Losing My Spanish

Last night I had two separate dreams and in both, my very existence was crucial to the survival of a people. In the first, I helped a group of Mexican strangers cross the I-10 after Katrina. A line of cops all in a row linked arms, Red Rover-style, a blockade the visual rhetoric for, All ye brown ones may not pass. But I am bilingual, see, and I was able to charm the officers by telling them that they didn't understand, that these were some of the good ones (wink wink), and I was simultaneously able to mollify my compatriots' fears. The officers unlinked their arms and we passed, and then like so much dust in my 7:30 a.m. living room, visible only by the sun's forty-five degree angle rays, they were gone, as was the dream, and I was on to the next one.

My other dream was, believe it or not, even more dramatic than the first. It was 9/11 again, or soon thereafter, and I was living in the rubble of the city and decided the only way I knew to help was to set up a translation booth just yards away from ground zero. The booth was made of cardboard, with a cardboard sign across the front of it reading something like, "Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled brown masses..." Separate from the dream, I've always thought the inscription on the Statue of Liberty should've been more honest in its pronouncement by including "your light-skinned masses," because dark-skinned immigration has always been more controversial than those of lighter-skinned folks. Then again, I was never a 19th century Irish immigrant to the U. S., or an Italian immigrant at the turn of the 20th century. But then again again, the Irish nor the Italian ever had to suffer Lou Dobbs.

Back to the dream: I'd set up my booth. Wait, that's all. After the booth was set up my dream ended. But what was important about the booth was that it had a purpose: I was going to help those who couldn't speak English figure out where their lost 9/11 family members were, have them sign a list and include their phone numbers. In other words I'd do the English-speaking legwork they couldn't. In other other words I'd be a goddamned American bilingual hero.

And then I woke up.

Tonight I went to a party where there was a charming but loud blonde who I could hear from my place at the doorbell, the woman who introduces herself profusely but whose name I forget a moment after and whose voice I can still hear weeks later, the type of blonde most parties are wont to include. The woman was a scientist whose professional job title I cannot even pronounce, so don't even think about conjuring up any blond jokes. Chick was wicked smart.

So smart, in fact, that at one point she summons her boyfriend by saying, "Demme mis llaves, tengo que ir al carro."

I was incredibly close to answering for her boyfriend, saying to her, hey man, I'll get your keys, just tell me where your purse is. But my fear was that once she knew I spoke Spanish, she'd try to engage me in a conversation in which I'd remain stuck. I cannot tell you how many times in my life this has occurred. An acquaintance does mission work in Costa Rica or spends a summer in Spain. When they see me, they want to engage, parlay, fucking talk, in Spanish. And at some point one of us is going to have to give it up. None of us are professionals here, but if anyone is expected to be, it's me. Which means if they are able to hold up the conversation longer (or I become disinterested in the game first, as I am wont to do in these cases), then they win.

Once a Spanish-speaking telemarketer called Lala's home while I was there and she was in the bathtub. The call was not important--the woman was trying to sell some nonsense--but what it was I couldn't understand. She spoke so quickly, and in such a foreign way, nothing like Lala's fashion, which is to roll out words deliberately, smoothly, the same way an accordion arches itself open. All I could tell the lady was, "Look, no entiendo." Then she asked me probably the most disturbing question of my life up to that point, "Is there anyone in the home who actually speaks Spanish?"

My Spanish in all its fullness had been a source of anxiety for me growing up. Some school kids took me literally for an alien. After the first time Lala picked me up and they heard her speak to me in Spanish, and heard me speak back to her, they were entralled in the way kids are enthralled at the zoo. Little Patrick would speak for a few moments in pure gibberish, completely goobledy-gook nothingness, and then ask me to translate what he'd said into Spanish. And when I told him he'd said nothing, that his sounds were untranslatable, he responded by saying when I spoke Spanish, I spoke nothing too. Because he couldn't understand them, my words did not exist.

By the time I got to graduate school I assumed I was no longer a Spanish speaking person. In the interim between Little Patrick and my language episode with Rodger Kamenetz, my thesis advisor, several things had taken place. For one, the telemarketer phone call. And for two to a zillion, I'd figured I no longer knew how to talk to Lala. I no longer liked the way she made me feel. If we'd speak and I'd forget a Spanish word or phrase, she'd ridicule me. Or she'd say my pronunciation was incorrect, but not tell me how to fix it. Most of all it seemed she didn't really like me much anymore, and I didn't know whether it was because I didn't call enough, or I was dedicating my life to the English language she'd loathed enough never to learn, or simply because the sound of my mueca lengua (the ugliest kind of Spanish pronunciation there is) had just grossed her out after all these years in which I was slowly losing my Spanish, and she'd had enough. In graduate school I felt Lala-less, and it was a lonely place to be. Losing Lala and a language

