by Roger Bruner
Piled high on my bed were books—new books. Dozens of them, I would discover after I learned to count.
“This one will teach you the alphabet—the letters that make up words,” Chalina said. “And this one will teach you numbers and how to count using them.
“This book is about Mexico, but it won’t mean anything to you until you master the basics of reading. That’s also true of this book about the United States. You should learn about both cultures.”
“They’re so big,” I protested. “Humongous,” I added in English with a giggle.
“Yes, but you will read them sooner than you think.” Handing me a skinny little book, Chalina said, “After you learn the alphabet, this is the first book you will read.”
My friends explained that—even though I was an adult in their eyes and in my own—I needed to start with children’s books. I would proceed to more advanced books after mastering simpler ones.
Although they didn’t question my intelligence, they had seriously underestimated my motivation. I would read the more complex books long before they expected me to. I was certain of that.
Beginning with children’s books would be good. Not just because Chalina and Nikki said so, but because I wanted to become familiar with books I would enjoy reading to Alazne when she grew older. For now, however, I would practice by reading aloud to her, even though she was too young to understand what I was doing.
She would learn to love books, too, and I would teach her to read as soon as she was old enough. I could barely contain my excitement at the prospect of doing that.
She would be much younger than I was now when I started giving her reading lessons.
Perhaps coming to San Diego had been a good thing after all. I had nice clothes and good, healthy food. I no longer slept on the cold floor of a dark cave. I had a wonderful best friend and a loving substitute mother. Alazne had been born where the finest healthcare was available. She would have died eventually if I had remained in Santa María de los Campos.
And San Diego had an abundance of books, Chalina informed me. An endless supply.
And those “incidental expenses” she would have Tomás pay for? Most of them would be books he would never know about.
I set Alazne down on the one spot on the bed that was free of books and hugged Nikki and Chalina for their willingness to begin my education—in spite of Tomás’s prideful rules.
“We must be careful not to leave any of these books in your room,” Chalina cautioned me. “It will be best to bring only one or two in here at a time.”
“But I have told Tomás never to enter my room without permission.”
“Would you dare to refuse him entrance if he demanded it?”
I had never considered such a possibility, and I told her so.
“Do you think you could keep him out if you denied him permission?” she continued in a voice that was uncharacteristically grave. “He would be all the more determined to come in and learn what you were up to.”
I looked down at Alazne. Then I looked at Chalina again. “You are right. Tomás does what he wishes. He pretends…he allows me to think I control the access to my room.”
“You won’t need to be as cautious about the children’s books. If he sees them in your room, you can tell him truthfully that you have borrowed them from me to look at the pictures.”
“Truthfully?” I said, laughing. “Truthfully, I will be too busy learning to read them to notice that they have pictures. Are you telling me to act like Tomás and lie and call it the truth?”
I had meant for my question to sound silly. Amusing. But then I realized how much truth I had spoken.
Chalina recognized it, too. “No, my dear, we—this is true for Nikki, too—we do not want you to be like Tomás at all. However, a word is a symbol. Something that stands for what it means. You will understand the meaning of a sentence by the way the words fit together.
“The better you learn to link their meanings without actually having to think about them, the better you will read. Since words are symbols, they are pictures in one sense—like the colors of a traffic light. You wouldn’t approach a traffic light and have to stop to think that—”
“Green means go, red means stop, and yellow means hesitate slightly and then speed through the intersection and hope no one comes at you from the side,” I nearly shouted in my enthusiasm.
I might not get outside often, but I observed and remembered everything I saw and heard.
“Exactly. The driver responds to the colors of a traffic light without thinking about their meaning. Because symbols are pictures, you will tell Tomás the truth when you say you have been looking at the pictures. If he misunderstands what kind of pictures you have been looking at, that will not be your fault. It will be his ignorance.”
“Very good. Honest deception.” I laughed, marveling that such opposite words made very good sense together.
“Rosa, a preview of something you will learn about eventually. Honest deception. It sounds impossible, does it not?”
“Of course. I was just trying to be clever.”
“You were more clever than you realized, child. You created something known as an oxymoron, and you did better than most authors I have read, and I have read many books by many authors.”
I beamed at this small preview of what lay ahead. “So when do we start? I can hardly wait.”
“Why wait? Would you prefer to start with numbers or letters?”
My excitement in saying “Letters” woke poor Alazne up. But she fell asleep again within minutes of my picking her up and rocking her.
Nikki started to take Alazne from me so she wouldn’t distract me from my first lesson, but Chalina told her, “Pay as much attention to our lessons as you can, but don’t let Tomás catch on that I am teaching you Spanish. Learning to read it with Rosa will help you both learn more easily, for you can tutor one another rather than rely on me completely.”
I could tell from the expression on Nikki’s face that Chalina had said something good. Something special. Once Chalina explained, I understood Nikki’s delight.
