Eating Bugs

Quito, 1954. My mother comes excitedly home from the market with a package of shrimp, the first she’s found since we arrived from Barcelona, where shrimp was only one of several marine species in our Sunday paella. She places the package in the sink and asks the indigenous maid, Maria—black braids, embroidered blouse, felt skirt—to wash them in preparation for cooking. Maria opens the package, takes one look at the contents, and runs out of the kitchen, her braids streaming behind her, screaming that those bugs in the sink are just like the bugs with many legs that you find curled up under a stone, and she would rather die than touch one, much less eat it. 

It’s my first lesson in gastronomic relativity, in which I realize that what we like to eat or can’t bear to even think of eating is determined more by where we come from than by the merits of the thing on our plate. Ecuador is replete with challenges to gastronomic provincialism. There is the Andean village where at dusk small flying beetles take to the air, and are chased by swarms of little boys who catch and eat them. “They are sweet,” they tell us, munching. And there is the Saturday afternoon ritual when native families sit in front of their houses ridding each other’s scalp of lice, which they eat--a practice that supposedly helps to protect them against typhoid. And in the Amazon basin, we are told, people hunt monkeys with blow guns and boil them whole…. 

In Spain, before we went to South America, everything that I ate was anatomically correct: small fish were served entire on my plate, and I don’t remember being grossed out by their fishy eyes looking up at me, or by the knee caps and hip joints of rabbits and chickens, or by the chicken’s comb, which my  grandmother used to save for me. 

But the years have changed me. Long before I became vegetarian I stopped eating chicken thighs, because I couldn’t bear the sight of all the muscles and tendons; then I stopped eating chicken breasts (those ribs!); and then I stopped eating chicken altogether. Now, wishing I had the energy and resourcefulness to be vegan, I make-do with vegetables and dairy products, with an occasional can of salmon or sardines to boost my protein intake. 

I recently read “Grub,” an article in the September 6 issue of The New Yorker about entomophagy, or the practice of eating insects. Given the expanding human population and the diminishing resources of the planet, insects offer an ecologically sustainable source of high-quality protein, so it becomes almost a moral duty for us all to support the companies that are working to make entomophagous cuisine available to the world at large—and that includes actually eating their products. 

This is something that I will happily do as long as I cannot tell what I am eating. That means no legs, no antennae, no compound eyes, no diaphanous wings, no chewy bits of exoskeleton. Give me bugs ground into anonymous, homogeneous powder, and I will ingest not only cute, small things like ants and ladybugs but Luna moths, tarantulas, locusts, and Madagascar hissing cockroaches. Shared by most Americans, this preference for bugs in powder form presents a problem for the “tiny livestock” industry, because insect protein, as you know if you’ve ever squashed a bug, is gooey instead of solid. But they’re working on it. 

Note that I haven’t said anything about flavor. But mix some insect powder with an egg substitute, dredge in bread crumbs, fry lightly in olive oil, and what’s not to like? I just celebrated Labor Day with a sad little vegetarian patty made of mostly beans and corn. After that, critter croquettes don’t sound half bad to me. 

Uniforms

To my first school, run by an order of German nuns in Barcelona, I wore a black- and-white houndstooth jumper and a long-sleeved white cotton blouse. In the classroom we wore a white coverall to catch the spatters from our dip pens as we practiced handwriting. And to protect our modesty while we did calisthenics in the garden, we wore bloomers under our skirts. 

My school in Quito, run by the Sisters of Mercy, required two uniforms, one for regular days—blue-and-white check with short sleeves and gathered skirt--and one for special occasions (el uniforme de fiestas). Since my parents’ original plan was to stay in Ecuador for only one year, my mother explained to the principal that it didn’t make sense to have two uniforms made. Would just the regular one suffice? The principal said it would. 

The problem was that the principal neglected to issue a school-wide edict declaring me exempt from the uniforme de fiestas. That fall, school had not been long in session before a special occasion arose in all its awesome grandeur: the feast of Our Lady of Mercy, patroness of the order. The day dawned light and clear over the Andes, as most days did in those pre-pollution times. The volcanoes ringing the city twinkled and sparkled under their eternal snows. In the school courtyard, my fellow students were assembled, and what had been a sea of light blue was now a sea of navy: el uniforme de fiestas. 

