The Year of The Spanish Fever

Just your average 68-year-old college freshman studying abroad.
There is a legend of a man who walks the streets here with no companion but the sins on his soul. He is a foreigner welcomed by all and treated with great dignity.

The legend tells of his search for a father confessor, a priest to hear his sins. But the man has a problem.

His resume of sins is disappointing, completely devoid of drama and imagination. He didn’t rob from the rich to pay the poor. He didn’t lie to save the life of a child. If he were to write a memoir, which he most certainly will not, only small sins of omissions would be confessed.

His deepest dread is wasting the time of a confessor and being dismissed as lightly as a schoolboy. Three Our Fathers and three Hail Marys would be the cruelest penance of all.

He goes from parish to parish to find a priest who doesn’t understand one word of his language. In all of Barcelona is there such a man of God?

One day at a grand boulevard, an elderly priest begins to step out in front of an onrushing autobus. Our man grabs his arm and saves the priest’s life. Obviously the old cleric has lost his hearing.

They retire to wine and companionship. When two bottles have been emptied the man asks the priest — deaf, unfamiliar with his language and now many sheets to the wind— if he will take his sins to God.

The priest is shocked at the cruelty of what he wrongly imagines the man has confessed. He orders the foreigner to sell all his possessions and follow the way of The Savior, an unusually harsh penance usually reserved for those facing the firing squad. No penance is more difficult to satisfy. But the man complies.

He had once overpaid his credit cards and for a short time was able to spend with abandon. Surely, he reasons, the Almighty is a munificent as Capital One. He wonders which of the Seven Sins he will enjoy committing most.

Just your average 68-year-old college freshman studying abroad.

It is with the last ounce of courage and an unbearable sorry that I subject you to “El Sueno Imposible.” Forgive me, but I hope to make a point.

Spanish is a language wrapped in the subjunctive. Without limiting yourself much, you can speak English for days and get by without using the subjunctive mood. But not Spanish.

The subjunctive is used to express what’s happening in the speaker’s mind — how he or she feels about something — not necessarily what’s real and true. Unlike German or Cantonese, two perfectly wonderful languages which sound like they don’t care about your dreams, Spanish has a wistful lilt. I grew up believing that Ricardo Montalban honestly did want me to have that pony.

We need to remember, though, that Spanish was used to enslave much of the indigenous world. “I wish we had more gold.” Isabella said to Ferdinand. Subjunctive and cold-blooded at the same time.

This, my friends, is a language worth studying.

Just your average 68-year-old college freshman studying abroad.

The men are men, the women are women. But in Spanish-speaking countries inanimate objects can go either way.

Every noun — a tool, a spice, a piece of wrapping paper — has a gender. Adjectives and articles have to agree. El, la, los, las.

Things you would assume are masculine or feminine often aren’t. The Spanish word for sausage, a phallus they shove into a bun, is feminine. The bun that it penetrates is masculine.

Stylish sling-back heels are referred as “los zappatos” (masculine). Rugged shit-kicker boots as “las botas” (feminine). A woman’s dress gets a masculine noun and is kept in the closet.

We think of meat and potatoes as a guy thing but in Spanish they are as feminine as Shakira.

Nobody can quite explain why or how but everyday, as the day turns into night, its gender changes from masculine to feminine. The nights in Barcelona can be dazzling.

Just your average 68-year-old college freshman.

The crow’s feet will still be there and you’ll have to come to terms with those jowls and wattles. But people like you are not interested in the shallow cosmetics of youth.

Our search is for a more profound renewal, an intellectual and spiritual innocence. And the key to finding it is within all of us. We can know the promise of youth in its full glory only through total and abject ignorance.

Here how it works. When you can’t begin to understand what a professor is saying, when you can’t process a string of syllables into recognizable sounds or articulate even the simplest thought, your mind curls into the fetal position.