No Words

“I can’t say it.”

That was what I knew, so it was what I thought and what I said.

Because I couldn’t say it.

We all have secrets, don’t we? Sometimes our secrets are silly and hardly deserve keeping. Sometimes they need to be concealed, because we think there will be consequences if they are revealed. Secrets have always been the stuff of fiction and poetry and they do have their justification. However, sometimes secrets can be dangerous, because they corrode from the inside out and when we realize that has happened, it may be too late. The damage is done.

This wasn’t one of those cases. She had a secret, but she didn’t know why she even thought it was something that shouldn’t be revealed. It had no dangerous characteristics, and in fact it was of minimal interest to other people. It was nothing more than something she didn’t want other people to know, something she didn’t want to share.

The secret was a single word. Normally, a word all by itself signifies little, finds it hard to be a true secret. When we think about things we don’t want to be revealed, it’s usually an action, meaning, there’s a verb. For example, “So and so did such and such.” Maybe it’s also :So and so did such and such to somebody.” Maybe it was done to the person who wants it to remain a secret. We can think of all kinds of scenarios for this. Or maybe it was done to another person and the person who knows about it feels guilty, but still keeps the secret. It’s not easy to decide whether to refrain from telling the story or to cover it up. In these cases, nobody wins, and perhaps everyone dies.

Yet there are other sorts of secrets, ones which a person decides to keep for reasons totally unrelated to the circumstances of uttering a word. This was a word that could never be said. Maybe in the past it could be said aloud, or written down in a semi-phonetic way. Maybe it had been used by another person, close to the cringing individual who didn’t want to hear the world passing judgment on it.

These circumstances lead us to moments of sheer panic, as she well knew. Yet even though she understood, felt, that panic, she hadn’t the least ability to understand why. 

A few months ago, they had all been gathered around a small table, the limbs of some members of the group draped over the limbs of others. For a reason nobody could remember, a member of the group ventured to pose a question to the others. She was genuinely curious as to what nicknames her companions had borne as children, say, those under fourteen. The names most often came from close family or friends, not teachers or ministers or complete strangers. In the cases cited, the bestowing of the name was unlikely to have negative connotations.

Still, she didn’t want to hear it, much less say it. Three syllables that her mouth could not form, that her heart refused to hear.

Except that wasn’t completely true. She loved the word, which had no verb and would never have one, not any more and not now.

The word needed no other parts of speech, since nobody else could understand it. Nobody would know what it meant, nor would they care. That was part of the problem: it was a word that had but one reason for being. It had been in the mouth of only one other person. It was a word that person used for a certain purpose. There was a whole world in that word.

He used it when he spoke to her, when she was a little girl. Maybe it was nothing more than the thought that it was a childish nickname. A lot of people get a nickname based on their hair or their teeth, the way they walk or talk or eat. They may mean nothing or maybe they’re ridiculing the person. The individual might outgrow it and the word disappears. Or the nickname sticks, because it’s appropriate. Or funny. The one who receives it says fine, call me that, and life goes on.

What happens if the nickname becomes embarrassing, because the recipient outgrows it or changes so much that it no longer makes sense? Example: “Shorty” has a growth spurt and ends up way over six feet tall? That can be laughed off and forgotten, used or discarded. I remember when I found out they called me “Walking Dictionary” and felt an odd sense of pride. 

Her situation was different. He had given her a name and from the pronunciation, the tone of his voice, she knew it had come from a good place. It only meant good things, things like love. The best kind of love: the one a father feels for his daughter. Thus, there was no fear about its usage. Rather, it was to be used by only one person. She herself wasn’t allowed to say it out loud (a self-imposed rule). Only he could say it.

“I can’t say it.”

She insisted, because the three-syllable word was a one-way street: it went from him to her. Nowhere else. Her mother only used it when she was quoting him; the word clearly did not belong to her. Nor did she try to usurp it, because she knew how it was supposed to be used.

At some point, she realized that she could not say it, that the three syllables refused to enter her mouth, refused to be reproduced by her tongue, teeth, or palate. That was when she knew it had become a secret, although she didn’t know why. She was true to that feeling, so when a group of friends started talking about names they’d all had as children, she shrunk into a wadded-up ball of paper. She rustled and crinkled, but no name-word appeared on her lips.

“What’s wrong with you?” they asked, but got no answer.

She could only shake her head. It was strange, but then she read about Rigoberta Menchú, Nobel Prize winner from Guatemala, but more from her Maya-Quiché culture. Rigoberta and other children all had secret names; nobody else ever found out what those names were. She didn’t explain why that was so, but the bond between the name-giver and the name’s recipient was akin to sacred, if one believes in those things.

This women with an unspeakable name was neither Guatemalan nor indigenous, but she understood completely. The bond of silence was the defense of identity, which means many things. In the case we’re describing, the unspoken name was what she shared with him. It was the most important word he had ever taught her, maybe the only one. He had untangled it from a web of lives, forgotten and discarded histories, another continent. It was only a remnant of another world, and he had assigned it to her.

He hadn’t said she shouldn’t reveal it and she was going to follow his wishes forever. Only two other people had known the word, neither of them certain how to explain it. Both were gone now, so the three syllables existed in her alone. She had, however, crawled back to the space whence the little beetle-word had emerged and found it to be a paradise. He had entrusted it to her, and with it had tied her with a fine, trisyllabic thread to a sense of origin few people have.

One word, standing out in italicized or capitalized (it doesn’t matter which) letters, to remind her of whence she had come. A power such as that could not be trivialized, nor made fun of because it wasn’t English. She would never allow it. She could only hear it, and respond. She could pass it on, yes, except…

… except she had no children of her own.

What’s an unsaid word good for anyway? She would cradle it, hoping her tears would not dissolve it. 

And she could, would not, say it. She was only its fortress, like a rock. Everything unsaid.