Even to my ten-year-old eyes the outfit looked weirdly old-fashioned: a scoop-necked wool dress with a white cotton “dickey,” it was belted at the waist and had wide sleeves gathered in folds at the wrist. The skirt, deeply pleated, fell to mid-calf. An absurd beret, also navy blue, crowned the effect. This being the 1950s, my classmates wore starched crinolines under the pleated skirt, which made it swing like a bell with every step, and patent leather Mary Janes. 

I entered the courtyard in my everyday uniform and the scuffed lace-up ankle boots designed to correct my supposedly flat feet. “Why aren’t you wearing your uniforme de fiestas?” whispered one of the girls in my class. 

“It’s because…My mother said…,” I mumbled. 

“La Mercedes won’t care what your mother said. She will be furious,” the girl warned me. 

La Mercedes, the vice-principal, was notorious for her temper. She soon spotted me as we lined up to enter the chapel, and wanted to know why I was disgracing the school on this, the most sacred of fiestas. I again stammered about my mother and the principal, and she frowned, shrugged, and sent me to the back of the line. 

That first year, I endured several more feast days in the wrong uniform, believing that in the summer I would go back to Barcelona where my non-controversial uniform and the German nuns were waiting for me. But several months after our arrival in Quito, the Ecuadorean government had mysteriously run out of money to pay my father’s string quartet their contracted salaries, and between endless promises that the money would come soon, and endless negotiations to get at least part of what was owed to us, we stayed in Quito almost four years. 

I was ten, then eleven, twelve, thirteen. Every fall the drama of the uniform was reenacted. Every time I showed up in ordinary blue when the school was in festival navy, nuns, lay teachers and students were outraged. “But why are you wearing the wrong uniform?” they would ask, as if it were my first offence. And every time I was at a loss for words. I understood that my mother, who on one occasion had had to borrow my allowance to buy groceries when the Government neglected to pay my father’s salary, could not afford to hire a seamstress to make me one of those awful navy outfits. But I also knew that, in that school, few things mattered as much as showing up in the right clothes for the right occasion. When nuns frowned and shook their heads and sent me to the back of the line, when my classmates asked why, why, why, I felt that I, and I alone, was responsible. 

Things got much better when I entered a Catholic high school in Birmingham, Alabama. Here, in the land of the free, there were no uniforms, and once I got my mother to understand that it was unacceptable to wear the same outfit to school  two days in a row (“But why? If it’s not really dirty…”), the clothing dramas temporarily abated. 

But in tenth grade, the school decided to institute uniforms. Perhaps some prophetic soul had seen miniskirts on the horizon and decided to take preemptive action. Whatever the reason, our mothers were instructed to go to Pizitz, Birmingham’s premier department store, to buy the uniform, which consisted of a plaid, pleated skirt and a short-sleeved white cotton blouse. My mother was fine with the skirt, but she saw no reason to buy the regulation white blouse, because she had a perfectly good white blouse hanging in her closet that she was sure would fit me. Never mind that her blouse was nylon rather than cotton, and had pearl rather than plain flat buttons. 

I warned her that it would never do. I argued and pleaded, but she was unmoved. I don’t believe that lack of money was my mother’s reason for her refusal to buy the uniform blouse--the Birmingham Symphony was a lot better about paying its musicians than the Ecuadorean government had been. Maybe she thought that two white blouses in a single household would be sheer American extravagance. Whatever the reason, she sent me to school in the nylon blouse. 

It did not take long for what I had foreseen to come about. I was summoned to the office. There I was interrogated by the principal’s secretary—mercifully not by the Monsignor himself, who perhaps thought it improper to concern himself with female attire—about my incorrect blouse. And suddenly, as I stood looking at my feet while she glared down at me, my brain was flooded with the clear understanding that this was not my problem. 

It was my mother’s problem, and it was the school’s problem, but it had nothing to do with me. It was not my job to reconcile two opposing sets of adult requirements. I was not morally responsible for their contradictory ideas of what was right. Let them fight it out among themselves, I said to myself, feeling a mixture of relief tinged with righteous fury. 

And so I looked the secretary in the eye and said, in a voice that trembled only slightly, “My mother has decided that this is the blouse she wants me to wear. Perhaps she cannot afford to buy another one. You could always call and ask her….” The secretary nodded and sent me back to class, and I never heard another word about uniforms again.

