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ESPANOL UNO-CERO-UNO

It’s Day One and my wife, Amanda, and I have just met Miriam Barrios, the matriarch of our host family. Miriam chats with us as she shows us the house we think we’ll be living in: four bedrooms, immaculately kept, cable television and a telephone. The telephone, we learn, is rare here; the TV is not.

As we sit in the family room, I fantasize about gathering on weekends with the Barrioses, watching soccer or the latest Mexican soap opera, bantering whimsically about the ties that bind us on this place called Earth: sports and television.

Amanda, meanwhile, is listening to Miriam and, more to the point, understanding her. Later, Amanda translates: She tells me Miriam has a cousin in South Carolina. She tells me Miriam has three children. She tells me lunch is served at 12:45.

My head pounds, but some of Miriam’s words start to come back: (start ital) “Carolina Sur … tres ninos … doce cuarenta y cinco.” (end ital) I realize that, yes, that (start ital) was (end ital) Spanish that Miriam was speaking. I try to hide my panic from my wife, which is pretty much my standard policy with health issues, career prospects or dangerous assignments, and I wonder why I was able to follow so much more of what my teacher had said that morning.

I get my answer shortly. My … teacher … talks … like … this. She speaks only in the present tense. Somehow she forms complete sentences using almost solely words that I might understand, of which there may be, oh, 30? I’m very impressed. I am also very, very afraid.

See, my wife and I are studying Spanish because of a move to Mexico City. That’s in Mexico, the country, not in New Mexico, the state, as we had to tell an alarmingly large number of people in Chicago. Learning Spanish for us is no lark; it’s a part of our life.

To do it, we’ve chosen San Jose el Viejo Spanish School in Antigua. I tell my bosses, who are paying for this, that it’s because of the school’s fine reputation and highly trained teachers, blah, blah, blah. But one of them has seen the place and knows the true reason: The place is postcard pretty. Individual classrooms are spread around a fragrant garden with orange, lime and grapefruit trees in bloom, a gurgling fountain and bougainvillea everywhere. The staff is friendly, the system is organized and the classrooms have padded chairs.

Antigua is hard to beat. Yes, purists criticize its touristy feel, and not without some justification: The hotels and restaurants can be overpriced and some places have a contrived quaintness that, believe me, you will not find elsewhere in Guatemala.

Antigua was the capital of the Spanish conquerors in the region for much of the 17th and 18th Centuries before a series of earthquakes finally made the conquistadors abandon it and move to Guatemala City.

The town is set in a valley surrounded by mountains and volcanoes, with colonial buildings and ruins spread across it. Dozens of good to great restaurants and bars cater to tourists and locals alike. Antigua also has one of the most beautiful hotels in the region: Casa Santo Domingo, a renovated convent. While thousands of people come to Antigua to study Spanish each year, more descend just to visit.

The teachers at San Jose School are, for the most part, young, underpaid and bored–Guatemala’s version of American child-care workers.

Personally, I can’t blame them for having to feign interest. I mean, I give my teacher as much as two minutes to nod off between my words, and most of what I can say is singularly unexciting. Out of guilt as much as ineptitude, I try to keep my sentences short to match her attention span.

San Jose, like most schools in Antigua, works this way: For $90 a week you get one-on-one instruction for 3 1/2 hours in the morning and 2 1/2 in the afternoon. For $85 more the school sets you up with a family, where you get a room and meals five days a week. The program is as “immersion” as you want it to be. You can spend all your free time with other English speakers and pretty much refuse to learn Spanish, as some students strangely and proudly do.

Or you can be hard-core and swear off your native tongue altogether. To stay sane, and stay married, Amanda and I find the middle ground.

Eventually, Amanda and I find out we are not living in the aforementioned house. We are in what used to be a garage. The Barrios family has remodeled it, in a fashion, but I still keep expecting to find motor oil on the shelf.

There are two very old, very soft, very small twin beds. We put them together, but it’s not the same. The gap between my wife and me is a problem.

During the course of the first week, we learn the patterns of the Barrios family. Lunch is the day’s highlight. The family’s cook is excellent, and there is no shortage of food–a situation that would change dramatically with my next family.

