Adam Mars-Jones - Cedilla

I used to refuse to leave the cinema while the credits were still running. I’d complain when people walked into my field of vision on their way out that I was trying to watch the film. Dad would say, ‘The film’s over, Chicken, time to go home,’ but I’d sit tight and so would Peter, out of solidarity. ‘Somebody’s taken a lot of trouble to write all these names down for us,’ I would say, while Dad sighed in the dark. ‘If it was your name, wouldn’t you want people to read it, even if you’d just made the sandwiches? And besides, there may be an extra bit of the film at the very end which is just to reward the patient ones.’ Though actually there never was.

If there are levels of reality below us, then it follows that there are levels above, superior to us as we are superior to characters in books, but not themselves absolute. Nothing that possesses characteristics is perfectly real, not even the guru. The guru himself is in some sense unreal — but he doesn’t need to be absolutely real to get the job done. When an elephant dreams about a tiger and wakes up in alarm, the tiger wasn’t real, was it? But the elephant has been awoken, and that is a real thing.

I was still far short of wakefulness myself at this time, and more preöccupied with lower realities like Boyde Ashlar than higher ones. You could even say that I’d left Boyde Ashlar in the lurch by not finishing The Ring . I had neglected to give the spinning plate the full charge of attention to which it was entitled. I told myself that I would borrow the book from Mrs Pavey again after Dad had forgotten all about it, so as to find out what happened in the end, but I never got round to it.

The Red Spot on Jupiter blinks in shock

Eckstein’s manner didn’t soften as my German improved. Instead he opened up a campaign on another flank by pressuring me to learn another language. He kept me back after one German lesson to make his case. ‘You are taking things easy at a time when your brain is still able to absorb new things without difficulty. Absurd! Take advantage of this — it will not come again. You should learn Spanish. Starting immediately .

‘Here — I’ll start you off. I’m about to teach you something you will never forget. My own learning of Spanish was very rapid. My tutor gave me a copy of Don Quijote de la Mancha by Cervantes and told me to get on with it. I had to reach degree level from nothing in eight months, and I did. If you decided to learn Spanish, you could get to A-level in a year, very easily. Don’t bother with the O-level. It’s just a distraction.

‘When you leave this room in three minutes’ time you will know more of the language than I did when I was thrown in at the deep end with Miguel de Cervantes and his knight.’ He walked over to the blackboard, took a piece of chalk and carefully wrote something on the blackboard. It was:

¡ Que te joda un pulpo!

Then he stepped back from the board and said, ‘You start with the advantage of knowing this charming sentence, which I discovered relatively late in my own progress. When I did, I vowed that it would be the first thing I taught any pupil, if I was lucky or unlucky enough to acquire one. It means,’ he said with a deep hissing sigh, ‘“ May you be fucked by an octopus ”.’

The world stood still. The Red Spot on Jupiter blinked in shock. He went on, ‘It would be more accurate to translate, “May an octopus fuck you”, but such a sentence is not idiomatic in English. It lacks the proper cadence. Joder means fuck , and is transitive, for obvious reasons.’

When Klaus Eckstein said ‘ joder ’ he used the proper Spanish sound, like a heavy ‘H’, not far from a guttural German ‘ch’. ‘No doubt your English teacher will have told you to avoid passive verbs, on the grounds that they are weaker and vaguer. This is an example of the opposite, with the passive construction being the more forceful. And there you are — I have done as I promised. I have taught you something you will never forget. From this day on, you will always have one phrase of Spanish at your disposal. If you do in fact choose to learn the language, not everything will come so easily, but the difficulties are not overwhelming. Now, I have somewhere to be even if you do not.’

I saw that those five little staccato words, those (he was right) entirely unforgettable words, remained on the board, and a wave of fear swept over me. Not entirely selfish fear — I didn’t want Eckstein to be compromised in any way, though why was I worried? His unpopularity was already exemplary. He had nothing to fear.

‘Sir —,’ I piped up, ‘shouldn’t we clean the blackboard?’

‘As I understand the situation, young Mr Cromer, you cannot do so, and I myself … cannot be bothered. No one will understand what those words mean,’ he added airily, ‘and if they do … well, who cares? I am here to provide instruction, am I not? Let them learn …’

He didn’t abandon me quite as brusquely as I feared. He pushed the Tan-Sad roughly to the stairwell, wheezing as he did so, but then summoned up enough breath to produce an enormous whistle which summoned some of the boys with which those premises were so richly supplied.

Orthographical paraçites

Perhaps Eckstein gambled on Spanish attracting me as a language of secrets and obscenities. Presumably the octopus featured in the unforgettable curse because with its eight arms it could quite easily explore a lady and a man at the same time, and still have fingers left over for the eating of its lunch. Eckstein instilled in me the idea that Spanish was a language of adult intimacies. German as I first experienced it was a motherly language, full of lullabies, endearments and diminutives, while Spanish was more of a lover from the start, a fount of forbidden knowledge. German was a familiar hand on the cradle. Spanish was an unknown tongue in my ear.

From then on, at the end of a lesson, Mr Eckstein might mention some virtue or peculiarity of the Spanish language, contrasting it as if casually with German. He thought German and English were both impoverished compared with Spanish in the matter of punctuation, specifically the punctuation of exclamations and questions. In English we would think it very odd if someone only bothered to indicate the end of quoted speech, and not the beginning. ¿So why not apply the same principle to questions? ¡And exclamations! ¿Why not prepare the reader for what is coming? ¡It’s silly not to!

Or he might remark that Spanish, unlike German, had two verbs meaning ‘to be’. They weren’t interchangeable. Estar and ser . One referred to the merely accidental and contingent, while the other dealt with permanent, existential characteristics. He said that there was a lot more German philosophy than Spanish, but perhaps that was because the Spanish needed less, so much being embodied in their language. When he made these remarks in passing on the relative merits of languages, he didn’t address them to me. He never even looked at me, but I realised it was my interest he was fishing for.

He knew what he was doing with these sidelong comments. Ever since I had fallen out with Miss Collins, the tutor of my bed rest years, over the sacred symbol æ, disputed 27th letter of the alphabet, strange forms and symbols had been my chosen playground. If I had been less prudish I would have seen at once that the punctuation of the five-word curse he had chalked on the blackboard was as thrilling as its meaning. Eckstein was drawing my attention to two symbols that were right up my street. ¡If they’d been any further up my street they’d be sticking their tongues and so on!

I vowed from then on to import these useful symbols into my own essays and letters, in any subject, for every teacher. ¿Wasn’t it logical, as Eckstein said? ¿Why should English remain at its historical disadvantage, when help was at hand? Any page of my writing crawled with orthographical paraçites. I didn’t much mind that my attempts to Iberiçise English punctuation were invariably crossed out and çingled out for reproach. That’s always how the world treats pioneers.