Tongue-tied in Andalucía

After taking my first siesta in my Sevillano host family’s guest room, the standard lethargy associated with awaking from a midday nap came with a new brand of discombobulated consciousness. I lay in bed running the track through my head. What was I doing here anyway?

I had arrived in Seville one week earlier; however, my first time in Spain had been spent within a microcosm of Americanism. We had met in the heart of Spain. A substantial horde of English language assistants had converged into a concentrated whole in the Madrid–Barajas airport. Somewhere in the mass of our group–a cross-section of U.S. citizens, mainly from the coastal States, some exceptions withstanding–lay my head. I was one of many, a small spec in a greater mosaic.

Now we had met our host families, disbanded and were peppered about el centro de Sevilla, no more comfortable fishbowl for me, just one deep, foggy ocean of Spanish, open for the navigating. I was a long way from home and what felt like an even farther distance from my last ‘college-try’ with the language.

Now my host parents, eager to get to know me, sat just outside my room’s door. I wanted to get to know them, too. With most others in my life, this never posed a problem. I have never operated on a deficit with words. My extroversion usually walks a tightrope strung above two viable beginnings: the seedlings of lifelong bonds or the precursors to deliberate avoidance.

It is an uncanny feeling awaking to the knowledge that your words are nothing more than wandering phonemes, homeless and destitute of any meaning whatsoever to the listener. Of course, this was my problem, not theirs. After all, I was the one who came to their country. I was the one who arrived with Spanish skills hardly one cut above the sharpness of a bowling ball.

Fortunately, I was not without any resources. The Spanish language shares many cognates with English, plus I had another American living with me who I could see was definitely more seasoned than myself with the language.

If all else failed, I could always rely on reducing myself to primitive forms of communication. Pantomiming my wants and needs were always an option. I could always entertain the fantasy that they were part of Magellan’s Armada de Molucca and I was the first Patagonian they had encountered. In that world, ignorance on my behalf was not blameworthy. It may be a self-serving way of coping with my linguistic laziness, but at least it was a semi-romantic way of imagining myself living through the Age of Discovery. 

My name is Travis Mott. I have now been living in Seville, Spain for almost one month. This is my blog. Consider this first entry of mine an open invite to keep your finger on the pulse of my progress. I have not flat-lined yet.