It's watch­ing me.

Even in sec­u­lar Spain, Jesus can hunt you down like the hea­then dog you are. I fled from him as best I could last week, strug­gling to remain true to the oath I swore in a beau­ti­ful medieval cathe­dral four months ago—an oath to never again step in a beau­ti­ful medieval church or suc­cumb to any reli­gious tourism while living in this country.

I’m proud to say that I made it until Thurs­day of semana santa, or Easter week, with my sec­u­lar­ity flex­ing and unblem­ished. When some­one told me that a beau­ti­ful, his­toric catholic pro­ces­sion would be pass­ing out­side my apart­ment tonight, and tomor­row night, and every night this week, I self-​imposed house arrest. When they told me oh wow the cos­tumes, oh wow the pen­i­tents look like purple KKK mem­bers, it’s so morbid and the can­dles and Jesus bleed­ing red velvet and you’d totally dig it, I nodded politely, and left town. I hud­dled in tapas bars on the wrong sides of towns. I stopped even look­ing at cathe­drals when I walked by, con­vinced that to do so would cause hun­dreds of penitents—whatever they are—to burst out of the gates like a bat­tal­ion of chaste orcs.

It was Madrid where they got me.

Read the first half here

And now, as I men­tioned, every­thing changed last week when, for the first time, I had a suc­cess­ful con­ver­sa­tion in Span­ish with a total stranger.

Wait; let me qual­ify that. I had my first unplanned, totally impro­vised con­ver­sa­tion in Span­ish with a stranger with­out any backup from my wife or the cul­tural script that can carry even total non-​speakers through, say, a trip through the super­mar­ket. At any super­me­r­cado, no matter how grand my con­fu­sion, there will usu­ally be people wait­ing in line behind me and so the end is always in sight. Not so at the oft-​empty local Min­istry of Tourism office in our wee town, where my recent tri­umph took place.

I admit that, word-by-word, the story is not par­tic­u­larly impres­sive. It starts and ends on very low notes, and in lit­er­ary terms pales next to the pig face epic (though paling next to a pig face is for­giv­able). In truth, it has more in common content-​wise with the spec­tac­u­lar fail­ures that have often punc­tu­ated my learn­ing process, such as the inci­dent wherein I attempted to con­tribute to a group con­ver­sa­tion about which types of animal manure are worse to live near than others, and only suc­ceeded in blurt­ing out “I love cow­boys” to a stunned and silent audi­ence. The dis­tance between what I said and what I meant to say is wide enough that stop­ping to explain it would be as objec­tion­able as having said it in the first place, so I’ll leave it unadorned. Suf­fice it to say, at the moment of speak­ing, all errors are pos­si­ble. This has become my mantra.

The epochal con­ver­sa­tion began with a pop­u­lar refrain: “Lo siento, no hablo mucho castel­lano, pero…” I no longer feel shame over begin­ning every sen­tence with an apol­ogy, as this phrase has helped to warm up my audi­ences on count­less tar­geted mis­sions. These days, my self-​loathing has shifted to the phys­i­cal rou­tine that I have inad­ver­tently devel­oped around the phrase, includ­ing a coy little half-​laugh and valley-​girl head-​bob. “Learn Span­ish the Fun and Easy Way” cer­tainly did not pre­pare me for this. I’ve looked through the whole book, and nowhere did it warn me, Not only will you suck, you will be so annoy­ing in your meager suc­cesses that, were you a Spaniard, you would simply walk away from your­self in disgust.

Friends and family warned me that learn­ing a new lan­guage at age 29 would be dif­fi­cult. If only you hadn’t wasted all those lan­guage cred­its on German, they said. If only you hadn’t spent so much time in writing-​focused jobs bela­bor­ing over pre­cise word choice and think­ing that lan­guage was a medium to express­ing your­self rather than a tool to communicate.

My response was always the same. I am ready to strug­gle with Span­ish. I like chal­lenges, which is to say, I like think­ing I like chal­lenges. And even before my wife and I moved from Chicago to small town of El Burgo de Osma six months ago, I knew that my strug­gle would be height­ened by social iso­la­tion, because as every­body knows, Nobody Speaks Eng­lish in Spain.