My Two Voices

Were I writing this essay in Spanish, it would be a story of homecoming. But an unusual one. For one thing, you can’t return to a place you’ve never left. For another, Spanish is my mother tongue, but it’s not my only home. I have two homes: the one I was born into and the one I was borne to. English is the home I was borne to. As in the classical arts of memory, I think of the two languages as occupying adjoining rooms connected by a door. Normally I spend more time in the English room, but when I’ve been there for a long while, I get restless. I open the door, close it behind me, and settle into the other room. If I stay there too long, I get restless again. In conversation, the door sometimes stays open and then I happily bounce back and forth between rooms, but when I’m writing, it takes days, sometimes weeks, to adjust to a move. With time, I’ve learned to take my time. Don’t rush it, I tell myself. I walk in, look around, breathe the air, take in the atmosphere. Sooner or later the room, whichever one I’m in, is home again.

The furnishings of the rooms are words and voices, some of them similar to one another, others as different as a photograph and a foot stool. I haven’t inventoried them, though I suppose there is roughly the same number on each side of the door. When I’m in the English room, as I am now, what goes on in the other one is not mysterious to me. Several generations of people I have known inhabited the Spanish room; their words and voices still hang in the air. (In Spanish, words are called voces, and vowels are vocales.) When I step in, I’m like Brydon going back to the home of his childhood in “The Jolly Corner.” As in James’s story, dim ghosts populate the place, but they accompany rather than menace. In their presence a line by the Cuban poet Dulce María Loynaz occurs to me: “una ausencia cargada de regresos” (“an absence filled with returnings”). The Spanish room is made of, and made for, such returnings.

The English room has a different atmosphere. Its voces are fresher, livelier. It has the feel of an aviary rather than a nest. Though its occupants are no less familiar to me, they are not revenants but newcomers. If Spanish is the tongue I inherited from my forebears, English is the one I share with my American family: my wife, my children and step-children. From this it follows that the rooms have different nationalities. The Spanish room houses my own private Cuba; the English room opens out onto my life as an American.

In formal contexts like writing and teaching I keep the door between habitations closed, but sometimes it cracks open, inadvertently. The last sentence is an example. “Habitations” is a perfectly good word, but when I wrote it I was thinking of habitación, the common Spanish noun for a room. Here the stealth hispanicism doesn’t spoil anything. At other times, however, the door opens wide and the noise coming from one room muffles the voices in the other. On either side of the door, barbarism lurks. And since the door doesn’t have a lock, making sure it’s closed requires constant vigilance. Otherwise cacophony ensues. But even then the dissonance can generate exhilarating counterpoints: “You say tomato, I say tu madre.”

The words and voices coming from each room compose something very much like music. The melodies differ, however, and not only because of the sound palettes of the languages. Since Spanish and English are not-so-distant cousins, their deep structure is similar. On the surface, however, there are some striking differences. At the end of the nineteenth century there was a vogue in the United States of children’s books written with monosyllabic words—what is called, incongruously enough, antisesquipedalianism. No children’s book in Spanish, however elementary, could ever be written with this stricture, since monosyllables are largely limited to pronouns and articles. For someone used to Spanish, the concision of English, which allows it to convey information more efficiently than other European languages (the so-called “speech information rate”), is a constant source of wonder. The title in Spanish of Star Wars: La guerra de las galaxias; of Die Hard: La jungla de cristal. Doesn’t have quite the same oomph, does it? The suddenness of a string of monosyllables—a bolt from the blue—is unavailable in Spanish, which has no adequate translation for this idiom. In a language where a bolt from the blue is called a relámpago, and where the only way to be blunt is to be directo, concision is hard to achieve in verse, prose, titles or twitter-talk. Even LOL expands to JAJAJA.

A language doesn’t determine what we think, but it does mold how we think. Take the distinction between Hence and Therefore: Hence reaches back, Therefore points forward. Spanish is a language of Hences rather than Therefores. Conjunctions like “De aquí,” which translates “Hence,” and “De allí,” which translates “Thence,” are at least as common as “Por lo tanto,” which translates “Therefore.” When you say “De allí,” literally “from there” (also the primitive meaning of “thence”), you are pointing back to move ahead. When you say “Por lo tanto,” the causative event has already been left behind. I write: “Nací en Cuba pero me crié en EEUU. De aquí que tenga dos lenguas.” I translate: “I was born in Cuba but I was made in the USA. Hence, I have two tongues.” It would be more natural to say, “Therefore I have two tongues,” but then I’m making the train of thought, which the “Hence” had put in reverse momentarily, lunge forward. The meaning remains the same, but the conceptual emphasis, the shape of thought, changes. Spanish is backloaded, as it were, for it relies on the past as the starting point to an extent that English does not.

