“Who’s that sitting with your parents?” I asked Luis and Moi.
“That’s our cousin, Monica.” Luis replied.
It was a large family fiesta late Sunday afternoon. A wedding or something, I don’t recall. I didn’t have the right shoes. I didn’t have the right anything. This was a culture that dressed up for events. I had jeans and t-shirts and tennis shoes. Fortunately they understood that foreigners did things differently and were endlessly gracious about my oddities. But between my outfit and being over six feet tall, blonde and blue-eyed, I stuck out at this party like a banana tree in a corn field.
“You should ask her to dance, Eric,” Moi added, “she’d love it.” Moi, which rhymes with toy, was short for Moises, and he was named after his dad, who was currently sitting across the dance floor with his wife, Lulu, a circle of people I didn’t know and the cousin named Monica.
The DJ was playing Latin music. I didn’t know the difference between salsa, cumbia, merengue and danzón back then, so I couldn’t tell you what kind of music was being played. But it was fun music and I liked dancing. However, the idea of asking this girl to dance...I mean, back home at my wonderfully progressive university, boys didn’t ask girls to dance. Or get the door for them, or pull out a chair, or even necessarily treat them to dinner. All of those old gentilities had long since been deconstructed by our West Coast culture. On the dance floor we all grooved around independently, very free form. If you wanted to dance with a girl, you just sort of danced in her general direction. To go and ask this girl on the other side of the dance floor to dance, that sounded about as hard as learning to speak Spanish!
“Nah,” I demurred, nerves racing through my belly as my host-brothers prepared to throw down the gauntlet.
I had been in Oaxaca for a month, studying this language until my head felt like it was going to burst each day and then heading home for the daily lunch from 2-3 with my host family. The lunch party included Moises the elder, Moises the younger, his brother Luis, their sister Irma, her husband Raul, their two amped up pre-adolescent boys, mother Lulu who orchestrated the whole grand spread, and me. The conversation swirled and raced around the long table beside the big patio doors like traffic in Mexico City swirled around the large boulevards. I was like a horse and buggy in the midst of it all, eternally lost as I laboriously translated each word into English in my head.
They were gracious and patient and tried their very best to include me in their conversations. But three years of high school Spanish and two semesters of university Spanish had done little to prepare me for an average day at lunch with the Valenzuela family. I laughed and nodded and smiled. Always at the wrong time.
In different ways they took me under their wing. Raul, an intellectual hippy of sorts, had a big record collection. We’d listen to music and he’d tell me stories about the musicians, none of whom I’d ever heard of. It was a journey through Latin American folk and rebel and protest music. Raul made me two cassette tapes that I came to cherish, filled to the brim with good sounds by Inti Illimani from Chile, Mercedes Sosa and Atahualpa Yupanqui from Argentina and Los Folkloristas from Mexico.
Son de Madera, one of my all time favorite Mexican bands, plays a kind of folk music called Son Jarocho.
Meanwhile Moi, a very different kind of character, taught me about eating tacos at tiny, old-time eateries around the neighborhood that he loved to frequent and was generous in helping me understand very useful words we were not being taught during our daily 9-1:30 Spanish intensives.
Brother Luis told me about cool places to hike. And Irma intervened when her brothers got a little overzealous about teasing me and my horse and buggy Spanish couldn’t keep up.
But just now they were working on something else with me.
“Ask her, Eric!”
“No man, it’s cool” I fiddled with my napkin.
“Si hombre!”
“Nah”
“Ándale, go ask her.”
She was gorgeous.
I was petrified.
The story of my life.
They continued to cajole me, enthusiastic in their noble duty as host-brothers helping me integrate into the local culture. Just now I wished they weren’t so gleeful about it though. But I could see there was no escape from doing this thing that I actually really wanted to do and was resisting with all my might. So I rose from my seat.
“Eso!” That’s the way!” Moi gave me a playful little nudge onto the floor towards Monica’s table.
The thing about being new in a culture and language is you generally don’t know what’s going on. I didn’t, for example, understand that at that party, where I was the only foreigner, many in the crowd were quietly curious about what I was going to do as I walked across the dance floor. Back at my table, Moi and Luis were loving it. On the one hand, in the most benevolent sense of things, they were rooting for me, like good brothers would, as I went out on this holy human quest to ask a girl to dance. On the other hand, they were not free of mischievous genes and they’d known me long enough to understand that I didn’t understand how things worked and therefore something unpredictable might happen here, and that would be worth watching. It’s kind of like how Oaxacans love to offer mezcal, the smoky and high proof older brother of Tequila, to visitors. They genuinely want to share in this cultural wealth. And they love to stand back and watch the reaction, which usually includes some amount of watering eyes and sputtering.
Walking across the floor, now empty in the pause between songs, I was oblivious to the subtle attention I was beginning to attract. I was much more focused on my nerves.
Moises and Lulu greeted me when I arrived at the table. They introduced me to the circle. Monica looked up at me with eyes that I could drown in with eyelashes that swooshed like a hand fan. I’m not kidding. She blinked and I was almost blown over.
