Chapter 18: Grace Under Pressure

We confess our plight in the face of the grueling DELE A2 exam to Pilar, a recent acquaintance in Madrid. She offers to help. It is August, the sacrosanct vacation time of Spaniards. It is the time of peace from her demanding job. It is the time of leisure with her delightful husband. Yet Pilar has selflessly offered to help. She says she will speak with us in the evenings by videoconference so that we, two women she barely knows, can have a fighting chance of passing the exam. We protest — we had no such hidden wish when we told her our troubles. She insists.

This is Spanish grace at its most generous and accommodating. Pilar is an elegant woman with crystalline diction, her vaguely aristocratic bearing leavened by her good nature and an enveloping laugh that swoops up and then cascades down. During our first call, I feel anything but elegant and feel like doing anything but laughing. A central paradox of learning a language as an “aware” adult, as opposed to a clueless teenager or formational child, hits me: it requires hyper-alertness, with all gears of the brain operational. It demands constant attention to what one hears, immediate absorption of what one sees, and an awareness of what one says with a readiness to self-correct — in real time. But to survive this almost unbearable kindness of Pilar, I am going to have to get over any sensitivity about looking foolish. Fortunately, I have some experience in this regard: years of arguing clients’ cases in court pretending not to be affected by judges’ skepticism. But language is personal and primordial — and therefore more difficult. And self-conscious worries about losing a friend I don’t actually have yet are not going to advance the cause when that person is trying to teach me something.

Me being me, I take this too much to heart. On our third videoconference, I cry.

It begins with my eyes misting slightly and proceeds to a still acceptable teary. But then my lips revolt and commence a quiver that threatens to convulse into an ugly, rictus-producing spectacle. I know this because I can see myself in the corner of the screen, under the words “Zoom Meeting.”

I can also see the look on Pilar’s face. This madrileña has too much class to look anything other than composed. She has too much grace to be anything other than kind. She went to high school in the U.S., and I wonder if she thinks Americans are too emotional.

What precipitated this unravelling was a simple practice exercise: describe a photo. We selected one from a magazine, and I started out confidently by describing a young couple walking on a street next to a large brick wall. But then I got hung up on trying to remember words no one really expects me to know at this stage, such as the difference between a lantern affixed to an outside wall and a free-standing lantern or street light. Soon, my speech was as labored as dragging a sledge through deep mud.

What really triggered my tears, though, was COVID fatigue. While we had nothing to complain about (we were healthy, had access to plenty of food, and could pay our rent) and much to celebrate (we were in a beautiful country with wonderful people like Pilar), my sense of isolation was now undeniable. I didn’t know when we could safely visit family and friends in New York in person again. I wondered when we could return to the familiar comfort of our apartment there, with its many memories and some of the cherished belongings we had left behind — practical items, such as cooking tools, and emotional items, such as photographs, Christmas ornaments, and meaningful books. We signed up for this grand adventure, but we hadn’t intended to axe the dock for firewood — just yet.

Kate rescues me and gets a little emotional too. She thanks Pilar yet again and explains how difficult it has been dealing with a new language in a new city under the conditions of a pandemic. In what I interpret as an able effort to regain our dignity, Kate suggests that, before our next videocall, she email Pilar some of our travel photos for us to describe in Spanish. Kate’s suggestion pleases me immensely. I think Pilar will be pleased too, as Kate approaches photography with the same attitude as every one of her other endeavors: do it right or stay home.

After bidding Pilar buenas tardes and returning from ZoomWorld to our living room, we discuss the gravity of the situation. We also discuss my key failing, specifically, why I haven’t yet internalized the adage that less is more. Kate reminds me that a perfectly suitable DELE A2 word is the noun “light”; there’s no need to get into lanterns and lampposts. Kindergarten or no kindergarten, at this point in my life, I should be illuminated enough to have realized this on my own.

