The Center of the World (12 page)

He'd been in the Peace Corps and now he was staying in Antigua before going home. He was a great big Boy Scout. The muscles along her neck softened.

He put his hand on hers, the one that rested on the iron knocker.

“Do you know any knock-knock jokes?” he said.

Kate shook her head. “Not a one.”

“Me either. Knock, knock, knock,” he said. He lifted her hand with his and together they moved the hinged knocker. The sound of it echoed through her chest. When Marta pulled open the massive wood door, he walked off.

Inside the shelter of Casa Candelaria with its thick adobe walls, she smelled something delicious.

“What are you cooking?” asked Kate. At the sound of her voice, Sofia looked up from playing under the banana tree with Felix.

“Soup, with every kind of vegetable I could find. I needed something that felt like home,” said Marta.

Home. How could Kate find her way with Sofia? Had she said too much to Will?

CHAPTER 19

 

“D
o not engage with people who want to put a straw through your brain and suck your energy,” said Will's mother. She taught English to newly arrived immigrants.

“Where did you learn that?” Will asked when he was twelve and still in love with his beautiful mother, although even he knew he should begin the transition to disdain as some of his friends had done with their parents.

“It's from one of my Ethiopian students. It's a rough translation. It's more poetic than saying,
Don't hang around with overly needy people
. I like it.”

By the time he was thirteen, he could still be dazzled and sometimes embarrassed by his golden-haired mother. Cesar Stefano Ramirez, his best friend growing up in the Williamsburg nook of Brooklyn, had said, “Face it, Will, your mother is hot. Why do you think we're all here every Saturday? Because you're so irresistible? Sorry to be the one to break it to you.”

But as his mother taught new immigrants, he somehow absorbed the melody of language from her students. He had accompanied her to the evening classes since he was five, on those evenings when his father worked late.

His parents held hands when they walked or watched a movie. “The secret to a happy life is to marry a woman who is interesting,” said his father as they jiggled along in a subway to Manhattan. “And beautiful, it's a bonus if she's beautiful.”

He grew up around Puerto Rican kids in Brooklyn and was bilingual by age five. Speaking in two languages was as natural to him as breathing. Language poured into Will like music. Once he got the melody and the rhythm, the words fell into place.

His mother shopped at the markets where the old women spoke to him in Polish, offering him juicy bits of warm pastries and sausages. Will inhaled the sounds that came from deep within the chests of the round women, their throats rising like the muffins. They sang a different song than the Puerto Rican kids with their rapid-fire trills of hot streets and memories of trees. His mother hired a young Polish babysitter when she taught during the day. Within weeks young Will could keep up with the babysitter and was the darling of the Polish stores.

The Romance languages followed. Italian was just another variation on the tune; smoother, more like the Motown music his mother played when she vacuumed. Turkish was the first leap from round sounds to the muffled clatter of consonants, bumping against each other. The flood of people from the Saharan region of Africa opened the door of full-out world beat, symphonic variation. Multiple chambers in his brain popped open to make room for new languages.

Will joined the Peace Corps after several years of jobs that left him in free fall. