What’s in a Word?

Looking back now, I think I’ve taken two leaps of faith in my life. One of them may have been a good decision, but it also could have been a huge mistake. It is still not clear to me whether life would have been better had I not taken that dive into the abyss that lay before me back then. It’s not something I’m in the mood to discuss, though, so we’ll move on to the other time I risked everything. It wasn’t immediately clear that I’d done the right thing, but years later, it is obvious that it was the correct decision.

Here’s what I did:

I chose a course my advisor said not to take. My curiosity was too strong to put aside. Once in the course, my mind split open. Two weeks into the fall semester, I asked if Spanish had a hortatory subjunctive. The instructor, who was a teaching assistant and definitely unprepared to deal with oddballs like me, had no answer. It didn’t matter. I had simply been curious. After all, Latin had that grammatical feature. Later, it would appear that Spanish - which seemed to be half a language by comparison - did indeed have some hortatory-ness stashed away in its syntax.

Yes, the class I had been advised not to take was Spanish 101. My advisor, who was herself in possession of a Hispanic surname, said I’d have too many hours of classes. A day or two after my impertinent query, I announced that I was going to major in Spanish.

Mostly the teaching assistant ignored me. It would take too long to get up to speed. It would take two more years to finish my degree. I didn’t have enough money for two more years. I didn’t have any money, really.

That meant I had to hurry. I was already a sophomore. By the time I had reached the advanced classes, the ones that counted for the major, there was only my senior year, plus summer school, to achieve my goal. Since I had already taken that leap, there was no crawling back to the top, no scrabbling up the precipice. That was fine, because I was already in love.

There’s no explaining that sense of floating in waters so warm and melodious as the ones I’d found. On the other hand, the decision may not have been mine. Maybe the decision had chosen me and I had been tossed into those waters without knowing what was happening.

You might not be entertained by this rather simplified version of what happened barely two weeks into a course, but the tenuous nature of what tied me to the decision should send chills up your spine as it does mine. I was fascinated by the sounds, the way Spanish - which I only knew was spoken in Puerto Rico - made sense. 

At some point somebody must have reminded me that there was a whole continent called South America and a European country called Spain. Places that knew something about Spanish, too.

The jolt of understanding the first poem in Spanish has never been forgotten. The shock at learning some speakers aspirate their S sounds, while others pinch their vowels into some unintelligible sound has, however, dissipated. Geminated consonants in the Caribbean, velarized nasals, lexicon torn from indigenous, African, and Arabic speakers - all were just come-hither gestures that tied my tongue in knots and kissed my struggling lips. 

R or RR, alveolar L, no diphthong if there is only one vowel in a syllable, the marvelous bilabial fricative that is clearly not the V of English but instead is the sound you get when playing a comb with paper around its teeth. These were, and are, miracles. I wrapped my mind around each and every difference, and leapt. Over and over. Every new feature caressed my shoulders, gripped my arm, and led me onward.

Yes, I craved words. Perhaps more than other people, because I was an only child and spent a lot of time not talking to anybody. Even in school, I had not been outgoing, and words had not come easily. Not the spoken ones, at least. In contrast, the written ones were my sea of perdition and there were not enough around to consume, not enough hours in the day to live inside books.

(I still didn’t know that decades later the library would be giving out free buttons and one said “I’d rather be reading.” I have always felt that way and in fact would rather be reading than writing this essay.)

Yes, I adored sounds, loved listening to my favorite music, but I never had learned to play an instrument. Just like with books, I preferred to slide inside and stay awhile. It was so peaceful in those inner places.

This makes it all the more ironic and puzzling that I would choose a language, a modern one, in which oral fluency is one of the requirements. Perhaps it was my masochistic side that pushed me over the edge. Fear of speaking up in a group, in public, in English. Fear? No, torture. Now do it in Spanish. It felt like slow-motion suicide, believe me.

Syllable after syllable after point and manner of articulation began calling, insidious (I’m sure) and not expecting much from me. Moods and tenses, hooked to my moods and tension at having to converse in public, forced me to keep going. Maybe they knew I had nothing else, that the new linguistic wilderness was the only life I had. Oh, there were dates and beer parties, but they were repetitious, boring. The language termites had already begun to work at carving new rooms for thought in my Anglo brain. 

