Book reviews

Home to Barcelona: A Foreigner’s Story by Richard Manchester; PPU, Barcelona, 2008/2010

Ever wonder what it’s like to live in Barcelona and teach English? I’ve been doing it for years, and the first thing I learned was that my degrees and teaching experience in the U.S. didn’t mean squat. Because you’re competing with every crusty in torn jeans passing through who’s trying to earn a little pasta by capitalizing on the mere fact that English is his/her native language. Especially back in the 90s, the city was rife with rinky dink English schools who hired anyone who’d work for the ridiculously low wages offered. Often the owners were upstart locals whose command of English left a lot to be desired; and they didn’t always know exactly how to discriminate between bona fide teachers and those who claimed to be teachers. Or if they did, they likely passed over the experienced teacher in order to hire cheap staff who’d work crap hours and teach kids or whatever was needed. I taught at some of those schools in the beginning, and the “teachers” I met there go down in history as some of the most colorful, eccentric—often just plain wacko—characters that I’ve ever encountered. Take Una, a red-headed vegan world-traveler from New Zealand, whom I overheard one day lecturing to her class of young adults on “pork auras,” which she claimed to see emanating from around their sick heads. I don’t think their English was good enough to grasp what she was saying, but it didn’t stop her from a lengthy lecture with ominous overtones on the evils of eating pork, a staple in the diet here. Mainly, these teachers-who-weren’t-really-teachers were British, but they came from English-speaking countries everywhere. And one thing they all had in common: an unquenchable thirst for alcohol. I loved these guys. We’d all get soused at the end of the night after teaching at one of these mills; it was part of the ritual. We knew every scuzzy after-hours bar in this city, and they got to know us. People back in the States said I should write a book about the experience. I never did. But Richard Manchester, an American in Barcelona whom I knew briefly during that decade, took up the task . . . and this is that book.

Our narrator is one Lester Ferry from San Diego, known by all simply as “Ferry.” He has just been dumped by the beautiful Svetlana, a relationship he knew was too good to last. He’s a short order cook at Snapperheads restaurant which specializes in all-you-can-eat popcorn shrimp and forty-eight ounce margaritas. He is 27. He lives at home. A move to Europe seems like a good idea (Svetlana had fantasized about it). “I chose Barcelona . . . because it looked nice enough when I watched the Dream Team dunk their way to the gold in the ’92 Olympics.”

And so he arrives, with no contacts, no language skills, no real skills period, “worried that I’d be the oldest one at Barcelona’s George Orwell Youth Hostel,” which he was not. He rents the first room he stumbles onto, from a middle-aged Andalusian woman, Paz, who feels like a foreigner herself in Barcelona. The other renter is Enrique, who chain smokes Ducados and hardly ever looks up from the TV except to razz Ferry about the evils of capitalist-imperialist America. “Anything bad in the world, you can bet came from the U.S.”

Money, of course, is a problem for Ferry, but that’s not all: “For me, the most unexpected difficulty of living in Barcelona was the Catalan’s insistence on speaking Catalan. At first, I imagined that Catalan was just a dialect of Spanish, but as my ear developed, I became aware of the language’s sheer power—its ubiquity, its difference. The city itself spoke Catalan, not Spanish.” And so, “Catalan justified my inability to learn Spanish, which was one of the reasons I told everyone I was going to Spain.” Of course, it doesn’t help that he only hangs out with other English speakers, namely other English teachers.

Because soon enough, don’t you know, Ferry lands a job teaching English at Hello Its English Time!, where he is sent out on site to various students at businesses, no clue what he’s doing. One such student is a high-powered executive in a posh high-rise office at Plaça de Francesc Macià. We follow Ferry on the stifling hot bus to get to the class, where he will earn enough to eat lunch, buy a paperback book or get a haircut. “My chest and back began to perspire, and I could smell the sweet pungency of last night’s beer seeping out of my pores.” And once there, arriving late, he must improvise all the way. “I vowed to myself to be ready for the next lesson, but then I remembered that I had made the same vow two days before, squirming in the same seat.” The exec is half on to him, and asks at one point: “Did you had a special classes to teach English?” To which Ferry spews his “credentials,” before forcing the guy to read one of the paragraphs for advanced students in the back of his book, correcting every single pronunciation mistake.

