Of Birds And Lilies

"Look at the birds of the air," Father Molloy intoned in his Irish brogue. "They neither sow nor reap nor gather into barns, yet the Lord God feeds them." Then he then went on about lilies and King Solomon, and when he had finished reciting he twinkled his blue eyes and said "Class, I want you to memorize this passage by tomorrow." The blood froze in my veins.

At home that evening I got out the New Testament and my paperback Spanish-English dictionary and went to work. I had no idea what the passage was about. I didn't know the meaning of sow, reap, gather, or barns. Then came the part about the lilies, which neither toil nor spin, whatever that was, but even Solomon was not arrayed like one of them. Arrayed--was it a good or a bad thing not to be arrayed like a lily?

And then a few lines further down Jesus said, "Therefore, do not worry..." (Matthew 6:26-34)

How could I not worry, when I had to memorize that long passage by tomorrow and I didn't know most of the words in it? I looked up sow, and reap, and gather. But by the time I got to barns I was confused. I had seen plenty of sowing and reaping in my grandparents' farm in Catalonia, but as far as I knew, the birds of the air were a menace around harvest time. They did not wait for the Lord God to feed them, but helped themselves boldly to the grain.

I ground my teeth and soldiered on, looking up word after word, but when I put them all together, the passage still didn't make sense. And here it was, almost bedtime, and I hadn't even begun to memorize.

"Therefore, do not worry..."

At fourteen, newly arrived in the U.S. and possessed only of the few crumbs of English I'd acquired from a German teacher during my three years in Quito, I worried all the time. I was the first-ever foreign student in a Catholic high school in Birmingham, Alabama, long before the days when English as a second language became an academic subject. I suspect that nobody knew what to do with me.

For my part, my all-consuming goal was to blend in so I could catch my breath and figure out, without letting anyone notice my ignorance, things I'd never encountered before, like homerooms and assemblies and rallies and football games, and to acquire enough English to survive.

My efforts at camouflage must have worked, because from day one my teachers seemed to assume that I was no different from my classmates. I'm sure that if I'd asked for help it would have been given gladly, but I never asked. I believed, given the stern regimes of my schools in Barcelona and later in Quito, that any sign of weakness or ignorance would be pounced upon by the school authorities and I would be cast into the outer darkness, to spend the rest of my days cleaning bathrooms for a living.

If I had only known how comparatively lenient and indulgent American educators were, I would have relaxed, but I didn't know, so I anxiously continued to mask my deficiencies. Arriving home in the afternoon, after a day of straining with every fiber to understand what was going on in class, I would retire to bed with a headache. Later I would get up and, dictionary in hand, try to do my homework.

But on the night of my encounter with the birds and the lilies, I finally realized that the dictionary was in fact hampering my efforts to understand. It was slowing me down, interrupting the flow of ideas so that I was missing the gist of the passage. Besides, there were just too many words I didn't know. It was impossible to look them all up, let alone remember them. I would simply have to figure out the meanings from the context.

With a sigh, I put the dictionary away and never opened it again. Somehow I winged it, lexicon-less, through the rest of school. At college graduation, my husband-to-be presented me with a hardcover Merriam-Webster Collegiate, but by then I hardly needed it.

It's been a late spring in Vermont, and the birds of the air and the lilies of the field are busy making up for lost time. The words in the Matthew passage are no longer a mystery to me. But, having learned to fret early on, it's those other words of Jesus that I still struggle with, "Therefore, do not worry...."

Fun with Foreign Languages

My mother was a born adventurer, a conquistadora , the first female ever to leave her village in quest of higher learning in Barcelona.  But after she married the mindset of the era caught up with her and she gave up her studies and settled down to making my father happy and being a good mother.

She supervised the maid, mended socks on rainy days, went to lectures and art openings, argued with her sisters, and read.  But her wanderlust kept her restless and frustrated. When it came time for me to go to school she looked at the convent schools for girls and found them tame. Besides, they all taught French as a second language, and France was hardly exotic, being practically next door, just across the Pyrenees.