Fourth grade, in Barcelona, in the garden of the German school. I'm in the last row, next to Mater Leonarda

 

Revelation

I am wandering around in our house in Quito—the one my mother chose because it has the best views of the surrounding volcanoes—looking for something to read. There wasn’t much room in the three suitcases that the airline allowed us when we left Barcelona, so this house is almost bare of books. It is almost bare of furniture, too, and in the kitchen there is only one big pot for boiling water (what comes out of the spigot is full of parasites that we’ve been told might kill us) and a frying pan for omelets. We believe that we’re here for only one year, so we’re sort of camping out. 

On the dining room table, among a stack of letters from Spain, I notice my mother’s passport. In the photo, my mother looks especially happy, because she is about to fly to the wilds of South America. (My mother is the most beautiful woman I know, as beautiful as the statues of the Virgin Mary that I see in church—not the ones where She’s holding her dead Son, but the ones where He’s still a baby.) 

Below the photo I read, Date of Birth: February 28, 1918. But this cannot be. We’re in 1955, which means that my mother is…thirty-seven years old! I repeat the math, just to make sure, and there it is again, that appalling, fateful number that tells me that my mother is extremely old, and will die soon. 

As I stand holding the passport, the room swims and darkens around me. A ghostly hand squeezes my ten-year-old insides, and my breath feels as tight as when I run in Quito’s 9,000 ft altitude. My father is upstairs, rehearsing Dvorak with his string quartet. My mother is taking a nap. I am alone with my terrible secret--because it is a secret, and must remain so. I cannot reveal to my mother that she is in imminent danger of dying of old age, because the knowledge might kill her on the spot. Let her spend her remaining days in blissful ignorance. I must deal with this horror alone. 

My mother, dead—I can no more imagine that than I can imagine my own non-existence. The sense that she is essential to my survival is as deeply rooted in me as if I were still in her womb. But yet here she is, an impossibly ancient woman of thirty-seven, with perhaps just a few years or even months left to live. 

What will happen to me when she dies? Although I know that my father is a few years older than she, the realization of her imminent mortality is too overwhelming, and leaves no space for wondering how long he will last, or what my life with him will be like. No, when my mother dies I will be left alone in this strange country of volcanoes and no seasons, left to find my way back to Spain somehow. 

If I had come across my mother’s passport in Barcelona, I would have had two sets of grandparents nearby, all of them older than thirty-seven, yet going about their business without so much as a cane to lean on. Or I might have confided in one of my mother’s sisters, who would have mocked me a little, and jollied me out of my fright. 

But all those people are far away now, across the Atlantic, and here I am face-to-face with my mother, carrying my dreadful knowledge. Our uninterrupted mother-daughter duet, now that the buffer of grandparents, aunts, and uncles is gone, is beginning to weigh on me. Without her in-laws to please, her parents to worry about, and her sisters to shop and argue with, my mother is free to concentrate on me: my posture (slouched); my hair (in my face); my smile, or lack of it. In our nearly empty Quito house, there is nowhere for me to hide. 

But in the secret recesses of my cells, the hormonal tides are rising. The feathers that will power my future lifelong flight away from my mother are beginning to sprout. This wordless sorrow at the thought of losing her, my utter inability to envision life without her presence, are the last fraying threads of the cord that has bound me to her from conception. 

For now, however, the rumbles of my oncoming puberty are too faint for me to hear. As for my mother, she is in her glory, surrounded by volcanoes, having adventures that she could not have imagined as a child in her Catalan village. Her husband adores her, and the Dvorak sounds divine. The Amazon beckons, with its orchids, ocelots, and head-hunting tribes, and the best is yet to come. After all, she’s only thirty-seven. 

The Mystery of the Unborn Calf

I was a backward child, wandering dreamily in a world filled with mysteries and miracles. At ten, even as my breasts were starting to develop, my mother had to sit me down and inform me that it was  parents who gave their children gifts on the feast of the Epiphany--not the Magi following the star on their camels. Prior to her revelation, I had felt no need to question the story. I had been taught that my guardian angel hovered over my right shoulder as I went about my day, and the Virgin Mary personally kept vigil over my bed at night, so why not flying camels and wandering stars? 

One day a couple of years later, informed by the maid who made my bed that overnight I had transitioned from niña to mujer, my mother called me into her room and handed me a box of sanitary napkins and a belt.

“What’s all this?” I asked, oblivious to the events of the night.

She explained the basics. Thinking that menstruation was an annoying but temporary manifestation of adolescence, like acne, I asked her when it would stop. My mother smiled. “Not until you are very old,” she said.

