Crash Course in Spanish by Tina Martin

Just to have this easy to access:

From the 2005 travel anthology I Should Have Gone home

Crash Course in Spanish

by Tina Martin

I'd been back from Chile for only a few hours when a nice policeman pulled me over for making a "California Stop," which is not quite a stop, and wrote out a bonus ticket because I didn't have my driver's license with me.

"It was in my wallet, which was stolen a couple of days ago...8,000 miles away in South America," I told him.  I was waiting for him to respond, "Yeah, that's what they all say," but he just politely handed me my tickets and commented that he was trying to brush up on his Spanish.  Even though he hadn't exactly asked, I made the usual recommendations like watching People's Court and LA Law in Spanish or marrying someone who needed a green card.  But I forgot to mention the method that had led to the second ticket he was giving me:  Getting robbed on the metro in a Spanish-speaking country.

As a Christmas/graduation gift for my son in December 2001 after travel prices had been slashed following the attacks on the World Trade Center, I offered him a trip anyplace in the world--with his mother.  My son chose Chile, where we had friends, one of whom had been a political prisoner for the three years following General Agusto Pinochet's coup on September 11, 1973.  I mention this because the subject became part of my Spanish lesson.

Our friends in Chile were among those who advised me not to get robbed.

"If someone stops to ask you something, pretend that you don't speak Spanish," one friend told me, "and just move on."

"That's no fun!"  I said.  Practicing my Spanish was high on my list of things to do in Chile, no matter how much it obfuscated communication.  (Como se dice eschew obfuscation en español?)

Maybe I was too old to do what I'd done in Madrid almost 30 years earlier.  Then, fresh out of the Peace Corps (and with my Peace Corps Readjustment Allowance of $1,500), I'd gone to Spain and almost immediately headed for the University of Madrid to make some friends--preferably a boyfriend--who would be willing to speak Spanish with me.  Finding the campus deserted, I realized that it was Semana Santa--Holy Week--and the campus was closed.  But just as I was murmuring something stronger than caramba, I spotted a handsome bearded man who was checking job announcements on the bulletin board, and we met, spoke, exchanged numbers, met again, fell in love and spent a year of evenings in Madrid sharing vino tinto and tapas, singing in mesones and spending weekends by the fireplace in Peguerinos.  That's how I'd improved my Spanish back then.

But now, in my 50s, if I appeared in a university corredor, I would be taken for a professor instead of taken for tapas.  Getting robbed, on the other hand, availed itself to travelers of any age.  Besides, as perfect as my Spanish boyfriend was, he never gave me a document like the one I got from the Prefectura de Radiopatrullas in the Metro  Estación Baquedano in Santiago, Chile, after I was robbed.

There was a certain irony in how I became a victim.  I was robbed right after trying to warn anther passenger of the same danger! My son even suspects that the passenger I tried to warn was the one who robbed me or at least set me up.  She had boarded with a friend and fallen backward against my son, who noticed that her backpack was opened, putting he cell phone in clear sight and up for grabs.  He wanted to warn her but didn't know spanish for backpack.  I knew it probably wasn't paco de baco, but I couldn't remember mochila.  Now I'll always remember it because I think it was when her mochila caused her loss of balance that our attention was diverted away from my bag, which had someone else's full attention.

"May wallet's gone!" I cried after we jumped off at the next metro stop and I noticed my bag felt lighter.  "After all the warnings!  I've proven myself to be as stupid as they thought I was."

Instead of delivering the verbal punishment most parents receive on such occasions, my son tried to reassure me.

"It wasn't our stupidity.  It was their...deftness," he said.  "We still have my ATM card, so we can get more money.  What did you have in your wallet?"

"My Visa.  My ATM card.  The card-key to our hotel room."

"That has the address and room number on it.  We'd better call the hotel and tell them."

I had a good chance to practice my Spanish by explaining to a guard what had happened, leaving out the paco de baco part.  Sweetly sympatheic, perhaps to my loss as well as to my Spanish, he obtained a special key and led us downstairs to a little room with a pone.  We called the hotevhotel, and I got to practice announcing what a fool I was.   (“!Que cabeza la mia!”) Then I got to practice following directions, which I can’t do even in English.  We were to go to the metro station Baquedano.  Thanks mostly to my son, who doesn’t speak a word of Spanish, we got there, where I began my really intensive language course in Spanish.

