No Quiero Quejas

"No quiero quejas," he says.  

I know instinctively that this is some sort of smack down, maybe because the word "no" is in it.  Maybe it's his tone, stern and clear.  I sit in a row in a desk, probably wearing an Ocean Pacific T-shirt, even though this is central Illinois.  It's hot, always hot and humid by mid April, and I'm probably sweating in my Levi's.  He passes out the quizzes, freshly rolled off the "ditto" machine, and shortly that iconic blue smell washes down the row of desks.

The only Spanish class I ever took was at US Grant Middle School.  Like French the semester before, it was mandatory.  I remember thinking that French was way cooler, but we all had to take Spanish with Sr. Martinez.  Sr. Martinez was Cubano -- and I hope he still is.  (All teachers look ancient when you're in eighth grade.)  He wore guayaberas and punctuated his "T" sounds with pursed lips and bared teeth.  He had shaky jowls,  especially when he played the bongos -- as promised all semester -- on the last day of class.  

I know he talked about Cuba, but I don't remember any details.  For one, I wonder how he ended up in the Land of Lincoln.  I don't know what he thought of Castro, or the Bay of Pigs, or the Mariel Boat Lift, which would have occurred just three years before.

I do remember three things:  puedo botar el papel, puedo afilar mi lapiz (which we sung to the tune of the Mexican hat dance), and no quiero quejas.  It fascinates me what scraps of language bounce around in my head, sometimes for decades.  "No quiero quejas!"

We joke that it was our third date when Kerry and I moved to Central America for most of a year, and that's pretty close to the truth.  We landed in Heredia, Costa Rica to start, and after a week or two, Kerry told me unequivocally that she could not be the only person I talked to.  To my horror, she said I was driving her crazy.  

Actually, K has informed me that, as a matter of fact, I am the one who said that.  I declared that she could not be the only person I talked to.  (Memory is malleable, untrustworthy.  Makes the whole thing suspect, but we keep at it anyway.)  I believe her; it would be like me to be frustrated by dependence.  Now that I think about it, yeah, I guess I would have said that.  Sometimes I drive myself crazy.

However it happened, I hit the library with my sister's Spanish I textbook in the mornings, and hung around cafes and markets in the afternoons, listening and eventually venturing into the murky area of oral expression in a new idiom.  The first lesson is that nothing translates exactly.  Forget exactness altogether; the whole process is littered with ambiguity and nuance.  Even the tenses don't translate; time, especially, is relative to place.

Fast-forward eighteen years: we find ourselves in South America, again for most of a year, but this time with two children (5 and 7).  Our children go to school here, in large part because we want them to learn Spanish.  Now Spanish is cool.  I myself have been known to wear guayaberas and play congas.  Now we see the value in being a polyglot, multi-lingual, moving past the native tongue.  The only native English speakers in their respective institutions, it has not been easy for the kids.  

But they get it.  They know instinctively that their survival depends on communication.  In the black-and-white world of children, words carry even more weight.  Progress is slow, impossible to see when you're up too close, at a day or a a week.  It took six months for us to see them turn the corner.  Yesterday, Kerry sent our blond-haired blue-eyed son into a toy store.  If he wanted something, he was going to have to ask.  And he did, much to the delight of the lady running the store.  He didn't know the name of the toy, but he knew how to explain where it was and to ask its value.

"We don't get many American boys in here who speak Spanish," she said (in Spanish), lavishing him with praise.  These are proud moments for us as parents, where this endeavor seems worth it.  They still don't speak much Spanish when we're around, but when they play with the neighbors, that's all it is in its emphatic yelling and exuberant Spanglish chaos. 

A couple of weeks ago, fed up again with limits, I took my first real Spanish class since eighth grade.   Professor Juan began to fill in some of the blanks in my serviceable but limited street Spanish.  I am not sure why, even as one who teaches grammar, it took me so long to come around to this angle of learning.  Things have begun to resolve even more, become sharper.  A whole lot of "I get it now."

One of my assignments was to translate an essay I'd written in English, into Spanish.  And I'd come to the verb, "quejar."  Suddenly I heard Sr. Martinez: "No quiero quejas."  I'd always heard "chaos," so phonetically close to quejas, but it turns out that a queja is a complaint.  "I don't want any complaints."  More implicitly, "no whining, you spoiled, naive, entitled little weasels."  I get it, Mr. Martinez -- now I get it.

I love the click of a word when it comes freshly into your personal lexicon.  A modismo is a spanish idiom or particular turn-of-phrase.  I keep my eye open for these windows into meaning, views into a culture.  Darse cuenta de is a great one.  Meaning to realize [something], it's more literally, "I got the bill (cuenta or count)" -- "the check came due, and I picked it up"   For me, the check for Sr. Martinez' words came due, fully thirty years later.

Things novel and poetic stand out in my mind.  The more you wade into language, the more you see things standing in for others, the metaphors.  (I keep close to me John Ciardi's words: The root meaning of every word is either onomatopoeia or metaphor.) Popcorn is palomitos, or little doves.  Grasshoppers are saltamontes or jump-mountains (or is it mountains of jumps?).  A speed bump is a rompe velocidad or speed-breaks.  Possibilities are infinite.

Down here, "To miss" is extrañar, to be estranged.  Te extraño, I miss you.  Elsewhere, it's echo de menos, or "I cast out for less" or "I grasp for what's gone."  There's no way to translate it exactly, but the phrase emanates nostalgia.  Really, once you get to know them, all words do.