I was born where the Mediterranean meets the cold, blustery waters of the Atlantic, in Tangiers (Morocco). My parents were Spaniards, and at home we spoke the Andalusian dialect of Castilian, the language that is called Spanish everywhere else in the world. The rest of my family also spoke other languages. Mostly, French and Arabic but also English.
When we moved back to Spain, other Spanish languages came into play —Catalan, Galician, Basque (Euskara) and in the summer, when we descended to the shore, the gabble of even more European languages swirled around our beach umbrella. I learned very early to notice the cadences, differentiate between the Romance and Teutonic languages, and to find commonalities.
“The sound of language is where it all begins,” Ursula Le Guin writes.
That’s how it was for me. I fell in love with words, repeated them under my breath, memorized the lyrics of Eurovision songs (without understanding them), made lists. I had favorite words. Tomato in English; canzone (song) in Italian; lune (moon) in French; habibi (beloved) in Arabic.
‘Word music,’ Mario Vargas Llosa calls it. The reason why I love some writers, even when I’m not listening to an audiobook, I hear their words.
Realizing the difference translating could make, I decided to study English and teach it as a second language, so that I could read English and American writers. That led to my marriage to an American GI, a midwesterner who dashed my friends’ old world expectations by becoming a diplomat.
Without giving it much thought, while we raised a family on distant lands, I started writing in English. Why English and not Spanish? Isn’t one’s own language a determining factor? Not necessarily. Not for me anyway. As I said, I grew up around multilingual people, reading multilingual writers such as Kundera, Nabokov, Conrad, Kerouac. Language is a vehicle that serves the story.
I believed Walt Whitman in Leaves of Grass: “I am a real Parisian, I am a inhabitant of Vienna… Constantinople… Madrid.”
Since those days, I have learned that your homeland asserts itself in unuspecting ways (See The Fight with Duende page). But that’s another story.
Life in the Foreign Service was an exciting mixture of the great and the awful, with a heavy sprinkling of the unexpected. It entailed moving from country to country, always a challenge, and also learning different cultures, sometimes from scratch. We had to set aside preconceived ideas and adapt to circumstances that sometimes felt uncomfortable and foreign.
Along with our three daughters, we picked up superb skills in the Foreign Service. But with every skill came a balancing trait, sometimes a defense mechanism that was not always positive. Because for instance, to protect ourselves from the sorrow of leaving friends behind, we caught ourselves distancing from them, even before it was time to pack up.
From one continent to another, we became students of the relativity of societal norms and formal and informal standards. In Rio de Janeiro, we greeted with three kisses; in Seoul, we bowed deeply. Flavors, colors, humor, gestures, nothing was the same.
Every time we transferred, there were opportunities and new beginnings, but we also lived with homesickness.
Those vagabond years taught me to see the world and our homelands with fresh eyes; they taught me that places and people leave indelible marks on the heart. But also that no matter how much we have in common, there are deep differences across the world.
Those years inform how I think and write, even now, living in Northern Virginia, with the same GI turned diplomat. And with an opinionated lemon Treeing Walker coonhound that came to us already bearing the very unlikely name of Sancho.∼
I'm always on the hunt for visual aids in the form of books, documentaries, films. The Men-at-Arms series, for example, is superb.
Going to Spain is an endless dip into the font of stories and perspective.
I'm lucky to live close to the Smithsonian museums. The pumpkin above came from a Yayoi Kusama exhibit.
This is Sancho. Like our previous coonhound, he is is highly intelligent, stubborn, lazy, but very, very fast, and the unholy terror of our backyard. Running tally of the battles (Sancho: 3 - Squirrels: 0)