by Paul Theroux
I knew the word hormigas as ants, and more, the “big-assed ants,” hormigas culonas—a memorable name—that were famously eaten in Colombia. Chicatanas, a Oaxacan specialty, Herman explained, were flying ants that appeared from the sodden earth in the rainy month of May.
And, of course, worms (gusanos), Herman went on, they too were eaten, the gusano de maguey that was found in a bottle of local mezcal, and sometimes a red worm (gusano rojo) that was fried, or folded into a taco.
And frogs (ranas), and the well-known varieties of mole, the sauces with twenty ingredients, including chocolate and green herbs, and the tortillas of maize, the folded-over tlacoyo that might be filled with lamb testicles (criadillas) or grilled goat intestines (machitos). The drinks—cold maize and cacao tejate, and the hot maize atole, two more Nahuatl words for Aztec drinks. An hour more of this—local dishes and ingredients—and correct verb forms for enjoying (disfrutando) them. I liked the idea that I was not so much studying Spanish as learning Mexican.
A brief coffee break—God, was it only ten-thirty?—and back to the classroom to continue our conversation, Herman inquiring, “A qué te dedicas?” What is your job?
Language learning is an incessant interrogation. I realized that first morning how, in studying a language, being asked and answering direct questions, you reveal yourself; how so much of such a class is revelatory—sometimes simple, often confessional. This is true of school generally, analyzing texts, reviewing historical events, engaging in dialogues with the teacher. But nowhere are you more naked than in the back-and-forth of classroom conversation in the practice of new words and verb forms. It was apparent from the beginning, from “Have you visited the churches?,” and I had stammered to answer. But “What is your job?” was a direct question that suggested something deeper.
“Yo me dedico a estudiar,” the younger ones replied. They studied. And Marcie was an abogado. Lawyer.
Though I had intended to be anonymous, I could not think of evading the question with a plausible answer, and said, “I am a writer,” feeling exposed, and to Herman’s next question, I added, “Yo me dedico a escribir novelas y libros de viajes.” My job is writing novels and travel books.
This impelled Herman to introduce us to a helpful construction: “What is the book you like most?” Cuál es el libro que más les gusta?
Miley liked James Patterson, Dieter liked Dan Brown, Alan liked Harry Potter, Marcie liked crimen ficción.
“Don Pablo?”
It was that bad dream in which you’re asked an impossible question, while being judged in your answer by a row of grinning simpletons. A young person can name a favorite book, out of a dozen; someone new to the language might nominate The Da Vinci Code; the lawyer might reasonably choose a whodunit.
“Many books,” I said. Muchos libros.
And at once I became conscious of being elderly and conspicuous, because my hesitation seemed like the doddering of an old buffer. But it wasn’t that at all; I was fully alert, my head surveying shelves of books, authors and titles on their spines. Choose one is the diabolical demand.
The younger students stared, triumphant. I could not name a single book!
“I have read thousands of books.” He leído miles de libros.
“Treasure Hunters by James Patterson?” Miley asked.
“I hadn’t realized he wrote children’s books.”
“He’s written millions of them!”
Herman said, “En español, por favor.”
“Ha escrito muchos libros para niños,” Miley said.
Dieter leaned toward me and inquired, “Has leído a Dan Brown?”
“No he leído a este hombre,” I said. I have not read this man.
As if to spare my embarrassment, Herman moved on to a new construction: “What do you most like—or least like—about your work?”
“Qué es lo que más—o menos—le gusta de su trabajo?”
“Lo que más me gusta de mi trabajo,” I began, and thought hard, because no one in fifty years had ever asked me this question. And what was it that I most liked about my work? That I had no boss, no employees, no rivals, no competitors—the freedom of being a writer? That it was a way of dealing with my life, transforming my experiences, finding ways to understand it—recording life’s joys, making its tribulations bearable, and also, in writing, easing the passage of time? Making a living this way, my own way, self-employed—that was something to like. Curious to know more about Mexico, I could get in my car and drive from home to the border, and from the border to Mexico City, and then here, making notes at the end of the day, answerable to no one.