I acknowledge that this view may well be idiosyncratic, a matter of perception rather than fact. Perhaps I regard Spanish in this way because it’s my heritage tongue, the language of my past and my family’s past. Inside the Spanish room, surrounded by ancestral voces, I can’t help looking back. (Inside the English room, I look out and sometimes forward.) Whether boon or burden, the type of bilingualism that I’m discussing is deeply, often perplexingly, personal. My two rooms have the same dimensions, the same number of windows, comparable furnishings; yet when I go from one to the other, I change climate, time zone, the hour of the day. In the English room, sunlight pours through bare windows; in the Spanish room, soft light filters in through horizontal blinds. When it’s morning in America, in Cuba it’s afternoon.

For exiles, the mother tongue is a possession that bespeaks loss. When I’m in the Spanish room the voice I hear most distinctly is my father’s, who left Cuba when he was forty years old, spent the next forty in Miami waiting to return, and never did. I learned of his passing from a cousin to whom I am close. This happened twenty years ago, and to this day when I’m in the Spanish room, I hear his voice calling me. It’s no surprise, then, that in the melodies of the Spanish room, blue notes and minor keys prevail. I arrive in Miami and I put on a Cuban talk-radio station and I listen to the same conversations I’ve listened to countless times. Whatever the meaning of the words, all I hear is the pain. If English swings, Spanish winces.

Of course, there is nothing “objective” about this. Writing in English, a conjugal and filial tongue, I’m talking to people a few feet away. Writing in Spanish, a fatherly mother tongue, I’m engaged in a sermo absentis, a conversation with invisible interlocutors. I haven’t written very much in Spanish about the way I live now: this life transpires in English. But I've written a fair amount in Spanish about the absence of Spanish in the way I live now.

In the early 1960s there was a man in Miami who made a living publishing booklets with Cuban idioms, proverbs, customs, legends. The title of one summarizes the contents of all: Catauro de folklore cubano. A “catauro” is a Cuban term for a basket made of palm fronds. It also appears in the title of the authoritative dictionary of Cubanisms, Fernando Ortiz’s Un catauro de cubanismos. When I step into the Spanish room, I access my own catauro. I sift through its treasures, come upon a word or idiom that I haven’t heard in years, and make Cuban voces come alive in my voice.

I didn’t move with my family to the United States until I was on the cusp of adolescence, and yet I don’t remember a time before I knew English. I know there was such a time, probably before I was seven or eight years old, but I have no recollection of it. By the time we left Cuba, I had been studying English for several years, both at home and in school. Since my mother was born in Newport News, where my grandfather was the Cuban consul, and lived there for part of her childhood, she liked to address my siblings and me in English. Beginning when I was in fourth grade, my mother’s older sister would drop by our house once a week to give me English lessons. I didn’t enjoy them, but I submitted. And since we went to the movies often, almost every week I’d spend several hours enveloped by the sounds of English, which sometimes turned out to be nothing more than macaronic Spanish, as in Doris Day’s “Que sera, sera” from The Man Who Knew Too Much.

Once in Miami we lived among other Cubans, many of whom I knew from Cuba. School was in English, and that was different. But I never had the experience of walking into a classroom where the teacher and the students spoke a language I didn’t understand. They were foreign, but their language was not. It seemed natural that Mrs. Myers, my sixth-grade teacher, spoke in English, and just as natural that I answered her in kind. In her class I learned to diagram sentences, a teaching tool that, as I learned much later, was unique to America. I picked it up quickly and enjoyed it immensely. However complex, English sentences were like jigsaw puzzles, with every part fitting into its proper slot. I can still see myself tracing the horizontal underline that spanned the main components of a sentence, the vertical bars that separated subject, verb and direct object, the diagonals for the adjectives and adverbs, the shelves (that’s what she called them) that lodged the prepositional phrases. By the time I was through, the pattern of lines looked like the tile-sculptures made by my favorite game of dominoes. Before I began diagramming, English was ambient sound. But taking apart sentences allowed me to get close to English in a way I had not done before. We became intimates.

And so the transition from Spanish to English, in school and elsewhere, was stress-free. Not so, of course, with other entailments of exile, which were and continue to be, even after sixty years, fraught. Some years later, when I was attending a community college, I was puzzled when on my first assignment in a creative writing class the instructor wrote that although he didn’t like my story, “at least your English is good.” It had never occurred to me that it wouldn’t be. I suspect that Mr. Genaro was misled by hearing me speak with a Cuban accent, but if there is any correlation between elocution and written performance, it is not obvious. A few years later I spent two semesters teaching English composition at the University of Miami. I was the only Cuban among the TAs. I don’t know what my students thought of this instructor who “chaired” when he tried to share, and who “yoked” when he meant to joke, but it never crossed my mind that I would not do the job competently. Correcting their essays, I was in my element, like being back in Mrs. Myers’ class.

