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I don’t know where I was raised, exactly, but I came out of that Childhood Centre speaking fluent Spanish and English. And a bit of a third language that I swear, for the life of me, I cannot remember. Not even what it was called. I took a whole class, there was an exam, and it’s probably on a transcript somewhere, but I don’t know if I’ve ever even requested a copy of that. There must have been other kids in the class, right? The Programming Centre was well after age ten, I should know this, but I’m getting to an age, now. Thirty years out of school, and none of my classmates can stay distinct in my mind. They’re all melded into one big Spanglish hormonal blob. God, the relationship drama in that school. I’d need to draw a map. If I could remember anyone’s names.
This is awful. It’s awful, isn’t it? I’m going to have to start again. I’m only thinking back to school at all because I was thinking about what languages you must have learned, Anita. Is it still three for everyone? What was your third? I suppose you might not have gone to school in Texas. Do you speak Spanish? I forget not everyone can, some people speak… French, or Mandarin or something. Or Portuguese. Do you speak Portuguese? Probably not.
God, this is already a mess. You’re thinking, “Oh, just get on with it, old woman.” I blame the pain meds. Or my age. Or… any number of things, probably.
Whatever third language I learned at school, I’ve never had cause to use it in Medellín, either fresh out of school or in my old age. Middle age. Does middle age become old age when nobody expects you to live very much longer? But anyway, that probably means it wasn’t an indigenous language in the area like the one Rose learned a few words of. Tucana. Tucano? Something like that. Not that I ever heard Rose speak Tucana in Medellín either.
I always had this idea that if I just heard the language – the mystery language, not Tucana – again, I’d know it, my speaking exam would come flooding back and I’d be set. I’ve travelled a great deal of the South American continent with Rose, but it never happened. I should probably have just taken a refresher class like a normal person. If I ever figured out which language it had been. Then again, who am I going to speak it to? I don’t have any friends left I might cajole into joining me. I can hardly strike up a conversation with the postman in an indigenous language from thousands of miles away. Everyone speaks Spanish and English. Too late now, anyway. I doubt I’ll learn anything in the time I’ve got left. It feels like they’re putting out new English words every year, I’m having enough trouble with those. The things Gael comes out with sometimes…
Rose grew up with a lot of other Spanish speakers, but she was one of only a handful of Colombians across several age groups in her Centre. The Language & Culture teacher was Mexican, and the kids weren’t allowed to know where she lived, but the running theory among the students was that she was driving in from El Paso. For some reason, they were obsessed with figuring this out.
Clearly I remember Rose’s childhood better than I remember my own.
Point is, they celebrated Día de los Muertos in the class. Or, they learned about it. Learned about, celebrated, same thing. Kind of. They made an ofrenda in the classroom, and when Rose explained to me what that was, I was a little shocked. It was, definitionally, a violation of the Age Ten Laws, no? An altar to family, a tacit acknowledgement of the relatives one has lost?
Rose explained that the ofrenda was not populated by the families of the schoolchildren – instead, the kids all drew portraits of famous people who had died. There might have been a couple of photos, too, a former principal who had died, a class pet, that kind of thing. A sweet enough idea, I suppose. An excuse for the kids to color in pictures of calaveras and eat snacks, a way to gently teach them about the loss caused by the Reckoning. Wasn’t until she was an adult that Rose realised it was something of a sham.
I’m sure the teacher had the best of intentions. There were teacher shortages back then, I guess they didn’t pay them enough, and I doubt they got much training. You can speak Spanish and English and handle being around a bunch of confused hormonal teenagers who are mandated to be there? You’ve got the job. I don’t know how old she was, maybe she was doing the best she could to reconstruct the idea of the holiday from memory, maybe from a textbook. Maybe she deliberately made some adjustments to get around a school board that had to approve her curriculum, I don’t know. But Día de los Muertos doesn’t work for people you don’t know.
I mean, I don’t know if it ever “works”, I’m not, like, making a judgement on the faith, culture, whatever practices of pre-Reckoning Mexicans. I’m not saying they were right about the afterlife. Maybe they are. I don’t know.
But what I mean is, from what Rose found out, having a picture on the ofrenda is more symbolic for what it actually means, which is about passing on the memory of a person down the line of the family. Or anyone who knew them in life, that’s the important part. Someone who knew them. Because there are multiple deaths in Mexican, um, mythology, and the first is the one we all know, right, the death of the body. The old machine grinds to a halt and you leave this mortal coil, passing on to the land of the dead. On Día de los Muertos, the dead get to come and visit the living, check in, see how they’re doing. The ofrendas are meant to help guide them to you, I think. But if nobody in the living world remembers you, or hasn’t been told stories about you from someone who does, then putting a picture on the ofrenda doesn’t do anything. And once no one remembers you, you aren’t just stuck in Tierra de los Muertos, you actually die again. I think that’s the third death. I guess there’s a second one in between? I’m not sure.
So these famous people decorating the classroom ofrenda, they weren’t known by the kids, most of them died before the kids were born. Principal died before the kids came to the school. Et cetera. You get it. They have no memories of these people, and even if they did, they would have lost everything prior to age ten.
And why does this matter, right, I mean it’s a classroom activity to keep the kids busy. Maybe the teacher is hungover from Halloween night. But I wonder, you know. If there’s something to that idea, of the multiple deaths, I wonder how many people died a second, third time after the Age Ten Laws came into effect.
…
Man, that’s depressing. This is unusable. You don’t want to hear this, Anita. I should scrap it and start again.
Are you religious? It never even occurred to me to think you might be. You might have your own ideas on the afterlife. Or you might even have a Mexican understanding of it, and I’m just poorly explaining things to you that you already know. Sorry.
I never found religion. There’s a lot of Catholicism in the architecture around here. Maybe in the people, too, still, I’m not sure. Does it work that way? I feel like I heard someone say once that Judaism is a religion that sort of exists in the essence of a person even if they don’t practice it actively. Do they even have to know it’s there? Do they just feel Jewish? I’ve kind of felt something before, in one of those big cathedrals with the stained glass windows. It was in Bogotá, I think. It was a strange sort of serene feeling. Rose kind of leaned over to me and whispered, “Do you feel close to God in here?”
I think I kind of did. I’m not sure if she was making a joke, or if she felt it too. I wish I’d asked. I wish I’d answered honestly. I don’t know if that feeling was Catholicism, but I never went to a priest about it, so I suppose that’s an answer all its own. I’ve never been to a proper church service. Unless funerals count. I’ve been to funerals in churches.
Man, don’t you think sucks to die three times? Who makes a religion like that? What if there was death, the normal one, and then two other kinds of death with their own special kind of grief. Now not only do I have to be afraid of the pain associated with my body giving up the ghost, I have to worry about my ghost too? Passing away into oblivion or whatever it is happens after someone leaves the afterlife as soon as no one alive remembers me. And I don’t have any kids, and even if I did they wouldn’t remember me, so my ghost really isn’t going to last that much longer than my own lifetime.
…Do you think it hurts?
…
Oh my God, this is awful. It’s not about me. This is not about me. It’s about you. And Rose. I’m just… I’m not… We don’t even celebrate Día de los Muertos in Colombia. Former Colombia. Oh God, I’ve not been saying “former” this whole time. You think I’m some kind of tribal Society-hating nationalist for sure. Whatever. This isn’t about me. You’re never even going to hear this. I’m sorry. I’m starting again. I’m erasing the tape and I’m starting again.