But at the bottom of it all was the spell at my desk, bent over a piece of paper—since I had always written in longhand—and saying something new, often surprising myself by what emerged from my unconscious; then afterward, rewriting, improving, polishing, mulling it and making it whole, and so on, for days or years—a page, a story, a book.
In the silence of the classroom, my fellow students waiting for me to reveal what I liked most about my work, the answer came to me, easy enough to translate from English to Spanish, since the words were so similar.
“El acto de la creación,” I said. The act of creation.
“Lo que más me gusta,” Herman said, cueing me to make a complete sentence.
“Lo que más me gusta de mi trabajo,” I said, “es el acto de la creación.” What I like most about my work is the act of creation.
The others stared at this weird, unexpected, incomprehensible answer, and then chipped in with what they liked most, and what they liked least, about their jobs. Then it was our travel, our food, our fiestas, an elaboration of pleasures and prejudices. After an hour and a half, we were fairly fluent in explaining how we felt about various personal activities. We knew each other better, and I was sure that I had revealed myself as a pompous ass, or just another old buffer intruding on their fun.
At noon we went outside and sat on one of the verandas for a session of free-ranging dialogues, conversation as greater self-revelation, but in an aside, discussing the concepts of wanting and liking, Herman said, “Tengo ganas de una chela.”
It was a Mexican way of saying, “I have an urge for a beer.” Not the tourist’s “Yo quiero una cerveza” or the thirsty Spaniard saying, “Me apetece una cerveza.” And as a bonus, chela was Mexican slang for beer—brew or suds. Another indication that I was learning Mexican.
After four hours of listening and repeating and answering questions, my first Instituto day ended. I walked to El Llano park, found a restaurant, and nodded over my lunch—corn chowder with squash blossoms—and then went back to my posada. Exhausted, believing I was taking a siesta, I slept the rest of the afternoon, waking in darkness to strange odors and the thin air at five thousand feet.
On a solitary stroll along Calle Porfirio Díaz that evening, past the plaza in front of Santo Domingo church, I heard a brass band and saw a masked man on a gray horse—a skull mask, wide black sombrero, a drooping cape. There were trumpeters and drummers, a troop of small girls dressed as coquettes but with ghoulish masks, small boys as devil-faced monsters, and older children as space aliens—green heads, squinting eyes. And all this time the blaring of the band, the rat-a-tat and syncopation of the snare drums, the boom of the bass drums, the skirl of flutes, this tooting and tapping fanfare bearing them down the road toward the Zócalo—it was comic and macabre and assertive. Masquerade gave the procession confidence: they were poor people from the nearer colonias, dressed as aristocrats and ghouls.
This was to be the pattern throughout late October in Oaxaca—masks, costumes, band music, enlivening the afternoons and evenings; dancing devils and clown costumes and a proliferation of skulls.
That was my first day of formally learning Mexican.
The next entry in my notebook, I see, is headed Six days later. What had I done in those six days? I kept track of verb forms, listed vocabulary items, conjugated verbs, learned to say El cerdo le gusta revolcarse en
los lugares lodosos—The pig likes to roll in the mud. I noted the Nahuatl cognates, but I made no record of my days. I attended classes every morning, and the lessons consumed most of my days and all my energy. I did a little furtive sightseeing, and I found some of the lovely restaurants for which Oaxaca is also famous. I tried to stay alert at the Instituto, but it was an effort, and it exhausted me—not just the effect of disentangling irregular verbs, but the tedium and humiliation of answering questions.
So you’re a traveler, and you write books about your trips.
Qué es lo que más (o menos) les gusta de sus viajes?
What do you like most (or least) about your travels?
What I like most? Conocer personas. Meeting people.
What I like least? Las demoras y el peligro. Delays and danger.
“And by the way, Don Pablo, did you know that there is a Spanish saying that goes, There is danger in delay?” (Peligro en la demora.)