Along with the supplies, she handed me a Spanish translation of a booklet published by Modess. It had line drawings of cool-looking American girls in circle skirts and saddle shoes, and, less interesting, sketches of the organs that menstrual blood came from. The booklet did not explain what the bleeding was for, and it never occurred to me that it had anything to do with babies, much less with men. I did notice that some pages seemed to have been cut out of the booklet, but I didn’t ask.

Now that I would have to carry those bulky pads around with me, my mother decided that I needed a purse. We were living in Quito at the time, and you couldn’t simply walk into a store and buy one. Like furniture and clothing, purses had to be made to order. She took me to the man who made things out of leather, and they had a conversation about the design of the purse while I stood on one foot and then the other, daydreaming. They decided on one in the shape of a flattened flower pot.

As they discussed the kind of leather--cow, pig, alligator?-- to be used, the man said something that startled me out of my trance. “I have something that would be perfect for the child,” he said, spreading a skin on the counter. It was covered in short, fine, honey-colored fur. He ran his fingers over it and smiled at my mother. “It is unborn calf. Feel how soft…”

“Wait a minute,” I said. “That is impossible. How can you make a purse out of a calf that is not born, that doesn’t exist?”

“Hush!” my mother said.

"No, really," I persisted. "It's absurd!"

My mother gave the man a deposit for the purse and hustled me out of the store. At home she explained that before birth calves grew for several months inside mother cows, just as human babies grew inside their mothers. Again, she made no mention of bulls or men, and again I didn’t ask. After all, hadn’t Our Lord been "conceived of the Holy Spirit"? But that was not the main issue on my mind.

“It must hurt a lot when the baby comes out!” 

“Yes, of course,” my mother said. “Maybe that is why mothers love their children so much.”

I remember feeling skeptical about this. Why would one love something because it hurt? But of course many other painful things were supposed to be good or even holy--fasting before communion, giving one’s allowance to the poor, not to mention Our Lord’s death on the cross—so the pain of childbirth fit right in with my worldview.

Although I am sorry that I embarrassed my mother and the leather man that day, I nevertheless recall my preadolescent self with tolerance. My lack of curiosity about sex was not evidence of an impoverished mind. On the contrary, my mind was already so full of unfathomable things that there was no room for thinking about mundane stuff like where babies came from. Figuring out what  impelled Saint Eulalia at age thirteen to confront the Roman governor of Barcelona, an avid persecutor of Christians, who then proceeded to torture and kill her, was more engrossing than wondering how that calf got into the cow in the first place.

I wore the calf-skin purse for a long time, until the zipper broke. Another thing that I neglected to wonder about during those years is what had to happen to the cow in order for her unborn calf to be made into a purse. I regret that I came late to an awareness of the suffering of animals, but I am making up for it now.

Homesick

 While my mother, immobilized by vertigo, lay stretched like a corpse on the bed in our Manhattan hotel room, my father and I went to the top of the Empire State building. It was the spring of 1954, and we were on a two-day layover on the week-long airplane trip from Barcelona to Quito.

“Why is she sick?” I asked my father as we walked down Fifth Avenue.

“It’s because she’s sad that we left Barcelona,” he said.

Sad! What was there to be sad about? Weren’t we going on a fabulous adventure to South America, one even more thrilling than those of Hernán Cortés, Ponce de León and Francisco Pizarro? And hadn’t my mother, driven to distraction by the monotony of her housewifely existence, been the principal force behind my father’s acceptance of the Ecuadorian government’s invitation to found the country’s first string quartet? There was no room for emotional ambivalence in my ten-year-old heart. I couldn’t understand that my mother, who had wanted to go on this escapade as much as I had, could also feel regret at leaving her family behind.

For the next three years, while we lived in Quito, my mother oscillated between breathless excitement at the exoticism of it all--snow-capped volcanoes! endless jungles! head-hunting tribes!—and elaborate bouts of homesickness.

I never quite understood what was going on with her, but I sensed that the homesick role was hers to play. By contrast, I sought to distinguish myself by adopting a mask of stoicism. Tears and complaints were not for me--I wasn’t a baby anymore, nor was I sentimental, like a woman. I preferred to mimic my father, and leave the tragic persona to my mother.

And yet, how could I not have been homesick? But nobody asked if I was, and when confronted with my mother’s articulate depictions of her nostalgia, I assumed that mine, if it existed, couldn’t hold a candle to hers.

