So she knew. I answered. “I lived here once. As a kid.”
Her eyes darkened. “Your accent gave you away.”
“My accent?”
“How you said buenos días, how you pronounced Guatemala. Yankees work their heads off to get that just right. Why didn’t you tell me?”
“I’d rather it didn’t raise expectations.”
“You can trust me. If you’re relearning an early language, it makes a big difference. Were you born here?”
“Yes.”
“Oh, then you are actually a Guatemalan?”
“I’ve never thought of it that way.”
“You’re a U.S. citizen then, by choice at age eighteen.”
“Correct.”
“You haven’t been back?”
“No.”
“And how old were you when you left? May I ask?”
“Seven.”
“Seven years old.” She stared at me as if I were still a child, a naughty one. “Let me get this straight,” she said. “Unless you were hermetically sealed in some Yankee bubble-house for the first seven years of your life, you spoke Guatemalan Spanish—fluently, I expect.”
“As fluently as a seven-year-old might, I suppose.”
“Did you read it?”
“At an elementary level. A bit of grammar in school, as I recall.” With my mother as first classroom teacher, a stickler for grammar, but I didn’t say that. Ordered by the same mother to never speak the language again. I didn’t say that either. “The truth is, I haven’t used it in years and I can’t account for what I’ll remember,” I said. “Isn’t that what’s important?”
“Have you reviewed it at all?”
“Not really.”
“It should come back quickly.” She rattled off something in Spanish.
“You’ve lost me,” I told her.
“Old expression. ‘Those raised by lions will always know how to growl.’ I’ve been speaking Spanish for twenty years, and if I stopped, I’d get rusty pretty fast. But I’ll never forget English. My guess is you’ll find your Spanish right where you left it.”
“In the lion’s den? Then who is to say I won’t be eaten?” I thought that was rather funny, but she asked, “Is that why you’ve never been back?” When I didn’t answer, she said, “Well, why don’t you ask the questions for a while. You must have some.”
And you, Catherine O’Brien from Milwaukee, what brought you to this country? I didn’t ask. I didn’t really want to know. Three whole weeks in her presence, under her tutelage? “Exactly what are we going to do for six hours a day?” I asked.
“Does that seem like a long time to you?”
“Possibly an eternity.”
“I’ll try to surprise you.”
The diagnostic test took an hour. It was largely a matter of translation, to and from, without a dictionary. I performed as I expected. My original use of the language had been almost completely oral, to say nothing of childlike, and I found little relationship between that and what I saw now on paper.
“How was it?” Catherine asked, as I handed it back to her in the office.
“Well, I’m sure I didn’t ace it.”
She looked it over. “No. You’ve got a ways to go, all right.”
After lunch she said she wanted to test my ear. She would ask a series of questions and I would do my best to answer. This time I was free to use the dictionary.
I was exhausted in half an hour. It was like a grueling game of singles tennis, even though we were following the most basic dialogue. I dove into the dictionary, my glasses on and off. Hello, how are you? I’m fine, thank you. How do you like the weather? The weather is beautiful. What day is this? Monday. It’s Monday, lunes. What is today’s date? Date. Ah, give me a minute. August 5th. El cinco de agosto. There. What year? Year. Uh. Two minutes, please. —One thousand, mil. Nine hundred, novecientos. Eighty seven, ochenta y siete. There, good for me. She didn’t seem impressed. More questions. “Hable más despacio, por favor,” I said. Slow down, please. She had offered me that sentence herself, in case I needed it, but it did no good. At last I threw up my hands in frustration. Look, she said, if she spoke any more slowly she would distort the pronunciation. Guatemalan Spanish was slow, anyway, archaic even. That was the Spanish of my childhood, wasn’t it, the language of my heart?
“Heart and mind” was the phrase she used, corazon y mente. She repeated those words, dragging them out teasingly. To my confusion, I found myself translating them to other sounds. Tammee. Na-beel. That’s how they echoed phonetically, in Mam, out of the cave of years.
“What section of the country did you live in?” Catherine asked.
“Las montañas,” I said.
“Mountains where?”
I shrugged, pretending ignorance. We were strolling in the courtyard by this time, as other teams were doing, the school turned peripatetic. It was almost four o’clock and the sky was beginning to cloud over. I turned to face her. “Listen!” I said, in English.
“Oye!” she corrected. “Español, por favor. Oye.”
“Listen!” I said again, in English. “We can make this easier. All I’m after is a functional level, just whatever I need for my —.” I discarded “purposes,” then “search,” then “research,” and landed on “agenda.” That sounded too stuffy, but Catherine said, “Good. That’s what we’ll do, just get you ready for your agenda.”
Did she hit that word a little too hard? Never mind, the day was over. I couldn’t have been more thankful. I ran back to my quarters through a gusty, purgative shower.
SIX
The word I’d given Rebecca was even more pretentious. Moratorium. I thought of it later that evening, sitting at my desk in the crowded room, sounds drifting up from below, rain in the patio, television in the parlor.
Rebecca knew very little about my early years here, but she had often asked me why I didn’t “go back.” My answer was always the same: I had no reason to do so.
“And now you’re changing your mind?” she said. “It’s a bit risky, isn’t it?”
I thought she meant physical risk. “Supposedly it’s safe now,” I told her.
“Safe, good,” she said. “But what’s the real reason?”
“Call it a moratorium,” I said, and then wished I hadn’t. She wanted a definition. Erik Erikson’s, for example, a temporary flight from other realities? “But he was referring to adolescents, of course,” she said. Rebecca worked with disturbed teens, and her musings sometimes made me feel about age fifteen.
It didn’t matter, I told her. I might not actually go, anyway.
“Not go? But why?” she asked.
“There’s my mother, for one thing.”
“I’ll look in on her. You should go. I knew you would some day.”
That almost killed it, right there. If I did go, I assured her, the trip would not change anything in our plans. When I got back, right after Labor Day, I would finish moving out. She gave a little shrug. No problem.
There wasn’t much left to do. I had already