Pilar has saved us from ourselves. That evening’s experience with her helps us to fully appreciate how much more we still have to learn before exam day — now only a month away. We resolve to hire a private tutor the next morning.

©2021 Kay Diaz

Chapter 17: Oui, Je Regrette Something

Though the summer’s Black Lives Matter protests and Biden’s rising numbers in the polls made us more optimistic about the situation back home, when the opportunity arose, we signed up for the Spanish government’s DELE A2 language proficiency exam required for citizenship. Kate was rightfully skeptical about being ready for the exam in September and thought we should wait until October. I, on the other hand, wanted to take the exam as soon as possible so that, if I failed, I could take a breather before cramming again to retake it in November. There was no debate, however, about taking the exam before November 3, Election Day in the U.S.

“We’re gonna pass,” I said.

“Why would you say that?” replied Kate. That she didn’t say, “What makes you so sure?” didn’t escape me; this was no invitation to be convinced.

“People are here from all over the world. They passed, and we don’t even have to learn a new alphabet,” I replied.

“People who have more common sense than you!” Kate shot back, adding, “You are either arrogant or delusional, and I’m not sure which is worse.”

But I didn’t feel arrogant or delusional. Embedded in my “we’re gonna pass” was a “we have to pass.” And it wasn’t even because of Trump. It didn’t stem from a feeling of superiority, either, though I’m sure memories of pulling off academic miracles by cramming were lodged in my brain somewhere. It wasn’t about my Spanish grandfather, though surely it would be nice to honor his labors. I was thinking of Lilia, our teacher in Mexico, a trilingual playwright, so smart and creative, and consistently encouraging us from afar. I was thinking of Josiel, a former colleague and irrepressible New Yorker of Dominican–Puerto Rican descent, who would pepper our conversations with just enough Spanish to keep me motivated to learn, and even coached me in saying a few public remarks in Spanish at a labor rights event. I had to pass the DELE A2 exam as a show of how much their kind tutelage had meant to me and to fully partake in their contagious enthusiasm for the expressiveness of the Spanish language.

So, against Kate’s better judgment, we signed up for the September exam — but, instead of relief, I felt instant regret. The goal we had talked about for more than a year was no longer a theoretical endeavor. The grains of sand had commenced their persistent slide through the neck of the hourglass at a time when we no longer had the structure of even an online school to mark our progress. We were on our own.

By now, however, the apartment was plastered with sheets of paper in Kate’s neat hand. Our bedroom has a massive armoire seven-and-a-half feet tall and the width of an entire wall. To all ten cabinet doors Kate had affixed a tableau of pronouns, grammar rules, and verb conjugations in a riot of colors in six-box grids by tense.

Some background about my wife: Kate has much to boast about, but doesn’t. Appreciate (or damn) her skill in the art of rhetoric, and she’ll say it is just the product of an unhappy childhood arguing with bad people, augmented by study at a Jesuit university, where she’d had a whole lot more to argue about with that religious order’s world-class debaters. Ask her how she got to be an accomplished classical guitarist, and she’ll say that it is just the product of years of arduous daily practice escaping an unhappy adolescence. Ask her how she got to be such a great cook and she’ll say it is just the product of having escaped unhappy lawyerdom by making it through a culinary school so demanding that only one-third of the students passed, followed by bone-wearying labor under toque-wearing French chefs whose patience was as thin as the blades of their knives. It was all just a matter of survival, she’ll say, for which she is grateful, she’ll add.

So I was a bit surprised when I heard Kate brag, I mean really brag — no humblebrag alloy — this past summer. It went like this: “I am an expert test taker.” Starting in elementary school, Kate was plied with workbooks and quizzes by teachers who didn’t know quite what to do with her. And with scientific precision, she advanced her test-taking skills in subsequent years.

I, on the other hand, have only been a champion test taker once in my life — when I was five years old. It propelled me from nursery school to first grade. The hidden tragedy was two-fold: one, I peaked way too soon; and two, I never did learn all I really needed to know in kindergarten — for which I now apologize to anyone to whom I have been rude these past 52 years.