True, I was sheltered by my parents’ reassuring presence. But once the excitement of being in a foreign place wore off and life settled into a routine, how could I not miss the rhythms of my existence in Catalonia, where each month was marked by some festival, its ritual, and its accompanying dessert?

January was the month when the Three Kings brought me presents and we ate the marzipan-stuffed tortell de reis. February 12^th was the feast of Saint Eulalia, and my mother bought ensaïmadas from the bakery in my honor. On March 19^th, the feast of Saint Joseph, my aunts made crema catalana in celebration of my grandfather.  In April, for Easter, my godmother gave me the mona de Pasqua, a cake topped with chocolate eggs. In May, the month of Our Lady, we ate strawberries. And all summer-long, at my grandparents’ farm, we feasted on melons, peaches, and pears so ripe that their juices ran down my chin and soaked the front of my cotton dress.

All this was gone. And so was the tutelary presence of my grandparents, my aunts and uncles, great-aunts and great-uncles, who had revolved like planets around my sunny childhood, and whose affection, interest, and willingness to entertain me I had taken for granted, just as an infanta assumes the devotion of her courtiers. But that wasn’t all. In the constant hubbub of our extended family, the to-and-fro of visits and phone calls, the telling and retelling of stories, gossip, opinions, advice, and concerns, my relatives had absorbed some of my mother’s emotional energy and distracted her from her focus on me.

Now, without her sisters to argue and shop with, her parents to worry about, and her in-laws to visit, my mother’s attentive gaze, when she wasn’t soaking fruits in permanganate or boiling milk to kill the tropical parasites that threatened us daily, was directed at me. And what she saw was in need of improvement. My baby charms were fading fast, and I was morphing into an icon of preadolescent awkwardness. I was a work in progress, and my mother girded her loins for the challenges that lay ahead.

My mother and I in Quito, 1954

Swimming Lessons

My mother believed that for a girl to make her way in society she should, in addition to speaking a foreign language or two, know how to swim and play tennis. In the Catalan village where she had grown up in the 1920s and 30s nobody did any of those things, much less taught them. She had visions of country clubs and elegant house parties in my future, and she wanted to spare me the embarrassment of sitting dry and bored by the side of the pool, or being unable to return a kick serve on the tennis court.

One summer, while we were living in Quito, she heard that a former Olympic swimmer, señor Otero, was offering a girls-only swimming course, and she signed me up. This was just before I developed breasts, while I could still squeeze my twelve-year-old body into my childish swimsuit, a cotton affair with tiny pink roses on a white background..

In the dressing room, as I struggled to cram my thick braids into a white rubber swimming cap, I looked around at my fellow learners. These were no girls! They must have been in their late teens or early twenties, but to me they seemed practically as old as my mother, with fat white thighs and bathing suits that had built-in containers for their breasts.

At an altitude of over nine-thousand feet, Quito’s temperature year-round hovers in the  60s. The pool where we would learn to swim--“like fishes, guaranteed!” according to señor Otero--was outdoors, under a sky that in those days was untroubled by pollution, and with a view of the green slopes of Pichincha, the lively volcano that presides over the city. The pool was unheated.

Before we were allowed to get our feet wet, señor Otero—balding, ripped, and wearing a  tiny bathing suit—dragged out a number of narrow wooden benches and arranged them around the pool. We were each assigned a bench, and told to lie on our stomachs as senor Otero threaded his way among our recumbent forms, explaining the scissors kick and the crawl stroke.

That exercise over, señor Otero led us to the deep end of the pool. “Señoritas, al agua!” he yelled, motioning for us to jump in. The idea was that we would eventually surface, turn on our backs, and practice floating. There was much shrieking as bodies hit the chilly water, but one by one my classmates emerged from the depths and began to float. But I, stunned by the jets of water forced up my nose by the dive, my muscles turned to stone by the cold, just couldn’t do it. Every time I turned on my back, my feet and then my legs, my pelvis, and the rest of me would gradually and inexorably sink.

When señor Otero blew his end-of-class whistle I pulled my soaking-wet braids out of my swimming cap and got shivering back into my clothes. At home, I lay in my darkened room all afternoon while pool water drained out of my sinuses.

