Goat Boy, Captured!

I’m listening to a new album of Ottoman court classics.  Closing my eyes, I can see Istanbul, a city that I love.

Meanwhile, outside, the neighbour kid is breaking in his new skateboard.  He’s practising tricks that will allow him to hold his own at the skate park not far away.  The skateboard’s sound, as it grinds down the granite curb, is oddly appropriate accompaniment, notwithstanding the distraction of worry that the boy might break his neck on the pavement below my office window.

Playing on the streets of urban Cambridge can sometimes be a dangerous proposition, even during the quite hours of the working day.  But now, it’s 4:23 p.m.  When his father arrives home, the sun has nearly set.  Drivers are already racing down the street in hopes of finding one of all too few parking spaces for the night.  Drivers, at this and in the hours to come, will be single-minded.  Their desperation will make them more dangerous the darker it gets.

Conversations between father and son usually begin in the father’s native Spanish.  They often communicate instructions.  Presumably, they’re in Spanish as much to save the child face among the friends who usually accompany him on the street, as for the bonds strengthened by a family language.  As a child, I’d often wished that my father would have spoken to me in his parents’ German, to save me the indignity of being seen to bow to his will.  But, on this street, the kid is aware perhaps that Spanish separates him from his English mates.  So, the father’s Spanish is usually interrupted with the son’s pleading, Ah, Dad. Speak English!

This evening, I’m not paying much attention to the conversation.  Living so close to one another, one learns to tune out the conservations of others and to blindly stare past open windows blazing light like a beacon to sailors on the sea.  Besides, my Spanish is rather poor.  By time it registers that it’s an argument I’m hearing in fact, it has gone well beyond Ah, Dad.  The father who has in the past been, by measures, friendly, fatherly, and stern is now audibly angry.  It’s a single word, one that I rarely hear in public, that pins the specimen to the board. . . . cabrón . . . It’s spoken as the verbal equivalent of the slamming of a door, or, the breaking of a dish.  Surely, it’s not meant to be understood by anyone other than the son.  This is the language of family.  Nonetheless, I can’t help overhearing it, or, attempting to understand what it conveys.

Language is, for me, like a mechanical flip-clock with its split-flap display.  It has teeth.  They go Tick. Tick. before the moment of comprehension.Tock.  To understand this word, I have to be refreshed, by words more immediately familiar to me.  Along the way, I will have collected up all of the similar sounding words that I know, whatever the language.  It’s as if I need to see the stepping stones across a stream before I will make the crossing.  It’s caballero to which the dial first spins.  Sir. Mister. Cowboy. in translation.  Caballero is a word that I’ve frequently heard used in the heat of debate.  It seems particularly New World Spanish.  Often, it accuses another of being cavalier if not arrogant.  Cabestrillo next takes its place.  I once heard this word used in an argument between a Colombian and a Venezuelan.  Go hang yourself with an arm-sling! one quipped to the other.  The comment was, certainly, a cavil.  The use of an arm-sling would be rather ill-suited to a hanging.  But, as argumental rhetoric, it was effective, as considerable offence was taken.  Other words from my mental dictionary step forward in mechanical succession.  Cabra = Goat.  And, Cabro = Boy, quickly tick up.  Destinations to which my train of thought has already departed.  I sense that I’m honing in on a precise understanding despite the fact that Goat boy . . . Niño de Cabra lights upon a cultural reference.  Cayetano Muriel, El Niño de Cabra as he was known, was a Spanish flamenco master-singer.  In a sense, this is the model of the kid’s skateboarding practice: to master the sport’s art form.  This is interesting!, I think.  Earlier in the day, the Indian news-ladies, gave me new words.  Gujarati, not Spanish.  Doebo, one said, this, it means “Boy” or “Goat”. Doe-Bo, I repeated.  But, the other interjected, Doe-Bee, it means “Stupid”.  Her timing was perfect.  She must have seen me flashing through yesterday’s lesson: Kew-Tro = Male Dog and Kew-Tree = Female Dog.  I mustn’t accidently call their teenage sister “stupid”.  Internationally, it seems, goat boys can be synonymous with “stupidity”.  When cabrón finally goesTock!, it’s the slur of Caribbean Spanish.  So vile is it that, when used among Domicans and Puerto Ricans, it can’t be put into English print.  I’ve dredged up words from arguments overheard while working or traveling in the Spanish Caribbean, and come to this.  A word that dare not speak its name.  Certainly, in Continental Spanish — the language of this father and son — its use must be less vulgar.