The moment of truth was upon me. But I had a choice. I could give my fear the reins and make up some story about having wanted to say hi to Moises and Lulu and avoid the whole terrifying dance question entirely. Or I could do what I’d come all the way across the dance floor to do. My brothers were watching across the room. Everyone at Monica’s table was looking at me. And silently throughout the room curious eyes were subtly waiting to see what the tall foreigner was up to.
I would do what I had to do, and I braced myself for embarrassment; for the polite no and the defeated retreat across the dance floor alone.
“Um, Monica, um, do you want to dance?” I could see Moises and Lulu beaming behind her.
Monica fanned the air again with her eyelashes and took in this unusual human standing before her in jeans and a (freshly laundered) t-shirt.
“Si.”
I was flooded by a joy driven by pure relief and offered her a gaping grin. “Oh great!”
I continued to stand there and grin, “um...vamonos!” And with that I turned and squeaked out onto the dance floor in my tennies.
There are those of you reading this, perhaps even all of you, who will realize what a huge faux pas I’d just made. Certainly Moises did, for as I was turning away I could see a look of shock on his face. I didn’t know why, but I knew I’d just blown it.
And so began the good spectacle.
Monica followed me to the floor. She was kind and I made awkward conversation in bad Spanish. Then I let myself feel the music and began to move to it, from side to side, in front of Monica. This is how we danced back home; doing our own thing in each other’s proximity. I’d always felt that I was adept at dancing, but I knew my grooving wasn’t quite right here. Everyone else on the floor was partner dancing, moving in a coordinated and smooth way between couples with spins and turns all aligned to the rhythmic cues of the music. Monica blushed and tried to follow my free form movement. I suspect that on that dance floor it looked a lot like flailing. Then I tried to imitate the dancers around us, putting one sweaty hand on Monica’s shoulder, another on her waist. But my feet had no idea what to do, while hers did. And so our feet crashed, often. We laughed nervously and I let her go and went back into free form dancing.
In this way we managed our way through the song. For all my desire to be close to this beautiful human, I was relieved when the song ended. Monica was, perhaps, even more relieved. But she was all smiles. I thanked her, beamed and blushed like the nervous boy that I was and then retreated to the safety of my seat, wishing like mad, not for the first time and not for the last that semester, that I wasn’t so utterly inept.
I was beginning to understand that I wasn’t just in Oaxaca undertaking the complex process of learning another language. I was also learning about music, dance and social customs...I was learning an entire culture. In the description of the semester in Oaxaca it probably actually said something like that; “Come immerse yourself in another culture and learn.” I had no idea it would mean this.
Whatever jokes they may have made at my expense, my brothers were jovial and friendly when I returned to the table. Without knowing it I’d given the entire party a good show. I hope there are brownie points waiting in heaven for that. And may there be an equal, if not greater, number of points waiting in heaven for Monica, who had the courage to say yes to this awkward boy from another land.
About a month and a half later something strange and magical happened, I began to understand. I discovered that I was able to follow the currents of conversation at the lunch table with less and less effort. Over a ten day period something miraculous happened in my brain and Spanish simply began to make sense. It was as if during the preceding two and a half months, and all those years before it, I had been putting one after another puzzle piece of Spanish in my head. And then, one day in Oaxaca, having met some critical mass, my mind assembled the puzzle in a way that seemed effortless. All of a sudden I was in the midst of the verbal flow of traffic at the lunch table and I began to roll my R’s with ease and even have dreams in español.
When that happened I had two wishes. One was to run into Monica again and speak coherent sentences to her. Preferably not on the dance floor. And the other was to walk into a classroom of second year Spanish students back at Founders Hall at the university and have some slangy, hip conversation with the professor about anything at all. As long as it was in fluid Spanish and the classroom was full of awe-struck students.
Neither of those wishes came true.
But two other important things happened, that in the long scope of life, may (or may not) matter more. First, I learned dance floor etiquette. This was via osmosis with the first and most impactful lesson being with Monica. In Mexico, and perhaps everywhere, except the fringy edge of the West Coast, when you ask a woman to dance, you wait for her and lead her, preferably by the hand, out onto the dance floor. You then look her in the eyes and, ideally, dance gracefully with her. When the dance is over, you then lead her back to her seat. Without fail. Young gents of the world, take note. You needn’t make such a fool of yourself as I did.
I also learned to dance. Salsa, Merengue and Cumbia. This has been via many, many dance classes. But like Spanish, it is a skill learned with patience and practice, and is a thing worth knowing.
I highly doubt that dance had as much impact on Monica as it has had on me. But I am immensely grateful to my pesky host brothers, to Moises Sr. who knows how things should, and shouldn’t be done, and to Monica, for saying si.
Next week I’ll tell you how I learned to eat a tortilla. If this sounds utterly boring, you are in for a great surprise. Because to learn that skill I had to travel down a long dusty road into a place from another time.