It starts at the breakfast table. As I take a bite of some toast and jam, studying some stubborn acrylic paint trapped under my fingernail, my stomach lurches. Strange. Then there is a sweet lump in by throat. And my vision is a little blurry. What I am feeling has a name, but I do not allow myself to think “nausea.” I attribute these symptoms to lack of sleep; I was up late the night before, my seventeen-year-old attention fixed firmly on the racy texting ads that rev up at 11:00pm sharp on many of the networks on the hotel TV. I choke down the toast against the protests of my digestive tract, and resolve that some more fuel would help strengthen my constitution. When I get up, intending to snatch an apple and a tiny carton of yogurt from the buffet table, the room spins. Deciding against any further nutritional input, I excuse myself from the company of my elderly (and now furrow-browed) tablemates, and head towards the elevator. My room seems painfully bright. I lock the Barcelona skyline behind the blinds, turn off the lamps, switch on the TV, and curl up in one of the beds as the gurgling pain in my gut starts to roar.
Half an extremely unpleasant hour later, I vomit, and then crawl back in bed. Repeat.
The phone in my room rings, a series of deafening beeps. I stagger over to it, pick it up. My art teacher, the leader and organizer of this painting trip, talks through its plastic.
“Sam?”
“Hi.”
“Are you coming? The bus is leaving now. We’ve been waiting for you for almost—”
“I’m not feeling well. I’m gonna sit this one out.”
“Oh. I’m sorry to hear that. Drink water. You know, Bill and Sandy said they were sick too…”
“Hm.”
“Okay. Feel better. See you at dinner tonight?”
Dinner? Oh God don’t think about food…
“Maybe.”
“Okay. Bye.”
“Bye.”
He hangs up and I am alone: the youngest person on the trip by thirty years, a high-schooler rooming by myself for the duration of the eleven-day trip, three thousand miles from home, and needing to purge again.
I was in a market district in the heart of the city. I walked down a wide, bright, crowded plaza, foreign sights and smells approaching from all directions. I saw people in booths and stalls shouting across the causeway and talking on cell phones, leaning towards each other over coffee or wine under café umbrellas, and several street guitarists with hands a blur. I did not hear them. My ears were filled with Oklahoma’s own Flaming Lips, broadcast through my earphones from the iPod in my pocket. I strode along, the silence between songs filled not with the vibrant cacophony of the market, but with the muffled underwater sounds of my own breathing and pulse—my earphones fit snuggly. I was hungry, searching for a place to eat. Everyone back home made me promise to find some good tapas. But every tapas bar I passed seemed risky—too dark or too empty or too full or too small or just not right or or or—and so I steered clear. I ended up at a little restaurant that served me Americanized pasta and a Coca-Cola. While I ate, I read a book I had brought from home. When I paid, I nearly skimped out on the tip, having momentarily forgotten the Spanish definition of prompt service. I perambulated down the plaza once again, pleased with myself at having found a satisfactorily safe lunch. I had never taken my iPod earphones out, not even to order my linguine Alfredo.
Assuming various positions on and around the toilet throughout the day (a weirdly European toilet, I find myself thinking), my mind often flips back to dinner the night before:
Thirty-some Americans in an otherwise empty hotel dining room, alone because of our insistence on adhering to an American dining schedule (eating at 6:00pm, approximately three hours before Spanish suppertime). Laughing and chatting, still riding high from our first painting excursion in Barcelona. Wine flowing into cold glasses, some appetizers and bread. The main course, prepared specially for us who want so badly to taste Spain: seafood paella. Yellow and steaming and pungent, served in tar-black cast iron pans. Little insect shrimp, whole, their antennae crisp and shuddering like aerials above the rice bed, their eyes dead and matte. My reluctance to consume said shrimp. The septuagenarians at my table preaching to me the value of being adventurous, showing me how to eat the crustaceans shell-and-all. The feel of the shrimp carapaces crackling between my molars and the briny taste on my tongue. The rich rice that chased it down, and the little bit of cooking water left at the bottom of the pan when the food was gone.
Flushing the toilet, I shudder. Shrimp. Foreign waters. Seafood always seemed perilous to me, even in the States. Spanish seafood is alien and obviously dangerous. The sickly rainbow that just exited my body is evidence enough of that.
I wish I were home, where my friends, family, girlfriend, house are. I try not to cry.
The next day, when I’m in bed and not the bathroom, I watch Italian MTV (half the channels on TV at the Barcelona Marriott seem to be Italian), and hate what I see. It’s even worse than the insufferable American MTV: Spanish dance pop and Italian goth-metal and what seems to be various Western European nations’ answer to Nickelback and Creed, peppered with interludes from shrieking, spiky-haired veejays. All the channels’ programming is awful and foreign and incomprehensible—the TV starts to seem hostile, a blaring reminder of how out-of-place I am, a payload of unfriendly unknown wrapped in a familiar package.
Spain is rejecting me. And my body is likewise rejecting Spain’s most famous dish. It is clear to me now that we are incompatible, each trying to puke the other one up and out. Spain won’t let me in.
I read magazines I’ve brought from home—Rolling Stone, Spin, the Sun and Paste—immersing myself in good ol’ true blue American media. They comfort me for a while, but only for a while. Then they are just fragments of a home too far away, their presence unbearably upsetting, lifeless chunks of my real place, where I belong, artifacts of a world far away and unreachable, one I now deeply regret leaving.
While I was working on a small painting of a church on Montserrat, a dozen local youngsters approached me. They gathered around behind and whispered and pointed while I bristled. I made a point to not turn around, to not engage. I felt…invaded, crowded, my private bubble violated by these gibbering children. I felt their eyes follow each flick of my paintbrush, certain their quick Spanish was full of snide comments and insults. The minutes passed and they did not leave. I was sure they could smell out my Americaness, and were having a grand time right behind my back, pointing out to each other the ridiculous arrogance of my artistic aspirations, the wrongess of my clothes and shoes, the ridiculousness of my clumsy foreign presence in their country. I began to guess at what the universal sign for “get away” was when they were called away by a woman’s voice down the street. They turned and started their exit, and I breathed in deep relief. One of them hesitated before going. I turned to him. “Bonita,” he murmured, and then was gone. But of course I knew better.
I awake to wellness. And a revelation.
It is a new dawn, a full forty-eight hours after the first pangs of breakfast nausea. I take a shower, get dressed, leave my room for the first time in two days, and go down to breakfast, where I am greeted with warm smiles and the news that nearly a third of our group has been laid out with food poisoning. Some are still sick in their rooms. I realize that I feel—genuinely feel—lucky for having recovered so quickly, knowing that others are still trapped in digestive hell. I make pleasant conversation with my tripmates. They say I look remarkably good, considering.
I arrive at the bus early, my art supplies packed neatly in my backpack, carrying a canvas. Barcelona bustles and vibrates and sings, and I let it, let it in. Left in my room are my iPod, my magazines, my disgust, and my fear. I board the bus and gaze at the shapes out the window as it takes off. The painting I make that day is bright and kinetic. For lunch, I buy a cheap sandwich at a charming café and take an hour to eat it, peoplewatching all the while.
And the morning’s revelation was that it was not just my body rejecting Spain, and certainly not Spain that was rejecting me. Simply an experience, a story. Just chance, maybe bad luck, and something to survive.
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