The Spanish people were generous and hospitable with a liberality that astonished someone raised with a Yankee sensibility like I was, with an emphasis on self-reliance and habits like thrift and prudence. When a Spaniard picked up a few of us American hitchhikers, he would treat us all to a meal at a café in the next town we stopped at, whatever his financial circumstances. Because the Spanish sensibility was, as I perceived it, steeped in a sense of community, people weren’t constrained in the way many Americans tend to be; they didn’t worry about the future the way we do in our culture, trusting in the shared ethos that we are all our brothers’ keepers.

By the end of the year, my love of Spain and sense of belonging, like a root system, had grown so broad and deep, I began to consider the possibility of making a life there as an ex-patriot after I graduated from college. I felt for the first time that I understood the wish of the farmer who wanted to be buried under the old oak he’d climbed as a child—because I felt I wanted to be buried in Spain.

The University of Madrid was in political turmoil that year—there were frequent student demonstrations and violent confrontations with the “Guardia Civil,” the state police. (We called them “grises”—“gray men”—for their gray uniforms.) When there was liable to be trouble, Gay, at the Education Abroad Office, would call all sixty of us in the program, warning us not to attend classes that day. We risked jail if we were anywhere in the vicinity—police trucks would drive around and spray “protesters” with paint to mark them for arrest. One day Gay didn’t reach me in time. I took my two metros and bus to campus, but as I got off amid a crush of students, I saw a line of Guardia Civil on horseback at the far end of a field. Frantically I scrambled back onto the bus a moment before the doors closed—and watched the grises charge down the field, descending on the students and beating them savagely with “gomas” (rubber clubs), until the melee was right underneath my window—frightened horses rearing, clubs swinging, students screaming as they were thrown against the bus or clawed at the doors.

Some time after this incident, all classes were suspended, and we U. C. students were given a choice—to leave Madrid or stay—because if the university remained closed, the boys in our program could lose their credits for the year and risked being drafted for the war in Vietnam.

My friends and I, including Ella, Dale, and Pete, chose to stay.

In Paris, after our landing in Le Havre the previous summer, I’d swung through the rainy streets with a boy from our program named Pete—on our way to buy him an umbrella. He was an economics major—handsome and outgoing, with an amiable charm. From time to time during the year we found ourselves together, and I would get my hopes up that it was the beginning of something, but he would always back off.

“At the party Pete told me about the book The Games People Play and we went to the kitchen to try our hand at tortillas, but there weren’t any eggs in the fridge. ‘Por fin y al cabo’ we ate at the university cafeteria and went walking through a park—the grass was wet, the night balmy. There were shadowy figures on benches, low murmurs. Pete carried me over a hedge. I was amazed at how easily he lifted me up. I said one or two things that made him laugh—like pointing out the constellation Orion with his three belly buttons. But it wouldn’t have been necessary to talk at all if he had held my hand. Debbie and Bruce were walking hand-in-hand. His aloofness began to bother me, and I started to tense up. The walk home was uncomfortable, the lack of physical contact so unnatural I think it upset us both. The evening just fell off; he clapped for the sereno, said ‘Adios!’—that was it. I wondered if he would ever ask me out again. I thought he wouldn’t, and I swore to protect my feelings no matter what happened.”

Then, on a trip with some girlfriends, we missed the train back to Madrid and disagreed about what to do. While two stayed behind to wait for the next train, two of us went to the outskirts of town to hitch a ride. There on the shoulder of the road was Pete with a male friend. He and I hitchhiked together that afternoon and shared a room in a pension that night. And although nothing happened, the intimacy of the situation caused something in our friendship to shift.

I found out from Wendy, who was dating a friend of Pete’s, that he had a girlfriend back in the States, which I realized had been the obstacle all along. That spring we hitchhiked to Portugal together. He was great fun to travel with—being ingratiating enough for the TWO of us—and people responded with warmth wherever we went. He didn’t speak any more Portuguese than I did, but had no inhibition about speaking Spanish and changing just the endings of words to approximate Portuguese.

One afternoon we found ourselves on the wrong bus, so the driver let us off along a country road, directing us across a valley to a distant road somewhere on the other side. We waded through a field of wildflowers that streamed up and over the steep hills to either side, the two of us getting giddier and more intoxicated with the natural beauty as we went. We wanted to touch each other but were too shy, so we horsed around instead, frolicked and chased each other until we finally collapsed, exhausted, on the ground. Beneath the flowers, mint was growing everywhere, and when Pete finally kissed me, his hair, his clothes, everything smelled of mint.

Rome wasn’t the only place I was anonymously harassed. One day in Madrid I found myself waiting for the subway at rush hour. As the doors of the train opened, I was swept into the car by the surge of the crowd—and someone pulled up my dress the moment before I got hemmed inside. When the train started, my skirt was bunched up around my waist—my panties, nylons, and garter belt exposed (this was the year before we started wearing pantyhose)—and I felt a lecherous hand squeezing my thigh. Not knowing what else to do, I wormed my own hand down and grasped it tight so it couldn’t stray any further, while I peered into the impassive faces around me, trying to figure out who it belonged to. When I found I couldn’t, I hurled myself at the exit at the very next stop and made my escape, even though I was still many stops away from my own.

At first I was too shy and insecure to speak much Spanish, afraid of making mistakes. I’d had three years less Spanish than the other students in my program, since I’d started out in French in junior high, as I’ve said, and I continued to have to struggle to understand and keep up.

But in the spring of that year, a strange thing happened. I’d become so facile at conjugating verbs from tables in my head and to referring, mentally, to the other diagrams and charts I’d memorized that I sounded—almost—fluent. Then, quite suddenly, all my “props” fell away—I couldn’t remember these schemata, and I found myself floundering in a sea of panic and confusion. This lasted only a few weeks, until one morning I woke up fluent. I could talk and think—I even began to dream—in Spanish. But the change wasn’t just a matter of verbal proficiency. With mastery, I underwent a more profound transformation from the anxious, reticent young woman I’d been to a voluble, extroverted “Latina.” An alter ego emerged who actually enjoyed being the center of attention. I’m afraid you could hardly shut me up.

Looking back, I think one of the things that freed me was finding in the Spanish language a refuge from my father, a place he couldn’t follow me—criticize or mock me. Rather than the unsympathetic audience I’d had in him, I found a sympathetic one. The Spanish people couldn’t have been more pleased and enthusiastic about anyone’s efforts to speak their language. Soon they were asking me what country I came from, assuming I was a native Spanish speaker, though they couldn’t quite place my accent. (My accent, curiously, WASN’T quite like anyone else’s—and it wasn’t until many years later when I met a woman from the Canary Islands that I finally heard an accent like my own.)

And perhaps I should mention here that throughout all these changes, I frequently shared my evolving thoughts and feelings in fantasy dialogues with one person—Dr. Camarer, promising myself that when I got back to the states, I would resume therapy with him. More than once I thought of writing to tell him how rich and full my life was in Spain and to thank him for his help. But I never did.