Some day it will happen.  I know this from my previous life running marathons. Sooner or later, I will become fluent in Spanish. It won't happen tomorrow or next week, probably ten more years(!) but I will eventally approach the fluency I desire. It's because I put in the hours everyday.  I used  to wake up very early to run 8-9 miles every morning.  On Sundays, I doubled that.    My progress was slow and painful -  Jaja –  just like the development of my Spanish skills.  In Mexicali, I used to run from my house over to La Garita Central and cross to the California side of the border. I followed the dirt paths along the canals – and then I could cross back at La Garrita Nueva and make it home along the side streets. That's like seventeen miles, which could take me like two and one half to three  hours.  Now, following hip surgery, I can no longer exercise, but the time I have to read and write in Spanish pretty much matches what I did when I was running.  When it comes to learning a new language I know what it means when they say, "It's not a sprint, it's a marathon." 

Recently I finished Edgar Mendoza's novel Nombre de perro.  In English, that's Name of the Dog, but I read it in Spanish.  In Mexico Edgar is known as El padrino de literatura-narco.  That's a new genre,  Narco-Lit.   Edgar is an Engish Lit professor at the Sinaloa Autonomous Unviersity. This is in Culiacán, the capitol of Mexico's cocaine and heroin trade.   His prose is full of literary references.  He balances the ruthless violence of narco-traficante killers with his love for Mexican food and sixties rock 'n' roll.  I previously read  a novel of his called El Amante de Janis Joplin. Elmer knows his landscape.  In literature circles, he is el Muy Muy.  El Pez Gordo.  Elmer is Bad-Ass.

Nombre de perro took me a long time to read.  As I get older, I find myself more focused and organized in my Spanish learning.  I try to underline, circle, star(*) words and phrases I may be able to incorporate into my everyday language.  I'll read a chapter in English, before I read it in Spanish.  Both my English-language and Spanish-language copies of my novels are marked up, HIGHLIGHTED, beyond recognition. But, poco a poco, I transfer my favorite phrases to my notebooks.  Lately, I'm reading a lot of Elmer Mendoza.  I see the same vocabulary and characters pop up in my reading. I'm using the dictionary less. I 'm sharing more what I read with the Mexicans I know.  That's a sign I'm immersing myself  in both the reading and the culture.  Nombre del perro follows the daily grind of one Edgar 'Lefty' Mendieta. He's a Mexican police detective who is not always holding up the law, but interpretting it. Much of the crime he sees on a daily business occurrs in his own building.  Corruption is everywhere.  Incompetence.  Disinformation.  Lefty is smart, not in the way of the politicians, doctors or lawyers he encounters, but in the way he can make it to the end of each novel,  ALIVE.  That's not an easy task in Sinaloa.   Like many of the hard-boiled detectives I read, Lefty is a drinker.  A pill-popper.  He's in his forties, his life is full of CONFLICT.  In his profession, he doesn't know what to believe or who to trust. 

The bloodshed begins in Nombre de perro with series of cruel and mysterious murders of local dentists.  Lefty finds himself called from one dental office to another to find the same thing, an innocent man in a white coat lying on the floor with a hole in his head. No one knows why.  There doesn't seem to be any connection.  In the ongoing drug war, no one is safe,  and everyone knows it.   Meanwhile, Lefty receives TWO surprise visits from important women in his life.  I'll start with Susana.  She's a beautiful woman he first fell in love with in high-school, la prepatoria.  They share a lifetime of mutual respect and understanding.  They also share a son who is now eighteen years old, a son Lefty had never previously heard about.  The son's name is Jason.  He has a gringo name, and here is the difficult part for Lefty:  Jason wants to be a cop, just like his dad. When Lefty looks into the eyes of his son, he feels a surge of pride from the way he has turned out.  He has his mother's looks at his father's determination.  But, Lefty doesn't know what to say to the kid about becoming a policeman in today's age of Narco-Traficantes.  I mean, half the time Lefty is high on whiskey and pain medication just to make it through the day. Now is not a good time to be a cop in Sinaloa. 