As to why Kate found my confidence laughable, one of the highlights of my downward slide since age five did not bode well for the upcoming Spanish exam: I failed French in college.

To be sure, it was a bygone era of no grade inflation or helicopter parents. But still. Who does that? And worse, who does that who actually studied French in high school? (Middle school too, if we are going to be perfectly honest here.) And still worse, who does that who had a French college freshman roommate. Not just French ancestry, but FRENCH. The roommate who would, not four feet away in that crowded dorm room, speak French on the phone with her sister Laurence — Laurence! The roommate who only used graph paper for note-taking and whose ones looked a bit like sevens!

I went to the dean to complain about my failing grade. Almost 40 years later, I can remember her words about the French professor: “Oh him? He’s nuts.” But the grade stood. Somewhere I had missed the part where savviness in dealing with such characters is taught, or I was just a willfully stupid teenager. I retook the class (with a different professor) and got an “A.” But lest that be some feel-good lesson about not giving up, I never really learned how to speak French at a functioning level. And wasn’t not giving up the whole problem? Any sane, moderately intelligent person would have seen the writing on the wall (which obviously was not verb conjugations taped up in my dorm room) and dropped the class. Any good daughter would have followed her mother’s suggestion years prior to study Spanish because “it is much more practical in this day and age.” Somehow my mother had already surmised that I was not going to be spending my life among diplomats speaking French.

For almost 40 years my “F” in French has haunted and taunted me. Little gremlins hiss into my ear, “You failed French,” distracting me or putting a raincloud over my head at the most inopportune moments. They are always there. A new acquaintance casually mentions having studied abroad in Paris. Ordering in a French restaurant. Seeing Paris Match on a newsstand. Learning that a lover has a master’s in French. (No wonder that didn’t work out.)

Or when I traveled to Paris for the first time in 2014 and visited the Louvre. Mona Lisa’s smile wasn’t enigmatic to me, for as I returned her stare, I knew exactly what she was thinking: You failed French.

I should have plumbed the depths of this shame during years of therapy, but I was too ashamed to bring it up.

I decided to be a better student this time and scoured the website of the Cervantes Institute, downloading all of the requirements for the DELE A2 exam. A2 is not as simple as its designation implies (the second of six levels ranging from A1 to C2). The “curriculum” runs dozens of pages precisely laid out so that we know the difference between an A1 beginner and an A2 beginner. For example, under “notions existential,” A1s need to know how to say “to live,” whereas A2s need to know how to say “to be born” and “to die.”

Meanwhile, expert Kate scoured the rest of the internet for information about the exam. It is composed of four tests grouped into two pairs for purposes of grading. The first pair of tests measures reading comprehension (multiple choice) and the ability to write; the second measures listening comprehension (multiple choice) and the ability to converse. To pass the exam, one must achieve a score of at least 60 percent in each pair of tests combined, meaning that if one of the individual marks drags its mate down, we could fail even if our composite grade from adding all four test scores and dividing by four would exceed 60 percent. Our hearts sank when we learned that our strong suits, reading and writing, were paired. Even if we could get 100 percent on that half of the exam, it wouldn’t do us a bit of good if we couldn’t get 60 percent combined on the listening and conversing.

The pricey exam registration fees were non-refundable.

©2021 Kay Diaz

Chapter 16: Knowledge Gained and an Early Sense of Loss

From mid-April through late July, online Spanish classes with Irene were the organizing principle of our lives. And despite the COVID lockdown, our class materials and exercises were giving us valuable first-hand insights into Spanish culture and priorities. Years ago I’d read James Michener’s Iberia and wondered whether he was exaggerating in calling Spain “a place where picnics are a way of life.” What about all of those paseos and hikes to get to the picnics, from the Camino de Santiago to more secular journeys — is that really a thing? In more recent years, Kate and I had watched Chef José Andrés’s Made in Spain cooking shows, enjoyed sublime meals while traveling in Spain, and started collecting Spanish cookbooks, but do exceptional ingredients and skillful cooking really extend to the day-to-day? Yes, and yes.

