Themother tongue in Foreign lands
Ángela Pradelli
translated by Daniela Gutiérrez
I feel a real fascination when I am among people whose language I do not understand. I am not afraid of not understanding the language. I really like to walk many blocks listening speaking a language I can not understand. Whenever I'm in that situation, I always think about my grandmother. She was from Italy and she had to emigrated to Argentina after the First War. She could not speak in Spanish, the language of my country, and in Argentina she has learned step by step, but she always preferred to speak in Italian. Andshe also spoke in Italian to me. She knew I could not understand she, but she always talked to me in her Italian language.
My grandmother, who did not attend mass on Sundays, prayed the rosary with a devotion I have never seen, even among members of religious orders. She always prayed at night in her room, in a semidarkness that barely dispelled the dim light of her night table lamp. She sat on the bed and prayed in a very soft voice. She did it with such intense and swift concentration that the words stuck to one another and it was impossible to recognize a beginning or an end. I can hear her now: my grandmother’s thick lips moving fast with short movements that regulated the air in her mouth. I know that I will hear her forever. In every bead of the rosary she put the kind of fervor that is professed only by people with an enormous faith in words. I remember myself beside her, listening to the murmur coming alive in the warm room. The whisper of prayers grew and grew. The muted sound of those dry prayers didn’t allow for interruptions. My grandmother closed her eyelids while whispering her prayers and only sometimes did her huge eyes stare at me, though never interrupting the litany. Although she always prayed at night, sometimes she suspended her activities in the kitchen in mid-morning and locked herself in to pray. I can still hear her. Air came out of her mouth, becoming words that buzzed around me. My grandmother’s voice dangling in whispered textures that tightened the threads as it moved on. I will always hear that sound. I have had the weight of that buzzing of hers nested in my ear ever since, and I always will. My grandmother’s prayers filled the room, and once embodied, they traveled in their own sounds. Her words were never clearly understood but they had an unmistakable music in which my grandmother had placed enormous faith. I was a little child but could see this: in each bead of the rosary my grandmother offered her soul and recovered it in the following bead. She stuck one word to the next without beginning or end and gave them a music so precise that it left that murmur in my ears forever. The ferment of these words had the urgency of someone escaping, fleeing from some dark place. That language was pure intimacy and also a dialogue that rose to the greatest heights. My grandmother, with her urgent prayers, rhythmic and lonely, taught me at an early age that language runs along a dual track. It penetrates the innermost part of our humanity while traveling outside us to meet others, to search in the depths of its disquiet for a listening God. That is what I learned on those nights when I heard my grandmother praying. Pronunciation was for her a journey into her own depths and at the same time, an offering of words to the highest heavens, where there would always be someone listening.
On those warm nights, both of us locked in her room, there were times when I confused my grandmother’s prayers with her breathing. Those were moments of uncertainty when, in the heaviness of that atmosphere, I could not recognize if what was being heard and was floating around our bodies were her prayers or the air entering and exiting her mouth. Was that a gasp or a letter? Was it a syllable or an exhalation? Those were instants in which words and air merged, and separating them was impossible. Were they just one? Or did they become one from that moment on?
I often return to the scene of my grandmother praying. And every time I do, I enter into the whisper of a language that is also mine but still not entirely understood. Language can partly allay anguish. I could not see it then but I see it today, that woman who had left her parents, her village and her friends in a country at war, was anguished. She was anguished because she knew she would not see them again.. I return to that scene and try to listen. However, the voice of those prayers does not have the litany of religious rites. It is a voice that seeks salvation, yes, but it is very close to the excitement of desire. A voice committed to moving forward and leaving pain behind. But why didn’t my Italian grandmother pray in her mother tongue? Why did she choose a new language for her prayers and therefore a different voice? She always switched to her mother tongue for talking about important issues, but she never prayed in Italian. I have returned to that scene many times, and I always ponder the issue of the two languages and her choice of one or the other, according to the nature of the conversation. Why did my grandmother, who used Italian, “her” language, for the most important speech of everyday life, pray in the language of a country where she was an immigrant? My grandmother got angry in her mother tongue, and Italian was also the language in which I heard her fighting, cursing, laughing, and telling secrets. That was the language for expressing her anguish and sadness. But doesn’t prayer, our dialogue with God, document the most important aspect of the words we speak?