Then she heard about a new school run by German nuns, and her imagination caught fire. Germany! Those deep pine forests, the men in strange leather shorts, that fabulous snow—here was weirdness and the promise of mind-expanding adventures, especially since the nuns, who barely spoke Spanish, promised to have me speaking German before I reached puberty. This, my mother hoped, might qualify me to marry an ambassador some day, and help to make peace in the world.

But neither my mother nor the nuns realized that a state of terror interferes with learning, especially learning a foreign language.  My German nuns, survivors of the Reich, were fiercely devoted to discipline, punctuality, and standing up straight.  In their hilariously inadequate Spanish they would shriek strange insults at us. Eres mas tonta que la noche! (You are dumber than the night!) was a common reprimand that made no sense to us Catalans, who associated night with the scent of jasmine and the trill of the nightingale.

In that atmosphere, I found German grammar even more impenetrable than math. Der,des, dem, den; die, der, der, die... no matter how well I memorized them, declensions made no more sense to me than lowest common denominators.

Fortunately, after almost five years of this, my mother’s wanderlust freed me from my struggles with German. My father was offered the chance to go to Ecuador as part of a string quartet; she urged him to accept; and when I was ten we left Barcelona for the wilds of South America.

In Quito, she enrolled me in a school run by Spanish nuns for the daughters of the Ecuadorian aristocracy. There I was instantly branded as la españolita, the little Spaniard, because of the way I spoke. Although my classmates and I shared the same language, my Castilian Spanish was the equivalent of British English, and I must have sounded foreign and affected to them. It took me about a week, in self defense, to shed my accent and sound like a local, incorporating not only their pronunciation, but also native Quechua expressions:  arrarrai (hot), atatai (disgusting), achachai (cold).This appalled my parents, who thought I was prostituting my national identity. But I had to fit in somehow.

Meanwhile, the river of Catalan in which I had used to swim in Barcelona shrank to a narrow stream. My parents and the other three members of my father’s string quartet all spoke Catalan, but everyone else—the maid and the vegetable seller and the Indian man who sold us milk from his cow--all spoke South American Spanish. To my Ecuadorian classmates, I was the little Spaniard, period, and they didn’t know or care that I wasn’t really and truly Spanish, but Catalan.

In my new school there was a teacher from Germany, a tall, thin man who, thank heavens, taught only English. After the rigors of German grammar, the apparent simplicity of English was balm to my brain. After class I would mumble bits of phrases to myself:  Little Miss Muffett/sat on a tuffet/eating of curds and whey.  Tuffet, curds, and whey were mysteries to me, but they sounded cool.  English was cool, and I thought I had just about mastered it.

When my parents and I landed in the wilds of Birmingham, Alabama, in 1958, the confusions about where I came from and what my “real” language was continued to dog me. In the Catholic high school that I entered as a freshman some of my classmates weren’t too certain of where Spain was on the map, and what distinguished it from, say, Mexico. When people assumed that my native language was Spanish, I tried to explain that it was Catalan.

“Oh, you mean a dialect of Spanish?”

“No!” I would shriek. “Not a dialect! A different language! A completely different language!” And they would shrug and turn away, baffled.

After a while, I stopped explaining, and let my friends assume that Spain was a homogeneous culture where everybody spoke Spanish, played the guitar and danced flamenco. At home, though, with my parents, I spoke Catalan.  The river of language had shrunk to the merest trickle, but it still flowed where it mattered.

At least for a while. Then in 1960 my parents, who had long been disappointed in their hopes for a large family, produced another baby. I was sixteen when she was born, and as delighted as my parents were. Undeterred by the fact that Americans found my name, Eulalia, unpronounceable, my parents proudly gave my sister another weird but thoroughly Catalan name: Nuria, after a valley in the Pyrenees.

Where language was concerned, however, they were more pragmatic. As an American, my sister would need to know English, but learning Catalan as her second language would take up precious space in her brain. Spanish would be far more useful, and therefore they decided that we should switch from speaking Catalan to Spanish at home.