The two older Barrios kids, ages 18 and 19, never eat with the family and have no interest in talking with us gringos beyond an occasional “Que tal?” (“How’s it going?”). This bothers Amanda more than it does me and, we suspect, it truly pains Miriam. I see the teenagers for what they are–teenagers!–and figure I might not want strangers sleeping in my garage either.

My biggest joy so far: The fresh fruit is really, really good.

By Week Two my wife, who studied Spanish in high school, is already reading the newspaper and discussing politics in Guatemala. We have made friends with a couple from San Francisco, Larry and Cinda, who are here after traveling through South America for six months. Larry and Cinda and Amanda have actual conversations in Spanish. I’m still mercilessly flubbing common verbs in the present tense.

The key to learning another language, I’m told, is to think in that language instead of trying to translate everything into your native tongue. This I cannot do; instead, I become consumed by what Spanish does not have that English does.

I keep mentally grasping for that wonderful, multipurpose verb “to get” in Spanish. (It’s conseguir, but it doesn’t have the same uses.) “I don’t get it,” I want to say. Or, “Don’t get me wrong.” Or, “Let’s get a beer. . . . Let’s get lost. Get real. I have to get some sleep. I get confused. I want to get to know you. Did you get the painkillers?”

I am spending too much time studying, Amanda tells me. I’m becoming boring, one-dimensional, obsessive. “Get a life,” she tells me.

As a diversion, we take a weekend trip to the picturesque town of Panajachel on Lake Atitlan. The weather is perfect, the volcanoes are gorgeous, and the markets are teeming with intricate handmade crafts and clothes bursting with colors unseen even on MTV.

Undaunted, I go to class for Week Three. I have a new teacher, Bittia, a quiet, formal, striking young woman who is studying at the University of Guatemala to be a television journalist. After having made what I thought was progress during the previous week with my teacher Alicia, I find I can hardly understand a word from Bittia. I realize I’m on the roller coaster that is language study; in my current physical condition, it is not a good thing.

“Oh, don’t worry about learning Spanish. It’s a really easy language.” They told me this in Chicago, lots of people, some of whom could actually speak it.

Why they told me this is anyone’s guess: A.) They saw my fragility and wanted to give me confidence. B.) They had heard that somewhere. C.) They don’t know what they’re talking about. D.) All of the above.

At this point, I’m going with “D.” This is the hardest thing I have ever done.

The more I learn the more I realize how much there is to learn. We are studying the perfect past tense now (2 down, 12 more verb forms to go), and I’ve already forgotten as much as I’ve learned.

I’ve been taught enough now to be embarrassed and frustrated when I don’t know something I should. And frustrated I get. So much so that sometimes I want to take people and very gently put them up against the wall and tell them that, seriously, I am not a stupid person. I make my living with language, as a matter of fact. I have fully developed opinions, and not just about the lunch I just ate. I can be funny–intentionally.

Everyone tells me that these emotions are normal, that they are part of learning another language, of opening oneself up. But knowing I am not unique does not not make it any easier.

Things with the Barrios family, meanwhile, have gotten little better. We had always thought that roosters crowed only at daybreak, but these here keep it up all night. And the sound is nothing like in the cartoons, more cry than crow. One night we are lying in bed, wide awake at 2 a.m., and Amanda turns to me and says, “It’s like they know they’re going to die.”

Each day at lunch we get the latest on the Barrios’ 8-year-old daughter’s preparation for the big Independence Day parade. Every school in town participates, practicing for hours each day. The kids walk around town banging huge drums, with only an occasional triangle or other percussive instrument to break the monotony. It’s quite charming, for a while. The children who don’t play, like our hosts’ daughter, march.

And on Independence Day (Sept. 15), they parade all day–from the edge of town, through the historic square and on to the stadium. Drumming and marching. Drumming and marching. The military joins in, too, parading menacingly through Antigua with automatic weapons at the ready. By the end of the day, when the soldiers have gone home and the formalities are over, the somber aspect disappears and the day becomes a fiesta.

Amanda and I join in. We watch the parade in the morning and that night join the crowds in the square. For dinner we squeeze into a restaurant housed in a 250-year-old building. In the window is this woman cooking over an open grill these sublime scallions that rank among the best food I’ve ever had. The parade goes on outside, practically right in front of our table, and people laugh and sing and sell these beautiful clothes and weavings and we sit there drinking a good Chilean cabernet for an absurdly low price. I barely understand a word of what anyone says.

