asesinando español (dispatch #3)

Yesterday I met up with Professor Mario, who has been my Spanish teacher off and on for the last 15 years or so. We met at CILAC (then called “Cetlalic”), the school I mentioned in my first dispatch. Then a second time, and then I started taking lessons with him online, mostly to keep from losing what little Spanish I may have learned. The experience of going five years between in-person classes had taught me at least that much.

Our lessons have mostly been an hour of conversation. At one point I suggested we should read something together, and I further suggested Isabel Allende’s La Casa de los Espiritus, and, reader, that may have been an error. It's not quite as dense a thicket as Cien Años de Soledad, but brother, there are a lot of words in Spanish. I read in part to improve my vocabulary, because I keep using the same words over and over, and the very nice people here use those same words because they talk to me like I’m a toddler, which in truth I require. But in reading Allende to improve my vocabulary, it’s hard to know which of her palabras are just fancy but still common and useful words, like “volume” instead of “book,” and which are Allende trying to capture a world long since past, like “spectacles” instead of “glasses.” (I ran around CILAC for a while using gafas to refer to my eyeglasses, thinking I was being cool. Nope, I was being weird and cien años out of date.)

In any event, my advice would be that you are better off starting, as a friend did, by reading Tommy Taco: ¡la loca aventura de Tommy y Chewy! and not something by Allende or Garcia Marquez.

And yet, here I am, wandering the streets of Cuernavaca, going to the Mercado Carolina to buy frutas y verduras, and to the farmacia to buy venditas, and asking the very polite guard at the Plaza Cuernavaca how to get to Wal-Mart. And understanding enough of her response to actually find it. And once in a great while remembering to use the subjunctive, and even occasionally using the correct for of the subjunctive. And the people here remain extremely kind, and put up with my niño-español, and even those that speak English don’t immediately switch over to make life easier for me.

But Mario and I met yesterday to try to navigate Mexican banking - unsuccessfully, as it turned out: I would minimally need more than a tourist visa; documentation of an address would help further. Then we stopped for desayuno and ate chilaquiles, and chatted about where I’d been and what I’d seen and what we might do in place of our weekly zoom calls, which are now kind of redundant. As we chatted, I heard myself again torturing the Spanish language, stumbling over even the most basic of those 501 Spanish verbs in the book. (It’s an extra twist of the knife, Mario once pointed out, that the book taunts you with not just five hundred verbs, but five hundred and one.) Fumbling around with caerse and dar and tener. Hearing rocks tumbling out of my mouth. Thinking, “¡Dios mio! How painful it must be still hear me murder his native tongue fifteen years later.”

I’m sure he would say no. But that isn’t the point, the point isn’t what’s in Mario’s head (or Martha’s or Jorge’s or Ita’s at CILAC), it’s what’s in my head. Which is to say, as Julia Cameron points out repeatedly in her book The Artist’s Way, “It is impossible to get better and look good at the same time.” This is true, I suppose, whatever level you are at; you have to make your best go at the new bit that you want to learn, and risk tripping over your own feet, the way I did before seeking out venditas and desinfectante.

Last night I went to bed feeling embarrassed and a little angry about how slow the process is, how I had still said embarazado (“pregnant,” except that adjective probably does not exist in the masculine) instead of avergonzado. And then I said to myself, “You haven't given up. Fifteen years of grinding away at this, and you haven’t given up.”

“Tan largo es el camino,” I said in my summation at the end of a couple weeks at CILAC, ten or so years ago. Yep - still true. The only thing you can do is to keep walking down it.

It’s my dad’s birthday today. He studied at Mexico City College, now the University of the Americas, back when going to Mexico was a much bigger deal than it is now. He loved Mexico, and I feel sure he would be delighted that I'm here now.