Before leaving for Mexico I did not speak a word of Spanish. In Canada French is our other national language and a common misconception is that all Canadians are reliably bi-lingual. This is decidedly untrue, with most French speaking citizens residing solely in Quebec, Canada’s only francophone province. Growing up in Vancouver, clear on the other side of the county, the only French I was exposed to on a regular basis was on the side of my cereal box and even though the Canadian government has made French mandatory curriculum, the course is taught with lackluster enthusiasm at best. After taking French for all five years of high school I somehow managed to only ever learn how to ask someone if I may use the toilet, a slightly less useful phrase than knowing how to ask where said toilet might actually be. My dismal grasp of another language has always plagued me and so as we prepared to move I became more and more excited about the opportunity to turn my attentions to Spanish. Months before we left I purchased the first level of The Rosetta Stone, a computer program that claims to teach you any language through the beauty of immersion. I pictured myself sipping tequila on a patio in a hot and tropical Mexican town, dressed in long flowing Oaxacan skirts, a braid in my hair. I would be effortlessly carrying on a conversation with my new Mexican friends, a community of up and coming artists and revolutionaries, easily breezing through any existential topic that was tabled. Clearly I had seen ‘Frida’ one too many times. As I began my first lesson it became obvious that the only patio I would be welcomed on while speaking Spanish would be located a few doors down from Oscar’s garbage can on Sesame Street. I spent my days memorizing colours, numbers, and simple nouns – blue, morning, sky. This would come in handy when my new friends called upon me to protest against government corruption. Fists raised I would shout, ‘Today there is indeed a blue sky and on that table sits four apples!’ Still, in the privacy of my own home, safely situated in an English speaking country, I proudly repeated each new word, confident that in just a few weeks of living immersed in a Spanish speaking society I would be fluent.
I have always been a shy. When I was a small child I would hide behind my mother when asked to say hello and fought passionately to be able to play by myself instead of with the large band of kids that roamed my neighborhood. In high school I walked with my eyes to the ground and took elaborate alternate routes to avoid feeling too exposed in the large main hallways. As the years passed I grew more comfortable in my own skin and, more importantly, I began to cultivate the age-old defense mechanisms of cynicism and dry wit to shield myself whenever I started to feel too self-conscious. Unfortunately for me The Rosetta Stone had failed to include a lesson on cutting remarks and as we crossed into Mexico I felt a wave of panic hit and then settle as a heavy and oppressive weight in my stomach. I no longer had English to protect me, and until I could speak Spanish I would be forced to resort to complex and enthusiastically preformed charades guaranteed to create a scene wherever I went. I felt like my self-conscious sixteen-year-old self all over again and silently vowed to never do anything without V, my perfectly bi-lingual boyfriend, ever again.
We spent the first month living in an eccentric little hotel at the bottom of Honduras Street. Our home was one room with a kitchenette and a huge patio that overlooked the ocean. Every night the sun awed us with its pastel descent into the cool blue ocean below and we began to understand how lucky we were to have made this move. The proprietress of the hotel had given us an exceptional deal for the month and as such we put up with the little inconveniences I have now come to understand are just the way of life in Mexico. The most consistent quirk seemed to be our maid service, a team of women who never seemed to agree on our correct allotment of clean bathroom towels. Every new cleaning held a surprise - some days we were left with towels enough for a pool party and other days we were rationed just one. The maid’s decisions seemed to have no rhyme or reason and V and I made the best of it, only bothering the hotel staff when no towels were left at all. In the first few weeks of our arrival I had been using V to negotiate everything, from our rent to buying a pack of gum, but now he worked at his parent’s gallery which left me on my own for vast periods of time, exposing me to actual communication with our Mexican community.
One particularly hot and humid day, I came home desperately needing a shower and discovered, once again, an empty towel rack. My first tactic, as always, was to do nothing and hope that the universe would provide me with towels if I believed in them enough. This did not work. I soon realized that if a shower was to be in my near future I would have to take the matter into my own hands.
Nervously I descended the long flight of stairs, silently cursing myself for not having the foresight to look up ‘towel’ in my dictionary before leaving my room. I made determined eye contact with the woman at the front desk and then plunged forward eager to get this whole experience over with. I quickly realized that the unfortunate thing about a towel is that in terms of its mime-ability it has no real distinctive shape. Without any action attached to it, emphatically slicing the air to display a square could mean a multitude of things to the person trying to understand you. It turns out, in order to truly communicate ‘towel’ one must display both the act of showering and drying off. Sighing, I lifted my arms and fluttered my fingers in the hopes to convey water streaming down upon me and set about showering with air in the center of our hotel lobby. Just when I thought it could not get any worse, of course, it did. In an attempt to communicate with words instead of attention drawing gestures I started to speak in a foreign language. Unfortunately for all involved I was not spitting out words in Spanish but in French. My brain had registered that English was of no use here but when put on the spot had forgotten each carefully memorized Spanish noun and had left me madly grasping at any French word I could recall. This was an alphabet soup of the French I had learned over the years and absolutely none of it had anything to do with towels and my lack thereof – ‘Oui! Non! Bien. Ou est la chat?. Bonsoir. Je suis!’ I was now the undisputed center of attention in the lobby, even the hotel dog had stopped his incessant barking to stare at me in wonder. Clearly this was not working. I dropped my arms to my sides and quietly muttered in defeat, ‘I just need two…’ The woman working the front desk smiled in sympathy and said, in perfect English, ‘What, exactly, do you need two of?’
And that, as it turns out, is one of the benefits of living in such a large tourist town – almost everyone can speak some amount of English. While I still spend every other day with a tutor in the hopes to one day be able to ask for dos toallas in perfect Spanish I no longer require V to be glued to my side at all times. The fact that I now buy my own gum may seem far from my original dreams of challenging debates on sun soaked patios, but to me it is no less rewarding.