This threw me into fits of adolescent rebellion. Although I had all my life spoken Spanish to  non-Catalans, I could not bear to even think of speaking it to my parents. It felt artificial, affected, false, pretentious, and profoundly embarrassing. But my parents were adamant, so I compromised. If my sister was in the room, I spoke Spanish. But the moment she toddled off and I was left with my parents, I would switch to Catalan, even in mid-sentence. When she toddled back in I would clench my teeth and go back to Spanish.

My parents also decreed that, since my English was better than theirs, I should speak to Nuria in English, so when I was alone with her that is what I did. To this day, even though she speaks it well, I don’t think my sister and I have exchanged a single sentence in Spanish.

That is how the trickle of Catalan slowed to an occasional drop. After my father died, it became a language that for many years I spoke only with my mother. Now that she is gone, I almost never speak it. On the rare occasions when I do, the words feel like stones in my mouth.

Translating My Mother

The summer I was fourteen, after our first nine months in America, my parents and I went back to Spain.  When we returned to the U.S., our friends the Kendalls picked us up at the airport and took us home.  After we had unpacked and readjusted to the tropical steaminess of Birmingham, Alabama, my mother said "We must write a letter of thanks to the Kendalls."

With a  year in an American school under my belt, my feelings of terror about functioning in an English-speaking world were beginning to abate.  My father too, in his work as a musician, had achieved a degree of comfort with the language.  But for some reason, this was not the case for my mother.  Despite having studied Greek, Latin and French at university, despite being a well-read, intelligent person, English came slowly to her.

But that was o.k., because she had me.  Since I was in school all day, she was pretty much on her own as far as spoken English went.  But letters were different.  Letters could be saved until I got home in the afternoon.  And for reasons that I couldn't grasp at the time, I had grown to dread those letter-writing sessions.

"Get a pen and a piece of paper," my mother said, "and I will tell you what to say."

If my mother had simply said, "Write a letter to the Kendalls thanking them for picking us up at the airport," I would have managed a simple letter that was within the confines of what I knew how to say.  I remember doing that a lot in those days, in school work as well as around my classmates.  I would take a mental inventory of the things I knew how to say--nouns, verbs, idiomatic expressions--and would then compose something that lay within that set of capabilities.  In other words, I didn't start out with an idea, and then try to find ways to express it.  I started out with what was possible, and then combined and recombined those elements to come up with something that would be appropriate to the situation.

The trouble with my mother was, she started out with what she wanted to say, in the way she wanted to say it, rather than with what she could say--or what I could say.

"Write 'My very dear friends,'" she began. I wrote "Dear friends."

 "Now say, 'Your generosity makes me ashamed.'"

I felt a wave of nameless aversion, coupled with obstinacy, wash over me.  "You can't say that in English," I muttered.

"What do you mean, you can't say it.  Can you say 'generosity'?"  I nodded.  "Do you know the word for 'ashamed '?"  I nodded again.  "Well, then," she commanded, "say it!"

"No, I can't"

"Why not?"

"Because you don't say things like that in English."

My mother would want to know why you didn't say those things in English, and all I could answer was that you just didn't.  She would get angry, and I would become sullen.  Somehow the letters always got written, but they took a toll on our relationship.

Many years later, when I knew that a language is more than words--that it is a way of thinking, an attitude towards the world, a way of being--I remembered the letter about generosity and shame.  To express shame or embarrassment at being the recipient of another's kindness is not bizarre or crazy in Spanish.  The speaker is simply saying that your kindness towards her puts her in the obligation of reciprocating said kindness, a thing that she, being so much less worthy a person than you, is incapable of doing.  Hence the feelings of shame. (This way of putting things is, I feel sure, a legacy of the eight centuries of Arab domination in Spain.)

The "shame" letter was just one of the countless balancing acts I did during my teenage years, translating the culture that I was wading into to my mother, and translating my mother--who made a point of honor of not changing who she was--so that her American friends and (especially) my friends would not think she was insane.

Eventually, after I married and moved away, my mother had to write her own letters.  Eventually, her efforts to steer me away from the dangers of excessive acculturation subsided.  Many people found--and still find--my mother quaint, exotic, fascinating and original, and I can now accept that persona without cringing.  However, when she asks me to look over her letters --overly effusive, baroque, emotional--I still want to yell "but you can't say that in English!"