EIGHT
Meanwhile, Rebecca seldom left my thoughts entirely. In dreams I often found myself a passenger in her car, my knees pressed against the dashboard, seat stuck in the forward position, as it was in actuality. In these dreams, she was always driving me to Logan Airport, where she was dropping me off, as she did—in actuality—because she was going “right by,” on her way to a conference.
I finally called her, only to get my own voice on our answering machine at home. She had not yet changed it. “Please leave us a message,” I heard myself say. So I did. “Ted, tell Rebecca everything is fine here. Ask her how she is. How is his Mom?” I left the number and said goodbye to myself. She called back when I was out. Juanita wrote down her message. “All fine here, too. No news. Your mother the same, holding her own.” Juanita thought she’d missed a word, whatever it was my mother was holding. It was all right, I told her, nobody knew.
On Saturday, at the end of the first week, I took my run later in the morning while my clothes washed at the local lavendería. Doña Rosa had been urging me to visit the chapel next to the partially restored Church of San Francisco where a 17th century healer, Hermano Pedro de Betencourt, lay in state. I lingered there maybe five minutes, staring at the mesmerizing display of the wizened corpse in a wall niche surrounded by candles, dead flowers, crutches, and scores of photos of those who claimed to be healed. A woman standing nearby muttered a chatty prayer and crossed herself repeatedly. After leaving the dim recesses my eyes took a while to adjust to the sunlight, and maybe that was part of the problem, because when I got back to the central plaza I saw her.
The plaza was alive with traffic—motor bikes, street hawkers, tourists. She was twenty feet ahead of me, looking in the window of a shop with a sign that read High Class Tipica. It was Rebecca for sure. I recognized her from the back as she walked away from me. Same height (just under my chin up close), same solid hips (“broad across the beam” as she’d say), same close-cut auburn hair, and her walk, like a thirteen-year-old boy, I used to tell her, the left foot a little pigeon-toed, arms swinging slightly wide of the body. She was wearing jeans and a T-shirt, as she would be. Sunglasses dangled from her fingertips.
Never mind the odds. I knew it really could be Rebecca, that she could and would fly here if she was so inclined, rather than phoning or writing, to tell me that she had changed her mind. I started after her, shouting her name. Half-a-dozen people turned their heads, and so did she, with a face that was not her own. I spun around and ran in the opposite direction as if I were chased, then studied vocabulary back at the house, finding sanity in words that were nothing but words: Rain: lluvia. Rainfall: cantidad de lluvia. The language, imbécil, just get the language.
But things were not going very well in the language department, either. I heard another student say that success in language study depended on hitting it off with your teacher. Catherine and I were not hitting it off. On the contrary, it’s a wonder we didn’t come to a blow-up sooner than we did.
I don’t know what she saw when she looked at me during those six hours together day after day, but her own appearance never changed—hair skinned back so tight under the visored cap I thought it must hurt, always the chinos and white shirt. Was it always a white shirt? I won’t swear to that now. But my sense of her was unchanging. Against the background of astonishing color everywhere around us, and in contrast to the woven tote bag she carried every day, she seemed superimposed in monochrome. She seldom smiled, unless to give me that needling half-way thing. I started a collection of adjectives to pin her down—dour, saturnine, churlish, taciturn. Atribilious. I liked that one.
Not that I was earning medals for charm myself. Often I felt like walking away. Once I did. I got up and left the premises and stayed away long enough to convey a message, which I was pretty sure she got. But otherwise I just fell back on the rules I used in teaching: level voice, never frown, never interrupt. If she disliked me, it was not going to be because I was a mannerless chump. I kept a discreet distance as we sat together at the table. I had no interest in the intrigue of accidental touching. If our legs met, as they were apt to, both of us long-legged, the arousal factor registered below zero.
Mornings were devoted to grammar. In this she was merciless, as she should be, drill, drill, slow and repetitious on her part, clumsy and hesitant on mine. I felt like Heinlein’s Martian-man, looking up the code. After the lesson, Catherine would ask me to read something aloud to her in Spanish and translate it to English. These readings were always juvenile, comics with data about the Maya (over fifty percent of the population, identified by twenty-two different languages), and a child’s version of the Popul Vuh, the K’iché myth of the world’s creation. I knew what she was doing, groping for the point where I had left off as a kid. It irked me, but I had no reasonable objection. There’s something about learning a language, anyway, that reduces you to babbling childhood.
Afternoons were harder. This is when we were supposed to “dialogue informally,” for two whole hours, exhausting as a prospect. But even more tiresome was finding anything to talk about, for more than a few minutes, that is. “Anything” is hyperbole, of course, but day after day we faltered and came to an impasse. It was not a minor glitch.
At the beginning, Catherine offered me the choice. What did I want to talk about? I considered sports or music, but quickly backed off those, the language of each too specialized to be practical right now. The same was true of world affairs. I thought I’d get help from news reports, about East Germany or South Africa, say, but that turned out to be more than my low-level skills could take on with savvy.
What about the history of Central America, Catherine asked me one afternoon. What did I know? I assumed she meant short of the big taboo, current politics. Not that I knew anything much about that, or about the history either. I fell back on the old high school ruse, when you’re stuck make the teacher laugh. I gave a sniff. “You mean like this is where you get your bananas and stuff?”
“Divertidísimo,” she muttered. Not funny, Bozo.
“Okay, here’s something I really do know,” I said. “This will knock your socks off.” I worked it out in Spanish, first in writing, while she waited, then read it aloud. “In 1972, the great Puerto Rican ball player, Roberto Clemente, was killed in the crash of a plane headed for Nicaragua with aid for earthquake victims. I bet even you didn’t know that.”
“Puta!”
“Wowee, that’s a dirty word, right?”
I was about to be sent to my room, I could tell. All right, I said, I might be able to describe the Monroe Doctrine, though it was really just a verbal clot from a high school class. Oh, but, I added, Congress abolished it not long ago, right? And hadn’t President Reagan resurrected it recently? Wasn’t there once something called the Atlantic Charter? Or was that the Alliance for Progress? “And then you’ve got your Cuba and your Bay of Pigs, right?” She smiled in spite of herself, just a little, so I added the Battle of 1066 and the French Revolution.
All that was in English. Back to Spanish, she said. Let’s talk about you. What about my work? What did I teach? What could I say but “Lit Survey,” in a full sentence, of course, and list some classics, all of which translated badly. Well, then, how about the subject of my dissertation? I didn’t do a dissertation, I told her.
“What? No PhD?” Teasing half-smile. “How come?”
“Acrofobia academica,” I said. Sarcasm works poorly when you have to put on your glasses and look up the words. What did that mean, she wanted to know. Nada, I said.
We had already been through the “Who are you?” exercises in vocabulary. Who are you? Yo soy el hombre. Americano. Tourist, teacher, student, husband, son. And the nots. I am not a brother. Not a father, a doctor, a bus driver. I got tired of it and tried to switch the focus. Who are you? I am the teacher, not the student, was all she would say.
Once, during a water break, I asked people what they talked about with their tutors. Families, jobs, they said,