One day, during the like and dislike routines, I was asked what word I liked the most.
“The word I like most”—La palabra que más me gusta—what can I say? I have written millions of words. No one has ever asked me this. I confessed to resbaladizo—slippery—the word I had seen above the hotel stairs and chanted to myself.
Another day, the forbidding question, Cuándo naciste?
When were you born?
Around the table, the answers tumbled out, and I was amazed once again that Miley was born thirteen years ago, during George W. Bush’s second term, and she was the same age as my car. But the intention here on Herman’s part was not to shame anyone but to teach the verb form, nací, I was born.
I thought hard, then said, “Nací a mediados del siglo veinte”—in the middle of the twentieth century—evading a date. During the coffee break, Marcie confided that she had lied about her birth date.
“I do a lot of lying,” she said, shaking her head.
“Me too.”
“Those personal questions!”
To the question “Cómo celebras habitualmente los cumpleaños?”—How do you celebrate your birthday?—the younger students spoke of cakes (pasteles) and candles (velas), but when my turn came, I thought, What a question! and said, Yo no celebro este día—I don’t celebrate that day—and who could blame me?
At the end of most lessons, often in the conversations under the trees or on the veranda, Herman was more affable and playful, and I provoked him to share words or expressions that were specifically Mexican.
“No kidding!” was No manches! (Don’t stain!)
“What did you say?” was Mande? (Give me an order.)
Qué padre! was “Cool!”
Qué desmadre! was “What a mess!”
Dos tres was “Okay,” an equivocating reply to “How are you?”
And there was the Mexican expression for being tactless or off-base or blundering: mear fuera de olla—to piss outside the jar.
“Did I say it right?”
“No, Don Pablo, se está meando fuera de olla!”
I shared the words I had learned on the border—camacha for chick, gabacho for gringo, halcones (falcons) for lookouts, piedra (stone) for crystal meth, choncha and mota for marijuana, and agua de chango—monkey water. And Herman countered with Fierro!—Iron!—a cartel war cry in a gunfight.
“The northerners say that southerners are lazy and short,” Herman said in Spanish. “Southerners say northerners are tall and work too much. Most people say the chilangos are urbane and educated, and everyone mocks the people in the Yucatán for being rustic and less intelligent.”
Most days, I trudged away from the Instituto, had a snack, and went to bed, sleeping through the hot afternoon, rising at dusk to survey the calaveras parading down the main streets in costumes, waving banners, and often carrying large images—of monsters and demons and, now and then, a saint, often Santa Muerte. And the following morning at the Instituto, I reported what I had seen, in answer to the question “What did you do yesterday?” Herman told us the main names for the figure of Death: Santa Muerte, Señora Blanca, Señora Negra, La Flaca (the Skinny One) and its diminutive La Flaquita, La Huesuda (the Bony One), and the others I’d heard in Mexico City—the fifty others.
The word for skull, calavera, also meant skeleton, and a literary calavera was a four-line satirical poem, which Herman assigned for us to compose one night as homework.
Learning Mexican with Herman helped to clarify for me the two skeletons that were often confused. There was Santa Muerte, Holy Death, in a hood, carrying a scythe, and sometimes a globe, an oil lamp, and justice scales, a folk deity, prayed to because she is nonjudgmental and might grant a criminal request—a convenient death, say, or a blameless robbery. And there was another skeleton, the more recent, a mere century-old bony figure that had been drawn by Mexican artist José Posada (1851–1913) as a satirical cartoon image to mock the political and social elites in Mexico at the turn of the century. Posada’s skeleton, often referred to as La Catrina, was elaborately dressed, with a wide frilly bonnet on her skull.
Now I saw that the children were dressed as Posada’s La Catrina, because this image allowed the skull-faced child to wear finery and a fancy hat. This was dressing up, the macabre comedy of the fiesta. Santa Muerte was another story altogether—the fastest-growing cult in Mexico, and a dark one, nothing funny about it. And though the Day of the Dead was approaching, neither of the bony creatures had much to do with those dead souls, yet all of these skeletons were conflated for the holidays in a daily danse macabre, some of it played for laughs, some a response to the tenor of Mexican life—violent, dangerous, and histrionic.
