like a native North Walian,’ Rhiannon claims – but has even learned to fly light aircraft so she can careen between Holland and Wales quicker than I can say awyren, Welsh for airplane.
Sylwi to Notice
Ed has come home, and the four of us are going to an outdoor concert. Rhiannon and … Ed. In a tie-dyed shirt and sandals, Rhiannon is convincingly down-to-earth despite being named for the personification of a deity. In the First Branch of ‘The Mabinogi’, the character Rhiannon – who spawned the name that has taken hold of parents in Wales as completely as the wretched Ashley has in the States – is a powerhouse who still bears traces of magic about her, left over from her former role as a goddess of horses in the prehistoric Celtic pantheon. Rhiannon of Delft is not my idea of a horse goddess, for which I’m grateful, but the name remains hard to pair with ‘Ed’.
Ed is a geologist and a quiet, wry mumbler with an Irish accent (‘Irish Gaelic lurks in him, too,’ they assure us, though it’s skulking somewhat deeper than Rhiannon’s Welsh). Tonight the two of them lead us out through the fresh, sea-smelling dusk to a canalside café. As in Amsterdam, Delft’s city blocks have been turned into an adjoining series of islets by an intricate canal system, begun around 1100. The canal we’re sitting next to has a lustre like molten jade, which deepens as the sun sinks, and is threaded with flowering lily pads. A trio – two violinists and a pianist – bob on a flat-bed barge and play until it gets dark. Further down the canal a pack of kayakers sit absolutely still in two-person skiffs, paddles across their laps, rapt.
We talk softly. Rhiannon tells us she would never have been caught dead baking Welsh cakes in Wales, but last year found herself making a ton of them for the Welsh Society, which has about fifty members.
‘The things you do when you leave home,’ she says, wincing.
‘It’s hiraeth,’ adds Ed.
I broach my hiraeth theory about Wales and Portugal. One clings to the western edge of an island, the other to the western edge of a peninsula; both are tiny nations hemmed in by the sea and bullied by bigger, wealthier neighbours to the east. And both suffer from the same malaise, which in Wales is called hiraeth and in Portugal saudade, a kind of longing that is more than simple homesickness, because you can get it at home too. It’s a lament not just for what has been lost, but for what should have been but never was; a weary and, so far, an impotent protest that history hasn’t played fair.
We all fall silent. In a window above the musicians’ barge a woman lights a cigarette, backlit by a pale, incandescent glow. She turns her profile to the flared match and puffs out the window, smudging the blue twilight. I wonder if she’s rehearsed this gesture, and then I know, with utmost certainty, that had we been speaking Welsh just now instead of English, I never would have noticed her.
Cymysgu to Mingle
Dutch toilets, I remark to Marguerite, have a flat ledge rather than a bowl filled with water, so you can examine your waste should you so desire. We try to read significance into this but fail.
This morning we wandered around the town centre looking for Delft tiles. Marguerite, who is a world-class fretter, wanted one like Rhiannon and Ed have next to a Welsh lovespoon in their guest room, which reads, ‘Worries are like crumbs in the bed. The more you wriggle, the more they itch,’ but she couldn’t find any by the time we had to get back for the barbecue.
‘Okay,’ I drill her, ‘what’s your mission at this shindig?’
‘Remember what everyone tells me in English so I can tell you what you missed in Welsh.’ I give her a thumbs up.
‘By the way, Pam, isn’t this cheating?’
‘One woman’s cheating is another woman’s book,’ I reply, pointedly.
Unlike the wine and cheese party in Norway, the Delft barbecue is not a lipstick-imperative affair. Phil Jonathan shows up in gym shorts as does Geoff, an Englishman from Amsterdam who’s stuffed a lumberjack shirt into his. Rob and Eryl, both native speakers from Wales, round out the group. I like these people immediately.
Phil and his wife Jana have brought their new baby and their three-year-old daughter Catrin. Perhaps as some unconscious sign of respect for his command of Welsh, I’d assumed Phil was fifty at least; it’s a shock to see he’s my age, maybe younger. He and Catrin immediately flop on the floor to put together a crossword puzzle. Catrin speaks Czech to her mother, who’s from Prague, and Welsh to her father; last year they lived in Houston for a while where she picked up a few words of English, which she’s just beginning to learn in earnest now, in Holland. Of all the people in the room, this little girl with the immense eyes and shiny dark bob makes me the most nervous; she is the first person I’ve encountered on earth with whom I can communicate only in Welsh. It doesn’t go well. I try to help with the crossword puzzle but drive her near desperate with frustration.
‘She says you’re too slow,’ Phil relays sympathetically in Welsh, after she whispers something in his ear.
On my way out to the balcony I notice Rhiannon’s kitchen calendar: yesterday is circled with a note, ‘Welsh woman comes.’ Funny, no one here has asked me why I’m bothering to learn Welsh, something that drives Americans nuts. At home my ‘Welsh thing’ is like an affront to the national cult of utility and pragmatism. Among these people it’s taken for granted, and again, as in Norway, my identity seems more a construct of shared passion and individual practice than something I was merely born with.
On the balcony a barbecuing frenzy has seized Ed, who seems bent on crisping every sausage, steak, chicken wing and veggie burger in Delft. When he runs out of these he grabs a banana, which he roasts in its peel and passes around to whomever wants a taste. Geoff, Rob and Eryl are standing downwind of the grill and by the time I join them have begun to look like baby ducklings, each covered in a fine, fuzzy ash. They’re discussing Welsh in Welsh.
I haltingly tell Rosemary’s story of being yelled at by a woman from Tregaron for speaking high-falutin’ Welsh on the radio. Like Catrin, they get the point before I’m through and move on.
‘Cymraeg Byw, in my opinion,’ adds Phil, who’s joined the group, ‘is whatever Welsh is spoken by living people. If they say leicio instead of hoffwn, or ffeindio if they’ve just found something. What the hell. It’s still Welsh.’
The only word I get for certain is ‘hell’, which he says in English, but that’s his gist. Both hoffwn and leicio mean ‘to like’ (the latter, pronounced ‘lickio’, has always struck me as vaguely obscene); Cymraeg Byw means Living Welsh. It’s a made-up language that was invented in the sixties as a way of uniting all the discordant strands of Welsh: the spoken language of the South, the spoken language of the North (each of these have their own brood of variations), and Literary Welsh (itself an artificial creation). Unfortunately, the only people who spoke Cymraeg Byw were students, and it turned out that no one else could understand them. The simple fact of the matter is that Welsh is like Silly Putty. You can stretch it and twist it and mould it into any number of shapes and it’s still Welsh – which is both a boon and an anxiety for learners. If you’re used to the authoritarian dictatorship of English or French, for example – two of the few systems in the universe in which there exists an absolute right and wrong – then the sloppy democracy of Welsh is unnerving. On the other hand, it’s pretty hard to sin against grammar in any really grievous way.
(This said, there are, of course, no perfect democracies, and