At this moment, all the headaches become worth it. Amanda and I raise our glasses and, with a not-half-bad salud, toast our decision to come to Guatemala.

By Week Four, however, Amanda has returned to Chicago to deal with the grunt work of moving. And depression has set in. I finally decide that I am, in fact, quite stupid. People who have studied a foreign language as an adult or read Stephen Hawking will know what I am talking about. I speak Spanish hardly at all, and I comprehend little of what I hear. I need one of those breakthrough days, when everything becomes clear in a flash, like math used to be, or a good episode of “Star Trek” . . . the new one.

I switch families and, all of a sudden, life brightens. Three other students live in my new house as well and, much to my shock and delight, THEY SPEAK LESS SPANISH THAN I DO! I find myself doing some translating, even if it is only dinner table talk like, “Pass the beans” and “That’s beef, I think.”

My confidence gets a critical boost, and another maxim of language study is brought home: One who has no confidence has no tongue. (I just made that up.)

The matriarch of this house is called Patricia. She fled to Canada after her first husband was “disappeared” in the early 1980s, when Guatemala was in the throes of a still-lingering civil war and the right-wing regime was killing thousands of people a year. Her son, now 12, was threatened with death as an infant, and to save him as much as to save herself she left the country. In Canada she met another Guatemalan refugee, a labor leader named Jose who escaped soon after death squads killed his union’s hierarchy. They married and returned to Guatemala a couple of years ago, hopeful but not positive that the dangers had passed.

Patricia, who speaks excellent English, is adept at making her guests feel at home. At lunch, the big meal of the day in Guatemala as in much of Latin America, members of Patricia’s extended family join with the students, and we work at following conversations.

There are usually eight of us, though it seems as if there is only enough food for five. The Americans often leave the table hungry.

The students in this house are pretty representative. In my three weeks I will share the house with an exceedingly nice and charming flight attendant whose favorite word is deliciosa, even though I have not yet met a single native Spanish speaker who says that; an Anglo lawyer from Miami who hopes to better his business in that city’s Latin community even if, as he says, “I really don’t like working with those people”; and a middle-age Florida real estate salesman who bought a hotel in Costa Rica and has come to Guatemala to learn Spanish–in two weeks.

There are some ugly Ugly American incidents. The hotel owner sits at the table and loudly asks me things like, “Now, who’s this guy?” or “What’s he talking about?” even though three of the family members understand English perfectly.

The attorney launches into a long tale in English about going to a disco in Guatemala City and making fun of the patrons: “Have you ever seen Guatemalans dance? They’re terrible! We were laughing so hard!”

At school, students swap stories about horrible crimes in the area, some of which may actually be true. By the end of the second week, after spending nearly all his free time with other Americans and learning how to say little more than gracias, the real estate guy is complaining that the school wasn’t immersion enough for him.

But, thankfully, these incidents are the exceptions. Most students show great respect and try hard to use what they learn in class. On breaks we gather to drink coffee and chamomile tea (great for stomach problems, and thus much in demand) and share stories about why we came to Antigua.

A couple from Columbus is here because he has retired as a dentistry professor from Ohio State University and she has just joined the U.S. State Department and is being posted to El Salvador. Larry and Cinda, our traveling friends, left coveted jobs in San Francisco as a lawyer and fund-raiser, respectively, to learn Spanish and then make a career switch to teaching and computer programming, respectively.

A pair of Germans, drunk on strong marks, are spending a year on the road before returning to the world of work in Frankfurt. An Australian teacher, taking full advantage of her country’s generous leave policies, has chosen Central America as her months-long vacation blowout.

We discuss fine points of Spanish grammar, pass along the latest school gossip that our teachers have showered on us and, in our weak moments, drink lots of bad Guatemalan beer. We celebrate birthdays, singing in both Spanish and the celebrant’s native tongue (the Dutch version is quite lively and won the informal contest as best birthday song). Friendships are made quickly, and then people leave.