“Rosa,” Chalina explained, “you will write in this book as you learn the alphabet. Nikki will not need to do this part since she already knows letters.”
“The same alphabet is used in both languages?” I asked almost breathlessly in my thirst for knowledge.
“Yes, daughter. Although Spanish uses some marks English doesn’t use, both of you will learn what they mean. Here is an example.”
Chalina took a pencil and wrote a letter on the inside of the book cover. “That is the letter N and it makes these sounds…” She proceeded to explain and give familiar examples.
“But when used with this little wavy line,”—she wrote N again, but this time she put a strange-looking squiggle over it—“it is pronounced quite differently. This is the sound of the N in señor. The squiggly mark is called a tilde. I don’t know if it is used in other languages, but it is not used in Engl—”
“Other languages?” I interrupted without realizing at first I had. “You mean Spanish and English aren’t the only two languages?”
Chalina translated for Nikki what I had just said, and they both cackled.
“What other languages? Tell me, please.”
“We’re sorry for laughing at you, Rosa. Your question was, uh, cute. How small your world has been up to now.”
I began fidgeting. Why couldn’t they simply answer my question? It wasn’t that difficult, was it?
“There are dozens—no, probably hundreds—of different languages in the world. I know you won’t understand that concept until you have learned numbers and counting, but take my word for it. There are too many languages for one person to memorize all of their names. It would be even more impossible for anyone to learn to speak them all, no matter how poorly.”
Chalina’s words fell like rain on dry, parched earth, and each drop that fell upon my ears soaked in, refreshing and rejuvenating me.
We carried all of the books from my room to Chalina’s. When I saw that she had recently bought a huge bookcase for her room, I laughed to myself. Tomás paid for it, didn’t he? Good for you, Tomás!
Then we moved to the kitchen so we could work at the table.
To avoid problems if Tomás returned unexpectedly, Nikki set the deadbolt lock on the front door. That would give us a few seconds to clear things out of the way before he caught us disobeying him so flagrantly.
I grinned, imagining what one of us might say. “Tomás, you have been nagging us to lock the deadbolt. We three women didn’t feel safe now that we have a baby to protect. So we decided you knew best after all.”
He would never suspect our true motive.
Chalina placed a large tote bag on the table. “We can slip a book inside this before Tomás sees it. He won’t be curious about the bag. He will probably assume it is somebody’s purse—if he notices it at all.”
I nodded and waited for Chalina to translate her comment for Nikki.
“Good idea,” Nikki said. “Although I don’t expect Tomás back today, we always need to be prepared.”
Nikki’s guess proved accurate, and that gave us the freedom to work far into the night. If I had been older, more mature, and more thoughtful, I would have noticed that my first lesson was wearing Nikki and Chalina out. But I didn’t notice. I was nowhere close to tired. I could have kept going all night.
When my stomach grumbled loudly and unexpectedly, we looked at the clock and realized how much time had passed. We had worked through suppertime and beyond.
Nikki went to the refrigerator and got out bacon, eggs, butter, and bread. Wonderful. We would have “breakfast for supper.” That was one of my favorite meals, and she spoiled me by fixing it often.
Chalina had spent so many years living alone and doing her own cooking that she was delighted to have Nikki spoil her as well. Not having to cook for herself any longer was a fine reward for her wisdom and maturity.
I looked at her more closely. She was older than me, but not nearly as old as I had thought.
Nikki had told me young adults often think their Elders are older than they are. How right she had been.
I had no idea where or how Tomás and Chalina had met, but I got the impression they had known one another even longer than he and Nikki. Their common history gave Chalina invaluable insights she could put to good use in protecting our secret studies.
“Although I think Nikki is right that Tomás will not come home tonight, I must teach you a simple card game while we eat. Then we can tell him the cards have kept us up late if he comes in before we go to bed.”
Seeing that I was about to object to that type of deceitfulness, Chalina hastened to add, “I’ll use these cards to teach you numbers. We won’t tell Tomás we were playing cards until now, just that the cards kept us up. That will be truthful enough. We won’t be lying to him.”
I was satisfied with Chalina’s rationalization, although one thing nagged at me slightly. “Why are you teaching us to play this specific game if we are to use the cards only to help me learn numbers and avert Tomás’s suspicions?”
“We must be cautious, child. Although we won’t lie about the cards, we should all have the same answer if he asks, ‘What card game do you know?’ We should also be able to play it convincingly if he decides to watch us.”
I chuckled. “My Chalina is so smart.”
“I’m glad you think so,” she retorted. “It would be much easier if you would let us lie instead of just bending the truth. But if your conscience is that fussy, we have stayed up past our bedtime playing War. We are waging war against Tomás and against ignorance, are we not?”
Many months would pass before Chalina admitted that she had been dying to tease me about lying to Tomás to trick him into paying for Alazne’s operation. But by the time she did, I could barely recall my falsehood.
