O Say Can You Sí?
(Flying Pigs and Spanish Language Classes)

by Turk Pipkin

(originally appeared in Texas Monthly)

I remember the exact moment that I decided to spend my next vacation at an intensive Spanish Language school. I was in a cab at a traffic light in Acapulco when an American woman rolled down her window to ask for directions.

"Say-nyor!" she called out to my driver, speaking loudly and slowly as if he didn’t understand much Spanish. "Say-ñyor! Don-day es-tah’ el aero-puerco?"

Without batting an eye, the cabby gave her the directions, not to the destination she'd inadvertently requested, but to the airport. Either he was accustomed to hearing his language butchered every day of the week or perhaps he simply didn't know the way to the flying pigs.

A few months later I found myself climbing the steep hills of Guanajuato to the Instituto Falcon, a private school dedicated to teaching Spanish language to foreigners. Finding a small sign above a nondescript door, I climbed on, this time up a long flight of steps, thinking that this truly must be an institute of higher learning.

It had been a long time since my four inattentive years of high school Spanish, and just opening the placement exam handed to me by school director Jorge Barosa caused my palms to start sweating. I hoped to be placed in an intermediate level class, but the truth was that I didn’t have a clue about direct object pronouns or copreterite tense conjugations. Proving that I had not come so far since high school, within minutes I was reduced to peaking at the exam of the woman next to me.

Finally Señor Barosa returned and gave my hard-fought papers a cursory glance.

"Oh, so you haven’t studied any Spanish at all," he said as I sank slowly beneath my desk.

This was the first, but not the last time that I thought about sneaking out and never coming back. But I stayed, mostly because I've got a half a billion reasons for wanting to learn Spanish. That’s the number of Spanish-speaking people in the world, people with whom I can't manage more than a perfunctory exchange. I'm tired of being an ignorant gringo, always on the outside looking in. A competent grasp of a language opens a thousand doors to both knowledge and fun. And to top it off, there is still the simple fact that Mexico purchased 24 billion dollars in goods from Texas last year. We're a bilingual economy and we might as well get used to it.

The method of learning at the Instituto Falcon is simple: speak Spanish all the time with smart and energetic teachers and no more than six students at a time. The program is flexible, with new students starting every Monday and staying as many weeks as they like. Paying $220 for my two weeks of study, I found a chair for the first of my five classes. All day I filled page after page with copious notes: vocabulary, rules of usage and conjugations, all the while feeling as lost as the lady searching for the flying pigs. Somehow I couldn't quite kept up with the anything. I’d open my dictionary to look up a word I didn’t know, and in the meantime I’d miss five more.

Exhausted at the end of the day, as my classmates made plans for drinks and dinner, I excused myself and headed to my hotel. In order to provide a total immersion in the language, the Instituto recommends homestays with local families, a bargain at only $19 dollars a day, including meals. But long set in my traveling ways and unwilling to give up my privacy, I was staying at the venerable Hotel and Museo Santa Fe. the former Prussian Embassy with spacious rooms overlooking one of Guanajuato’s main pedestrian plazas.

The Santa Fe also has one of the best restaurants in town, and I spent much of the evening sitting at the hotel's outdoor cafe, studying my class notes and reading through "Spanish Lingo for the Savvy Gringo," an excellent book which sprinkles the paroles Españoles with the gringo speak. (Technically speaking, by the way, a gringo is any foreigner, not just visitors from the United States.)

I had chosen Guanajuato for my schooling because, unlike San Miguel de Allende and Cuernavaca which have large English speaking resident communities, this town is pure Mexican. Four hundred years old, Guanajuato has just two narrow streets traversing the town, both of them one-way streets that wind uphill through this narrow canyon that is brim full of buildings.

In an ingenious solution to modern traffic problems, at the top of the valley, traffic is diverted underground and moves back beneath the city on a thoroughfare built in the channel of a diverted river. You can get where you're going by car or cab, but it's more fun to walk the streets (so narrow in one place that a couple leaning off the balconies from facing buildings may kiss above the middle of the street.) Among the many people parading by my hotel that night were my fellow students from the school, several of whom joined me for a refreshment and a chance to practice what we’d learned.

Everyone seemed to be working on our parea or homework, stories that we were to tell in class the next day. My story was a chiste or joke, that seemed to go over well – the tale of a man I saw in the streets who was wearing a hat shaped like a giant wedding cake. Hardly believing my eyes, I followed him through the crowd and found that he was only a baker delivering a special order that was balanced on his head

As the week progressed, these stories in carefully constructed Spanish became the highlight of my day. A student in his twenties told us excitedly that he was renting a room from a family with four college-age daughters, all single. This sounded like trouble to me, but by the end of the week he was considering getting engaged. A teacher named Kimon, who was on summer sabbatical from a private high school in California, told us of his upbringing in a strict Greek family. When Kimon was 13, he went away to summer camp where he changed his name to Ken so that he’d fit in with the beach kids. Alas, after camp was over, his father found out when kids started phoning the house and asking for Ken.

A student from Japan who spoke no English referred frequently to his Japanese/Spanish dictionary to tell us about his favorite scenes from Akira Kurasawa’s classic movie, "Seven Samarai."

By Thursday we were practicing our usage by taking turns arguing the advantages and disadvantages of marriage versus being single. And that is when I discovered that in a second language the most intimate details of your life tend to come out unchecked.

Since I was the only married person in the class, Kimon was asked to argue that side as well. He began by pretending to be married and having many kids, but it's difficult to lie in a language you do not know well. Soon he was telling us the real story – that he had recently split up with his fiancee who, just three nights before, had married another guy. I could not think of anything to say in Spanish or English. That night we all took Kimon out for a drinks, reminding him after a few margaritas that the word for husband and wife, esposas , is also the word for handcuffs.

