Más lento que una tortuga

| La gaviota by Juan García Ponce, photo by G. Enns |

Last night, I picked up a tiny copy of La Gaviota (The Seagull) by Juan Garcia Ponce, a novela the young attendant at Cefebrería el Péndulo assured me wouldn’t be too difficult. Hm. He was understating things a bit, so I’m taking my time, reading through the winding sentences for the feel of them, reading again, writing down unfamiliar words, translating, and finally copying—one sentence at a time, one sentence a day. Last night and today, and I’m still on page one. This is the way. 

It’s a good time for this kind of mental heavy lifting, as I’ve just switched over to a private maestra, Karen, a university student willing to go very slowly with me. We meet at Bola de Oro, the little modern cafeteria on the corner from the apartment, the one with the primary color chairs and the upstairs balcony overlooking the busy Avenida Nuevo León. Over iced coffee or chai, we read and discuss the flight of Garcia Ponce’s seagull and the various beachcombers it spies from above. Garcia Ponce’s light es dorada, intangible, una luz única. 

Leaving the novela behind, we delve into the finer points of the marriage of conditional tense and subjunctive mood, then talk about the beauty and the ugliness of the gran Ciudad. 

God, how much better this is than the classroom I started out in, a kind of machine set to run as slow as the fastest student. Now, one-on-one, I ask as many questions as I need to ask. We go as slow as I want and need to go, and that speed—for my Spanish learning and mental wellbeaing—turns out to be más lento que una tortuga.

Two hours of the heavy mental lifting of foreign language study, and I was physically exhausted. After lunch (tofu salad sandwiches for the family), I did the tarea Karen assigned to me—a translation of the next of Garcia Ponce’s sentences, plus ten original sentences in the conditional tense—and then passed out on the futon.