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1. Skills and Knowledge
Mrs. E. never got it.
In January 1967, I was sitting in her fourth grade class in Glendale, California. The children were instructed to come to my desk and greet me. One by one, they said, "Hi." Had they said "Hello," I would've probably understood what was happening, but this simple monosyllabic word threw me off—I was frightened, convinced that I was being insulted.
Mrs. E. then dropped a pile of books, including a dictionary, on my desk. She said something I didn't understand. And I started to cry.
For some time, I studied the ancient trees coming up to our second-story windows. I watched the branches sway and the leaves fall and the sky beyond the trees change while the class went on with its business. Months? Only weeks? Hard to say.
I remember exactly where Mrs. E. was standing the moment her words began to make sense. She was at one end of the blackboard, explaining a lesson, and I was absorbing it all, deciphering it. It was that sudden.
Before long, I was speaking her language. One morning, I walked away from the bike rack with another boy. When we got to the steps of the school, I realized that I'd been speaking American. Let's get this straight: I was speaking American. It was that sudden. And glorious.
But it was a quiet glory. No fanfare has been composed for these moments. In the earliest days, the new language sounded muffled—like voices at the public swimming pool when I'd come up for air: that moment when the ears are not completely out of the water and the dry world is still unintelligible.
Mrs. E. gave me a failing grade in Reading, then raised it to a C for the last quarter of the year. My parents and my sister were appalled. Even at that age, I understood that you don't punish someone for not yet knowing a language.
Then there was Spelling. I went from a B in the third quarter (when I was still far from fluent in my new tongue) to an A in the fourth quarter. Mrs. E. was amazed. And very confused. She knew I couldn't possibly cheat. But I'd get one perfect score after another. Week after week. Spelling words I often didn't understand, from a language I'd just begun to take in—one very small crumb at a time. Mrs. E. asked me how I did it. I had no answer.
By now I was the star of every spelling bee, the kid everyone wanted on their team. I was only ten, so there was no reason for me to know how I did it, but Mrs. E. should've known better. Didn't she understand that there are only five vowel sounds in Spanish and I owed my success to phonetics?
2. Habits and Attitudes
There was always this need to write. I tried to describe the world around me but had very little to say; my imagination played a very small role, if it played one at all, in my interpretation of things and events. Today I found a diary I don't remember writing. The brief and extremely boring entries begin in December 1967 and end in November 1969. What I find most striking about it is that everything is written in Spanish.
I don't remember the transition. When did my second language become my primary language? In other words: When did I start talking to myself in American? It's one thing to remember when you first understood or spoke a new language, but quite another to nail down the moment when you began to feel comfortable with it. I'm sure it's like death: we don't die little by little; we go from life to death instantly; the distance between them is like the point in geometry: it's there, but you can't measure it.
Mrs. E. was not pleased with my "habits and attitudes." According to the report card, my performance was, at best, "satisfactory." What she never understood was that before a child can work independently, work well with others, or listen attentively and with understanding, he must be immersed in the culture, and the catch-22 of this is that you can't approach the culture until you have the language—or vice versa. She didn't see my fragile connection to her world.
Of course, none of this explains my need to write.
3. Meet Your New Words
In my teens I tried my hand at a journal again. Fifteen years and many volumes later, I took each page and tore it up. It became obvious that personal observations of my environment lacked something crucial. I admire journalists and their intimate relationship with facts. I love the reporting of Calvin Trillin and Joan Didion. Their writing is very poetic, but this doesn't mean that poetry is journalism. In The Triggering Town, Richard Hugo has some memorable advice for poets concerned about an audience, about what the reader will or will not understand: ". . . give up all worry about communication. If you want to communicate, use the telephone."
Eventually, I turned my back on description and gave in to my true obsessions: subtext and metalanguage—the foundation and roof of our house of words.
It began with a single word in fourth grade. For the last thirty-some years, I've told people that I cracked the wall of the American language with "mountain," which appeared on a spelling test. But one has to be careful with memory: it has a memory of its own.
 The other day, however, memeory manifested itself when I found my spelling workbook from fourth grade. The first fourteen lessons are blank except for some doodling and words I wrote later on. The first in a series of completed lessons is the one beginning with the word "mountain." In my head, with my five Spanish vowel sounds, I said: "moh-oon-tah-een."
I was fascinated, frankly, and continue to be fascinated by what a single syllable can do. Or undo. "Mountain," I said out loud with my heavy accent. "Dick and Fred live near a mountain," I read in Unit 15 of Success in Spelling—Grade 4. And the first clear note broke through the cacophony. My second language had become my primary language. As abruptly as all the other language-related epiphanies I would experience between January and June of 1967. As abruptly as understanding my teacher, or having that morning conversation with a classmate as we walked into school.