When I was not in class, I was usually coming to the conclusion that Guanajuato is one of the most appealing cities in Mexico. It’s altitude of 6600 feet provides an ideal year-round climate, especially cool and pleasant during the hot months in Texas. Small parks and plazas are scattered among the ancient buildings, and the air is filled with the aroma of fresh-baked bread and fragrant bunches of sweet-smelling camellias sold by wandering street vendors.

With over 20,000 university students among a total population of just 75,000, the atmosphere stays lively. In the evenings there is an age-old tradition called los callejoneados. In splendid Elizabethan costumes, a troupe of singing students roams the city, moving from plaza to plaza, carrying an ever larger audience with them as they go. It's a fine way to fill an evening and, once again, put me in a situation where I could practice my Spanish outside of class.

Thursday night is the big night out here because on Friday afternoon many of the college students head to their family homes in neighboring cities of León or Irapuato. With my weekend also free, I toured the neighboring sights: the mummy museum (yes, it’s full of bizarre-looking mummies), the Valenciana mine (for 250 years, source of 20% of the world's silver production), and the Presa de los Santos, an ancient masonry dam topped by tall stone columns which are themselves topped by carved stone statues of saints.

As I discovered while living in Italy many years ago, I once again found that the best part of learning a new language is not what you can say, but rather what you can understand. In Mexico, everyone has a story. And when the locals realize that a conversation can take place beyond rudimentary greetings or simple bartering, the people of Mexico are usually very willing to tell theirs.

Late on Saturday night, the manager of a small hotel told me how the mayor of a neighboring city had been arrested in a house of ill repute with cocaine in his nose and, he claimed, a young man in his bed. From the police station, the Mayor had called the Governor of the state to bail him out. Though the story had already been printed by one of the local newspapers, the mayor's cronies bought every copy of the morning edition and thus saved his career. Whitewater's got nothing on a scandal like that.

Back in class on Monday morning, I began to retell the story (in Spanish, of course) and was surprised to realize that I was using a wide range of vocabulary and tenses that were completely foreign to me just a week earlier. My mention of local scandal then led to a discussion of a wide variety of cultural differences between Mexico and the U.S.

One of our favorite study aids were the cheap photo comic books which are sold at newsstands all over Mexico. Because the language is colloquial, these little rags can be a big help in conversational Spanish. Though the situations are mildly racy – about like an American day-time soap – I was surprised to learn from our teacher Vicky that you have to be eighteen years old to buy these publications. Vicky, twenty-three years old, had recently been turned down when she wanted to purchase one of the photo comics for class.

In a similar vein, most Mexican people are generally astonished to learn that so many American kids drink alcohol and experiment with drugs at an early age, both vices which in Mexico are rarely explored before age 17 or 18 (if at all).

One criticism I had of the Instituto was a lack of overall coordination of classes. After listening to three different teachers repeatedly cover the four uses of se, I was ready to run away screaming. Worst of all; I’m still not certain about what the four uses are. I suffered similar confusion concerning direct and indirect object pronouns and a variety of other topics, which is not surprising when you consider the complexities of the Spanish language.

With nearly limitless variations formed by various tenses, uses, and added endings, Spanish has considerably more ways to express an idea than English. By the same token, many native Spanish speakers often find learning English difficult because to them our language seems so vague.

The precision of Spanish, in which a change of one letter at the end of a word can radically shift its meaning, is enough to drive a slow learner completely bonkers. After repeated memorization, I am finally able to remember that, when giving directions, the word derecho means straight, and the word derecha means left. Unless it's the other way around.

Of course, if directions and minimal understanding are all you need, there are easier ways to learn than an intensive classroom. There are hundreds of books, audio tapes, and even computer CD-Roms devoted to teaching Spanish. If you've gotten past the standard phrase books, you'll need a good grammar book or a complete conjugation of Spanish verbs.

I'm also partial to a guide to street language called, "Mexican Slang" by Linton H. Robinson. Your conversational skills may still be a little unpolished, but at least you’ll know that chingón means tough or cool, chigado means screwed, and that hijo de la chingada is one you better look up yourself.

With all of this and so much more rolling around like thunder in my hear, near the end of my second week of classes, my mind began to wander out the windows to the streets below. When I realized that I'd reverted into the classroom clock-watcher of my youth, I knew that I was done. Playing hooky on Friday morning, I wandered around town, for a change not talking to anyone, with the exception of my regular newspaper vendor who noticed that I had shifted back to buying only the English language editions.

When it began to rain, I ducked into a fabric store where a man I’d estimate was pushing eighty years old asked in his formal and deliberate Spanish if I was from America. He'd been there once, he told me with great pride, had traveled in 1944 to Billings, Montana where he worked as a stone crusher on a highway crew.

"The strong men of the United States," he told me with a slurring accent and a far away smile, "were fighting the war which must be won."

We spoke of the beauty of Montana, then he sold me some hand-crocheted baby clothes, wonderfully detailed baptism outfits priced at an astounding $4 each. When we shook hands in parting, it seemed that he felt we were friends. Waiting in the doorway for the rain to stop, I heard him tell someone in the back room that an American had been in, an American who spoke Spanish.

I smiled at the compliment, happy to have had a little more than the perfunctory exchange, but also knowing that what the old man had said was not true. Two weeks had taught me just enough to know that, in all likelihood, I will never master the complexities and subtleties of Spanish.

I was reminded of a joke Vicky had told us on the first day of class. What do you call a person who speaks three languages? Trilingual.

And what do you call a person who speaks two languages? Bilingual.

So what do you call a person who speaks one language. An American.

For class information, contact:

The Instituto Falcon

Callejón de la Mora 158

CP 36000 Guanajuato, GTO Mexico