Learning to Die in Miami

by Carlos Eire

  Flash forward, forty-seven years. I’m speaking with Tony on the phone, as I do every night. “Oh, man,” he says in his perfect Chicago accent, “do you remember that tongue dinner?” Tony uses the f-word a lot, so please insert that very special expletive in that sentence and all others spoken by him at the appropriate places. Use your imagination on this assignment, or refrain, however you prefer. “That’s the worst thing I ever had to eat. Jeeezus, I couldn’t believe it, that fat tongue, there on the table. What a sight, what a disgusting sight. Oh man, I can’t think of anything worse than that tongue, ever.”

  And he goes on about the tongue for about five minutes, finding very creative ways of expressing his disgust, and his dismay at what it meant for him and for me at that moment, in those foster homes. It was as much a turning point for him as it was for me: proof positive that we’d entered the Twilight Zone, some sort of alternate dimension where you could never get your bearings because everything was so weird, so mindblowingly and unpredictably strange.

  Whenever I need a good laugh, I bring up the tongue dinner.

  “Hey, Tony, how about that tongue?”

  We speak in English now, all the time. The only time Spanish comes up is when we’re talking about something someone said, long ago, in that other world we both lost so suddenly.

  Funny thing: Both Tony and I became addicted to the television show The Twilight Zone at that time, right after the tongue dinner, even though we still didn’t have full command of English. We’ve talked about it many times. The show made us feel more at home than almost anything else, back then.

  Leaving the cave and entering the “real” world requires major adjustments in thinking. Plato had foreseen that, of course. He knew that those who escaped from the world of illusion would have trouble adjusting to the light and dealing with the real world. But he failed to go into the gritty details, as many philosophers do. He said nothing about having to eat tongue.

  And he also said nothing about those in the real world who would have to contend with the refugees from the world of illusion. What crazy bastards, those cave dwellers. If Plato had been more thorough, he might have addressed this problem: the nonsense that people in the real world would have to put up with whenever those annoying refugees would emerge from their cave.

  “Eh . . . wat eez deez?”

  “Go back to that stinking burrow that you came from, you troglodyte. Ingrate. Ignoramus. Kvetch, chronic, whining complainer.”

  Allow me to explain that sudden slip into Yiddish.

  Tony and I learned Yiddish along with English. That was a delight, and a surprise, later, after we’d left those foster homes. Tony and I thought that all of the Yiddish words we’d learned were English. Well, to put it that way is misleading. We simply thought every word uttered in our households was English. Why wouldn’t we?

  Surprise, surprise, surprise! Oy!

  Every now and then, someone is shocked by my Yiddish. Just as shocked as I was to learn that all those wonderful words were incomprehensible in central Illinois.

  “So-and-so is such a schnorr.”

  “Say what? Is that Spanish?”

  After the tongue dinner, the list became complete. All possible surprises were eliminated by one simple category: no inner organs of any kind, even from all permissible quadrupeds. Tony and I would end up eating a lot of egg dishes. And we’d learn to fend for ourselves in the kitchen, for the first time in our lives.

  We learned how to make scrambled eggs. Norma taught me how to do it, and I couldn’t believe that she’d trust me with a frying pan. Back home, my parents wouldn’t have ever allowed me near a stove. I could detonate huge firecrackers, climb tall trees, walk along narrow high ledges, and engage in rock fights all the time, but handling fire on the stove was too dangerous. I never asked why. Anyway, after a few days, my scrambled eggs began to evolve from so-so to very good. Soon enough, my eggs were the best I’d ever tasted. The same thing happened to Tony.

  I learned how to make my own sandwiches too, with cold cuts. And I found a new mysterious foodstuff called peanut butter, which tasted great.

  The best thing of all was learning to be independent, and to be given some responsibilities.