Twice a week, for the rest of the summer, I went to swimming class. I suffered through the back stroke, the crawl, the side stroke, the breast stroke and the butterfly. I also suffered from a kind of embarrassment that I had never experienced before: that of being in a group of half-undressed women presided over by an all-but-naked man. I was probably the most naïve twelve-year-old in the western hemisphere, but there was something deeply discomfiting about señor Otero prancing among us, telling us what to do with our bodies, and sometimes helping us do it.

Whether it was because of embarrassment, the mercilessly cold water, performance anxiety, or painful sinuses, while my classmates mastered one stroke after another, I could barely float. And summer was almost over.

Señor Otero’s course would culminate in a demonstration before a crowd of parents, relatives, and boyfriends, and would consist of each student swimming the length of the pool in the stroke of her choice. For me, señor Otero made an exception: I would only be required to float across the width of the pool.

One by one my plump, pale classmates dove in and, using the crawl, back stroke, breast stroke, side stroke and even the butterfly, emerged triumphant at the far end. When my turn came, I took a deep breath and flung myself into the frigid water. I stretched my arms out by my ears and tried to stay horizontal. I didn’t have far to go, but when the cement wall was almost at my fingertips, I felt something bump my hip. It was the head of señor Otero, who, not wanting to have a student drown in front of her parents, had dived in to save me.

A couple of weeks later, my parents went with some friends to El Tingo, a thermal springs resort south of Quito, and they took me along. It was a weekday and the place was practically empty. While the grownups were eating lunch I got into my bathing suit and, ignoring the swimming cap, entered the pool. The sun shone down on me, and in the warm water every muscle in my body softened.

Nobody was watching. I lay on my back and floated a while, squinting against the glare. I felt like I was dissolving in the glorious warmth that enveloped me, and dreamily, without thinking about it, I began to do the back stroke. When my arms hit the cement wall, I realized that I had made it across the entire length of the pool. I turned over and tried the crawl—nothing could be easier! The breast stroke and side stroke were a snap, and I even managed the fearsome butterfly.

My mother was delighted with my sudden metamorphosis into a swimmer. But when it came to tennis, luck deserted us. To this day, whenever I see a ball hurtling in my direction, I turn and run the other way.

The Nun on the Bus

When the noon bell rang in the hill-top convent school of Nuestra Madre de la Merced in Quito, Ecuador, we would board the pale-yellow school bus that took us home for lunch. Two hours later, the bus would pick us up for our afternoon classes. And it was during that after-lunch trip that the drama of the motorcycles would unfold.

As the bus made its rounds on the cobbled streets, the boys from the Jesuit school in their uniforms and the ones from the American school in their leather jackets would come roaring up on their Vespas, Harleys, and Moto Guzzis and escort us through the town. On cloudy days there were fewer of them, and during the rainy season only the most ardent pursuers showed up. But on sunny afternoons they came out by the dozen, hooting, whistling and waving as they rode.

As the first motorcycle appeared over the horizon, the older girls would start to whisper and nudge each other, and with each addition to the procession they giggled and rolled their eyes and squirmed in their seats, trying to get a better look at the bikers. I was twelve at the time, and convinced that my classmates--who, due to the difference in school systems between Spain and Ecuador, were two or three years older that I--were insane. While the gawky Rodrigos, Pacos and Ricardos accelerating towards us sent the other girls into raptures, I watched Sister Imelda.

She was a young nun, newly professed, which is why she had been given the hopeless job of maintaining order and decency on the bus. She had a pretty face beneath her wimple, with ruddy skin, shapely eyebrows, and flashing green eyes. In her floor-length habit of white wool with wide sleeves and black veil she looked, except for the mannish lace-up shoes that were part of the outfit, almost elegant.

She sat near the front of the bus. As soon as a motorcycle was heard in the distance, she would straighten up in her seat, tug at her veil, and stare fixedly ahead, resolved not to let the bus chasers get to her. But soon there would be two motorcycles, and then three, and her face would redden and her knuckles whiten as she gripped the seat in front of her. When she couldn't stand it anymore, she would whirl around on her seat and yell "silencio!" at the giggling girls. But they couldn't hear her because of the motorcycles thundering behind us.

She would sit back down, adjust her veil, and clench her jaw. I could see her struggling to control herself, but as the whistling and hooting and roaring reached a certain pitch, she would leap up and fly to the back of the bus, her face purple with rage and flames shooting out of her eyes as she shook her fist at the bikers, shouting "imbéciles! malcriados! facinerosos!" This never failed to send the girls into fits of suppressed laughter and embolden the boys, some of whom leaned over to slap the bus as they sped by.

