Glimpse - Your Stories from Abroad

Some days, all I could concentrate on was Paulino’s right thumbnail. It was just so long. His fingers moved with equal deftness back and forth across the strings of his rich maple-colored guitar, but it was clear that they depended heavily on that one long nail.

I first met the long thumbnail and its owner a week into my stay in La Paz. An experienced guitar teacher, Paulo had sounded quite jovial on the phone. He had worked with other Americans before, and he was quick to make me feel comfortable in the conversation. “No hay problema” (“no problem”), I soon learned, was one of his favorite phrases.

We decided to meet a few days later, and I asked him to repeat the rather cryptic directions to his small studio on La Bandera street—“half a block from the pharmacy” (there are roughly a thousand pharmacies in La Paz) and “across from the fútbol court” (equally common)—so I could cut my chances of wandering aimlessly about the city.

As expected, the journey to meet Paulino and his thumbnail began with a climb up a steep and winding road. Slightly out of breath, I then prepared to cross a busy street. Traversing La Paz, a city without crosswalks, was an art I would soon learn to master. I shadowed some Bolivians as they ventured into the chaotic traffic, weaving their way between one taxi and the next, dodging in front of the pickup truck but behind the minibus, and eventually emerging safely on the other side.

And so it was that simply arriving safely at my first guitar lesson, with my lungs intact, felt like an accomplishment. I settled on what I hoped to be Paulino’s stoop and caught my breath. Soon enough, I saw a short, eager man hurrying in my direction. I bent down to greet him with a kiss on the cheek. He was anxious to know if I’d been able to find the place okay, and he bent over to open the tiny aluminum door to his “office.” I followed him in, hunching over even further through a doorway that could not have been more than four feet high.

Inside, it was dark. I sat on a stool, accepted a glass of lukewarm water, and surveyed the scene. It was very simple: a small single room, filled wall-to-wall by one double bed, where Paulino was already seated with a guitar on his lap, deftly tuning the strings. Next to the bed there was room for a television set and a stereo, and little else.

Paulino handed me the freshly tuned guitar and pulled another one from a case in the corner. This guitar was older, simpler, and clearly not as treasured. I watched him manipulate the strings in the same way he had done with the other. That is when I first noticed the thumbnail. He asked me to pluck the low E string, which I did. Then the thumbnail plucked a low E. The thumbnail mimicked my plucking until the two very different guitars sounded harmonious. Paulino looked up and flashed a big smile.

“So,” he greeted me again. I smiled back at him. “What would you like to learn?”

It was quite a question. Learning to play the guitar was a long-held dream of mine. A fair-weather student for the past four years, I had learned an occasional song from the internet, or from a friend at college. But now here I was, faced with the energetic and talented maestro. And his magical thumbnail.

“Perhaps something Bolivian?” I suggested.

We began with the huayno, a Bolivian classic. I soon also learned the cueca, and a song from the Argentinean revolution. As we progressed, Paulo’s visual demonstrations helped me understand unfamiliar Spanish words, like “strum” and “fingerpicking.” I welcomed the new additions to my vocabulary.

Once a week, I looked forward eagerly to spending a little over an hour with Paulino. Our lessons almost always ran over. First we had to sit and talk a bit about life. How school was going, how practice was going, how life was going. By the time we started playing, a quarter of the lesson had invariably passed. But I couldn’t complain, because Paulino always allowed the lesson to continue until we had finished, which was typically 20 minutes late. It left me rushing down the main street of La Paz, bumping into businessmen and bread sellers as I hurried to class, but also left me eager to go home and practice on my host dad’s guitar as soon as school was through.

I eventually became accustomed to Paulino’s thumbnail, and grew to appreciate it for its true musical importance, for the beauty that it enabled Paulino to evoke. At first it had seemed so strange on the soft, well-manicured hand—almost grotesque, as though Paulino had found a way to channel more nutrients into that one finger, as if it were the spoiled child among the nine others he had to care for. Though I learned a lot from Paulino—whether it be about guitar-playing, Bolivian culture, or the merits of saying “no hay problema” to life’s minor problems— I still have yet to imitate that unique aspect of my guitar teacher’s practice.