4. Write the missing words in this story:
I suppose I've always been afraid of the literal. Not because it clears things up, but because it __________ them. In Climbing Back more than in any other book, because I've consciously used a character as a device to distance myself from myself, language becomes more _________, especially when everything seems to point in the direction of logic and the predictable. I originally wanted to call it Climbing _________, but it didn't have the weight of "back." Maybe it's no longer an obsession, this collection of sounds, these contrasts between the first language and the primary (second) language; maybe I'm a little closer to the center, where words don't feel the need to be melodramatic or _________. I have a whole poem composed of nothing but _________ to a group of spontaneous and random _________ that I eventually deleted, leaving only the _________ to fend for themselves.
5. Learn about Your Words
Because I learned them the way a house learns to live with a second coat of paint, all American words seemed abstract. Even "mountain." In my first language, now reserved for family conversations, a mountain was a thing to be scaled, a mountain was laced with memories of field trips with the teacher of a one-room school in Spain, filled with images of trips across Cuba. In my new language, sound was meaning. Abstract things are not functional; the new language made everything possible because nothing was limited by a purpose. I discovered a liberating yet terrifying flexibility.
There's a serious difference between learning words and learning about words. A child, in order to speak for the first time, learns words. A child starting tabula rasa with a second language learns about the various components that make him say things—as though his tongue were being operated by remote control, like a toy that keeps running into objects, bouncing away from them, coming back again: it takes time for the tongue to learn how to behave in its new landscape.
Add to this the natural evolution of language itself. In Future Shock, Alvin Toffler speaks of "the semi-literate Shakespeare." Were the Bard "suddenly to materialize in London or New York today, he would be able to understand, on the average, only five out of every nine words in our vocabulary." The idea of Shakespeare out of his element was suggested by lexicographer Stuart Berg Flexner, senior editor of the Random House Dictionary of the English Language. Some time has passed since Flexner made his calculations and Toffler picked up on them; one wonders how Shakespeare would fair in our twenty-first-century culture of sound bites.
I think of the time I went back to Spain and spent nearly a year there, with a brief trip to Portugal and another one to France. In spite of letters and phone calls and radio with American music and short wave programs from home and the International Herald Tribune and television newscasts, I missed quite a bit. Nuances. Songs that were only popular in the States. Jokes the rest of the world, even in translation, would not have understood. Jokes I will never understand because distance means a shift in context and I will never be able to reconstruct what I didn't live. I left the States in the spring of 1982. Came back in 1983. It may sound trivial, but Valley talk sounded foreign to me. I missed Frank Zappa's song "Valley Girl," featuring his daughter, Moon Unit. So I missed the peak of a jargon that, by the time I returned, was almost non-existent. But the gap wasn't limited to pop culture. I missed many books.
I missed news items that were relevant to me but not to Europeans. So I came home to a place that seemed like someone else's country.
The rift between the original language and the adopted language is much more severe than that. For a child who is still finding his way through the first language, the experience is overwhelming. For an adult looking back, it may also have a nearly paralyzing effect. Some days I almost walk in my parents' shoes, imagining how I'd feel if I were to wake tomorrow in a country that doesn't speak my languages. I would probably feel loss and all that comes with loss. Irrevocable loss. The sense of something torn from the core of my life. I didn't feel that in 1965, arriving in Madrid; I didn't feel it for long when I moved to Glendale a year later. To a child, place is not a fixed thing; maybe the past isn't time in the sense it's understood and experienced by an adult: there's not enough history to understand what one is leaving behind. I felt sadness leaving Cuba in 1965, but for a nine-year-old, sadness is fleeting, easy to understand, even easier to mend.
I had no idea that by picking up a new language and examining it and calling it my own, I would be adopting a culture I would never completely understand; or that I would be losing fragments of a culture I had not yet grasped. Then again, I didn't know then—and wouldn't know for a very long time—that there's a richness in loss, a toughening of one's character, a sharpening of one's sense of defiance. A gnawing feeling that the only thing one has lost is loss itself.
I read "mountain." I said the word. And I began to climb.
6. Use Your Words
The Prodigal Son deconstructs the origami language
that informs the syntax of his limbs. Beginning with the enormous, delicate wingspan—long, webbed digits fanning out majestically from his spine like a brittle cape. It is this version of himself that troubles him most deeply. It is this freedom that weighs him down, this hell-bent mythlike flightless self. Fortunately, this is his paper self, which folds like a row of lawn chairs at the end of summer, like summer itself under an onslaught of elms and sycamores. Each moment is carefully packed and put away and in each move at least one box is forgotten, but the future he leaves behind has nothing to do with the days that await him. The roads are lined with other creatures trying to sort themselves out—endangered on one side, extinct on the other; distaff on the left, spindle on the right. It makes the ride seem a little less hopeless. A tire blows out and the Falcon skids, stopping finally in the middle—exactly in the middle—of the road. He steps out to take a look at the flat, to see what he does not believe, and to discover in the process that there is symmetry even in an accident. He steps back, looks down and sees a nearly ordinary man looking up through the wing motif of the hubcap.
