of me dancing flamenco on a serviette, which I folded up and slipped into my wallet where it sat among receipts, metro passes, and museum tickets. They were little pieces of the puzzle that one day would form a whole picture so that I could look back and understand the journey that I was taking. At least, I hoped it would make sense one day.
• • •
My class at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs was held twice a week, and at the second class I had two new students. Paloma had told them that the new teacher was an improvement from the last, so they decided to give me a chance. The next week I had five students, then seven, then ten. Every class I’d come in to find a new face gazing up at me expectantly, waiting for the fun to begin. And the more students I had, the more interesting the class became.
The trick to teaching English, I was learning, was finding out what your students are passionate about; my students at the ministry loved to argue and debate about Spain and Spanish politics. That was perfect for me, because I was always asking them questions about things that I didn’t understand. Like the day I was running late for class and the road was blocked by a hundred men dressed up in top hats and frock coats carrying a giant papier-mâché sardine. I’d come to accept a lot of strange things in Spain, but when the men in tuxedos tried to fill my pockets with sweets, I really needed an explanation.
“It’s the burial of the sardine!” the class told me. They explained that it was Ash Wednesday, the final day of the carnivals and the first day of Lent. The men in frock coats were doing a mock funeral parade, my students explained to me, to mourn the end of the festivities.
“And will they actually bury the sardine?” I asked.
“Of course,” my students said. “They bury it in the park. Don’t you celebrate Carnival in your country?”
I thought about that, but I couldn’t recall ever seeing giant fish being carried through the streets of Sydney.
“What holidays do you celebrate?” my students asked.
“Well…” I pondered that for a moment. “I guess we have Australia Day.”
“Do you wear your traditional costume?” they asked. I didn’t know that we had a traditional costume. “But,” they protested, “what is the costume you wear for your festival days?”
“Well,” I said, thinking carefully about how Australians dress up to celebrate our “festival days,” “I guess it would be jeans and a T-shirt.”
“No!” they said. “Really?”
The new student who had joined that day, a white-haired, bespectacled man named Antonio, politely raised his hand and asked, “Who is the patron saint of your village?”
I had to think about that one. The patron saint of Sydney… Well, there was only one person it could be. “Kylie Minogue,” I told them.
They gasped in scandalized delight. “And your Virgin?”
That one was easy. “Nicole Kidman,” I told them.
• • •
One thing I needed to do was get out of the apartment in Tirso de Molina. If there was one simple way I could improve my quality of life, that was it. I couldn’t keep shivering through the nights, brushing my teeth over the cruddy bathtub because the bathroom sink was broken, hanging my wet laundry up around my bed, and going to sleep with two pairs of pants on just to stay warm. Plus I needed an apartment with a kitchen I could actually use. Each time I walked into the kitchen, there would be something to make me walk straight back out again, whether it was a mountain of dishes in the sink, gray-looking seafood that had been put out to defrost and then forgotten about, or a stew that made the whole apartment stink. On top of that, with the expense of my dance classes, there was no way I could continue to keep paying the rent. I was earning very little from my English classes and paying for my dance classes with my Australian savings, but they wouldn’t last forever, and in the meantime I needed to find a cheaper home. The problem was that I didn’t know where I’d find one.
A girl called Brigita had just rented the room opposite mine. A young Brazilian girl who’d also come to Madrid to study flamenco, she was paying for her classes by working nights serving drinks. She’d get home in the early hours of the morning smelling of smoke and exhausted after being run off her feet all night, then go off in the mornings to dance. Brigita had only been staying in the apartment for a few days when she came into the kitchen in tears. She told me that Miguel had asked her what kind of work she did. When she told him she worked in a bar, he asked her if she had drinks with the customers. “He thinks I am a prostitute just because I am from Brazil!”
“I’m trying to find a new place to live,” I told her. “When I find something we’ll move together.” This idea calmed Brigita down. I promised I wouldn’t leave without her and said that I was sure it wouldn’t take me long to find us a new place. Of course I wasn’t sure of that at all. I’d been stressed enough about finding a room for myself; now I had to find two rooms.
I lay in bed that night wondering how on earth I was going to do it. I needed an apartment that was warm and clean and safe, and cheap enough so that I didn’t have to worry about impending doom every time I made an ATM withdrawal. I decided that I’d ask absolutely everyone I met if they knew of anyone who had rooms for rent. Someone had to know of something.
I started out by asking Mariela when I saw her in the café the next morning. To my surprise she leaned across the counter and told me that she rented out rooms in her own apartment. She said she currently had a double room available with a view of the street, and another room with two single beds. I couldn’t believe it. That was exactly what I was looking for. I arranged to go and see it that day after class.
Mariela lived in a neighborhood called El Rastro. It was in the old part of the city, and the streets were lined with antiques stores and junk shops. Every Sunday there was a big flea market. It was the perfect place to go if you wanted to buy an old bullfighter’s costume, a rusty typewriter, a lace mantilla, or elaborate hair combs to wear to the feria.
Mariela’s apartment was above a Moroccan furniture store that had a selection of brightly colored tea tables and carved wooden stools set up on the pavement. I followed Mariela up the stairs to the second floor, and she opened the door to a dimly lit apartment. There was a narrow living area with a couch, a television, and a dining table. The kitchen was tiny with a small gas oven, and there was a little patio where they hung up their washing.
On the far side of the apartment was the double room. When Mariela opened the door, I immediately fell in love with it. It was large with a big bed pushed up against glass sliding doors that opened out onto a tiny balcony. From the window I could see down onto the street where all the shopkeepers had set up their wares to tempt passersby. Arranged on the pavement were oil paintings in gilt frames, old light fittings, and brass-capped walking sticks. The shopkeepers sat outside in the sun with their cafés con leche and cigarettes, calling out to each other across the street.
I came back later with Brigita, and she loved the place just as much as I did. The second bedroom with the two beds was ideal for her because her sister would be arriving soon from Brazil and there was plenty of room for both of them, and the price was perfect.
So Mariela had two rooms rented out, and Brigita and I had found a new place to live for a perfect price, in an apartment full of light and fun and beans and rice. It was a four-bedroom apartment, but with me and Brigita and her sister, there would be a total of eight women living there. Mariela lived in one room with her mother and two daughters, and then there was another Venezuelan woman called Andrea who lived in the room next to mine.
“Cómo te llamas?” Andrea passed me in the hall the day I moved in and asked me my name for the second time.
“Nellie,” I said.
She repeated it, struggling with the pronunciation. “Ne…ll…i…e… Ah! Nellie, como la laca?”
It took me a moment to translate laca to “hairspray” in my head. But then I remembered seeing bottles of hairspray in the bathroom with the name “Nelly” in pink letters.
“Yes,” I said. “I’m Nellie, like the hairspray.”