Breathless

I opened my eyes to a mosaic of faces hovering above me. An airport
official helped me to my feet, shooing away the gawkers.

My mind felt
a little clearer although my legs were still shaking, and my head
throbbed. I leaned heavily on the inspection desk, as the official
went through my papers, in painstaking detail. The phrases I had so
carefully rehearsed on the journey had completely disappeared from
my muddled brain, and I struggled to string together coherent sentences
in Spanish.

Learning to shine

When I had arrived in Spain, over nine months earlier, my Spanish had been
basic, to say the least. Prior to that, I had survived through one
and a half years of language and grammar classes at the university
before that, and had been proud, (and slightly amazed) to have been
placed at the top of my class in the mid-year exams. I had not studied
particularly hard, and my grasp of Spanish, I maintained, was based
on ninety percent acting, seven percent panache, and three percent
actual knowledge.

I had originally chosen to study Spanish at university
for a number of reasons - not least because I had been pronounced
a resounding failure in the language at eighteen, after two years
of (lack of) study. I remember my Spanish teacher at college looking
at me and shaking his head as he told me ‘You have the potential to
shine, but when will you realise it?’. And so I had muddled my way
through Spanish classes in Liverpool, determined to prove him and
all the others who had doubted - and myself - wrong. My knowledge
of the language was textbook, and based on speaking with others in
a small class of those with a similar ability.

Thus it came as no
small surprise that, on arriving in Seville one chilly Monday in January,
I went hungry for hours before I could get up the nerve to order food
in a shop. After that first hungry day, my language had improved in
leaps and bounds - I knew no-one who spoke English, and was therefore
forced to communicate, and understand, in order to survive.

I learnt
that it was better to say something quickly but wrongly, than to hesitate
until I was sure of the grammatic correctness, the appropriate tense
and pronoun and vocabulary, by which point the conversation would
surely have moved on and I would be left, speechless.

Churros y chocolate

I stayed in Spain for seven months, ostensibly studying at the University
there, which was frustratingly - but fortunately - on strike for much of that time.

So I had busied myself with flamenco lessons, and living as a semi-Spaniard,
rising late and making full use of the siesta, playing cards in
the park in the shade of leafy trees, and wandering through the
Moorish maze in the Alcazar palace. I went out with friends at midnight,
and drank and danced until dawn, when we staggered homeward through
the waking narrow streets, garlanded with geraniums on balconies,
snacking as we went on the traditional drinker’s breakfast of Churros
y Chocolate - hot sticky batter wands dunked in a cup of steaming
bitter-sweet dark chocolate.

I learnt to think in Spanish before
English, and to make jokes and word-plays. I began to dream in the
language which is, they say, the first sign that you are becoming
fluent, and I barely noticed.
I developed an Andalu’ accent, and enjoyed
heated discussions and afternoons with Spanish friends at an outdoor
cafe by the banks of the Guadalquivir, sipping lemon tea in the
shade of a wide umbrella.

Goodbye socks

But the heat
of those long easy Andalucian afternoons was distant from the chilled air of
the Altiplano, as I collected my papers from the immigration official,
and shuffled over to a row of anonymous seats, to await the arrival
of the baggage from the plane.

Unlike other airports I had passed
through on my journey, the baggage reclaim hall in La Paz International
Airport was tiny and cramped, and the baggage was thrown through
a hole from outside onto a narrow conveyor belt, which ran the length
of the hall before dumping the baggage unceremoniously on the lino
at the far end. The message and procedure was clear. You had to
collect your baggage before it hit the dirty floor.

But as the conveyor cranked into motion, the action of retrieving bags
from the belt was made more difficult by the sudden appearance of
a small army of men in brilliant blue boiler suits. I had seen them
lurking beyond the glass doors of the baggage hall, and had assumed
they were technicians, or cleaners of some kind. But no, they were
porters, and they clanked in rusty trolleys, and heaved suitcases,
backpacks off the belt as they appeared, flung through the portal,
balancing them on their carts. The owner of each piece of luggage
then had to locate its whereabouts, and by doing so, agreed to have
the luggage transported by that porter through customs and out into
the arrival hall.

One by one, the bags were reunited with their owners. Porters led their customers towards customs and away from the baggage hall.
I grimaced with panic, I hadn’t seen my brightly
coloured backpack come through the hole in the wall, and for one
brief horrible moment, I feared it had been ‘liberated’ en route.
I had not seen it since Manchester, and there had been plenty of
miles and stops and starts since then.

Service industry

I looked around the emptying hall,
verging on tears; the product of exhaustion, and nausea, and confusion,
and a sudden fear of being in a very, very foreign country without
even my few possessions.

Relief washed over me and I grinned, noticing that with impressive speed, my backpack
had made its way onto a porter’s trolley
at the other end of the hall. I had to applaud his cunning. To ask
him to remove the pack would be pointless, since by that point,
he had already done the hard work of lifting it onto the trolley,
and would expect to be tipped.

I sighed in resignation and amusement,
and approached him, signalling that his burden belonged to me. Perhaps
I imagined it, but I could have sworn that his eyes dulled when
he saw that I was just another shabby tired traveller, and not the
rich American he may have imagined owned my neon backpack.

Without
hesitating, he set off at a brisk pace towards the customs desk.
I followed in his wake, more slowly, unwilling to expose myself
to any more nausea and shortness of breath than that which I was
already experiencing.

Tilting the wheel

The customs desk, when I reached it, was just that: a long formica-topped desk,
looking curiously out of place, as if it had been transported from
a city office. Behind it, a stern-faced man was seated, and as I
approached, he indicated that I should press the button mounted
on the surface of the table. Beside it, a pair of bare light bulbs
were hooked up to a rudimentary circuit, and coloured with marker
pens - one green, the other red.

I pushed the button slowly, and
the green bulb lit up. He waved me through without a second glance,
already beckoning the next passenger to try his luck. I was reminded
of corrupt croupiers in casinos, manipulating the roulette wheel
with subtle pressure on a button on the floor with their foot, or
on the edge of the table with their belly.

My porter had already
skipped on ahead, and I hurried after him down the long passage out of customs and into the world.
The passage was created by scaffolding and clear sheets of tarpaulin,
barely masking building work and decorating going on behind. I had
the strange sensation that perhaps I had disembarked at the wrong
stop, as one can do when travelling by train or bus, for this narrow
dusty passageway did not match my visions of the International Airport
at La Paz promised so tantalisingly on my ticket.

Emerging into
the arrivals hall, I realised that the entire arrivals terminal
was little more than a breeze-block shed, and the Altiplano wind
whipped chillingly through the open doors.