Antigua

I don’t have a good memory. I remember in bright colors, in smells, in vague background sounds like static. I remember childhood dreams as real. I remember what I felt like. I remember something angered me when, but not what it was that angered me. I remember names without faces and faces without names. I remember what a sandwich felt like in my hands, the little bit of sand, that white dust bread seems to have, leaving a stain, the crunch in my mouth but not what it tasted like, someone’s leg pressed up against my own but not who that leg belongs to.

Some things are sharp. Never the most important things. Usually never.

I remember bits and pieces of Antigua. This colonial town made of cobblestones and pink buildings. Crucifixes carved into everything.

Although I was supposed to be learning pluperfect subjunctives or conditional tense irregular verbs or whatever, my broken Spanish was just good enough to entice my harried tutor to ditch lessons so we could get some food and drinks. The school she worked for, and where I rented rooms, had assigned Angelica to me because she had a reputation for no-nonsense. She was studying forensics in Ciudad de Guatemala. She wore pantsuits and had a serious case of resting bitch face.

I’d gotten my first tutor (Sofia, I think her name was, or definitely something starting with an S) in trouble for laughing too much. Even though our lessons were a floor below where I slept (and sometimes she would just drag a table and chair onto the balcony outside my room) I was always late, and always dripping wet from the shower. Drying off in the sun, I had her in stitches with new verbs I’d make up because I couldn’t remember the ones she’d taught me.

After lunch, she once asked me politely, ¿Qué comiste para el almuerzo? I wracked my brain for the verb to eat, before giving up and just replying, Yo naché.

¿Naché? She blinked. ¿Que es naché?

Tu sabes… nachar, el verbo to eat nachos en inglés. I then conjugated it for her. Nacho, nachas, nacha, nachamos, nachan… while she gave great big belly laughs, drawing the irate gazes of nearby students taking quizzes in their work books.

Perhaps fearing I was not getting my money’s worth, the school abruptly switched me to Angelica, whose knuckles rapped sharply on my door after only two minutes of my being late to meet her. ¿Estás enferma, señorita? Trying to creep discretely from my bed to the shower, my shadow betrayed my movement, stripping through the crack beneath the door.

For a single week, I was afraid, and it greatly improved my performance. I would wake up early, get to lessons on time, actually prepare index cards and do the homework assigned to me. Under a steely gaze, I would answer, stiff and haltingly but correctly, a Spanish interrogation disguised as casual conversation. Unlike Sofia, who would switch off between English and Spanish with me whenever it got too hard (which was often), Angelica refused to speak anything but Spanish, although the stink eye she gave me when I muttered something beneath my breath indicated she was perfectly fluent in both.

But by the next week, I relaxed enough to bring snacks with me to the lessons. The Dragon Lady (as I’d taken to calling my tutor) looked at me aghast when I dipped my oreo in a jar of peanut butter.

¿Quieres? I offered her the treat, and she took it, cautiously, looking for all the world as if she’d always expected me to try and poison her, but nevertheless compelled to taste it. Her expression didn’t really change. She chewed quietly, gave no assessment, and we returned back to our lesson. After a quick break, however, I returned back to my table to see that all of the tutors were surrounding Angelica, bouncing on their feet with nervous excitement. Upon seeing me they burst into a flurried Spanish I couldn’t understand. For the very first time, Angelica parted her lips and translated for me, “They would like to try it too.” Her cheeks were pink, perfect posture a little curved as she sat surrounded by her peers. For the first time, I realized she wasn’t quite as old as I had thought.

“Oh, uh… yeah, sure – sí.”

By the time I sat down across from my tutor, there were no oreos left. A handful of fingers had left tracks in the peanut butter, smeared against the plastic walls. Muffled graciases preceded the tutors hurrying back to their impatient tables, leaving me with a blushing dragon lady who cleared her throat and tried to direct me back to our lessons. But the ice had broken, and pretty soon I had her giggling quietly with my broken nouns and make-shift adjectives as I got distracted by a cloud and tried to describe what it looked like to her. We started talking about our boyfriends, about lesbians (I would describe, in as much lavish detail as I could manage, what they got up to while she shook her head in horror, never quite able to tell me to stop) about Guatemalan celebrities, about what she was studying at university, about Jesus actually being a jew (¿Qué? ¡No!), and finally about “testing” my skills in a real world setting.

Dragging her off to various bars for happy hour, I’d lessen my hold on her sleeve just enough so she could explain to the office where we were going before yanking sharply so we could get to Mono Loco for nachos and margaritas, her heels echoing off the cobblestones. I joked with her that I could tell who was native by which women wore heels in Antigua. At night, the students, tourists and backpackers stumbled across the uneven streets but Guatemalan women strutted in their five inch heels no problem.

If I was suffering from a hangover, Angelica would nurse me back to health with a cup of coffee and a tut of disapproval. Instead of midday nachos and margaritas, we’d go to one of our favorite cafes and order a sandwich de jamón for me and a dignified chicken salad for her. I remember the bread dust on my hands, slapping her on the ass and smirking at the print left behind on her pantsuit. I remember her kicking me beneath the table. I remember us snorting into our coffees.

One time, we ate at a cafe across from the school, and another tutor asked me if I was done with my food. It was half a chicken breast. I wasn’t, actually. But, I knew the tutors all talked to each other, and didn’t want to get a bad reputation with them, so I said that I was. Instead of eating it for herself, like I thought she would, the woman grabbed the breast off my plate and flung it out onto the street to the delight of some stray dogs who pounced on the meal. Waving goodbye, the tutor casually strolled away and Angelica burst out laughing at my face.

Another time, in another restaurant, at another table, a man wiped off his mouth and pushed back his seat, standing up. “Disfrute de su comida,” He told us and walked away, Angelica murmuring her thanks and for him to have a good day.

¿Quien era ese? I asked her, but she seemed confused by my question, answering she didn’t know who that was. I asked her then why did he tell us to enjoy our meal.

Angelica had two expressions that both meant I was acting strange, but one of them meant I was acting strange because I was me, and the other meant I was acting strange probably because I was from New York. Él estaba siendo amable. She pronounced amable slowly, as if the concept must be absolutely foreign to someone from the city.

It was either that same day, or soon after, that we were walking back to the school, in very little rush. I don’t remember what month it was, but it had to be either the end of one year or beginning of another, because I remember it was freezing cold back home and I had teased my shivering mother over FaceTime that I was so sick of how beautiful the weather was in Antigua, that I’d trade in my tan for snow angels.

Around the corner we ran into a woman walking her dog. Immediately I crouched down and started cooing over the precious furry baby, stroking him and smushing his face with his little paws on my knee and his tongue hanging out. Angelica looked at me with her usual brand of horror and disgust, but also reluctant curiosity. “So, in New York,” She had taken to speaking English only when she wanted me to clearly understand the burn of her diss, “You don’t say have a good meal to people, but you do talk to dogs.”

The walk back, after that, I don’t recall. The memory freezes there, her pointed look, dog saliva smeared on my grinning cheek, our skin darkening in the winter heat, cobblestones beneath our feet, a feeling in my chest. Tight with happiness. Bottled up moments that burst out sometimes, in random corners of my mind, spraying me with jokes I half remember.

~Amanda