I was too
short to reach the faucet, so to ask my mother for a glass of water, I said “un vas d’aigua, si us plau.” But if I
had to ask the maid, I said instead “un
vaso de agua, por favor.” Somehow I knew to speak to my parents, my aunts,
and my grandparents in Catalan, a Romance language born of the sloppy Latin of
the Roman soldiers who occupied the northeast of Spain. But to speak to the
maid, who came from the south, I used Castilian, another descendant of bastardized
Latin.
When Ferdinand and Isabella unified the various kingdoms of the Iberian
peninsula in the 15th century, Castilian, known in the rest of the
world as Spanish, became the official language of the new country, and a centuries-long
suppression of regional languages such as Catalan and Basque began.Growing up
under Franco’s dictatorship, my generation wrote and spoke Spanish, which was enforced
as the language of public life, more correctly than Catalan. But for all his
efforts to eradicate it, Franco could not erase Catalan from the dining room
table with its cruet of olive oil and its bottle of dark red Priorat, or from
the bedtime stories, the nightly prayers, and the lullabies.
Although as
a toddler I didn’t think much about the difference between Spanish and Catalan,
I was acutely aware of the distinctions between barceloní , the variety of Catalan spoken in Barcelona and by my
father and his family, and lleidatà,
the variety spoken in the province of Lleida, a mere eighty miles away, where
my mother came from. Although as a city kid I should have spoken barceloní, my heart belonged to the
horses, pigs and chickens, the wheat field and the grape arbor of my maternal grandparents’
farm, and I proudly spoke a countrified lleidatà.
But whether barceloní or lleidatà
, I spent my childhood swimming in a river of language that flowed over and around
me and sometimes threatened to engulf me.
If you had asked me in my earliest years what adults did, I would have
answered that they talked. At our house the radio was only turned on for selected
programs, and there was no television. So people talked, all day and far into
the night, as a kind of sport.
My mother
and her sisters talked while they mended their stockings, ironed their blouses,
or braided my hair. If one of them gave an opinion, the other countered it. If
one told a story, the other corrected, expanded, and topped it with an even
better one. When my father came home from rehearsal at the Liceu, the Barcelona
opera house, he told us about the fabulous all-Black American company that had
come to perform Porgy and Bess, or
the amazing ballerina Maria Tallchief--also American, and a real Indian. Back
from the bakery with the midday loaf of crusty bread, the maid relayed what she
had heard the baker’s wife say as she stood in line.
After the
meal I would sit on my mother’s lap while the adults lingered at the table,
talking. With my head on her chest I could predict by her intake of breath when
she was about to say something. I couldn’t understand what she was saying, but
I knew if she was feeling excited or angry by the rhythms of her breathing and the
resonance of her voice inside her rib cage—the same rhythms and sounds that had
lulled me during the nine months I had inhabited her body.
Words, followed
by sudden pauses and then more words, swirled around me as I drowsily pressed a
moistened fingertip onto the tablecloth to pick up the last crusty crumbs of
bread. People gestured and exclaimed, burst into laughter, interrupted and talked
over each other. This was not considered impolite, but rather a sign of
interest and engagement. Failure to participate
prompted anxious inquiries: “You haven’t said much. Are you coming down with a cold? You should
have worn a sweater this morning. Let me feel your forehead...” (To be continued.)
