¨littering and...¨

The time had come. After two weeks of hard work scooping shit, hugging cows and pretending to understand Catalan we were sad to leave our new family (human and bovine) but ready to return to the city. We had done a load of laundry, desperately hoping the remainder of our garments wouldn´t contaminate the very clean apartment of our friend Alberto, who was kind enough to let us crash at his place, again.

Sometime around Friday Josep, in a rare inquiry that did not evolve subtly implying that there is sometime deeply wrong with our country, asked us when we would like to leave. Thankful that we didn´t have to be the ones to bring up the topic of our departure, we ask if Monday is okay. To our luck it seems that Josep is planning on a trip to Barcelona on Monday as well, the first one in 8 years, and is willing to take us along. Saving us the 6 euros a train would have cost and giving us an opportunity to dry out the garments in the car because we were too lazy to bring them in from the rain.

Cops are nothing new for us on this voyage. We´ve bravely (well maybe not so bravely) faced the Tourist Police in Kashmir, which was nothing compared to our repeated run ins with the Indian Army stationed there. We are pros at looking foreign, dumb and cute- a useful combination when it comes to getting out of trouble with underpaid authority figures.

Some 20 minutes outside of Ripoll, we are flagged to the shoulder by a short cop wearing a gray uniform underneath the lime green reflector vest, which was just a tad gratuitous considering it was the middle of the day. After Morocco, I half expected Josep to hop out of the car, slip the copper a twenty and be on our way. After all, that was how it went down every time our shared taxis were pulled over in Morocco. There, coruption in the police force is no less common or publicly acknowledged than donut addicted cops are in the US. It´s treated as a common joke, a fact of life. The taxi drivers usually include the cost of their bribes into our fares.

So naturally, when the humorless cop sternly asked for our papers we were shocked. Really? We weren´t even driving, why does he need our passports? Before Leigh manages to fish my documents out of my purse (they were the most handy) the cop explains something in Catalan or Spanish too quick for Leigh to comprehend. He walks away with my passport in hand, leaving Josep to explain in his slow and deliberate Spanish that we were pulled over for not wearing seltbelts.

What? We die a little bit everyday from the second hand smoke in bars but you´re telling us they actually take the seatbelt law here seriously enough that they would pull us over? As the second cop car pulls up, Leigh and I glance at each other, unable to hide our shock that our personal safety choice is a grave enough offense to warrant the attention of three cops, two cop cars and doubtlessly a appalling sum of public funds. Clearly we are dealing with a bunch of small town cops who want to to be heroes but have little to do but pull cats out of trees and pull over unsuspecting tourists. Josep seems fidgety, which is nothing new, but this time it seems out of guilt and stress. He hadn´t noticed we were unbuckled and this little detour was putting off the trip to the city that he genuinely admitted made him nervous anyway.

The newer cop, a puffed up, self important son of a bitch, comes back with my passport and looks at Leigh while rattling off something in half Spanish half Catalan. He repeats himself twice, after Leigh informs him that she is not a native, is confused how this is a big deal, and needs him to speak slower. The jerk doesn´t slow his pace with each repetition, just increases his tone of indigence. ¨Vale?vale?¨ meaning Ok. He repeats like a broken record with no pause included for us to slip in ¨No, no vale!¨ I, of course, don´t understand a word of it except for a few numbers, which is cannot discern between 105 and 150. Surely that can´t be the fine.

Leigh responds as patiently and deliberately as she can, even though I can hear from the cracks in her voice that her anger is starting to burst through. She tells him we´re Americans, tourists, and that we didn´t know the law. He looks dumbfounded, as if he didn´t understand a word, which seems unbelievable considering that Josep uses the exact set of words to explain that we are Americans, tourists, and didn´t know the law. We´d be good little girls, put on our seltbelts (after all, who needs personal liberties) and drive away safely now. We´d learned our lesson, all we needed was a warning.

But that was not the case, apparently this was the cop who had SEEN us drive over the hill seatbeltless, and CALLED his buddy to insure that we were properly reprimanded for our crimes. He was the hand of justice. A hand that held the passport of a curly brunette but was too stupid to discern that it was not the same redheaded girl he was trying to fine. After several moments of confusion on his part, he returns to his car to do god knows what with Leigh´s passport, the same thing that had taken him 10 minutes to do with mine earlier. For once in my life, I had hoped the gigantic BUSH on the inside of her passport would do us some good. Fat chance.

Josep is getting increasingly anxious as time wears on. We´d been stopped for 30 minutes and he was already behind enough to miss the sporadic hours of whatever office he needed to visit. In the cop´s absence, Leigh and I practice the use of every curse word and insult we knew, disregardful of our conservative companion. ¨Fucking Fascist sons of bitches, they can´t really be writing us a ticket for not wearing seatbelts!¨ The both of us are spastic, seething with rage and disbelief. The seatbelts that we had retrospectively strapped ourselves in, even though the car was still, could barely contain us. I half expect her to bolt from the car for the hills, or worse for the cop car to reason our way out of this absurd charge.

When the cop returns and hands the ticket to Leigh she nearly jumps out of her seat. ¨105 Euros? That´s like 150 dollars! Is this for the both of us?¨ No, the duchbag explains, seeming to want us to think he was being compassionate for only writing the one citation. He wasn´t sure if I had been wearing a seatbelt, whih I had quietly slipped in on with the same ear for danger that as a teenager made me put on my bike helmet only when I was somewhere my mother could see. So 105 euros was for one person, and the slime ball wants us to think we were lucky!!!

At first I was convinced this was blackmail, extortion, which I ask loudly with the cop still lurking outside of Leigh´s window. I half hope he understands English, he should know that he IS the crook. The paper work is extensive, and the fine is immediate, meaning we could pay right on the spot or pay twice as much later. Somewhere in there it is implied that if we didn´t pay eventually, they would come and take Josep´s car. Josep seemed to want to get the whole episode over with as soon as possible so he could return to his cows, who love him even without a seatbelt. Still there was symbathy in his voice, turns out that he had also had been pulled over and paid an extraordinary fine for not having the proper light on a tractor he was driving on the dirt road from a neighbor´s house to his own. This, also, happened in the middle of the day. Had it not been for Josep´s nervous presence, and the chance that we could get him in trouble, I am almost certain we would have refused the fine, called the cops the arms of the fasict authoritative system that they are and gotten hauled off to some cell for disorderly conduct.

But we can´t let them get away with this entirely. When he comes back, he hands Leigh her credit card and it´s slip to sign. She grudgingly signs it, all the while muttering things under her breath that, thankfully, only I can understand. Next is the slip documenting our heinous crime. He explains in his inflated baritone is the denouncement. I am sure this is just the Catalan word for tickets, but the connotation is still there. Leigh is to sign it, agreeing to the fine and the ticket, whatever that means considering we had already forked over 105 Euros, at least six days worth of living. Instead, like the pistol she is, she looks him straight in the face, saying ¨Yo denunico la denunica,¨ roughly I denounce the denouncement. Good girl, the denouncement remains unsigned, denounced, as it were. Unfortuantly, even though a little of our dignity had been salvaged, we still drive away 105 Euros poorer and with much less respect for the Spanish government. Not too mention, the delay makes getting to Barcelona in time impossible and our host is forced to drop us off at the train station, where the ticket is somehow four euros more expensive than the one to Ripoll even though we had driven half the way.