We get to know the other teachers at Hello Its English Time!, a motley crew of foreigners including Kylie from Australia, who practiced her beginning Spanish with her landlady, spouting kitchen nouns to the poor woman; Gordon, from the English Midlands, with his shaggy bangs and acne, who snorts at Kylie’s reading material: Under the Tuscan Sun; and the (under)worldly and cynical Clarence, a binge drinker (“binging since 1993”), in fraying collar and cuffs, who truly does not give a rat’s ass about teaching or much else. The crew gathers at the Quiet Man and other watering holes and drinks to oblivion, the guys anyway. Literally in Ferry’s case. He begins to have blackouts and wakes up on a sidewalk somewhere, usually in a dodgy area. And so it goes. Everyone counting pesatas to see if they can afford the next drink. After the Quiet Man, there is the after-hours Bar Kentucky on a seedy, potentially dangerous street in the Barrio Chino. As Ferry recalls his introduction to the place: “I stumbled into the bar, bouncing off both sides of the doorway, as if I was falling, as if someone was shaking me down into a hole at the bottom of the world. I looked around Bar Kentucky and saw a place that I could one day reflect on as the lowest point of my existence. . . It was almost 5a.m. and an unbroken wall of human backs still lined the bar. In a dim corner near the toilets, a girl was hovering around a small man quietly playing the clarinet. He blew no distinguishable tune, but a rhythmic hum found the niches in the bass music that was thumping from the boom box behind the bar.” It’s a bar Gordon likes because, “It’s impossible to get out of line there.”

I love Ferry’s description of many things in the city (the Catalans themselves, for one), but perhaps my favorite is his running commentary on DIA supermarket, a place those of us on a low budget know well:

DIA manufactured their own brand of generic goods, labeled in Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, and Greek—the short list, Gordon told me, of European Union lightweights. The claustrophobic aisles were scenes of constant disaster—broken jars of beans in smelly fluid, burst sacks of flour and rice, abandoned infants screaming for the world to end. The chaos increased toward the end of the month, as the entire stock dwindled to nothing . . . DIA gave me the sinking feeling that it was the last stop on the block, abject poverty and despair waited for me to make one mistake to play to their advantage.
The second half of the book takes a slightly darker tone. The drinking catches up with Ferry, and on the advice of a palm reader/psychic expat from California, he begins to see an ex-English teacher who is now very ill. The relationship is beneficial to both, but we know we are beyond the honeymoon period of the newly arrived. Still, fun to be had, as Clarence and Ferry begin publishing a newspaper satirizing both the expat world and the natives, which they photocopy on the school’s copier. Author Richard Manchester did just this when he lived in Barcelona, only properly printed. It was called The Advocate, and I laughed my head off with each issue.

I don’t want to give away the ending; it will come as a surprise. Just don’t think it’s exaggerated; it’s not.

There are other ways for English teachers to arrive in Barcelona. One could perhaps get hired from one’s native country by one of the well-established institutions here (loath to offer contracts to those already here without papers, no matter how qualified), get a contract and go straight to work with good pay, surrounded by professionals who dress smart and take their job seriously. I have since worked in these places, and I found that they have never heard of the Quiet Man, or if by chance someone has, they’ve certainly never heard of Bar Kentucky. I will forever be thankful that I slid in the way I did —no contract, living in cheap hostels, scrambling for work with the great swath of transients, some of whom proved very good teachers, by the way, and went on to become professionals. Thank you, Richard Manchester, for capturing it all so perfectly. J.A.

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In 2003 TBR published an exract from a then 'work in progress'. Some names are different but one gets the idea of the style and humour. Digui, Digui