  Norma taught me how to take out the trash and put me in charge of that. It was a big threshold for me to cross, another one of those Twilight Zone moments. Back where I came from, only servants would handle the trash. The fact that I was being asked to sink to the level of a servant was shocking at first, even though I knew that the Chaits had no maids, nannies, or gardeners. But as soon as she asked me I realized that something was different here. The Chaits didn’t have any servants of any kind. They were a middle-class American family, and in this respect they were very different from their Cuban counterparts. In Cuba, even lower-middle-class families often had servants of one sort or another, at least until Fidel came along. I caught on to that right away, and chalked it all up as yet one more indication that this was a more advanced country. Everyone must do their own work, and no one seems to mind. It seemed ennobling to me.

  Or so I thought.

  Flash forward, forty-one years. I’m talking to Norma and Lou in their kitchen, in Cooper City, near Fort Lauderdale, reminiscing about the time I lived with them. Norma tells me that I recoiled with horror at the prospect of taking out the trash and that I put up some strong resistance to it. The way she remembers it, I never got over my revulsion. I’m shocked. How can her memory be so different from mine? I’ve remembered this as one of the most important steps I took in life, and as something that I came to treasure and love, and for which I thank God above.

  Funny thing, memory. Go figure.

  Slowly, gradually, we became more accustomed to one another’s weirdnesses.

  And immediately, Tony and I were sent to school. Both of us had missed an entire year of schooling in Cuba, and now it was late April and the school year in Florida was almost over. But that didn’t matter. We were both plunked down in English-speaking public schools: Tony went to Rockway Junior High and I to Everglades Elementary. Both of us set ourselves back a whole year, knowing we had a lot of catching up to do.

  I was supposed to be in sixth grade, but asked to be placed in fifth; Tony was supposed to be in ninth, but asked for eighth. We did it knowingly and willingly. We’d missed too much schooling and didn’t know enough English. It hurt me to take a step back, but I knew it was the right thing to do. It was the very first important choice I made on my own, and a good one, as it turned out.

  In high school, a few years later, I’d be the first one in my class to get a driver’s license, which instantly improved my social life.

  Everglades Elementary School was aptly named. Back then, the Everglades were not all that far from it. Soon after my arrival there, a forest fire broke out in that nearby jungle and the wildlife began to scatter. Warnings were issued at school: Watch out for panthers at recess time. If you see one, go immediately back to your classroom. Alligator sightings in the canal that ran right past the school were also common, even though I never saw one.

  I went straight into one of the portable classrooms outside the main school building. It was a cabin on stilts, filled with Cuban children. The main objective in that classroom was to teach us English and prepare us for the classrooms in the main building. Our English teacher was a very young and very gentle guy named Aaron: a Russian Jew who’d spent time in Argentina and spoke Spanish fluently. We Cubans jokingly called him El Ruso, the Russian, and he understood the ironic undercurrent in that name. We were all there fleeing the Russians who had taken over our nation, and here we were learning English in the United States from a Russian. It made us all laugh.

  Aaron seemed larger-than-life to me. He knew many languages and had multiple identities. He was patient. He was compassionate. He was very, very funny too. And, best of all, he sure knew how to teach. I’d had some good teachers in Cuba, but this guy was undoubtedly the best I’d ever had the good luck to run into. Even though I ar
rived at the end of the term, he made me feel at home right away, and he helped me catch up. We had a Cuban teacher in the classroom too, but I can’t remember her having much of a role. Aaron was in charge of teaching English, and we spent most of our time doing that.

  One of the very first things the other kids told me was that Aaron had jumped into the canal to rescue a drowning boy, and that he hadn’t given a second thought to the alligators that prowled the waters. So, on top of it all, the guy was a hero.

  And I can’t for the life of me recall his surname. That’s how friendly and informal he was with us, a very rare thing for a teacher back then.

  English all the time, from bell to bell. Some math, science, and social studies, yes, with some music and art thrown in. But English was our main focus. Let’s get these kids ready for life in the United States, let’s mainstream them as soon as possible. Drill after drill after drill. Constant exposure to grammar and vocabulary. Let’s make sure these kids don’t stay marginalized; let’s give them a real fighting chance at becoming Americans.

  No bilingual coddling crap. Learn English, it’s what you need in order to climb out of the bottom. Spanish is wonderful, yes, and you shouldn’t forget that, but you’re here now, and Spanish won’t get you anywhere. None of us in that portable classroom disagreed with that. All of us were on fire to learn English and to get out of that cabin on stilts.

