A lesson in humility

Once a day I force myself out of hermited isolation to meet with Guilermo under the Hule tree. Before you settle into harlequin images of a passionate romp in white sands with a sun-kissed Latin lover, I’ll tell you that Guilermo is an older gentleman retained to improve my feeble grasp of Spanish. Though I suspect Guilermo may have been a well employed Latin lover in his youth, now he passes the afternoon hour of one to two in the dense shade of the 50-year-old rubber tree outside my casita in childish conversations about bus stops, business hours, and grooming practices.

I’m not new to Spanish lessons which makes the hour-long exercise in humiliation that much more agonizing. I understand the majority of what Guilermo says but it usually takes me a minute to figure out if he’s telling me something (so I can relax) or if he’s asking me something (in which case I must brace myself for the horror of responding.)
It goes something like this…
Guilermo says in Spanish, “When I was young, I had many friends who played music.” His voice rises ever so slightly at end to ensure that I am understanding but I take this wayward note to mean it is my turn to speak.
“No, my friends do not play music,” I bi-lingually react.
He looks at me for a moment so I assume I’ve conjugated the verb wrong. I immediately stammer, “No, my friends did not play music” and then smile wantonly for a “muy bien” – the biscuit of my training.
Guilermo points to his torso and says, slowly this time, “When I was young, my friends played music” but this time he adds ample pointing and mock guitar strumming.

Well shit! If everyone in Meixco spoke like that I’d be all set!

At least half of our daily session revolves around verb tense. Second only to my daily duty to squashing a coachroach half-again as large as my big toe, this portion of my I lesson is a low point of the day. I remember when Celia was two years old and I’d ask what color something was and she’d proudly produce the name of a color! If she got the right one for the object in question it was pure coincidence. But she’d bark out colors until she got it right and we’d each beam with pride. This is me - minus the beaming - during daily verb torture. I struggle through a litany of veritable verb forms “Yo voy… no! fue…crap, fui?..” sometimes to realize that I just exhausted every possible form of the wrong word. Guilermo, ever the gentleman, calmly witnesses my seizure before stating the sentence properly. My spirit broken, I quietly parrot back the sentence nodding my head and saying “por supuesto” meaning, “of course” which is, ironically, the one thing I can always remember how to say.

I believe that parallel sentence structure in Spanish should be a sort of nirvana for second language seekers – like achieving gourmet status, accomplishing a marathon, or shaving one’s legs every day. Even if I somehow happen to get the subject and verb to agree, I trip on the gender of object, use the wrong article, or fail to find an adjective that can agree –for even a moment – with the wrongly emasculated object. In a mere six words, I can manage to get all but one right. And YET, the listener - when not in fits of laughter - can usually understand my meaning. So while I try to hit the verb lottery with Guilermo, in life beyond the Hule tree, I stick with setting the tense by stating the timeframe and then clinging to first person present like this, “Yesterday, I go to the store,” and “Tomorrow, I go to the store.” It’s not eloquent, I admit, but given the alternative is to sound like I’m afflicted with Spanish Touretts syndrome, I’ll save conjugation efforts for Guilermo – he’s paid not to laugh.