Entiendo, pero no entiendo. Amo y, no amo.

You may remember that my last piece was written for the Soaring Twenties Social Club (STSC) Symposium. [The STSC is a diverse, online club consisting of writers, philosophers, filmmakers, musicians, artists, etc. Each month STSC members create something around a set theme. The theme for the upcoming June issue is “Romance.”]  But then I remembered a subtle challenge from a club member about writing Romance with as little tie to the body or sex as possible, and it occurred to me that I have been in a non-embodied romance for years now. And while there are references to the body and sensuality, it is as close as I can get to sexless ha! If you’re into enlightened, self-aware artistry, then check out Clint’s work at

Clintavo

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Between an eruption of bookshelves in a small Montana town, I found a thin blue book of poetry by Luis Alberto Urrea. Time and travel-anxiety slowed down between ridges of rock and word. While the bulk of the book was in English, many of the poems were in Spanish. I tried to skirt the arete of a tongue I did not know, and tucked the words under my lingual muscle, waiting to learn.

Years later, between our 2^nd and 3^rd date, I sent Urrea’s poem that most enticed me to Juan and asked him to translate. Se llama, “Sombra.”

Mi cara
en la orilla
de tu pelvis

Yo 
hincado
a tus pies:
supplicanta
alabando

a tu olor
de mar, mariposa, 
margarita

Un minuto, no mas

Tú ahora
tan delgada en mi memoria
como estas teleranas 
de tinta

Juan wrote back with his translation:

My face
at the edge 
of your pelvis

I am 
kneeling
at your feet:
supplicantly 
praising

at your scent
of the ocean, butterfly,
margarita

One minute, no more

You, now
so thin in my memory 
what of your cobwebs
of ink

He said the word “orilla” could be “shore” as well as “edge,” and that’s the anti-science of translating because unless I wrote to Urrea and asked his intention, we can only go with what we know. Someone else attempted to translate the poem for me years before, but what was apparently “edge” or “shore,” she translated as “ear.” And I believed her, because in a way, the origami folds of our vulvas do resemble the cartilage contortions of the ear. Plus, how many secrets have lovers told to our nethers, as we basked in the alphabet of their sharing?

Juan ended his translation by commenting on what a sensual poem it was.

Juan was sensual.

He was kindling.

Waiting for fire.

Slow toasting your coldness.

Not long into our relationship, that rooted into my deepest friendship, I wanted to learn his first tongue as a way to learn him. Even for me, even up until the end, Juan was difficult to fully grasp. A soul untethered and alone. My truest friend.

I wanted to learn the language his grandmother spoke to him between the pecan trees in Mexico. I wanted to devour the language, the way we want to devour a person when they are our. . . .focus, our attention, our passion. So I dove in headfirst, leaving my body behind. Attempting to learn full sentences on the page, rather than learning the words by mouth. I complained about my trudging pace of language training one night to Juan, and he laughed, his eyes sliding quickly into happiness, and instructed “You need to learn like a baby. Babies don’t start with sentences, they point and name.”

He was right.

He was usually right.

He was so often right that he had to practice how to cope with being wrong.

And so I started pointing and naming. I began with food and the body, because of course, we start with our obsessions.

La garganta

El pecho

Chilaquiles

La espalda

La cara

Las piernas

El estómago

As my vocabulary swelled and I began to link words together into chemical chains of understanding, Juan struck a deal with the wait staff at a few of our regular Mexican food haunts. They couldn’t take my order unless I ordered in Spanish; it didn’t have to be perfect, but it couldn’t be in English.

Juan was the abstract feeling of joy and acceptance. He’d smile naturally at strangers, whereas – at most – I provide a head nod. When I do try and smile for politeness to those I don’t know, it’s unnatural, and I can feel my smile awkwardly close around my teeth, my rotten apple face attempting to juice itself of feeling. My unforced smile tho is wide and full of gums, as if I’m trying to seduce a periodontist. All this to say, if Juan requested something of a stranger, they very often eagerly said “Si!”

