Expatriate life is ever-punctuated by the pratfalls of muddling through a culture not one’s own. Living in Spain highlighted for me the many differences, subtle and profound, between the United States and the old world. “You were born modern!” a lady from Seville once exclaimed what had never seemed so obvious to me, prior.
My Mediterranean home was La Cala de Mijas on the southern coast; just across from Africa; a fishing village four streets deep, clustered around an ancient Moorish tower, and home to 500, or so, very colorful people.
I had fallen in with a few local fellows; fishermen and the sons of fisherman. One of them, "Pito" (Whistle) told me about a Moroccan girl living in the backcountry who was being denied bus service to school, presumably because she was “mora.” A moor or Arab.
Pito knew a mechanic named Andres running for city council with the United Left coalition who wanted to embarrass the reigning Socialist Party for this bit of careless, bureaucratic racism. Andres wanted to know if I’d write a story about the six-year old, whose mother walked her to school 14 kilometers round-trip everyday, with a three-year old in tow.
While leery of engaging in a local spat, I agreed to meet the family. The girl’s name was Asma and there was something so ethereal and otherworldly about her that I committed on the spot to help. My last address had been in Hollywood. I was not rube, but where had I ever been faced with a mystical Moroccan girl in peril? I was writing a novel about a woman cast out of the sacred Spanish Catholic community and Asma’s plight embodied the narrative I’d moved there to dream. 
The only poetry you will ever find is the poetry you choose to see.
Hemingway counseled writers to always have a photographer at hand and mine was the splendid English gentleman, Gary Edwards. He agreed to take some shots and, when we met, I was all American business, breathlessly laying out the plan when he put his hand on my chest, smiled and said, “Why don’t we start the morning with a greeting, Stephen?” It was very embarrassing and ever since then, you'll get a proper greeting from me before we move on.
Gary’s portrait of Asma captured everything she was in that moment and is the reason you are reading this.
Fired by righteous indignation and a zeal to fulfill my pledge that Asma would get a bus ride (which I’d had no business making), I went to the mayor of Mijas, the education delegate, the provincial delegate and so on. They were all socialists though mostly the kind of people who manage to survive politically whether it is a dictator, or king, or whomever, running the show.
Someone had screwed up, but they were closing ranks because it was election season and they didn’t want to give Andres a cudgel with which to get on city council. They lectured that I was not battling for justice, rather sticking my nose in the latest wrinkle to a centuries-old rivalry between local clans.
My position remained simply that the little girl should get a bus ride, but they refused to give in.
I took the train daily into the provincial capital, Malaga, and tried to interest local newspapers in the story. Editors said La Cala was small potatoes and, anyway, they couldn’t buy my piece, because I didn’t have a “license” to be a journalist in Spain. I told them I had just fled Los Angeles because of riots sparked by a citizen journalist's video; that anyone can be a journalist in a given moment.
“Good for Los Angeles,” the editor of “Diario 16” told me.
But the dust-up was becoming a dust-up, mostly because I was American and they didn't really know what to make of me. “Diario de Malaga” finally relented. Given my illegal status in Spain, I told the editor my preference was that they rewrite my report, excluding me entirely. I stuck my hand out to shake his. He nodded, smiled and walked away, leaving my hand hanging, which is a very bad sign in a chivalrous land.
The next day I stepped into the village and the locals did nothing to hide their stupefaction. Up to that point, it had been generally assumed the Californian “novelist” was actually both a drug-dealer and threat to the purity of their wives and daughters, only one of which was true.
“Diario de Malaga” had not only used my byline, they’d published a photo including my image, which is not typical editorial packaging. I called the editor. ”What the hell? Now everybody knows I’m behind it.” To which he responded, “You are as much the story as the little girl,” and hung up. I’d been handled and played by crafty Andalusians. And it wouldn’t be the last time. Fears the local socialist clans would make my life hell were unfounded. Asma got her ride and it turned out to be so much more because of the way she was thereafter integrated with her schoolmates outside the classroom, and looped into the charming rhythms of village life. It was the right thing to do and political pooh-bahs bit their tongues.
Andres was elected to the city council; the first ever for Izquierda Unida in Mijas.
He would entrust me with the keys to the soccer field on the outskirts so the kids could play at night under my supervision. From him I learned that, when you honor people’s children, you honor them.
Asma’s father convened a dinner in my honor. He said they would be serving a very “special part” of the lamb for the occasion. As I walked up the dirt road to their home, Asma and her sister Kouter ran toward me in all delight yelling, “Safiyya! Safiyya! (Journalist!).”
The special part of the lamb turned out to be the kidney, which I couldn’t really choke down, but did. It was served as a cous-cous in a big wide bowl at the center of the table from which we scooped straight into our mouths. The mom, Harouni, the one who had done all the walking, stood dutifully in the corner, not partaking, serving only. Asma’s father mentioned that he was from Ceuta, which is on the African coast, but belongs to Spain by virtue of a colonial army garrison that has been there since soldiers shot arquebuses.
When he said, “Ceuta,” he did so in Arabic, in reference to an Arab land and I, the guy from California who spoke Spanish as a second language, corrected him with the Spanish/Colonial pronunciation. He smiled in the way you do when confronted with an idiot.
Point being that it’s easy to be an idiot when you’re an expatriate. The deeper you settle into a foreign culture...the less you know.
But there was no damage. I was inviolable; enshrined in the family’s hearts and, for as long as I lived in La Cala, would visit them and be greeted with cheers of “Safiyya! Safiyya!” by two gleeful little girls already confronting the perils of this world.
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