At Home, part 13

I still hadn’t managed to find a conversation group that satisfied me, so I decided to form one myself. By now I knew some women who were serious about learning Spanish, and they were people I wanted to get to know better anyway, so I asked Huibrecht, Clarice and Amy to join me. All three were enthusiastic, and we agreed to meet at my house on a Monday morning.

“I’ll be glad to come and help y’all out,” Ana volunteered, to my surprise and delight.

“Are you serious?” I asked. “I’m afraid we’d be so boring for you!”

“I’m really happy to help people who want to learn the language,” she said. “I’m disgusted with all these ODC wives who can’t be bothered. But I know one who might like to come—Roseanne. You met her at that lunch at my house with the ODC wives. Her mother is Mexican, and she’s always understood some Spanish. She’s all right.”

“Absolutely, bring her along!” I said. “That would be great.”

The Monday conversation group filled all my needs. Amy took the school bus to ASM with her daughters that morning, and I picked her up at school. The others arrived at my house around 10. We talked about everything—our children, our lives in our home countries, husbands, careers, the intricacies of life in Spain, our travels. Having Ana there was a godsend, because it was often hard to express the things we wanted to say, and she was always able to supply the words.

But sometimes what we had to say was more important than saying it well in Spanish, and it got to be okay to lapse into English in such an emergency. One of the most difficult aspects of speaking Spanish, for me, was my inability to communicate my feelings. I could negotiate my way around my little Spanish world on a daily basis, but it was difficult to show my real self to others, because I just didn’t have enough language. I had always considered myself an excellent communicator, so to be stilted in this way was uncomfortable.

But among the five of us—and sometimes six, when Roseanne joined us—we put the priority on saying what we felt, even if we couldn’t do that in Spanish.

There were funny moments, too—Huibrecht and Clarice occasionally spoke Portuguese by mistake, and Roseanne had us giggling over her dislike of Castilian Spanish as opposed to the Mexican Spanish she knew. “I can’t believe it when I hear that vosotros form,” she said, referring to a form of the word “you” that was used in Spain but not in Latin America. “It sounds like someone from the Bible is speaking!” I realized then that vosotros was sort of the “thou” of Spanish.

We rotated houses so everyone could see everyone else’s. After we’d spent an hour or two talking I would drive to the city for my aerobics class, dropping Amy at a convenient Metro station so she could get home. It made for a great social morning, and my spoken Spanish began to improve.