Quiero tacos de pescado con tortillas de maize, y frijoles, por favor. Gracias.

When Juan died, I quit a lot. And tried to quit more. But Spanish was the first thing I quit.

When Juan was alive, he kept me from quitting, if I was trying to quit what was good for me.

He pushed me.

Challenged me.

Without him, it was easy to give up.

I abandoned the language because he was the only one I wanted to give my foreign words to. Without him, Spanish was a language of unbearable loneliness. An exercise in speaking to someone no longer there. Hearing your own voice ring out without an echo is an audible memento mori.

Fuck the Sol. Ditch the Cielo. I was done with the Tierra of it all. So I snuggled back into my first language of hard As and unrolled Rs.

Years passed without Spanish passing my lips until two years ago when I became a student in a remote immersion class that was held once a week with a teacher in Cuernavaca, the land of eternal spring – the eternality of just born and not yet hot.

Jim’s sister Peggy is married to a gal from Mexico, so Peggy and I were going to take Spanish classes together. But where she wanted to go the academic route of textbooks and grades, I wanted to soak myself in Spanish, so I ended up in remote immersion and she ended up in the classroom. Unfortunately, her teacher quit a few classes in, so Peggy is still in the mouth of the Angles.

Learning a new language fired my synapses, I could almost feel the pop and fizz of connections being made, strengthening the scaffold of my meaty brain. And since the language was Spanish, it brought Juan back to me, and the first phrase I ever learned from him; the phrase he’d calmly pronounce repeatedly while attempting to get off the phone with his mother; Se cuidan.

You all take care.

Take care all of you.

Immersing myself in new words for those first several months was fresh and easy infatuation. It was the excitement of unraveling someone or something new to you. No difficulties had yet arisen as I was on the forever shore of romance where stormy seas are miles away. But the deeper you wade into language or, the deeper you lean into a person, the stickier the experience becomes. Suddenly my present tense was disrupted by the baggage of the past and fucked by the future. Less romance and more effort. Infinite conjugations and multiple meanings left me feeling suddenly closed off from the romantic argot of secret entrances to architecture that only kids and hobos know.

Frustration was setting in and eroding my thrilling pinnacle into a flat plateau.

I quit my classes the day my mom was diagnosed with cancer. And while I’ve tried to study on my own, my exercises have gotten away from me, leaving my memory as flaccid as a drunk tongue. But the desire is still there. It is in the aortic shiver I feel when I effortlessly translate Spanish signs at the hospital or City Hall. But the language is fading.

Away.

Pronunciations tumble clunky from my lips like the cobble that careens from a landslide in a dream.

I am forgetting how to conjugate everything but the moment of ahora y aqi.

The evaporation of the Spanish language, the struggle of tenses and time, it is all too familiar to the losing that came after the loss of Juan.

Over five years have passed and I’m forgetting Juan’s face like I’ve forgotten the word for rain.

I’m forgetting his touch the way I’ve forgotten how to conjugate cuidar.

Language and love take practice, and I’ve quit both too many times.

I need to go back to the romance of Spanish. The most spoken of all the Romantic languages. I’m as ignorant as I am learned, and as dumb as I am educated, as I did not know that a Romance language is simply the expression of the Roman throat. I thought the term Romance Language was a reference to the languages of love and fire and passion, the languages of velvet letters and phrases of vibration.

Before my memory is as diaphanous as spider silk, I must begin my lingual assignation again.

I’m two phones past Juan’s death, so every once in a while I gather the wiring harness of old phones and plug them in to remind myself of our nightly ritual of “Buenas noches,” that morphed later into “Buenas noches, te quiero.” Not a night went by for over a 2-year stretch that we didn’t send a goodnight text in Spanish. The ritual of attention we gave each other, I now need to turn to being bilingual.