One of the classes started harmlessly enough with the concept of childhood boredom—“When I was a child I was bored by . . .” (Cuando era niño me aburría . . .), and I found myself confiding that I had been bored in church and in school and listening to speeches (escuchando discursos). The word aburrirse (to be bored) was batted around, and Herman asked, “What sport do you find boring?” Qué deporte te aburres?
And as the normally torpid yawning youngsters in the class became animated and expressed their feelings about various sports, emotions ran high. Miley hated baseball, Alan had no interest in ball games, Dieter denounced American football.
“The pauses, the stopping . . .” Las pausas, las paradas . . .
I said, “You don’t know the rules.”
“En español,” Herman said.
“No sabes las reglas,” I said. “Este deporte—fútbol—es muy complicado.” And I became flummoxed and tetchy because I wanted to explain how people in a community identify with a team, get to know the personalities and skills of particular players, enjoy the rivalries and the spectacle, anatomize the coaching, flaunt the colors and the uniforms, become a more unified community because of the team. I like watching all sports played well (todos los deportes jugaron bien). A city with a championship team was always a proud and happy place. I tried to express this, but my Spanish failed me.
Perhaps sensing that I was agitated, Herman asked Dieter his favorite sport.
“Paracaidismo.”
We stared. And he explained: skydiving. He had made sixty-two jumps. He intended to make many more. He was a German. He lived in a remote Canadian province. I knew nothing of skydiving—did it qualify as a sport if all that happened was you leaped from a plane, and in free fall clawed the air, and then tore open your parachute and hoped to land safely? And sometimes your parachute did not open, and you died.
I said that. “A veces, las personas—los paracaidistas—mueren.” Sometimes the skydivers die.
Dieter seemed pleased that I had challenged him, because it gave him a chance to cock his head and declare to the class, “No tengo miedo.” I am not afraid.
We returned to the subject of boredom.
Romantic movies bored Marcie as a child: “Cuando era niña me aburría las películas románticas.”
Miley had been bored by playing with dolls (jugando a las muñecas).
“Don Pablo?”
“Cuando era niño, no estaba aburrido.” When I was a child I was not bored. And later, to another question about myself as a child, I told a lie. “Cuando era niño, lo que más me gustaba de comer era la comida de mi mamá.” When I was a child, I liked my mother’s food. But in fact, I had generally disliked it.
All this confession and evasion, in the relentless interrogation of language learning, sometimes led to awkwardness.
“Mi abuelo era un huérfano,” I replied to a question about my family, revealing that my grandfather had been an orphan.
“Mi abuelo también,” Marcie said, and became misty-eyed.
Both of us resented this accidental intrusion into our private lives.
After a week, in the casual outdoor hour on the veranda or under the royal palms, Herman introduced us to Mexican card games and trivia quizzes, and cartoons that required us to explain in Spanish what was happening to the little dog in the snowstorm, or the bewitched doll in the toy shop.
And there were toys, too, little trucks and cars and tiny buildings, which we held and made the subject of a story. At first I resisted, feeling like a fool, and allowed the others to relate the story of the burning building that was saved by the fire truck, or the lonely child who was comforted by the pretty doll (linda muñeca).
“Don Pablo?”
“Estoy pensando.”
I was thinking of Philip Roth, who had told me of an experience he’d had in therapy, at a crisis in his life; how he had sat in a circle of strangers, all of them similarly undergoing therapy, and been handed a toy car. The therapist had said, “Philip, please tell us a story about this car. Where has it been? Where is it going?”
Roth had balked at first, feeling foolish and put on the spot. He sighed and then (as he told me) said to himself, “I’m a writer. I can tell a story. This is what I do.” And he held the toy car in his palm and began to describe its journey.
So when my turn came, I picked up the little doll and said, “Una vez en una pueblito extraño . . .”