“That is good,” she would say. “Forgetting her own wrongs is always a good defense for a woman. But when a man does wrong, never let him forget it.”
16
That night was the first of many days, weeks, and months of learning. But it was the last night of staying up so late to do it.
Chalina used the cards to teach me the numbers one through ten—not just the numbers, but counting using those numbers. Uno, dos, tres, cuatro, cinco, seis, siete, ocho, nueve, diez.
I practiced counting everything that was numeric. There were dos candlesticks on the mantelpiece and cuatro place settings on the kitchen table on those rare occasions when Tomás, Chalina, Nikki, and I ate together. There were cinco if you counted Alazne’s bottle of formula and tres for just the adults when Tomás was gone.
If Nikki cooked scrambled eggs for cuatro adults, she used siete eggs. She fixed uno piece of toast for each of us, but dos strips of bacon. There were tres pieces of flatware at each place setting if each had only a knife, fork, and spoon, but cuatro if there was also a salad fork and the addition of a soup spoon made cinco.
I would never forget my amazement when I realized that every number had one or more names.
“Mother Chalina?” She had recently asked Nikki and me to address her that way. “Each number has a word for it, does it not?”
She looked up from her book. “Yes, Rosa.”
“And a number is a symbol for however many it describes?”
She nodded.
“So the word for a number is actually the symbol for another symbol?”
She started to glow like a mother whose baby has just spoken her first word. “You have learned something most college graduates don’t know. Not many people would have figured that out.”
“But I didn’t try to figure it out. It just…came to me.”
“Someone as intelligent as you doesn’t always have to formulate a question to come up with an answer.”
Mother Chalina’s statement warmed and thrilled me. Even if I hadn’t already been sufficiently motivated to study hard, I would have been determined to show her how right she was.
I quickly learned additional numbers. Although I stopped at twenty at first because nothing in my immediate world existed in larger quantities, I soon went back and learned the higher numbers, too.
I knew all of the letters of the alphabet—they, too, were symbols of the sounds they made, and I learned those sounds by heart. Then I was able to distinguish familiar words by sounding them out according to the sounds of their individual letters. In no time at all, I was reading the children’s books Chalina had bought for me—and reading them to Alazne.
She must have been a very smart baby, for she turned toward me whenever I read aloud. She watched my face as if the magic of the words entranced her. I had to remind myself periodically that she couldn’t possibly understand them.
Nonetheless, if I stopped reading, especially before reaching the end of a book, Alazne wrinkled her nose and began crying. When I resumed reading, she quieted down. Instantly.
In no time at all, I had memorized all of the children’s books Mother Chalina bought behind Tomás’s back, using his own money. A short time later, I began holding each book where Alazne could see the words.
I knew so perfectly where the words lined up on the pages that I followed them across the page with my fingers while looking straight at Alazne. She started watching the movement of my fingers, just as fascinated as she had been before watching my face.
Alazne wouldn’t grow up to be a non-reader like the villagers of Santa María. Not if I could help it. They weren’t to blame for their ignorance. They had never had the opportunity to learn. But Alazne would.
“Alazne will attend public school when she is old enough,” Mother Chalina said. “It will not be optional. She will have to go.”
How wonderful that America required parents to send their children to school. But since Tomás had been so adamant about keeping me from interacting with non-Latinas, what would he say about sending his daughter to a school where children of different et
hnic backgrounds mingled so freely?
~*~
“I think you will find this book especially meaningful.” Mother Chalina handed me a paperback. “It comes from the public library. They have a section containing books in Spanish. The City allows anyone to check them out and take them home. It’s important not to mark them up or lose them.”
She had told me about libraries before. Even though she wasn’t saying anything new this time—especially about respecting other people’s books—I let her practice her mothering instinct on me without protesting.
“You said this book would be especially meaningful?” I hoped that would get Chalina back on track. “Why do you say that?”
“It’s about a little girl named Matilda whose parents didn’t want her or make much of an effort to take care of her.”
My mouth fell open in shock. “Things like that happen to other children?”
“That happens to many children.” She released a slow sigh. “Far too many.”
“Did Matilda live in a village where no one knew how to read and write?”
“No, she lived in a town. Perhaps a city like this one. I don’t really know. Books that tell stories—”
“Fiction,” I said, showing off a word I had learned recently.
Mother Chalina’s face lit up. “Yes, fiction. Books of fiction often take place in make-believe locations. Do you know what?”
I shook my head.
“Matilda’s parents were more interested in watching television than in reading. They hated reading.”
“No. That is not possible. How could anyone hate reading?”
She shrugged. “They didn’t want Matilda to read books, either. They wanted her to be just like them and watch television all the time. They probably didn’t want her to grow up smarter than them. They didn’t let her attend school until they had to.”
“Matilda’s parents could read and write?”
“Yes, but not as well as Matilda. They were selfish and lazy and they didn’t pay much attention to Matilda except to yell at her. Especially her father. They weren’t very nice people.”
