Driver's Ed. revisited

This is not an experience that I wish upon any of you. Especially not in the 3rd trimester of pregnancy. I went through with it only because driving without a valid Spanish license merits 3-6 months in prison, no questions asked, and I have never aspired to deliver a child behind bars. However, having now officially passed both the written and practical Spanish driver's exam and with a peach-colored, hologrammed Spanish license in my hand, I know that I have safely and definitively escaped the trial and can appreciate it for the humor that it presented, as opposed to merely the motion sickness and disbelief.

It's not that I think that Spanish teenagers are any more incompetent behind the wheel than those of other nationalities. It is simply that total inexperience driving a motorized vehicle combined with a setting in which all of the cars are of the stick-shift variety and the multi-laned traffic circle is an oft-used form of urban vehicular circulation results in a recipe for disaster--especially for the 34-week pregnant, experienced driver who is forced to spend 7 hours observing said drivers in the backseat of a compact Mitsubishi in order to obtain a Spanish driver's license. Observe I did. And I have never seen driving like this.

I realized that I was in for a very long first session when Laura got behind the wheel and it became clear that she is yet incapable of shifting gears without looking at the gearshift. This means that she is not looking at the road a good deal of the time. Yikes. I am, unfortunately, not lying when I say that she came within inches of running over an elderly pedestrian in a crosswalk; Laura wasn't aware of it since she wasn't looking, however, and so she wasn't traumatized by the situation as I was. Once we got onto the highway, I came to understand that Laura was also unable (or unaware? unwilling?) to adjust her speed according to the conditions of the road. We happily puttered along at 40 mph on the straight-aways of the wide, open 4-lane highway and then incomprehensibly accelerated to 75 mph on the curvy, mountainous passes. (as you can imagine, since this kind of acceleration required a shift of gears, there was one very important person in the vehicle whose eyes were not on the curvy, mountain road.) I am not exaggerating when I say that I feared for my safety and that of my unborn child. I considered asking to be dropped off somewhere en route so as to illegally hitchhike back to Mieres.

And then we reached the traffic circles. I do wish that I could have filmed at least one of the several traffic circle encounters we had with Laura behind the wheel that day because my description will not do justice to just how impressively ludicrous her driving was in this context. There was something about merging into a traffic circle that suddenly and inexplicably made Laura lose all sense of time, space and logic. She defied all reason. She accelerated, negated the concept of lanes and whipped around and around the circle as though she were chasing her own bumper. And since, as a rule in our driving school, you cannot exit a traffic circle until the instructor has told you which exit to take, and since our instructor did not want to direct Laura to exit the circle until she had stabilized the vehicle within one of its lanes, we continued to fly around and around and around in tight, tortuous loops, 3...8...12 times, generating nausea and panic in ours and other vehicles, effectively preventing any other car from safely entering the traffic circle. Around and around the little car careened, blazing a hellish ring that would have inspired Dante himself. The instructor, surprisingly unfazed, would finally break down once we had chaotically rounded the circle on the order of double digits and grab his right-sided, secondary steering wheel, maneuver us out an exit and mutter something about how she has to learn how to drive. I am not kidding. You can't make this stuff up.

I met Patricia while she was chain-smoking outside of the driving school before our class together. She is a tiny girl with thin hair and bright red wire-rim glasses. Her hands were shaking as she introduced herself, which I was soon to realize was due to her nerves and not the nicotine. She immediately blurted out, "I just hope that I don't cause us to crash." I laughed and told her she would do just fine, to which she responded, "No, really. I hate this, I hate driving. I am sure that I am going to crash." She looked me over and then said, as though it couldn't get any worse, "And you are pregnant!" Yes, crashing would be less than ideal, Patricia. I admit that I did begin to share a sense of her panic myself as we got into the car together. While she was, ultimately, a pretty terrible driver, it was her explosive language that I found most impressive about the small girl. All it took was a fellow driver feigning to access the road within a 10-meter radius of our car for Patricia to gasp, release a string of expletives (my favorite being what translates directly to "Sh*t on my mother! Sh*t on my mother!") and say "He could have warned me!" or "What is she doing there?!" This applied to law-abiding pedestrians, as well.

There were many other assorted variations to the classes, including the many students who repetitively mistook 2nd gear for 4th gear when shifting up from 3rd or--my favorite--down from 5th (you've got to love inertia slamming you forward into your seat belt strap as the motor screams for mercy) and the parallel parking jobs realized only (and sometimes not even) after 15+ maneuvers.

The additional element that made these situations surreal was that our instructor, Alberto, very infrequently used his steering wheel or set of pedals to help us avoid what always appeared to me as impending disaster. He instead paid very little attention to the frightful driving of my comrades and spent the majority of our classes with his head craned towards the back seat, asking me involved questions about life and culture in the United States. So as our little driver's ed. car lurched and veered across the highways and city streets, I watched in silent horror as Maria inadvertently blew through a stop sign and in the wrong direction down a one-way street and I tried to accurately explain to Alberto the theological differences between Catholics and Protestants. (True story.) I have to hand it to him, though--in this town, that guy has job security if anyone does.