I Learn the Language of the Deportees, Years Ahead of Time!

At Orville Wright Junior High School in the early ‘60s, one had to study a foreign language. As I recall, the choice was between Spanish and French, and it seemed to me there were lots more Spanish speakers in southern California. My first teacher of Spanish was a little man whose surname — Wiltamuth — intrigued me. Small, timid-speaking, and bespectacled, he’d have been described at the time as a Wally Cox type. Looking back, I imagine he had an extensive pornography collection, but this, of course is bald conjecture. For all I really knew, he might have been shacked up with a stripper. We young scholars of course referred to him as Wilty. The second semester, my instructor was an actual Latino, Señor Hernandez, who got a kick out of addressing me, with a twinkle in his eye, as Hijo-de-Mendelo.

At my upwardly mobile mama’s insistence, we moved five miles north, and I found myself attending Santa Monica High School, much later to produce presidential advisor Stephen Miller. My Spanish classes were held in the almost Dickensian Languages building, which was guaranteed to make even the most vivacious cheerleader despondent. As though I needed help!

In the early summer following my graduation, I actually conversed in Spanish with one of my fellow dishwashers at Malibu Pharmacy, which had a lunch counter. His complimenting my Spanish was genuinely one of the highlights of that summer, which I spent most of sneezing or feeling lobotomized because I’d taken non-non-drowsy antihistamines to stop sneezing. Pollen allergies, you see. Non-drowsy antihistamines had not yet come onto the market, you see.

As a sophomore at the big local university, I decided to study Italian, as I calculated that doing so was apt to make me seem more a man of the world than Spanish. Russell Mael, later of Sparks, was in my class. We were two of the very few boys on campus with long hair about six months before every boy on campus had long hair, but exchanged not a syllable, either in Italian or in English.

In my mid-fifties, I relocated to the United Kingdom. On discovering from Amigo No. 1 that he and his wife hoped to relocate to sunny Spain, and after having read that stimulating the brain can impede one’s descent into dementia, I revisited Spanish, mostly via Duolingo,com. Such was my diligence that the local freelance Spanish teacher who agreed to instruct me in exchange for a website featuring this little movie I made for her professed to be impressed. I found it exhilarating to be able to make myself understood, and at one point marveled, “¡Es milagro!”

It’s a miracle.

I visited Spain often. One is often told that if he tries to speak their language, the inhabitants of faroff foreign lands are invariably delighted. No such thing is the case. Commonly, it seemed to me that the thought balloon above Spaniards’ heads said, “¡Spit it the fuck out already, ancient gringo!”

(¿How can one not like a language that, when written, begins sentences with inverted exclamation points or question marks?)

I regretted that I was losing what Spanish I’d managed to learn, and heard the dementia eagerly whisper, “Great idea, hotshot. Be lazy!” I saw that the local council offers Spanish conversation sessions, and attended my first (and last) one yesterday in what had once been Richmond’s Town Hall. There were around 15 women and three chaps — me, an ancient human garden gnome, and an old fellow of my own vintage. None of the women had the ludicrous inflated lips that are so popular nowadays among British women with disposable income. There wasn’t a false eyelash in sight or a pair of those ultra-emphatic eyebrows that the so-called trout pout brigade regard as alluring.

The instructor, a vivacious 45-ish woman whose English was of a kind that might, in the country formerly my own, have gotten her tossed into the back of a windowless ICE van but for her fair skin and blondeness, spoke Spanish too fast for me to understand. She passed out a questionnaire in Spanish to which we were supposed to respond in kind. Each of us in turn read out his or her answers, and I was no less bored (aburrido) than back at Santa Monica High School.

I was about the dozenth to recite, and thought I’d liven things up. In response to the question about my age, I said, Tengo ciento y catorce años, pero parezco mucho más joven,” which I hoped meant, “I am 114, but appear much younger.”

Only the instructor was amused, and she only faintly.