The second woman is Samantha Valdés.  Samantha has shown up in other novels. Now that her father is dead, she is boss of the powerful Pacific Cartel. La Jefa.  She is the Queen of Drug Lords.  She is La Reina del Sur.  While Lefty has been working the Case of the Dead Dentists,  Samantha's lesbian lover, Mariana Kelly, has been murdered in a Mazatlán resort hotel under the tightest of security, during a meeting of cartel leaders.  Of course, Samantha's lover would be staying on her own private floor in the hotel.  Samantha had it arranged that no one could enter or leave the building without getting past machine-gun toting security guards.  There were cameras everywhere.  But, that's what someone did.  They got in there and out of there, onto the fourth floor, and left behind the corpse of a young woman who just got out of the shower.   Nobody can figure it out. All of Samantha's bodyguards have been thoroughly vetted.  They have pledged and proven they will die for her.  But, someone, somewhere, has figured out how to get to Samantha where it hurt most.  For all the talk of her being a stone-cold killer, Samantha loved Mariana with all her heart.  Now she has got a bigger problem.  Mariana's murder will incite revenge killings from inside her organization and out.   Mexico will become a bloody  battleground if she doesn't do something to stop it.  This is why Samantha turns to Lefty.   She knows from his personal history, he's the one who could find  Mariana's killer.  She's seen him do it before.  She pulls the strings and levers she has at City Hall.  She tells Lefty, he is now working for her.  Lefty has never liked or respected Samantha, her family, or her organization, and he never will, so now he finds himself between a rock and a hardplace.  He needs to balance his love for Susana with his hatred for Samantha.

When Mexicans see me with my books, pens and journals spread out on the table at the gasolinera, they ask me how long I have been studying Spanish. After five years, they said "Five years.  You must be fluent by now!"  No tanto.  I wanted to tell them.  After 10 years I was nowhere near it.  After 20 I'm still grinding.  I can see the surprise and/or disappoinment in their eyes, but what is there to say?  I  remember reading somewhere that someone who studies two hours per day, puts in a total of fourteen hours a week.  That's sounds like a lot to people who haven't tried learning a new language, but fourteen hours equals out to one full waking day for the average person.  After five years of study, that totals 260 days of immersion.  That's only eight and a half months.  The more I think of the math, the more depressed I become.  Five years of fairly obsessed study works out to be a little over half a year of Spanish time. 

Oquei, I'm not counting my reading hours on a daily basis, but I can say I'm up to four Spanish hours per day.  After I read all that I can read, I watch my Colombian telenovelas. I find them on Netflix.  I'm approaching the completion of 20 different series.  Each series offers like 80-100 episodes, approximately 45 minutes a show.   And in the time my hours of Spanish study are increasing, I feel the my sense of labor is decreasing.  I have found my comfort zone with the language.  On Christmas day I made a nice Caldo Tlalpeño using herbs and chiles from the garden in front of my own house. On New Year's Eve Day, I went looking to buy plants at Los Tianguis in Pueblo Nuevo.  While I was waiting to make my purchase, a young woman asked me if I know about Lavanda.  Of course I did – it's flowering purple all over my garden -  but I didn't tell her that.   I told her, "Claro que sí," and my favorite Lavanda was La Banda Machos.  Jaja.  She said hers was Banda MS.  I shocked her when I told her what the initials stood for:  Mazatlan, Sinaloa! 

This type of flirting may not seem so interesting or appropriate to anyone reading this post,  but these days I don't feel so lonely studying my Spanish at the Gasolinera.  People sit down with me at the table, and I tell them about the murdered dentists and La Reina del Sur I have read about in Nombre de perro.  I have met more than a few Sinaloenses this way.  We talk about beisbol.  They ask me things like how long I've lived in Mexicali, where do I live. I live in an old house in neigborhood called Colonia Nueva, I tell them, when you walk up to my front door you can smell the mild aroma of Lavanda growing in my garden. In my kitchen I'll show you my collection of dried chiles I have arranged in empty coffee cans along the top of my cupboard, but stand back when I open the top; you will cough from the pungent fumes.   Of course, my house is full of books, in Spanish and English.  Most of them are unreadable because of the highlight colors that bleed across the pages. I'm so happy to have discovered Mexicali, for there is always something new and unsual happening that adds to my experience. Sometimes at night I will be awakened by a loud sound.  Like a BANG!  It could be a group of neighbors drinking cerveza down the street.  Past midnight  I hear motorcycles racing down the avenida behind the house.  Maybe a cat runs across the tiles of my roof.  In Mexicali, you never really know.    I'm not opening the door.  Half asleep,  I say, "Qué Más Pues?"