In thirteen weeks of classes, we easily spent half the time on the vocabulary, verb constructions, and related grammar to gain proficiency in discussing where and how to do food shopping (“hacer la compra” OR “hacer las compras”); how to properly identify meats, poultry, fish, fruits, vegetables, and grains (and how to measure them); what to call kitchen appliances and tools; and how to describe the various cooking techniques. (in the familiar imperative). We also learned the words for the six (SIX!) meals or snacks a day in Spain AND the verbs that go along with “doing” them.

Because keeping the mind and body balanced is important, we learned how to interact with the shopkeepers and navigate the aisles in the “herbolarios” that are as ubiquitous on the streets of Madrid as banks and drugstores are in Manhattan. We also learned all of the variants of “to walk” — from going for a stroll, meandering in circles, going for a regularly-paced walk to going for a fast walk. We moved on to describing a variety of sports, “doing” yoga, and “maintaining” the various parts of one’s body. We learned how to describe hiking and the gear that goes with it, as well as how to describe scenes of the countryside and the perfect place for, yes, a picnic. We learned that “tienda de campaña” is not in fact a camping store but rather a tent. And our profesora, Irene, made it all fun.

Speaking for myself, however, “learned” is not entirely accurate. We were taught.

One of my many challenges was that I had not “overlearned” the basics, not even my ABCs and numbers. This meant that finding comfortable harbors in which to rest my brain, such as having an ample supply of second-nature word constructions, were few and far between. But I gamely tried my best to keep up in class, often cramming in basics during the day before that evening’s session. While I never wanted to slow the class down, I had an insatiable number of questions and often raised my voice in excitement. Kate suggested that I tape the words “keep voice down” and “hold that thought” to my computer monitor. I obliged, with limited success.

When I could help others, I was a little too pleased with myself. One day, the class was confounded by the reflexive verbs “sentirse,” which means to feel, and “sentarse,” which means to sit. The verbs are conjugated identically in the first-person singular and we were endlessly mixing them up. I volunteered that we could remember sentarse is “to sit” because the “arse” is right there. Teacher and classmates approved. I felt a surge of pride but glanced at myself on the Zoom screen to make sure I wasn’t showing it. Kate said I had had only limited success in that regard too.

My memory tricks turned solipsistic, juvenile, revelatory, or even mean. I remembered that “despertarse” is to wake up because I am desperate for coffee when I wake up. I remembered “bata” is a lab coat because 1970s Bata tennis shoes were white. I remembered “lata” is a can because of the abomination of Starbucks lattes in a can. To remember that “fondo” is bottom, I thought of peering into a fondue pot. To remember that “cartel” is a poster, I thought of a WANTED poster of Pablo Escobar. During a practice session, I told Kate that she could remember “acostarse” is to lie down because Bob Costas was lying down for each of his plastic surgeries. She just stared at me and said, “Next!”

One day, when our teacher Irene unexpectedly announced that she was leaving for a new job, we got teary-eyed. We were not ready to leave the nest. I was never a teacher’s pet (see next chapter), but Irene moved me to do something the next morning that was completely out of character. I woke up at 5 a.m. very alert — no despertarse coffee needed — and tiptoed out of the bedroom so as not to wake Kate. In the dark living room, on my phone’s memo app, I tapped out a lyric poem in Spanish for Irene. Although titled !Pregúntame! (Ask me!), a nod to Recuérdame, the theme song from the movie Coco, this was not an effort to roast or joke or lend obligatory tribute. My love for this teacher poured out of my heart onto the page without a drop of irony or splotch of snark. When I read it to Kate, she wept. She was as surprised at me as I was at myself. Spain was changing me.

But there would be many more tears to come — and soon.

©2021 Kay Diaz