The Prodigal Son, for whom summer is a verb
in the off-season, accidentally comes to grips with the largely incoherent letter of resignation signed by so many of his contemporaries. The names gather and sweep across the bottom of the page like a flock of small birds groomed by the thermal they ride. How can he question the signatures' authenticity when they are the only legible words in the letter? The birds are determined in their formation—a battalion charging with purpose; the impetus of a relentless world reaching into its own axis like Adam into the recesses of his imperfect rib cage, the maneuver performed for its own sake though from other worlds other Adams are most likely watching and taking notes and feeling for gaps between their own unfinished ribs which they read as their gods' ultimate disclaimer: perfection is attainable but unnecessary. There is often a single leaf—half green, half decomposed, and no sign of transition between one state and the other—left behind as proof or token. It is far more reliable than a feather, more likely to point to the arc of events, the sequence, whatever they call it nowadays, whatever leads birds out of their eggs and into the randomness that precedes the communal geometry of the flock, its skywriting abilities, the sky itself.
The Prodigal Son, accompanied by the ideogram
for instead, attends the performance of a Cantonese opera. If there is no such symbol, he carves one in his arm. If the knife is blunt or the skin unyielding, he goes alone. If there is no opera, he sings to himself though the song of the goldfinch nesting in his one good lung is only a melodious cough. In the opera, a magician makes a fist and covers it with a scarf he has been waving very slowly. He lifts the scarf and produces a hypothesis. The vanished fist, still attached—hypothetically—to the magician's arm, will only return to the song of a goldfinch. The director insists on using a real bird. It dies just before making its entrance. The magician, oblivious to this, waves the scarf again. His disembodied fist materializes, clutching some feathers, in a birdcage carried by a peasant in another opera.
The Prodigal Son as understudy
The pomegranate bites back. More than anthropomorphism, this is a ludicrous interpretation of what is commonly known as passive resistance. He lives in the attic and fasts before each performance though his part, for which he has yet to be called, is anything but crucial. He argues, nonetheless, that the play is driven by background tension and without so-called minor characters the whole thing might as well take place backstage. The pomegranate is invisible. It is difficult to tell our teachers from the agents of misinformation. This is Beethoven's "Fleur-de-lis," someone says, pulling the record carelessly from the sleeve and making a story to support the title, something about Ludwig and the French Foreign Legion. It is only by some slip of the tongue, years later, that he begins to say "Für Elise," and years after that realizes he has accidentally made a small correction with unfathomable repercussions. One must make adjustments. Leap years come to mind—every calendar at the mercy of February, the pendulums of Greenwich plotting a silent protest; one thinks of floodgates along the canal, their movements synchronized to keep the ocean on one side of the isthmus from spilling into the sea on the other side. He knows the drought and the law, keeps to himself during the state of emergency though he knows the bark of authority is only that; and there is little anyone can do to stop him should he decide to have company, cook indoors. They lift the ban as if it were a bandage and it rains pomegranates. He is secretly aware that the unfinished century is far from over.
The Prodigal Son locates the epicenter
It's always better to forget. When the voice says coordinates he doesn't know if the news is about fashion or warfare, he's not even sure that it's news; it could be interference, unclaimed freight, the last word of an ecumenical hermit, a game of hopscotch without numbers, his hand, his other hand clutching dice in his pocket. There must be something palpable that separates incidental from accidental; otherwise, the suicide is mistakenly filed under wrongful death and life goes on as if this were the curtain, this the proscenium, this the cue to burst into the scene with an unintentional soliloquy.
The Prodigal Son: Temporary trains
Some transgressions are not forgivable. If that's not the case, our stay here is a horrible mistake. An inconsistency must've tipped them off at passport control—a tiny mole, a secret history of what they used to call incidents. The delegation arrives on schedule, but the interpreters have been delayed, reportedly detained for failing to carry their share of contraband. The word on the street is that they're being charged with numerous counts of attempting to obstruct a literal translation. A reasonable man may very well throw up his hands long before the skirmish escalates. The danger is that the hands often end up in the face of reason, right up against the eyes. One assumes. One starts to depend on assumptions. Here's the picture. This is how he looks when he's not looking.
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