Perhaps these were the reasons Lala was such a frequent subject in my writing. That, and how many grandmothers actually talk to their grandchildren about fellatio before they reach school-age? What fascinated me was how fascinated others were in my grandmother, who I couldn't (and still to a certain degree can't) conceive as a character. But this is just how she is, I'd protest when someone thought she'd crossed a physical or emotional line with me. This is just how she loves people. Writing about her made me fall back in love with her all over again, and reminded me how lonely it was to be without her. Crazy people have this affect on you: if they are there for you to care and worry and feel insecure and lost over, then you're really lost. Maybe you become the crazy one.

Anyhow, Rodger loved her. He wanted to know everything about her and basically prodded me into the rough draft of the memoir about Lala, Lying in Translation, which I haven't read since I cobbled it together almost five years ago. Lala has since taken the book's place. She is in my life, and though I still don't call her as much as I should, I talk to her as much as I can. In my mind I've created a false dilemma: you must care for Lala or you must care for the book. I've opted for Lala, because I've got to live with myself for the rest of my life. Walking through nothingness into nowhere, since wherever I go, there I am.

Of course I could recognize this is a false dilemma and do something about it like, say, work on the book and love Lala too. But that's so grown up and complicated. And sometimes I prefer to be simple and stupid.

Back to Rodger, who loved her. When he asked me whether or not I spoke Spanish, because of course he spoke a little (mission trip to Mexico in the 70s), I told him, "Un pocito," and left it at that. But when day in class when we were reading Robert Bly translations, he asked me to go for it, since he hadn't used his mouth for Spanish in years, and he assured me I'd do a better job than him or any of my other cracker classmates. (Do I need to tell you that was a gross paraphrase of his language?) So I read the Spanish version of Bly, and congratulated myself that I hadn't fumbled any word, and just hoped I sounded moderately okay, which is all I ever ask of myself. I looked up in hope of, what, not being looked at like the asshole I often feel like? Rodger and everyone else were gaping. Why, he asked, didn't I tell him I spoke so beautifully? Why had I been so modest, why was I hiding my language? I told him I'd thought I'd lost it, and he assured me I hadn't. For the next hour I read poems in Spanish aloud in class, and someone else would read the translation in English, and we'd talk about connections and disconnections and why words sound more beautiful as they are originally intended.

And the metaphor of my life didn't escape me as I wondered whether or not I was more beautiful as I was originally intended. Yes, I learned both English and Spanish concurrently as a child, but the language I spoke more often, or at least the one I remember speaking most, because Lala was always there as listener and speaker, to tell me who I was and to have me tell her back, was Spanish. A language I now relagated to the classroom. Which I used to impress college professors and which explained to my classmates my slightly darker pigment. Which to use, in earnest, with Lala had grown into an impossibility. By ceasing to love her (actually to talk to her, which in her world are one and the same) I'd ceased to earn my language, and know it. I was mueca all the way and deserved to be. At the end of class we closed Bly and I went off into my English world of English folks where for a moment I'd been a Spanish-speaking star. The frustrated telemarketer didn't exist. Lala lived in a world I'd need a translator to inhabit, a scary place in which I wasn't ready yet to live.

It needs not be said I still have issues admitting my Spanish, or lack thereof, to strangers. A few months ago Brock and I went to Taco Jean, a family-owned Mexican restaurant in Tuscaloosa, a place where Jean's children work as cashiers once they're old enough to reach the counter. I hear them speak to each other about their lives, about what's left to be cleaned in the kitchen, what the kids learned in school that day, and I feel at once invasive and separate. Should I admit I'm one of them, I've often asked myself? But I'm not really, because I don't live my life in this language as they do. I get there every once in awhile on my verbal passport, that's all. When it's time for me to order I ask for a burrito without rolling my r's, without lowering my u into the gutteral as it should be pronounced. Even the pico de gallo gets no love from me (it's "peek-o day guy-o," the whitey way). The ten year old son of Jean takes my order and doesn't look at my face twice, though I get the sense he knows I've lost something somewhere. Or maybe he thinks I'm keeping it hidden too. What's funny is I'm as clueless about who I am (or should be) as he is.

And at the party tonight I let the blond's caucasian (okay, cracker) boyfriend get the keys to the car for her. He wore his ballcap backwards. The blond had blue eyes. Was it a mission trip for them too, or just three years of college Spanish? I sipped on my scotch and saw the beauty and simplicity of one human understanding the other, as the guy with the ballcap got the keys for the blond, and she took them, and thanked him, and walked out the door.