say), same close-cut auburn hair, and her walk, like a thirteen-year-old boy, I used to tell her, the left foot a little pigeon-toed, arms swinging slightly wide of the body. She was wearing jeans and a T-shirt, as she would be. Sunglasses dangled from her fingertips.
Never mind the odds. I knew it really could be Rebecca, that she could and would fly here if she was so inclined, rather than phoning or writing, to tell me that she had changed her mind. I started after her, shouting her name. Half-a-dozen people turned their heads, and so did she, with a face that was not her own. I spun around and ran in the opposite direction as if I were chased, then studied vocabulary back at the house, finding sanity in words that were nothing but words: Rain: lluvia. Rainfall: cantidad de lluvia. The language, imbécil, just get the language.
But things were not going very well in the language department, either. I heard another student say that success in language study depended on hitting it off with your teacher. Catherine and I were not hitting it off. On the contrary, it’s a wonder we didn’t come to a blow-up sooner than we did.
I don’t know what she saw when she looked at me during those six hours together day after day, but her own appearance never changed—hair skinned back so tight under the visored cap I thought it must hurt, always the chinos and white shirt. Was it always a white shirt? I won’t swear to that now. But my sense of her was unchanging. Against the background of astonishing color everywhere around us, and in contrast to the woven tote bag she carried every day, she seemed superimposed in monochrome. She seldom smiled, unless to give me that needling half-way thing. I started a collection of adjectives to pin her down—dour, saturnine, churlish, taciturn. Atribilious. I liked that one.
Not that I was earning medals for charm myself. Often I felt like walking away. Once I did. I got up and left the premises and stayed away long enough to convey a message, which I was pretty sure she got. But otherwise I just fell back on the rules I used in teaching: level voice, never frown, never interrupt. If she disliked me, it was not going to be because I was a mannerless chump. I kept a discreet distance as we sat together at the table. I had no interest in the intrigue of accidental touching. If our legs met, as they were apt to, both of us long-legged, the arousal factor registered below zero.
Mornings were devoted to grammar. In this she was merciless, as she should be, drill, drill, slow and repetitious on her part, clumsy and hesitant on mine. I felt like Heinlein’s Martian-man, looking up the code. After the lesson, Catherine would ask me to read something aloud to her in Spanish and translate it to English. These readings were always juvenile, comics with data about the Maya (over fifty percent of the population, identified by twenty-two different languages), and a child’s version of the Popul Vuh, the K’iché myth of the world’s creation. I knew what she was doing, groping for the point where I had left off as a kid. It irked me, but I had no reasonable objection. There’s something about learning a language, anyway, that reduces you to babbling childhood.
Afternoons were harder. This is when we were supposed to “dialogue informally,” for two whole hours, exhausting as a prospect. But even more tiresome was finding anything to talk about, for more than a few minutes, that is. “Anything” is hyperbole, of course, but day after day we faltered and came to an impasse. It was not a minor glitch.
At the beginning, Catherine offered me the choice. What did I want to talk about? I considered sports or music, but quickly backed off those, the language of each too specialized to be practical right now. The same was true of world affairs. I thought I’d get help from news reports, about East Germany or South Africa, say, but that turned out to be more than my low-level skills could take on with savvy.
What about the history of Central America, Catherine asked me one afternoon. What did I know? I assumed she meant short of the big taboo, current politics. Not that I knew anything much about that, or about the history either. I fell back on the old high school ruse, when you’re stuck make the teacher laugh. I gave a sniff. “You mean like this is where you get your bananas and stuff?”
“Divertidísimo,” she muttered. Not funny, Bozo.
“Okay, here’s something I really do know,” I said. “This will knock your socks off.” I worked it out in Spanish, first in writing, while she waited, then read it aloud. “In 1972, the great Puerto Rican ball player, Roberto Clemente, was killed in the crash of a plane headed for Nicaragua with aid for earthquake victims. I bet even you didn’t know that.”
“Puta!”
“Wowee, that’s a dirty word, right?”
I was about to be sent to my room, I could tell. All right, I said, I might be able to describe the Monroe Doctrine, though it was really just a verbal clot from a high school class. Oh, but, I added, Congress abolished it not long ago, right? And hadn’t President Reagan resurrected it recently? Wasn’t there once something called the Atlantic Charter? Or was that the Alliance for Progress? “And then you’ve got your Cuba and your Bay of Pigs, right?” She smiled in spite of herself, just a little, so I added the Battle of 1066 and the French Revolution.
All that was in English. Back to Spanish, she said. Let’s talk about you. What about my work? What did I teach? What could I say but “Lit Survey,” in a full sentence, of course, and list some classics, all of which translated badly. Well, then, how about the subject of my dissertation? I didn’t do a dissertation, I told her.
“What? No PhD?” Teasing half-smile. “How come?”
“Acrofobia academica,” I said. Sarcasm works poorly when you have to put on your glasses and look up the words. What did that mean, she wanted to know. Nada, I said.
We had already been through the “Who are you?” exercises in vocabulary. Who are you? Yo soy el hombre. Americano. Tourist, teacher, student, husband, son. And the nots. I am not a brother. Not a father, a doctor, a bus driver. I got tired of it and tried to switch the focus. Who are you? I am the teacher, not the student, was all she would say.
Once, during a water break, I asked people what they talked about with their tutors. Families, jobs, they said, life in general. Definitely not politics. Most of them joked about the “mordaza Méndez”—the Méndez gag, as it got quickly labeled.
The pony-tailed guy, Hank Stenning, the Peace Corps veteran, was adamant. Nobody was going to curb his speech. He’d made that clear to his own tutor.
I liked Stenning. He spoke Spanish far in advance of mine and so I mostly listened, catching what I could. One day he switched to English and I realized he had a speech defect, an articulation disorder, to be proper. It was somewhat charming, just enough trouble with the formation of the phonetic of “L” to require your attention. Did I know, he asked, that I’d been screened for “powiticaw extremism?”
Screened? Yes, prospective students were put through a background check, he claimed. Méndez had friends in the States who did that for him. Stenning said he wasn’t sure how he was admitted to the school himself, since his views were no secret. He could understand the caution. The country was a beehive of spywork. But “neutrawity” was naive, a sure vote for the status quo, especially during a war.
“War? What war?” I asked.
“This one.”
I tried to report that conversation to Catherine, though I knew it was pushing the envelope. She shut it off, of course, but it led to an idea that worked. Why didn’t I keep a log, I suggested, a record of various observations here in Antigua and at the Ávila household? In the evenings I could write some of those out in Spanish and give them to her orally the next afternoon. She agreed, as long as I kept to the rules.
I liked the idea, myself.
