Robbed

Everyone I know has the fondest memories of Spain. Everyone. But me? I sit there as people regale me with their fond memories, ready to tackle them with my oh-so-fondless ones.
My Spanish “brother” was the trouble-maker. He knew his hate. We’ll call him Pepe. I’m not sure if it was when he called Clara, a Frenchwoman, a whore for deeming a Spaniard cute, or when a giggling Pepe showed me his latest Halloween dance pictures and he and his friends had black face that I determined, he was an ass.
But hey, this was Pepe. Maybe he was an anomaly. My Spanish mother, who had somehow given birth to Pepe, was a woman who made me special meat meals after she keenly observed, like any mother in any culture, that I didn’t like the soup she had furnished for lunch on the first day I had arrived. And, my Spanish father came to my rescue when I was trying not to cry when we were discussing the L.A. riots, and Pepe said black people were stupid. Everyone else in the family was nice. Pepe was the problem.
Or so I thought for a few hopeful days.
One day after I got off the bus, I felt a tap on my shoulder. It was a guy about my age. After pleasant introductions, he asked me, “Did you mind what those girls were saying?”
“What girls?” I asked as I started to get tense.
“The one’s in the back. Didn’t you hear them?”
“Nooo.”
“They were saying you should wash your face.”
Huh? I should wash my face? I hadn’t turned into a dirty urchin in Spain. I should wash…. Ohhhh. I should wash my face to wash my color off.
By the time I reached my Spanish home, I could barely breathe. My Spanish mother kept asking me: Que paso? When I told her, she was relieved. “I thought you were robbed or assaulted,” she said. There were worse things for her in this world.
When I applied to go to Spain, I had written that as a Puerto Rican, I was interested in an aspect of my ethnic make-up.
On that day, my Spanish mother was wrong: I was robbed.