 Starting with the essential details—my age and my marital status-- a young officer took down all the facts longhand in a ledger.  I got to practice words like licencia de conducir del estado de California, Tarjeta Visa del banco Working Assets, Tarjeta ATM, Tarjeta de Salud Kaiser, fotos familiares, seguro automotriz de la compania de seguros CSSA, and sesenta mil pesos en dinero efectivo  (sixty thousand pesos in cash). After an hour interview, he re-checked the facts with me as he put the final report into their computer, which offered me another hour reviewing Spanish vocabulary.  Then he printed out the report and sent someone away to get it stamped.

While we waited for the return of the document, I got to look around and ask a few questions like the one about the framed Derechos de los Detenidos (Rights of The Detained)  on the wall, which led to a cultural exchange of sorts.  He noted that the rights of detainees was a concern in the United States now, after the the September 11 attacks a few weeks earlier had led to people being taken away without charges.  Then he asked me where we were headed when I was robbed, and I said, “Al museo de Allende.”  He’d never heard of it, and didn’t seem to know who Allende was. But the DERECHOS DE LOS DETENIDOS indicated that he knew Pinochet was no longer in power.

Eventually the document came back signed with a flourish and sealed with a very official blue stamp saying CARABINEROS DE CHILE SANTIAGO.  No certificate of course completion could have thrilled me more than this official documentation of  what I no longer had and when I stopped having it, which was all in Spanish!  As I slipped the precious souvenir into my bag, the young officer commented, “Usted es una en un millon!”  (“You’re one in a million.”)  When I asked him why, he told me that foreigners almost never reported robberies to them.  I translated this for my son, who wanted to know where foreigners did report.  The answer, of course, was to their embassies.

 So once again I asked directions and we headed to the American Embassy, referred to by people who guided us along our way as la fortaleza (the fort).  When we finally arrived there, we could see why.  It did not look like a structure built on trust.  It brought back the 1982 movie with Jack Lemon and Sissy Spacek, Missing, based on the real disappearance of an American journalist who saw too much of the United States’ complicity in the 1973 overthrow of Allende, an overthrow which took place, we found out, on 9-1-1 of that year.  That explained some street signs saying 11 de septiembre.

I assumed that everyone at the embassy would speak English too well to tolerate my Spanish, but I was equivocada (mistaken).  They temporarily took my son’s camera away from him and x-rayed my bag, which proved that my wallet was, indeed, missing.  Then, when we walked in through the very heavy doors, we found ourselves alone with someone who spoke English much, much too well for me to subject him to my Spanish, and in spite of my usual insistence on speaking Spanish whether the people liked it or not, I felt a certain relief.  It was a coffee break from my Intensive Spanish Course without the coffee.  He gave me the phone and the numbers to call to block my Visa and ATM, and then we left that part of the fort and went back to get my son’s camera.

“Y ahora podemos tomar una foto de la fortaleza al exterior?” (And now can we take a picture of the outside of the fort?) I asked the guards, who replied “De ninguna manera.” (No way!)

We then got on with our itinerary, musing as we went:

“It’s funny, but now it seems that there’s such a thing as doing what’s Recreationally Correct,”  I said. 

“I don’t think that was it,” my son replied.

“You’re not supposed to have a good time unless you leave town.  And people judge the success of your vacation by the number of miles you’ve travelled.”

“Well, I guess you got it right this time,” my son said.  “Eight thousand miles!”

“There’s a checklist of places you’ve got to see to be Recreationally Correct.  But it’s not really those planned things that make  a vacation memorable.  It’s the deviations from the plan.  The vignettes.  The little human dramas.”

“Kind of like life?”  My son asked. 

We reflected that our trip had been wonderful in the way it was supposed to be:  Staying with friends in Algarrobo by the beautiful ocean there, taking a friend’s guided tour of Pablo Neruda’s house at Isla Negra, staying in La Gran Palace above a cineplex showing  Harry Potter, El senor de los anillos, Los diarios de una princesa, and Monsters. Inc. and going to free concerts at the Teatro Municipal in Santigo, disovering the tradition of Las Onces (the afternoon tea named for the eleven letters of aguardiente, which isn’t tea), ascending and descending the hills of Valparaiso, where we stayed at the Brighton Hotel, so picture-perfect that it’s featured on the postcard there…

However,  there’s not one perfect picture postcard that I’d trade for the unexpected experience that provided me with my Copia Certificada de Constancia Estampada, that stamped document representing (and reviewing!) language practice I’d never have gotten if I hadn’t been robbed.

But once back committing traffic violations in San Francisco, I observed that police officers won’t take it as a substitute for a driver’s license.