Poor Sister Imelda! I felt the indignity of her situation. She could either rail at the boys and be laughed at, or ignore them and appear to approve of their behavior.  As it was, the only thing that dissuaded our escorts, besides the rain, was the end of the route. As soon as the school's great iron gates came into view the riders would peel off one by one, like fighter pilots abandoning formation, and head to their own schools.

I wondered what Sister Imelda made of her trial. Perhaps she saw it as punishment for her sins. Perhaps she offered it up to relieve the sufferings of the souls in Purgatory (don't ask how that was supposed to work). I imagined that every day at dawn, as she headed to the chapel for prayers, she begged Our Lady of Mercy for rain.

Where is she now, my nun on the bus? Nuns last a long time, and she may still be living in the sisters' quarters on the third floor of the school. I wonder if, when she hears the bus depart on its rounds, she's glad that she's no longer young. As for those long-ago boys, her tormentors, do they now, driving their cars through the winding streets of Quito, remember the days when the girls they pursued were held captive in a yellow bus and guarded by a green-eyed dragon?

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.

W Is For Water

My swimming suit didn't have bra cups yet, so I must have been eleven the summer my mother signed me up for swimming lessons at the base of Pichincha, the lively volcano that  periodically covered the streets of Quito with a light coat of ash.

It was the rainy season.  This meant that every day, shortly after noon, dark clouds would gather overhead,  thunder would rumble for a while, and then the heavens would liquefy and fall upon the land. 

The class, which met at midday, was composed of plump girls in their late teens who, to me, looked about the same age as my mother.  Our teacher, Senor Padilla, a former Olympic swimmer, was short and muscular.  He wore a  tiny bathing suit, and the rest of his body was covered by a rich pelt of black hair.  I didn't know why at the time, but being in that class with those plump girls and hairy Senor Padilla made me uncomfortable.

Not as uncomfortable, however, as being in the ice-cold water of the outdoor pool.  On the very first day, after a cursory introduction,  Senor Padilla blew his whistle and yelled, "Senoritas, al agua!"  There was nothing for it but to jump in, so I did.  I felt every muscle contract and my body turn to stone as the waters closed over my head.  I surfaced spluttering, my nasal passages burning from the chlorine, and looked up.  The dark heights of Pichincha were slowly disappearing under masses of lead-colored clouds.  I looked down at the water and saw that it too had grown dark and threatening, along with the sky.  I heard the faraway rumble of thunder.

The class ended just as the downpour began.  I went home shivering, and with a violent headache from what must have been chlorine-filled sinuses.  The altitude of 9350 feet, to which neither my parents nor I had adjusted, probably added to the discomfort.  Needless to say, I begged not to go back to the class.  Needless to say, I did go back.

Every day, my embarrassment grew as I watched Senor Padilla enjoying himself as he taught, and especially as my unathletic-looking classmates mastered the crawl and went on to the back stroke, the side stroke, the breast stroke, the butterfly.  Meanwhile I, frozen and stiff as a board, hadn't even learned to float.  If I floated face down, I inhaled chlorine.  If I turned onto my back, I saw the dark, leaden, threatening clouds rushing towards Pichincha, and feared I was going to die.

The last day of class finally arrived. Senor Padilla had arranged to exhibit our skills before our loved ones.  One by one, my classmates dove in and swam the length of the pool, each in her favorite style.  When my turn came, Senor Padilla said that all I had to do was dive and float across the pool.

As I stood shivering at the water's edge, I glanced up towards Pichincha and saw the black clouds galloping  overhead.  I closed my eyes and threw myself in.  Eventually I surfaced, sank, surfaced again and was making my way towards dry land when something bumped against my hip.  It was Senor Padilla, who, worried that I was drowning right in front of my parents, had jumped in to save me.

Several weeks later, I went to a different swimming pool.  The sun was out, the water was warm, and the pool was almost empty.  I got in, turned on my back, looked up at the blue sky, and, since nobody was watching, tried the back stroke.  I managed not only to stay afloat, but to cross the pool.  Then  I turned onto my stomach and did the crawl, the breast stroke, the side stroke, and the butterfly.  I couldn't believe it, but it was true:  despite the cold, the terror, and the embarrassment, Senor Padilla really had taught me how to swim.