of translation, to and from, without a dictionary. I performed as I expected. My original use of the language had been almost completely oral, to say nothing of childlike, and I found little relationship between that and what I saw now on paper.
“How was it?” Catherine asked, as I handed it back to her in the office.
“Well, I’m sure I didn’t ace it.”
She looked it over. “No. You’ve got a ways to go, all right.”
After lunch she said she wanted to test my ear. She would ask a series of questions and I would do my best to answer. This time I was free to use the dictionary.
I was exhausted in half an hour. It was like a grueling game of singles tennis, even though we were following the most basic dialogue. I dove into the dictionary, my glasses on and off. Hello, how are you? I’m fine, thank you. How do you like the weather? The weather is beautiful. What day is this? Monday. It’s Monday, lunes. What is today’s date? Date. Ah, give me a minute. August 5th. El cinco de agosto. There. What year? Year. Uh. Two minutes, please. —One thousand, mil. Nine hundred, novecientos. Eighty seven, ochenta y siete. There, good for me. She didn’t seem impressed. More questions. “Hable más despacio, por favor,” I said. Slow down, please. She had offered me that sentence herself, in case I needed it, but it did no good. At last I threw up my hands in frustration. Look, she said, if she spoke any more slowly she would distort the pronunciation. Guatemalan Spanish was slow, anyway, archaic even. That was the Spanish of my childhood, wasn’t it, the language of my heart?
“Heart and mind” was the phrase she used, corazon y mente. She repeated those words, dragging them out teasingly. To my confusion, I found myself translating them to other sounds. Tammee. Na-beel. That’s how they echoed phonetically, in Mam, out of the cave of years.
“What section of the country did you live in?” Catherine asked.
“Las montañas,” I said.
“Mountains where?”
I shrugged, pretending ignorance. We were strolling in the courtyard by this time, as other teams were doing, the school turned peripatetic. It was almost four o’clock and the sky was beginning to cloud over. I turned to face her. “Listen!” I said, in English.
“Oye!” she corrected. “Español, por favor. Oye.”
“Listen!” I said again, in English. “We can make this easier. All I’m after is a functional level, just whatever I need for my —.” I discarded “purposes,” then “search,” then “research,” and landed on “agenda.” That sounded too stuffy, but Catherine said, “Good. That’s what we’ll do, just get you ready for your agenda.”
Did she hit that word a little too hard? Never mind, the day was over. I couldn’t have been more thankful. I ran back to my quarters through a gusty, purgative shower.
SIX
The word I’d given Rebecca was even more pretentious. Moratorium. I thought of it later that evening, sitting at my desk in the crowded room, sounds drifting up from below, rain in the patio, television in the parlor.
Rebecca knew very little about my early years here, but she had often asked me why I didn’t “go back.” My answer was always the same: I had no reason to do so.
“And now you’re changing your mind?” she said. “It’s a bit risky, isn’t it?”
I thought she meant physical risk. “Supposedly it’s safe now,” I told her.
“Safe, good,” she said. “But what’s the real reason?”
“Call it a moratorium,” I said, and then wished I hadn’t. She wanted a definition. Erik Erikson’s, for example, a temporary flight from other realities? “But he was referring to adolescents, of course,” she said. Rebecca worked with disturbed teens, and her musings sometimes made me feel about age fifteen.
It didn’t matter, I told her. I might not actually go, anyway.
“Not go? But why?” she asked.
“There’s my mother, for one thing.”
“I’ll look in on her. You should go. I knew you would some day.”
That almost killed it, right there. If I did go, I assured her, the trip would not change anything in our plans. When I got back, right after Labor Day, I would finish moving out. She gave a little shrug. No problem.
There wasn’t much left to do. I had already leased a studio apartment in Somerville and had moved over most of my books and personal belongings. We had already taken ourselves through the crazy legal process, filed our “joint complaint” and a sworn affidavit, and all the right papers for this “irretrievable breakdown of marriage.” I had contested nothing. There was nothing to fuss about anyway. There was no wrecked home, no devastated children, no name changes, no property distribution. The house was hers, a settlement in her previous marriage. Among “No-fault Agreed Uncontested Divorce Packages” in the whole Commonwealth of Massachusetts, this one had to be a model of simplicity and civility.
I had offered to move out immediately, but she wanted me to stay “until it was really over.” That took longer than we’d thought. We continued to live parallel lives, a roommatey unmarriage, in what was, fortunately, a big Cambridge ark of a place. I moved my stuff to her daughter’s old room and slept there. We agreed on the rules: No implied guilt, no emotional entrapment, no sexual overtures. We still got dinner together. I did the heavy vacuuming. We even went to the movies and concerts as a couple. I gave her my Eames chair knockoff as a parting gift. She put together an album for me, photographs of our lives together, including Amy. We both skirted the obvious irony to that, since I had never known Amy by much more than pictures anyway, seeing her only on vacations from college, when we tried not to invade each other’s space. She had tagged me on first meeting as “seriously uncool,” words whispered to Rebecca, who passed them on to me. It became a repeated joke between us.
That had been the nature of our life in that house, always on a kind of high road of civility and good humor, which may be why I didn’t catch on earlier. We seldom argued. We “discussed,” or Rebecca did. She liked to spread it all out, identify and tag each little part. Some might call this a gender thing. I didn’t. I had encountered it in certain male colleagues, notably at faculty meetings. There are people who need to talk, who see their lives best as a journey of words. Rebecca, on the same odyssey, had always gone to a fellow therapist for “annual checkups,” and when she began weekly visits I didn’t question it. Her privilege. She was “getting to the bottom of things,” she said. But when she urged me to do the same, I refused. I had no compulsion to dig around.
But then I lost my job, lopped off in a budget cut. In itself, it was not disastrous. Untenured adjunct English teachers were always in demand in Boston at community colleges and business schools, and in due time I was high on the waiting list of two. But in that process something else “came to light,” something Rebecca was seeing now with more clarity, as she had not until lately—the “whole job thing.” Not that there was anything wrong with my earning power, she explained, or anything dishonorable about the level of student I taught. It was because I just let things happen, never recognizing my true skills (I was a “good” teacher, she knew that, but I could be “great”), letting myself bounce from school to school, teaching low level lit survey courses, with no sense of—. She stopped, hands up, palms out. No sense of something. Something. She’d been trying to put her finger