Actually, it’s wrong to think of them as termites. They were more like skilled masons, rearranging the order of reality as I had known it and preparing thousands more corridors for me to wander through. It should have petrified me. Maybe it did a little, but the dry bones of English could no longer sustain me. I didn’t have to have Spanish in my life (I had no family ties to it at all), but I had no life without Spanish.

So I became the field or meadow where fresas and margaritas and laurel, just to name a few plants, took root. I became full of the new strawberries and daisies and bay trees. There were many other residents on my land, in my head, but after a period of years, they grew directly in me. They weren’t transplanted from English, and some never had an equivalent in my first language. Ones for poetry, cooking, dancing, for example, defied me to say their names in any form except Spanish.

I was at a loss for words, and in a way you might think that was funny, ironic, but in a way it was scary. I was being colonized and didn’t even care. The army of phonemes and morphemes just kept coming, and there was no stopping the brigades of idioms that thrilled me, perhaps perversely so. The leap had been taken and could not be undone.

I was in deep, way over my head, and kept looking for the part of the ocean that went down just a bit farther. The currents that caught me now, that were lapping at my unraveling self, knew they could take me anywhere. I crossed borders into forbidden countries, bribed guards so nobody would get hurt, spoke lunfardo in Buenos Aires and pachuco in the Southwest. I swerved around ladino without a hitch, felt an earthquake in Bogotá, heard the lisping Castillian that grated on the ears. (A bit of Magno or Soberano cognac eased the grating feeling slightly.)

Just when it was enough, when the Spanish Empire had claimed me as one of its peripheral possessions, it began to drag me into Quechua (because the Andes, because Peru, Ecuador, Bolivia) and shove me into Portuguese.

The world began to swell for me. Not like when you get an infection and it hurts, but like when you go to the outdoor market and your canvas bags start to bulge with all the good food you’ve purchased. Swell like that. Or when rice or chick peas are soaked, then cooked to perfection. They swell. They are all the nourishment you need, rice and beans. 

There isn’t a lot more to say, other than to keep adding examples of how I kept falling, after that initial leap of faith, into my own little world of words. Yes, I admit there had been things to run from before making that decision, but somehow the method of escape I had chosen had been perfect. Spanish and everything else its Sargasso Sea brought to me had saved my life. 

It is late now, and there is not much of value in this room where I sit, writing this when - as you know - I would rather be reading. Nevertheless, the sea rumbles nearby, within. And I am reminded of Midas, the king with the golden touch. Everything he touched turned to yellow, precious metal because he’d made a wish. Well, a wish or a leap made me. 

Almost everything surrounding me at this very moment has been touched by Spanish. That is kind of sad, because I have nearly fallen out of love with it, after years of sleeping with Cervantes, Fuentes, Icaza, and Galdós on the pillow next to me or on the floor beside the bed. I have not exactly been unfaithful, but we became too intimate and that made our relationship too frail. Maybe I had finally heard enough.

Now there is a new leap of faith in my life. It’s kind of an offshoot of both Spanish and Portuguese, but mostly the latter. You see, it’s as if I’ve managed to throw off the shackles placed on me by the Empire. I’m almost embarrassed to admit our passion, how much I craved its sounds and structures, its limbs and intonations. I can speak it more or less like English, which is the result of agonizing effort, and there are still things that never want to come out of my mouth in my native tongue. We know that sometimes even the closest ties must be severed.

Sometimes somebody else severs them for you. You might say that’s the case here. Those much-loved syntagms and their conquista of me are over. I took the courses, finished the degrees, earned a living. Got my money’s worth from all the tuition fees. 

Now a new sea has sent its sirens, its books, its rain. I have already embarked on a route, lesson-less and degree-less, no longer learning but rather absorbing. I am adrift where I never studied, never planned to be, at least when I made that fateful declaration that I would major in Spanish. I have never studied where I am now, and hope nobody knows I don’t know how to swim.

I might, however, be able to walk on water. After all, it is my second leap of faith and that should count for something. Farewell, my first love. Parting is a very sweet sorrow, but I no longer have room, or years, enough for you. 

I have a new language lover, and he or she is all I need. This language may be unstudied, edgy, full of gaps and threshing floor politics, but the new me needs Galician instead. You see, when taking that second leap, it reached out to catch me with its personalized infinitives and future subjunctive.

That is another thrill you can never forget.