Juana Adcock
ON LOVE AND DYING LANGUAGES
ON LOVE AND DYING LANGUAGES
In our broken mother tongues,
in our English plain,
in our rented room,
in our foreign country,
with our migrant friends,
little by little we built
a vocabulary known only to us.
For example:
kamilo, derived from my word for walking and your word for camel, meant 'the path chosen through the desert'
pardo, 'the spots of light burned into our retina after staring at the sun', also 'dusk', or 'a ginger cat'
but kamilopardo: 'cute' or, 'let's make babies'
thalassa, from your word for the sea and my word for cutting down trees, was used to mean 'it aches at the pit of my stomach', or 'I understand', or 'we love it because it is unattainable, like the end of the rainbow, or the blue colour of distance'
We developed our own syntax.
The present continuous was always being lost.
Articles were obviated.
Dreams were something we saw, rather than had.
There was no indirect object.
The future was an act of purity of will. For example:
shlixá, the word for 'excuse me', was used to mean 'do you maybe have a cigarette?', the 'maybe' being an important marker of politeness, like when the government phones you to say your house will be demolished in 10 minutes instead of catching you unawares.
There were also things that were never to be mentioned:
the word 'bitterness'
or the word 'sorry' when criticized.
*
One day I had to go. I was called to work, to serve in the army, or to tend to my grandfather's death.
You had to stay. Finish your book, or school, make turmeric tea for your mother.
At the other side of the ocean, I let the sun pierce my eyes with its needles, instructing each muscle in my face not to contract.
I thought of a silk thread, joining my tear duct to yours. I called the thread pardo, and sang songs at my grandfather's deathbed. 'This is what I have come para,' I said to myself. Para being a new preposition which meant both 'from' and 'to', in terms of origin and destination. It had the added advantage that, to you, the word para meant both 'alongside', and 'beyond', the way people stick together through thick and thin.
I fell asleep every night repeating the word thalassa with each outbreath, like a wave crashing against the cliff where your house was perched. I thought this was helping you sleep.
You wrote me a letter saying you hadn't slept a wink for months. That the waves heightened your senses.
