There was a painful outburst of shouts and laughter, and I immediately imposed upon myself the quite reasonable punishment that I wouldn’t participate in that class again for the rest of the year. The results were disastrous, because the teacher let out one of her contagious guffaws, then said, calmly and sweetly: “That word doesn’t exist.” I found myself facing a dead end, and I tried to find a way out by uttering the word alimentation-I had the paradigm in my head of words like pronunciation, information, and generation, and I steeled myself to run the risk. One day, however, I got carried away by my damned enthusiasm and I raised my hand automatically mid-question, with only a vague idea of what was being asked. I was excited about studying it, and although there are so many things about that time that I have forgotten or distorted, I have a clear memory of the pleasure-the pride-that came from stringing together a sentence and achieving the miracle of communicating in another language. We preferred her-needed her-to be happy: it was much more important that she return our love than that we learn English.įrom music or movies or just from the ambient noise, I had or thought I had a certain precarious familiarity with the English language. The episode now strikes me as essentially comic, but at the time it seemed tragic and we tried to file it away immediately, because the teacher’s sudden seriousness represented a threat. “I didn’t know you were a gringo” was all the teacher said, in an effort to hide her humiliation. He spoke for about five minutes, and I didn’t understand anything except for the word Chile, which made an appearance every so often. Finally, when the silence was becoming unbearable, he stood up and launched into a surprisingly loquacious soliloquy, much louder and faster than he tended to speak at recess, his face bright red, as if speaking English were something to be ashamed of, and there was also something desperate in his incomprehensible-to us-torrent of words. She wanted proof, but the gringo was feeling especially timid, hiding away behind his notebooks. That afternoon several of us tried to explain her mistake. We loved her she was nice, much warmer and more approachable than most of our teachers. She was a thirtysomething woman with a chubby face and a cheerful demeanor, her eyebrows smeared with blue eye shadow, always just about to smile or smoke. It took us a minute to realize the teacher didn’t even know the gringo was a gringo. One day, after a group presentation, the English teacher decided that Michael’s (or John’s) pronunciation was deficient, and she gave him a five out of seven. Like a magician revealing his simplest tricks, he’d ramble on in a hushed voice about any old subject, and he even answered our questions, which were all basic: How do you say pico? (dick) How do you say zorra? (pussy) How do you say culiar? (fuck). Fascinated, we’d ask him to speak English for us at recess, and the gringo was shy but also happy and patient, so he’d play along. He had grown up in Chicago with Chilean parents, so his Spanish was almost the same as ours and his English sounded like the movies. The gringo was twelve years old, like nearly all of us, and his name was Michael González or John Pérez or something like that: a common English first name and a last name that was equally common in Spanish.
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