On the street, following its use, the argument goes silent.  No longer is the skateboard grinding down the granite; it — itself — is curbed.  There’s no slamming of the door; its closing is muted.  Here inside my office, the music of the Ottoman court plays on.  I close my eyes; and, as I do, I see the notes transformed to numbers that hang themselves on the grid of a musical scale.  Passerines.  Magpies.  Birds with a beautiful song.  I remind myself that their Spanish name, spoken while spitting, is maricón.

Recreation through Translation

Recently, I wore a pair of new shoes to a meeting with a client.  What a mistake.  I had to take a taxi home, unable to make the 15 minute walk that normally seems so easy.

The taxi driver had an accent - that is, not any of the American or British accents one hears here in almost any course of affairs.  So I asked her where she was from.

"Slovakia", she said.  The word was followed by a bit of nervous laughter.  Perhaps, because Eastern European immigrants are taking a bit of heat here: seen as taking jobs in hard times.  Perhaps, because, as she'd later tell me, most Britons wouldn't know where Slovakia is if you hit them with the Iron Curtain.  I sympathized; when I studied in Kentucky, one mid-1980s survey found that only nine percent of its citizens could find it on a map.  I lived in Ohio, so I didn't count.  But, I never got lost on my way to University.

I followed tentatively with "Bratislava is its capital?"

With the pain in my Achilles Tendon, my brain had been slow to visualize a map of the country.  The map was also dim and flickering something like a computer monitor suffering power failure.  But, that and its implications are another story.  The name, Bratislava, was difficult to read from the mental map.  And, distractingly, it conjured up an image of a plump, white Brat roasting on an outside grill.  It was lunch-time, I thought, and excused the image on a savory bun as hunger.

At my recognition, she was overjoyed, turning her head from the ruthless Cambridge traffic, offering a broad-smiling, "Yes!"  She turned back just in time to see the woman riding down congested Mill Road in the middle of the street as though she either owned the lanes or had a death wish.  Taxis, cars and loris were dodging the woman like a piece of gum you don't want on the sole of your shoe.

By the end of the ride, our short conversation had travelled miles, sometimes as if meandering down country lanes, sometimes with the intent of Dr. Viktor Frankenstein searching out buried body parts and stitching them together.

I'd walked because parking a bike in Cambridge is a hundred times worse than parking a crutch on the walls of the Cathedral at Lourdes or St. Joseph's Oratory in Montreal.

When finally home, I Goggled "How to break in new shoes".  One of the more highly ranked sites was a Spanish blog.  "I can deal with Spanish," I thought.  "I've held tri-lingual conversations with colleagues in the Caribbean where no one speaks anyone else's language.  This should be easy."

The English language sites gave lots of now useless or seemingly absurd advice.  "Wear new shoes with thick socks," for example.  This advice was useless; I'd already thought to do just that when putting the shoes on in the morning.  "Soaking [the shoes] over night and wearing them the next day until dry," was an absurdity.  Certainly, I could agree with the logic that wet leather would be likely to dry formed to the contours of my feet.  Wet leather, though, tends to shrink when dry.  I had the O.J. Simpson trial ringing in my ears: "If it does not fit, you must acquit"  . . . as well as an old form of torture-to-death practiced in the late 18th century by certain Western American native populations.  In any case, this was a strategy best not attempted during the wintry cold snap that Cambridge was now experiencing.

The Spanish blog had none of that.  Instead, it seemed fixed on the legalities of the practice.  It was flush with all of those common journalistic questions: Who would want to [break into a pair of new shoes]?  How would you get in?  Maybe unlacing would do the trick.  Might the wearer be asleep?  Or, per-chance, fixated on a newspaper while, say, riding a train?  Surely, no one would want to break into a pair of vacant shoes, would they?  And, once in, what would you steal from a pair of new shoes?  Laces?  Perhaps, one might silence their tongues as well, to keep them from naming you as the thief. 

I assure you that nothing was lost in my translations.  I used BabelFish to ensure that I hadn't gone crazy.  (I'm winking and nodding, knowingly.)

With books on this and that for dummies, I'm wondering if I might launch a new career here with a line of books: "Idioms for Idiots".  I'm sure that the description frequently includes myself.  I should be well qualified to author at least one.  There's no end of British idioms that have already gotten me wrong.  But, more on that later.