Lawrence Block - Step by Step

From time to time I would get the urge to improve my Spanish, and now and then I would buy some book in Spanish, pick up an English-Spanish dictionary, and try to work my way through the thing. I could browse Garcia Lorca’s poetry with some enjoyment, but I never got anywhere with the fiction I attempted, possibly because I didn’t stay with it long enough. I’d give it up, and then a few days in Mexico or Spain would bring back a flood of half-remembered vocabulary, and stir up old longings.

I always assumed that a few weeks or a month in a Spanish-speaking country would leave me with a command of the language, and so I took it pretty much for granted that I’d achieve that in the course of three months spent walking through Spain. Nor would I have the option of retreating into English, as I might in the more cosmopolitan areas of Madrid and Barcelona. The folks living along the route of the pilgrimage hadn’t been spending a lot of time studying English as a second language. They had one language, and that’s all they needed to talk with one another, and they evidently figured that was plenty.

No problem. I’d do just fine in the old Español. Right?

Well, not exactly.

The first problem was that nobody was speaking the sort of Spanish I’d been taught. I should have realized I was in trouble three years earlier in Gijón, where all of the locals sounded to me as though they were speaking through a mouthful of broken teeth. The one person I could almost understand was the Russian writer (and putative ex-KGB agent) Julian Semyonov, who addressed the assembly one afternoon in my idea of perfect Spanish. He was speaking Castilian, and I established later that he’d been taught by an American woman from the Midwest. That’s why he sounded just like Miss Sherman back at Bennett High.

That’s not the way they talked in Catalonia or Aragon or La Rioja or Navarre. In Catalonia they didn’t even use the same words, in that they were speaking not Spanish but Catalan. Some of the words were almost the same, and others weren’t even close. Open is abierto in Spanish, obert in Catalan. It’s not hard to work that one out. Closed, on the other hand, is cerrado in Spanish and tancat in Catalan.

Tancat became a part of our working vocabulary, and remains the one word of Catalan we know. I’m not sure how it’s pronounced, because we never heard anyone say it, but we read it often enough for it to be deeply imprinted upon us. A sign bearing that single word hung in the door of one shop after another as we made our way through Catalonia. It didn’t take us long to work out its meaning.

And, all these years later, we’ll still find ourselves using the word now and then. “Did you pick up the Sunday Times ?” “No, I’ll get it tomorrow. The fucking deli was tancat .”

In the Basque areas they speak Basque, understandably enough. (Well, it’s understandable that they speak it, but what they speak is understandable to no one but another Basque. And, from what I know about the language, it’s remarkable that they can understand one another.) And in each region where Spanish is nominally the language, the vowels and consonants do things very different from the Castilian Spanish I was taught.

Even if they’d spoken what I was used to, I’d have been in trouble. See, I could speak the language (after a fashion, and only in the present tense). But I couldn’t understand it. I could formulate a question and phrase it rather neatly, especially if I had a minute or two to go over it in my mind first. And, regional accents aside, the person to whom I addressed my question was almost invariably able to understand it.

Then he’d answer me, and I wouldn’t have a clue what he was saying.

Well, I could work it out if he said sí or no . And if I asked where the men’s room was, there was almost always a gesture to accompany the reply. But if he came back with a whole sentence, I would stand there trying to recall what he’d just said and trying to puzzle out what the words meant.

By the time I began to get used to a particular accent, we would have walked far enough to reach a place where people were speaking something discernibly different — though discernibly may not be quite le mot juste here. We managed to make do, we bought what we needed and found our way to the bathroom, but I was not finding the ease with the language for which I’d hoped.

In Castile, finally, they spoke something I was used to, if not with the clear Western New York accent of Miss Sherman. But all that really meant was that they had a little less trouble understanding me. I still couldn’t catch what they were saying, because my ears, alas, were far slower than my lips. I could speak Spanish okay. I just couldn’t understand it.

Lynne was the reverse. She had a sort of cavalier attitude toward languages other than her own, feeling that a close approximation of the requisite word damn well ought to suffice. Mark Twain, you’ll recall, once observed that the difference between the right word and the almost-right word was the difference between lightning and the lightning bug, to which Lynne would likely reply that the person you were addressing ought to be able to make out what you were getting at. “‘Oh, look, thunder and lightning bugs!’ Yeah, right.”

At the same time, she was sufficiently intuitive so that she could generally get the sense of a sentence spoken to her, whether or not she knew what the individual words meant. Consequently the two of us together almost amounted to a person capable of carrying on a conversation. I could cobble together a sentence and fling it out there, and she could translate the response for me.

This system worked best if we didn’t switch roles. If I tried to work out what somebody was saying, well, the worst thing that might happen was that I’d miss it. But when Lynne tried to talk, strange things could happen.

I’m reminded of a beastly hot day when we walked for hours under a relentless sun. I’m not sure where we were, but it was probably in León. (One problem with the pilgrim route was that it hadn’t been designed with climate in mind. In order to arrive in Santiago de Compostela in time for the Saint’s Day celebration on July 25th, you had to cross the Pyrenees while they were still snow-covered — viz., the avalanche that had delayed us. And by the time you got to the central plains, it was summer, and the heat was hard to bear. There was something to be said for starting in Santiago in the spring and traversing the route in the opposite direction, and I’d heard of people who did it that way, but not many of them. It was just too weird.)

On this particular occasion we’d walked a long way on a hot day, and when a café turned up it seemed heaven sent. We got a couple of coffees and went to a table, and I dropped my pack on the floor and collapsed into a chair. Lynne asked if there was anything she could get me.

More days than not, I’d buy a Spanish newspaper, generally El País, sometime in the afternoon, and read it over a cup of coffee. My eyes were okay with the language, it was my ears that had all the trouble, and with the aid of a pocket dictionary I could at least get the gist of most of the news stories. So what I told her was that I’d love it if she could rustle up a paper.

And how should she ask for it? “ ¿Tiene usted un periódico? ” I said. She repeated the sentence a couple of times to make sure she had it down, and then she went over to the bar, and a moment or two later she came back, looking very troubled.

“I think I said something wrong,” she reported. “He got all flustered and blushed and everything.”

“What on earth did you say?”