Kaixo!! Hello!! This is one of the few words I know how to say in Basque, a language which coexists along with Castellano here, on the northeast coast of Spain. My host family speaks Basque/Euskara, Castellano/Spanish, and English, all during dinner, usually all talking over each other and/or singing.
In my last post, I made it seem like ‘Castellano’ is a common term for ‘Spanish’ here. It’s not. But, it’s a useful term, as Castellano is native to a specific region on the Iberian peninsula, just as Catalan is native to Catalunia. Also, the term ‘Castellano’ indicates that it’s slightly different from Latin American Spanish. With time, distance, and niche comes divergence, just like with Darwin’s finches.
This is all to say, there are some categorical reasons that saying Castellano is not the same as saying Spanish. Even so, I’m more comfortable with the term Spanish. Mostly because only the self-assured old-timers here say Castellano. For me, not a native speaker, it feels a bit archaic.
Today, like most (good) days, I went for a run. It was searing hot today and I waited until the shadows were long, about 7pm. It was the kind of dead, burning heat that made me think of icy blue swimming pools and cryogenic naps. However, a kindly neighbor reminded me not to complain, as it’s still spring. It will get much, much hotter.
Lucky for me, I’m an experienced enough runner that I can take some heat.
Water is too heavy to carry on short runs. It’s better to carry a clementine- juicy, and you can chuck the skin.
In fact, while running here, despite the heat, I have felt absolutely amazing, the kind of bodily pleasure that’s as rare as a good lunch at school. I’m sure this has a lot to do with my proximity to the Basque mountains. The running here is the best I’ve ever had, with the one exception of the Pacific Northwest in the United States, also a mountainous region. Compared to this, running in concrete LA is pure torture. You feel like such an ass weaving in between the desensitized, perfumed crowds, and the sidewalks are barely wide enough for a Chihuahua.
But the boardwalks and trails here are wide. I catch dense, wet smells here that I associate with three things: the UCLA campus before 9am at the height of summer; weed; and rotting vegetables.
Today, I was doing my regular 5k loop. Up to the statue of the Sagrada Corazón de Jesus, which overlooks the city and the beach, and then back down. I don’t know the elevation gain, but I promise you it isn’t anything impressive. I’ve seen pigeons waddle most of the way up.
Sidebar: I’ve been able to bond with a few neighbors about our mutual hatred of pigeons, aka el ratón de la tierra (the rat of the earth). It’s funny, because in school I learned that the word for dove in Spanish was la paloma. But here, la paloma is pigeon. But are doves and pigeons the same species? Not exactly. So the word la paloma has an information value that’s not universally true, but locally true, and mutually intelligible between bird-haters of different places.
Close sidebar. No, what’s most interesting about this story isn’t the setting, but the characters. I’m running, and despite the late hour it’s still hot. Later, I’ll jump in the ocean to cool off. You can bet that felt good! After sweating, ocean salt is strangely (too) delicious.
But, let’s rewind to the middle of the story, the good part. Midway up the mountain, a scruffy white figure crashed out of the bushes. It was a fellow Midwesterner… just kidding, it was a huge dog… this Mutt’s eyes were so bloodshot, he had either drank too much and not slept for several days, or (much more likely) he spent much of his time in the ocean, chasing fish and waves. If that were the case, his bloodshot eyes were a quasi-permanent fixture. He was so striking that I composed a spur-of-the- moment poem for him…
La campana me busca (The church bell seeks me out) un perro con ojos inyectados de sangre (a dog with bloodshot eyes) me muestra a tráves de la ciudad (shows me through the city) que se repican, se refresca (the bell pounds, the city refreshes itself)
For a few minutes, that dog kept me company. There wasn’t another person in sight… I said to him, Perrito, it’s just tú y yo (you and me)… it was nice to run with a dog again.
I have learned from lived experience that most people don’t leash their dogs here, unless they absolutely must. Even so, I’m almost positive that that dog was a stray dog, without human contacts. He was too large, scruffy, absentminded, and friendly. Like yours truly…
Mariví (the M. From the previous post, and the grandmother of my host family) taught me an idiom in Spanish: el bacalao está vendido. The fish is sold. I taught her, time flies.
I have been trying to make sense of my context: I’m here, in Spain: the eastward plane is landed: the fish is sold. And I feel like I’ve landed in a silken net of neighbors… every move I make is understood, and in turn affects, the compound eyes of the neighborhood, the women of the neighborhood. Poca a poca, bit by bit, I’m learning to conduct myself among them… but here, I am so foreign: only among strays and kids can I relax, tú y yo.
Learning bit by bit means that my goal is to acquire chunks of Spanish, not isolated words. That way, I speak without thinking. Each chunk carries an informational weight. In my native language, to speak without thinking would be a sign of thoughtlessness. But in a foreign language, it’s a sign of familiarity, of automatic thought… It reminds me of the difference between idiom, and idiomas…
An idiom, in English, is a pithy saying that’s packed with meaning, like you’re trying to convey the regrets of years through one sentence. And they’re often jokes.. Don’t count your eggs before they’ve hatched…
But las idiomas in Spanish means the languages. Polish, Afrikaans, Castellano and English are all idioms. It makes me wonder to the extent at which the English idiom and the Spanish las idiomas mean much the same thing… if language is a sediment of undivisible idioms. That is to say language is all contextual, acquired meanings. You can only approximate, or imitate, a speaker’s intent when translating… perhaps when I achive my goal of Spanish fluency, I will contradict myself.
And this is one goal I can’t afford to take lightly. I have one summer and I need to give it my all. My future employment in the States is dependent on my acquiring these language skills now.
Untranslatable, undivisable: idiom. Layers of idioms: idiomas.
At the end of the day today, I was on the phone with my dad, telling him how the Spanish are constantly using a general ponerse nerviosa, to become nervous, where I would, in English, diagnose a more particular emotion. Some examples: “the technician was angry he couldn’t finish fixing our refridgerator by himself and therefore had to call in his superior, who was younger than him” or “that kid has been crying for an hour and I am very frustrated” or “I went to a cafe, bought a coffee and loitered before the shopkeep came to tell me she was trying to close.” In all of these cases, the native speaker used “nervous” where I would have said irritated or embarrassed. But a more generalized description could be helpful, as it makes it clear immediately both what’s wrong and how common the wrong is.
Anyway, that’s what I was explaining to my dad, on the phone, walking past the park, when an orange hit me in the head. I looked around to exercise some Spanish curses on my attacker, saw it was a sorry-looking kid of about seven, whimpered Fuck under my breath, and exited the scene at speed. I had orange in my just-washed hair. My dad of course though this was just soooo funny! Until he saw I wasn’t laughing and then he became nervous I was hurt. (By the projectile orange.) I told him my pride was hurt and hung up. Unfortunately, I’ve never been good at keeping face when my pride is injured.
Now I feel homesick, and I keep thinking about some graffiti I saw earlier: GO HOME TOURIST. Don’t worry, graffiti artists! Eventually, I will go home. And I can’t deny that some times I feel humiliated. Like eating outside on a restaurant terrace alone, on a cool cloudy day, wondering why no one else is sitting outside, and then it starts to rain. But, I came here to speak and learn and live in Spanish. And it’s hard, but I’m doing it.
TL; DR in this post I wrote about idioms, las idiomas, a dog, and my feelings.
cdzhouse 