As I progressed in my education, the language I began to feel uneasy about was Spanish. In graduate classes, if I was given a choice, I chose English as the language of my term papers. Even as I prepared myself to make a living as a professor of Spanish, which I have done for fifty years, I came to believe that I had one voice, and it expressed itself in English. Looking back, I realize that my difficulties with Spanish didn’t have to do with the language, but with its adhesions. I reacted against its sadness: Spanish was Cuba, Spanish was exile, Spanish was endless, fruitless talk of return. Spanish said to me: “not here.” English said to me: “here.” In the few poems that I wrote in “Spanglish,” one language was always trying to beat or beat up the other, to have the best and last word. Not entirely at home in either of my languages, I appropriated the term for bilinguals who did not command either of their languages: “nilingüe,” “no-lingual.”

In this internal war of words, which lasted for years, English had the upper hand. It laid siege to its neighbor and waited for surrender. But surrender did not come. As I grew older, the balance of forces began to change. When I turned fifty, I was about to switch jobs, my Cuban family had begun to pass away, and I had a summer without any projects. I decided it wasn’t too late to reach out and back to my mother tongue. Even if I had no recollection of it, my ears were originally tuned to the music of Spanish. I was coddled and lullabied in Spanish, taught to read and write in Spanish. That voice still sounded inside me, however faintly. I surrounded myself with Spanish-language books, the only ones I read that summer, and for several months wrote only in Spanish. It was a departure that felt like homecoming. The more I wrote, the more at home I felt. I have never written more easily, or with more ease. Every time I got lost inside one of the expansive periods of Spanish sentences, I relished the adventure. Somehow I always found my way out. The pleasure was lingual rather than merely linguistic. I found myself sounding out the words as I wrote them. I felt so comfortable in Spanish, so surprisingly at home in my home, that I wondered how I could have spent all those years in the other room.

Teaching in Spanish had never given me the same feeling. Putting or printing words on paper endows them with a solidity, a durability, that the spoken word—no sooner uttered than gone—does not possess. I’m not sure that technically my Spanish was any better at fifty than it had been at thirty or than it is now, but tongue ties have little to do with mastery, and everything to do with affects, which evolve over time. For aging bilinguals, the tendency to look to the past may express itself as a desire to reclaim their first language. At least, that’s what happened to me. Spanish tapped into segments of experience and registers of feeling without which I cannot explain myself. It was both a turning back and a turning in. The word I want to use is another of those Spanish tapeworms: ensimismamiento, which my Spanish-English dictionary translates, inadequately, as “self-absorption.” I think of ensimismamiento as settling, sedimentation, foundation-repair. Not self-absorption but self-restoration.

By transforming my study into a Spanish room, I shattered the harmony between inside and outside. Separated from the rest of my house as well as from the leafy Southern neighborhood where I live, my jolly corner became an inland island. An island that looked out on a backyard of oaks and pines and squirrels and the occasional deer. Except that the oaks had turned into robles, the pines into pinos, the squirrels into ardillas, and the occasional deer into un venado de vez en cuando. Day after day, I opened the catauro and made sentences. I discovered that I was not, as I had liked to say, a Cuban who writes in English, but that I had a writerly voice in Spanish as well. I’m not suggesting that what I wrote was going to give García Márquez a run for his money, but that I was able to write in Spanish without the sensation that I could lose my footing at any time. When I emerged, late in the afternoon, Spanish voces still rang in my ear. Finding myself in the kitchen or the living room was disconcerting. It was the feeling one has when, after sitting in a movie theater for several hours, one emerges into the light of day. You blink your eyes, look around, and after a few moments get your bearings.

The result of my voluntary confinement was a little book, a combination love song and act of contrition, about learning to write in Spanish again for the first time. Since then I’ve continued to write in Spanish. Not long ago, after completing a book of literary criticism in Spanish, it dawned on me that excluding several graduate-school term papers, it’s only when I write about Cuba or Cuban literature that I resort to my mother tongue. This should have been obvious, but somehow had never occurred to me. English is versatile, it adapts itself to whatever topic I’m discussing, including Cuba, but Spanish is summoned only by Cuba. Sometimes too much is made of the implication of language and nationality, but the link is there. It’s a cliché, but in the Spanish language I have a homeland that I don’t have to leave or lose.

A few years before her death, my mother said to me: “Gustavito, I don’t know why you say I’m Cuban. I’m not Cuban, I was born in Virginia.” Since she lived the first seven and the last fifty years of her life in the United States, she probably had sufficient reason to consider herself American. But she said this to me in Spanish. Unlike my father, who regarded English as a makeshift instrument that he used only when he had to, my mother had two voices. On my father’s lips, the words “los americanos” always carried a hint of disdain. But not on my mother’s, who was as much of an anglophile as my father was an island-lover. When she spoke in English, there was wistfulness in her voice, as if the language evoked a different and better life. I never asked her about it, but I believe that she regretted not staying in the U.S permanently. Leaving Virginia—not to return to Cuba, but to see it for the first time—had been tantamount to exile. My Spanish resembles my mother’s English. In a different room, the wistfulness abides. Even if I say so with my other tongue.