During my first afternoon in Granada, there was a parade.
It reminded me of a snake, but a gentle, intoxicated one - consuming slowly the streets of the city until its belly bulged. The celebration held me captive for two hours, observing the dancing and the warm smell of food cooked on hot-plates on every curb, and the rustling of beaded dresses that swept the cobblestones. It was all color and history I had no history to relate.
I was in Granada for a week alone, on break from leading mission trips in other parts of Nicaragua. I would spend mornings
and evenings in a warm classroom off a school courtyard with my Spanish
instructor, a girl slightly older than me with a quick grin and kindness. We’d fill the room with the stumbling over of
words – on my part – and dust from chalkboard erases correcting my mistakes. Each time I would answer and ask, timidly, “¿correcto?” she would laugh a quiet
Nicaraguan laugh and say “si, Amelia – Más o menos.” And I would more or less feel pride and
ineptitude both at once.
During the days, I was
alone with rented bike, carving my way through the city, pass open-doorways where
there were family meals and Central American soaps on TV. I’d weave around horse-drawn carriages and lean
against slowing taxi cabs around the corner bends, until the maze of Granada
felt smaller and smaller.
I’d eat ice cream cones
of Eskimo before dinner because I could, and write poems in a café off the
center square that was filled with palm trees, and bike along the water. I’d climb to the tips of dusty, magnificent cathedrals
and worship over the entire city, and grin and small talk in Spanish with
street vendors and visit art museums. I’d stay outside until the sun was as
heavy and low as it could be before giving way, and head back to my rented
room.
I was, in all things,
utterly alone. I’d go full days speaking
no English, only silently to myself, feeling like a tiny alien in a new world
that was beautiful and lonely. I was inconsequentially
alive, it seemed, for all of that week.
At the end of these
days of Spanish and wonder and loneliness and joy and a sickness for home, I’d
lay spent on the mattress, half covered in fan-wind and moonlight. In the quiet, I was aware of the
particularities of translation – it wasn’t true of me, my being “more or less”.
I was a girl made and
created, alone but important, an observer and a dreamer. In the silence of
those moments, I was so much more than I had imagined. And in the grandness of the city and the
beauty of the world, I learned, graciously, that I was also less.
