The Write Thing

I write for a living, and I write for pleasure…and I can tell the difference. Does that make me less of a whore?

Perhaps it is that I am at odds with myself sometimes, so I can accommodate better to the quirky irrationality of being 80% of my time operating in a language that is not my own, but in a country that is my own and whose language alienates me…so to speak.

Perhaps that is why I am trying to incorporate yet another, one of those that fall in the “least interesting” category, so I can avoid facing the fact that I am a foreigner at home…yet, again, does that make me less of a whore?

Maybe it won’t. So I’ll walk the streets of a city that has not welcomed me since I got back and fight my odds. I’m off to Guanajuato in only a few days, and you are welcome there. Let us look for adventure, let us be somewhere.

Love waits.

I have only recently started to learn Swedish, as I think I mentioned in passing a while ago in this blog. It is fun to learn a new language. I have always found that cracking a different code, diving into a new culture in the way of words is a good means of shedding our skin to become someone else. Even a person’s voice changes when they speak a foreign language. My Spanish voice differs from my English voice. I don’t know…it could be the tone, but I guess it’s more the character. Yes, that must be it. It is as if we were actors on a stage, performing in a new play. Language is a vehicle to connect with another side of ourselves. I don’t know if I would make a good viking, probably not, but there will be this particular slant to the new sounds that emerge from the complex postures my tongue is forced to find, this moment of bliss when I will discover that a word is only “that” word in “that” language, and it is untranslatable. Well, being a translator myself, I should be perhaps worried about the impossibility of rendering one word into its counterpart in another system. Oddly enough, I am not. I feel that being unable to put a word into another language is just sublime, a unique experience. Believe me, I have never been able to translate enjeu from French into Spanish, English, Italian or even Swedish (I should find out, though, maybe I can break the spell).

Kärleken väntar. I think it means something like “love waits”. I took it from a song by Kent, a Swedish pop band. Indeed love waits. We have to wait for love to be love, because at its very beginning it is only what we would like it to be, a collection of expectations, cravings and desires, above all. It is only when we can wait that it becomes what it should be, when it relaxes, when we understand it as we understand the soul we have chosen as our mate. This is perhaps, only in a way, similar to learning a new language. We only know we have grasped it, that our love for the language is there, when we cannot tell whether we are reading in our vernacular or in the newly acquired friend. We only know that we love someone when we do not have to think who she is, because we simply know her.

So I heard it again. I had promised myself I would not let that language reach me too deep. I would phase it out slowly, confine it to a corner where it would no longer upset me. I would leave it for the inevitable conversations with Paris colleagues and, even then, I would let the Saxons take over if it was possible. But it happened. The other night. The voice pestered me two nights in a row, right when I was trying to fall asleep and accommodate to the compulsory early morning rise the next day. Lying in bed, my eyes focused on their flickering pre-REM effort, I heard her. She was clear, her French was tuned so that I would not have to question the accuracy of verbs or conjugations. I calmed her down, moved over to the other side of the bed, and invited her to lie beside me, in silence. She did.

The next night, she forced me out of my worked-up slumbering endeavor, furious with me and insistent on the manifesto she wanted me to put on virtual paper. I agreed. There would be no escaping her. I had to get up, put on the hotel bathrobe, and sit at the ample desk to write her statement onto a clean Word document. Mind you, this is just a voice. I have no means of fighting her, or perhaps I no longer want to. Perhaps it is time, the great leveler. Aging makes you face some of your choices more boldly.

I have always wanted to keep French at a distance. Deliberately, as if the language, once it had taken over my Zelig-like self, would annihilate me, empty me of the animal English identity I have always treasured. Now it seems both coexist musically, blurring each others’ borders until I have to think hard to tell the difference (and cornering their Torquemada descendant into a lingua franca precariousness).

Here it is, the voice. I will let her speak for herself.

Reviens-moi. Comme la première fois, inévitable, toi et personne. C’est vrai, le vide m’accablait autrefois, quand je ne connaissais pas la puissance de mon être. Maintenant les extases maitrisées, la vie ordonnée comme un jeu de cartes auquel on triche très bien, je suis prête au nouveau défi de toi. Viens plus près de moi, lance-toi à ma conquête, comme si je n’avais jamais été acquise, et donne-moi la preuve que rien n’a changé. Je t’attends, même avant que tu ne sois partie. J’ai traversé les rivières, j’ai porté mes chaînes et m’en suis libérée pour être prête à jouir avec toi et pas derrière. Encore une ou plusieurs fois, je veux t’entendre gémir au dessous de mon corps, je veux sentir ta peau s’élargir à ma touche, un univers nouveau se générer entre deux esprits qui ont toujours dessiné leurs propres visages. Laisse-moi me perdre dans la mer de ta bouche, l’immensité de notre propre création, le calme de notre ancienne connaissance. Ne t’inquiète pas pour moi. Je saurai me retrouver à la fin, quand tu commenceras à fuir. J’ai déjà surmonté l’espoir de toi. N’hésite pas, il n’y a rien à craindre. Reviens-moi.