  Don’t ask me what I think about my fellow Hispanics who insist on bilingual everything, or about how I feel every time I see a public sign in Spanish or am asked to choose between English and Spanish on the telephone. Don’t ask, please. I get too angry. There’s no better way of keeping Hispanics down in the United States than to tell them that they don’t have to learn English. No better way of creating an underclass. No better way of making everyone else think that Hispanics are too dumb to learn another language, or maybe even the dumbest people on earth.

  I had an advantage over most of the kids in that class. When I went home, no one spoke Spanish. So I learned English very, very quickly. By the time June rolled around and school was over, I was already fluent. Yes, I made mistakes all the time and I still had an accent, but I could communicate easily in English, read in English, and understand television and movies without the aid of subtitles.

  Aaron helped me overcome my fear of seeming foolish, which is always the greatest obstacle in learning how to use a new language. He didn’t work all that hard on our pronunciation, knowing that it would straighten itself out soon enough. Speak it. Say it. Never mind your mistakes. Everyone makes them at first.

  And I made a whopper of a mistake that made Aaron laugh out loud one day. He’d asked us to write an essay in English describing and analyzing the content of some work of art. We had several famous paintings to choose from. I chose Dempsey and Firpo by George Wesley Bellows, a rendition of the 1923 heavyweight boxing match between the American Jack Dempsey and the Argentine Luis Ángel Firpo. I’d been hearing about this fight all my life because my grandfather had been a great fan of Firpo’s and had even named one of his dogs after him. As if this were not enough, this was a very cool painting. What could be cooler than violence of any sort, depicted on canvas? Or cooler than a boxer getting knocked out of the ring?

  I began to search my dictionary for the translation to pelea, which is what we called a boxing match in Cuba. It was a key word. Without it, I had nowhere to go. And there, under pelea, I’m given some choices, and I make what I think is a good one. I go on to write one hell of an essay in English, in which I exhaust whatever anyone might be able to say about this masterpiece, which surely ranks up there with da Vinci’s Mona Lisa, Gainsborough’s Blue Boy, or Whistler’s Mother—the only three other paintings I could name at the time, other than the ones hanging on the walls of my house back in Havana. It’s a fabulous essay, unlike any ever written on the subject, especially by a kid struggling with the English language.

  As soon as I’m done I hand the essay to Aaron, and he begins to read it immediately. And the first thing he does is laugh out loud. Not just one laugh, but one of those long laughing fits that seem eternal.

  “What’s so funny?”

  Aaron reads back the first line: “This painting is about two boxers who are quarreling.”

  “Quarrel, yes,” I protest. “It’s the English for pelea. I looked it up in the dictionary.”

  Aaron laughs some more, and then he explains the difference between quarrel and fight in such a light-hearted way that I start laughing too.

  And I’m laughing still, as I write this. “Some quarrel,” I say every time I stumble onto cage fighting on television.

  My Spanish-English/English-Spanish dictionary becomes part of me. I don’t wear it around my neck, but I might as well do so. I never let go of it, whenever I’m not playing outdoors or sleeping. Pretty soon it begins to disintegrate, but it doesn’t matter: As I wear out the pages I also store away every word I look up, and every phrase in the appendix of slang and colloquial expressions.

  I’m broke becomes one of my favorite expressions, along with to kick the bucket. Some words are sublime, like skinflint and tightwad. But every word, no matter how homely, seems a treasure to me. I’m smitten, enraptured by this tongue that bristles with Germanic barbarisms and makes no rational attempt to coordinate spelling and pronunciation. I fall in love with words that match sounds perfectly: thud, bump, crash, bang, splat, click, clap, clang, ring, bark, and so on. Their equivalents in Spanish had always sounded awkward to me, unconnected, stolen, phony. Some words are awfully difficult to pronounce, however, and can even get you into trouble. Sheet is the most treacherous word of all. Fork comes in a close second. Words beginning with two consonants are always a challenge: stupid, for instance, always comes out of my mouth as “es-toopit.” Final Ds and Ts are a problem too, for my tongue can’t distinguish between them. I just can’t get the right sound to come out. Final Gs, which are so common in English, are also tricky. Stealing always emerges as “es-teelin” and explaining as “es-playnin.” Some words are designed to trip you up: squirrel, stress, eschew. The hardest word of all is Worchestershire sauce. I never ask for it by name. It’s just “de braun soss.”

