Bilingual Insecurity in the Face of Loss

By Bailey Cohen-Vera

I didn’t go to the funeral. The previous Saturday had been the wedding; missing the busiest shift at the restaurant two weekends in a row was something I knew I couldn’t afford. My mother did everything she could. I could sense the frustration she tried to mask several times leading up to the weekend, when we talked on the phone and she reminded me to call Karine. “La mamá de Karine falleció el día de hoy, es muy posible que este fin de semana sea el funeral, apenas sepa que día te aviso,” she told me that Tuesday. It will probably be this weekend. I’ll let you know. I’ll admit, this should have been enough. I should have called out of work; I should have lied and said I was feeling terrible, gotten paid with the sick hours I managed to accrue exhaustively. I should have grieved. 

This is not to say that my mother’s brother’s wife’s mother was not important to me. Her name was Raimunda. Last Thanksgiving, she brought pernil and potatoes to her son-in-law’s house. To my siblings who do not speak Spanish, I paraphrased and summarized each expression of gratitude. Your tío is honored that we have all gathered in his house, all of us, for the first time; he reaffirms his love for his wife and adopted son. This physical union, his wife says, is a blessing. The men at the end of the table, the ones to whom I cannot explain how I am related, give thanks for good food, for beer, and for the innumerable desserts anxiously quivering in the refrigerator upstairs. For each superficial appreciation, their wives roll their eyes. They shove their husbands’ shoulders playfully, without using their palms. It is only Raimunda who breaks this gendered rule of snarkiness—she is glad that her family is here, in the basement where our cultures collide, so that there would be Peruvian food at the feast, a cuisine obviously superior to Ecuadorian. At this, Karine abandons her attempts to discipline the men. “Eres malo,” she says, shaking her head, her husband already beginning to eat. You’re so bad. She smiles.

In the summer, I take a Spanish composition class. My professor writes on my papers, “You do this thing where you put accents over the wrong letters and don’t put accents over the right letters.” “Also,” he tells me, handing back a letter I wrote to my dead grandmother, “this wasn’t exactly the assignment. You’re responding to the prompt, but I think the way you’re trying to talk is too advanced for you right now. You should consider taking a class in Creative Writing in Spanish.” I say I am sorry. I say I am trying my best; this language is one I know only by sound. 

I am consumed by translation. It follows me like a child believes the moon follows them. For the first time, I make the Mexicans at the restaurant where I work laugh with a joke I told in their language. Although I practiced it mentally before speaking aloud, I nonetheless consider this a form of fluency. For two years, I have worked here; for two years, most of them have known me. Yet Marcos thought I was Pakistani until just a couple months ago. “Why do you always try to speak Spanish with us?” he asks me, his brows furrowing at a grammar mistake I surely made, but can’t identify. My mother is from Ecuador, I tell him. “Oh!” He is surprised. His eyebrows lift. “Qué ciudad?” Riobamba, I reply. Now he is smiling. “¡No sabia que eras parte de la familia!” The sentiment is so touching, so automatic, I don’t know what to say. 

When I tell my coworkers I am studying politics, they are all surprised. Solo quiero ayudar a mi gente, I respond. They say all politicians are corrupt when I ask them what they think of the president back home. Then the issues become too complex. My lacking vocabulary becomes noticeable. In English, when I stutter, it is because I know the last sentence I want to say before I know the journey it takes to get there. I spend my diminishing breaths on hurriedly-formed thoughts. When I stutter in Spanish, it is because I am hyper-aware of my flaws. I say the same verb in different conjugations. Words of action—they stumble upon each other. I rely on the perfect tense. Marcos asks if I have a lighter as we sit after a grueling shift, his grueling from being harassed by the heat of the grill, mine from being dominated by overly needy and frustratingly inconsiderate customers. I want to ask him about his generosity, how loosely-paralleled national histories make us more blood than present, how it is not the shared place of work that binds us, but the language our parents spoke. But I don’t have the words. My Spanish is only as good as his English. We smoke in silence. Behind us, the university that pays for the bed I will return to shadows both of us, making something useless of the trees.

I don’t know what to make of this barely-there connection. The not-knowing is tantalizing. Why did I chase this intimacy? What do I do with it, now that I have it (without having earned it)? Is everything so devastatingly unfulfilling and self-aggrandizing? Is it right to think of an identity as something that has to be earned? Lately, I’ve been dissociating to the point of believing I’m just another character. I discuss myself in a seminar. I sit at a round table with eleven other twenty-somethings. “He makes a compelling argument,” I say, barely making eye contact with my blurry-faced professor, “but I’m not sure how I feel about the way he economizes his own diaspora.” I snap out of it. I make a face, then shake my head to rid it of thought like a dog does with water.

When I get off the 6 train to walk to my apartment, I translate and untranslate all of my thoughts. I see an advertisement and translate it into Spanish, just to make sure that I can. I stagger up subway staircases muttering the same sentences over and over in different languages. The anxiety surrounding my inconsistencies envelops me. Does this sentence sound unnatural? I have no way of knowing. I make it eleven messages with Eduardo from Tinder before he asks if Spanish was my first language and I have to explain yes technically but I forgot it I refused to speak it at home I had no friends in kindergarten nor in several of the years that followed I think it was because I always had to leave class for speech therapy it took me a decade to realize that speech therapy meant stop speaking English like your mom does. Then I realize that Eduardo asked the question in English; that I responded in English. It was the first message Eduardo sent in English. When he doesn’t respond, I wonder if this, too, was in English.

Over leftovers blanketed in cellophane, Raimunda and I gossip about our countries’ histories; how they are intertwined in some places, at a blade with each other in others. “Once we could have been so powerful,” she tells me in Spanish. “Can you imagine if all the countries in South America were united as one? We could have a nation as glorious as the United States.” Then the conversation shifts to recipes. We speak for half an hour. She emphasizes the importance of garlic.

I’m enamored with the conversation we share because of the borders it ignores. Raimunda speaks in English, reverting to Spanish for the words she does not know how to say. I speak in Spanish, relying on English to fill the gaps. These two broken pieces fit together like puzzle pieces. We are not speaking two languages inadequately; we are demanding that America succumb to our already fluent tongues. We are understanding each other. We are communicating. Our shared effort becomes something effortless. My Spanish is as good as her English; her English is as good as my Spanish.

By the time I call Karine, it is three days after the funeral. I tell her I only have this one story. She thanks me for sharing it, calls it peaceful. She tells me that I do not know what it is like to lose a mother, but I will, and the sorrow in her voice takes away all the edges that would normally accompany the threat in words like these. She tells me to always respect my mother, to call her and tell her that I remember her. I tell her that I called my mother this morning. She heard me cough. She told me to make sure I am drinking tea with lemon and honey. I told her not to worry. “Be grateful,” Karine says, and I tell her I am always learning how.

Bailey Cohen-Vera is the author of the poetry chapbook “Self-Portraits as Yurico,” forthcoming from Glass Poetry Press in May 2020.