Each Friday the school has a graduation ceremony for departing students, and everyone is supposed to say something. Most thank their teachers and talk about what a great time they had. Some tell stories, or relay the jokes they’ve heard in class (most of which are surprisingly blue).

One man, in a moment of living hell that he will not soon forget, slipped up and told everyone what a great time he had had in Argentina. It took a minute before the stunned crowd could wallop him with laughter.

Me? By the end of Week Six I have plowed through all the verb forms, and I decide quite foolishly to fill my graduation speech with each of them. Including the hated subjunctive. (Think of a non-English speaker trying to learn something like, “Now, were I to have done that.”)

As is my style, I try to do it off the cuff. Of course, I had thought of what I was going to say beforehand, but I did not write anything down. So 30 seconds into my little speech I am lost. What I think was a little joke goes nowhere, and everybody kind of smiles and nods the way people do when they cannot understand a syllable of what a person is saying.

When it is over, the school principal says something nice that I really don’t catch but I smile anyway because her tone of voice tells me to.

I get a diploma that congratulates me for spending six weeks studying Spanish, I have a goodbye chat with my teacher, and I bum a ride to the airport with Patricia.

As we come out of the mountains of Antigua, heading to the airport in Guatemala City, I am overcome by ambivalence. I desperately want to leave and meet my wife, now sitting alone in Mexico City with a sick dog in her lap and an uncertain future staring her in the face. And yet, I desperately want to stay and complete the job I started, learn Spanish as it should be learned, get to know the people of Guatemala in a way I have not yet done, see all of the remarkable beauty that the nation has to offer.

We pass deep, green ravines and piles of trash burning red along the side of the road. We talk in Spanglish of Guatemala’s future and what life will be like in Mexico.

I confide in Patricia my anxiety, my disappointment at not learning more Spanish. She becomes the big sister I need, the big sister anyone needs when learning a new language, the big sister who assures you and promises you that everything is fine.

“Poco a poco,” she tells me, reminding me of the Spanish student’s mantra. Little by little.

At the airport I glide through check-in without a hitch, getting everything I want–a window seat, no smoking, easy access to the emergency door. I settle into my seat and grab the Guatemala City newspaper.

And as the plane prepares for takeoff and the flight attendant launches into her spiel about seat belts and air masks, I can almost make out what she’s saying.

DETAILS ON IMMERSION SCHOOLS

San Jose el Viejo is one of dozens of Spanish schools in Antigua. And Antigua is just one place of several where you can study Spanish in Guatemala.

Panajachel (on Lake Atitlan), Quezaltenango and Huehuetenango all have several schools, though some close during the colder winter months. Some students prefer these other locales, finding daily life more “authentic” and the immersion a bit deeper.

One theory goes that the shorter the time you have to study, the better off you’d be somewhere other than Antigua, where the temptation to talk English out of class is greater. Do plan on staying with a family, no matter where you study. There is no substitute for that kind of conversational exposure.

If you are serious about pursuing Spanish, try to set up a system of study for when you return home. Try to practice with a Spanish-speaking friend. Watch programs on Univision or other Spanish-language television networks (their news shows are generally quite good). And try to read Spanish-language newspapers.

All these (even the classes themselves) can be found in the Chicago area.

Here is the basic information on the school I attended, plus several other highly recommended schools in Antigua; all have one-on-one instruction. Lodging with a host family generally includes three meals a day during the week and sometimes breakfast on Saturdays. Prices are as of spring 1996 and are subject to change.

– San Jose el Viejo: 6 1/2 hours of classes a day; $175 a week for school and lodging, $90 for school only (half-days available for less). Phone (from U.S.): 011-502-832-3028.

– Francisco Marroquin, Proyecto Linguistico: 7 hours a day; $200 a week for school and lodging. 011-502-832-2886 or 832-0406.

– Centro Linguistico Maya: 4 to 7 hours of instruction a day; from $85 to $120 a week. Family lodging is $50 a week. 011-502-832-0656.

– Academia Cristiana de Espanol: 4 to 8 hours of instruction a day; from $85 to $125 a week (family lodging is $55 a week; signup fee $20). 011-502-832-3922.

Switching schools is common among students, so you might want to pay for only a week at a time; if you are dissatisfied with your choice or want to experience other systems, you can switch.