There’s a moment, about an hour into standing in a Spanish government office, when you begin to wonder if you are, in fact, still alive. Maybe you died at some point during the process, maybe you’ve been wandering through the afterlife this whole time, doomed to an eternity of waiting rooms and forms you don’t fully understand. Bureaucratic purgatory.
I’ve been in Madrid exactly three weeks, and so far, I have achieved nothing but confusion, sore knees, and a newfound respect for people who manage to survive in this city without spontaneously combusting from frustration. All I want is a residency card so I can stay here legally and start digging into my family’s past. That shouldn’t be complicated. I am a well-educated man. I used to teach university students about historical documentation. I have an advanced understanding of Latin. And yet, standing here in a fluorescent-lit room, clutching a ticket with a number that doesn’t seem to correspond to anything, I have never felt dumber in my entire life.
A man at the counter has been arguing with the woman behind the desk for 45 minutes. He is sweating. She is sweating. I am sweating. A fly is trapped in the light fixture above us, throwing its tiny body at the glass in a desperate bid for freedom, which—honestly—relatable.
The last time I had this much trouble with paperwork, I was 23 years old and applying for a marriage license. That, at least, was a minor inconvenience with a reward at the end. This? This is endurance sport bureaucracy. This is an obstacle course of stamps and signatures and incorrect addresses.
I try to distract myself by thinking about my great-great-grandfather, the one who supposedly lived in Madrid. What would he have thought of this? Did he stand in a government office one hundred and fifty years ago, waiting for some underpaid civil servant to decide his fate? Did he have bad knees? I imagine him tapping his foot impatiently, glancing at a pocket watch, adjusting the lapels of his jacket. Or maybe he was smarter than me. Maybe he left the paperwork to someone else and spent his days drinking sherry and writing dramatic letters about politics.
My number is finally called. I step up to the counter, offer a polite “Buenos días” in my best rusty Spanish, and hand over my documents. The woman barely looks up. She shuffles through the papers, pauses, frowns, and then says, with the exact same tone of voice you’d use to inform someone that their house has burned down:
“You’re in the wrong office.”
I stare at her. She stares back, unbothered, immune to my suffering.
“Wrong office?” I repeat, like an idiot.
“Yes,” she says, already calling the next number.
And just like that, I am back on the street, blinking in the harsh Madrid sunlight, contemplating my existence.
So far, genealogy research is going great.