  Learning to bend your tongue and to rewire your brain is a struggle, but it’s also very exhilarating because there’s no way to lose this wrestling match. Even when you slip up, you always learn something. These new words and expressions give me a buzz. I’m flying high, literally. Drunk on words, on new ways of thinking. It doesn’t take me long to discover that my thinking itself is different in English, and that the change brought about by these new ways of thinking is altering my perception of the world. I’m especially struck by the way in which English gives so much more agency to the self, so much more choice and responsibility.

  For instance, if you’re on your way to school and one of your books falls to the ground, here is what you would say in Spanish: “Se me cayó el libro.” It’s hard to translate because English doesn’t have reflexive verbs. In essence, what you’re saying in Spanish amounts to a shirking of responsibility: “The book dropped itself from me.” It’s a way of thinking and speaking that is prone to fatalism and the creation of a victimized self. “Oh, damn, look at this: The book had the nerve to fall from me. Damn book. Damn gravity. Poor me. If only the laws of nature were different, I wouldn’t be having this problem.” In English, this is the only correct way of explaining what happened: “I dropped my book.” Yes, I suppose one could say “The book fell.” But that would be proper only if the book was not being held by you at all in the first place. What a contrast. It’s your own damned fault in English: You dropped it because you weren’t holding it tightly enough, or just simply because you’re a doofus. Wise up. Straighten yourself out.

  This difference stuns me. It’s a totally new way of thinking: a big deal, bigger than any I’ve ever stumbled on to. Of course, at the time I can’t explain it very clearly, if at all. My perception of this mind-bending difference is fuzzy at best, b
ut it hits me hard and shifts my center of gravity. As I would discover much later, the deepest insights are often—if not always—beyond the radar of our conscious, rational selves. What we intuit at deeper levels is often—if not always—what shapes us most intensely.

  If you don’t want to think of intuition or of the transcendent dimension of tongues and brains as spiritual, that’s fine with me. I understand. But I can’t help but peer over the edge of the purely physical, as I run my tongue along my teeth, and encounter a realm that our ancestors once deemed “spiritual,” which is linked to eternity rather than to the painfully fleeting here and now.

  Tongues of flame didn’t descend on me or Tony or any of the thousands of Cuban kids who were flowing into Florida. Unlike Christ’s apostles at Pentecost, we weren’t instantly blessed with xenoglossia or glossolalia, the ability to speak languages other than your own instantly or to speak in a heavenly tongue. We didn’t get the gift of tongues, but at least we had nimble tongues of our own, which were capable of learning all sorts of new somersaults, cartwheels, and contortions. Our brains were still pristine, more or less, proverbial blank slates. Every word we learned, every new grammatical rule, didn’t get filed away in an already crowded corner of our brains, but rather right next to the Spanish equivalents, in brand-new, easily accessible slots. We actually grew new neurons to handle the logistics of storage and retrieval. Our elders weren’t so fortunate. Their brains were far less nimble and their tongues too set in their ways. To most of them, it was a titanic struggle to think and speak in English.

  You can’t teach an old tongue new tricks. You can sure as hell try. But you’d better be ready for plenty of frustration and disappointment. And very thick accents.

  Our ancestors tended to think that words were one of our most direct links with the divine. They also accepted it as a fact that words were a curse. The Bible tells us that God got very, very angry when our ancient forebears aspired to reach his celestial realm by means of a skyscraper. King, architect, foreman, and bricklayer alike, they all spoke the same tongue at Babel, and the project flourished. And God put a stop to it by bending all their tongues, and twisting them in different directions, and by scrambling their brains. So, the profusion of tongues came about, a curse every bit as painful and beautiful as that leveled against us in the Garden of Eden.