Without language there is no possibility of an ever-after. Dreams and futurity become concrete in our speech. But why did my grandmother abandon her mother tongue for Spanish when she prayed; why did she need a new language to speak of the future and the uncertainty of days to come as she recited her prayers in an unknown land? When that Italian woman prayed, she prayed for the future in a language that was not her own. Curses were uttered in Italian and prayers in Spanish. Perhaps she was looking for new discourses in her speech and probably by doing so she was getting away from the words that had documented a past of absence and loss. New accents for a life that my grandmother wished would be better? Did she hope that by using a new grammar for the first time, the new syntax would open up a panorama of new horizons? Maybe she thought that a different vocabulary would finally augur happiness. Perhaps my grandmother felt that praying in Spanish meant existing in the language of others and being recognized by them. Perhaps that was the path to becoming less of a foreigner. Perhaps that would allow her to forget -at least in those heartfelt discourses- the fish-out-of-water existence to which she was confined.
On certain summer afternoons, when it was too hot to stay inside the room, my grandmother took me to the stream. After midday we went walking down a dirt road beneath the shade of trees that bordered it on either side. It wasn’t only because of the coolness of the water that I liked go to the stream. On those afternoons, the sound of the wind on the water or between the highest branches of the poplars sounded exactly like the murmur of the words exhaled from my grandmother’s mouth.
My grandmother was not a writer, but as a person who prayed, she constructed her prayers with new words, with her own music and a unique voice that sought emphasis in enunciation while avoiding stridency. Without knowing it, she introduced that music to my ears and left it playing there forever. Because of my grandmother, words became for me a rite of domestic liturgies. Because of her I understood that the sacred nature of words could be found in the intimacy of the rooms in the house. That woman’s deepest faith was placed in language.
I know that my grandmother also understood that our existence depends on the possibility of recognizing the energy in words, and that was why she sometimes was so determined to teach me how to pray. She was the first to believe that words would be my salvation. In that message she also bequeathed to me the mystery concealed in language and silence. Was that phrasing or an inhalation? Was that the cadence or the heavy air that my grandmother breathed?
After all, what are we talking about? About the way in which the entire universe and the deepest, darkest layers of our subjectivity can join together. After all, this is what we are talking about, pronouncing the world.
We used to spend our summers in Rio Negro, in my grandparents’ house. On Sundays I went to the river with my grandmother. Grandpa never wanted to go, but sometimes when the afternoon was almost over and the sun already down behind the sierras, he came to pick us up. No sooner did he get there,he perched on a tree trunk, but he couldn’t tolerate it for too long and wanted to return home with us.My grandmother, on the other hand, wanted to stay longer at the river. She loved being there, listening to the sound the wind made on the water or between the high branches of the poplars. As soon as we arrived, my grandmother took off her shoes, knotted the hem of her dress above her knees and waded into the river.
She had very white skin and I loved to stroke the dampness of her naked arms. Every now and then, she cupped her hands and poured some water over her head.
Freshwater drops ran down the smooth, white skin of her face and trickled down her neck all afternoon in the river, with the water above her knees, and she didn't mind if she had to go back home with her wet dress stuck to her legs.
At night, when everyone was asleep, I crossed the wide hallway that led to the bedrooms and entered my grandmother’s room. The hallway was dark, but I walked confidently, guided by the light that filtered from beneath the door of her room. My grandmother slept so little that sometimes she was still awake at dawn, but I never heard her complain about that. During the summer she left the window open all night and sometimes, when entering her room, I could see her with her arms on the varnished wooden windowsill. She wore a petticoat with delicate straps, which, on warm nights and because of her perspiration, adhered to her breasts and belly.
-What’s the matter?-she asked when I opened the door.
On other nights I found her sitting on the bed. It was such a high bed that her legs were left dangling and she wiggled her feet in a nearly undetectable rocking motion. My grandfather slept on his back, hugging the pillow, while my grandmother rummaged through a shoebox full of papers mostly written in Italian. She unfolded the letters and read them to me in a thick whisper so we wouldn’t wake my grandfather. She showed me some photographs that had a dedication on the back and Holy Communion cards from relatives in Italy. She read to me and a murmur grew in the heavy heat of the room. Afterwards, she put everything back in the box and hid it under the wardrobe.
- Grandpa doesn’t know about this, she said to me.
And although I never found out everything about those secrets, I kept them forever. And sometimes when I’m writing I feel all this coming back. The whisper of a language I half understood in an overheated room; just a handful of words to tell of what is hidden. Voices of people I don’t know, but who speak there, locked in a shoe box concealed under the wardrobe. And a light that on certain nights filters under the door and lights up the darkness as I walk along.