Evil General Pardiñas

I don't know who General Pardiñas was in real life but it would seem fitting that he was an exceptionally and arbitrarily cruel man. That is because on the street named after him there is an eternal line of immigrants waiting to be attended to by the police station that has been entrusted with the sublime bureaucratic privilege of reviewing applications for immigrant identification cards (as well as naturalization applications from Romanians and Bulgarians).

We thought we were supposed to be among the numberless throngs (truthfully there were upwards of 1,000 people) stationed outside the police station last Tuesday morning. After all, the Spanish consulate that processed our student visas told us it was important for us to take our visa application paperwork to the local police office to get it extended beyond the 3 months they could grant us. And the interior ministry's site lists the General Pardiñas address as the Madrid location for processing tarjetas de residencia and NIEs and that's where the lady at the bank directed us too. What follows is the bumbling heroes' quest to stand in that line.

The line that stretches into infinity. (Photo credit: Jorge París)

We had heard the crowds were bad but we didn't know how bad until Monday when we passed by at around 10:30 a.m. to survey the situation. There were hundreds of people frozen in line back to Bar Dickens. We decided to get up the next day at 5 and catch the metro when it opened at 6, hoping we could thereby improve our position in line. I guessed we would probably be among the first 50.

How naïve. When we arrived at 6:30 a.m., there were already as many people in line as there had been the day before at 10:30. We lined up a little behind Bar Dickens. There was a remarkable number of police officers outside in the dark morning, and for the next three hours they busied themselves commanding the line to stretch out and then allowing it to condense back up (I am convinced the line never actually advanced, only morphed forward and backwards).

Throughout all this, we were fairly unfazed, transported, as we were, to the world of Harry Potter as we listened to the 7th installment on audiobook together on our ipod. But around 10 a.m. we had luck enough to flag down a police officer handing out forms (though he refused to answer any questions). We snagged two copies what we presumed to be the correct form, figuring if we could fill it out and have everything ready by our turn, we might not have to return a second time. We had planned to wait in line that first day only to get the necessary paperwork, and then return later to turn it back in, because that is what we were told to expect by a policewoman we asked on Monday.

A. left to get all of our documents from home (letters from the university, doctors' letters, forms ascertaining that we had no criminal records in Provo, UT). He also made the payment indicated (6.70€ for each form) at a bank while he was out.

I, meanwhile, stood patiently in line, and since I was no longer listening to the audiobook, I was uncomfortably aware of how much smoke was being inhaled and exhaled around me. I also realized everyone was speaking Romanian, and that 3 people in front of me since 6:30 had magically transformed into 20 (the appearance of other family members reminded me of a not-so-different situation waiting in line the night before Black Friday back home).

If chain-smoking was the sole requirement to be a true Spaniard, these people should have gotten their naturalization approved on the spot. I was super uncomfortable and thinking of just how I would phrase my letter to the Guardía Civil about how asthmatics shouldn't be obliged to endure so much second-hand smoke when A. came back.

By this point, it was around 1:30 p.m. and we had been waiting around seven hours. In the three hours A. was gone, I had not seen the first 10 people at the head of the line move at all. I had "advanced" (or squished forward) far enough to be very close distance-wise, though not position-wise (the line continued to switchback) to the front entrance to the police station. I could, for the first time, make out a sign the size of a single piece of paper. AVISO, it read, "EU citizens, with the exception of Romanians and Bulgarians, and their family members, and students will be attended at Plaza Campillo del Mundo Nuevo, 3."

Three phone numbers were listed on the notice for setting appointments. As I stood there plugging them into my cell phone, a security guard approached me and said, "From the looks of it, I can tell you're a student" ("Por la pinta que tienes" is the phrase he used). Duh! How come nobody realized I didn't look Romanian or Bulgarian earlier (I was practically the only non-smoker among the immigrants and police officers!) How come nobody had pointed out and how come I myself hadn't noticed this tiny poster? Seven hours wasted. Boy did I feel stupid. We left the line wondering if we would have been seen that day or even the next, had we steeled ourselves to spend the night in line.

We have since read news stories related to the Romanians' and Bulgarians' plight. Romania and Bulgaria entered the EU at the beginning of 2007.