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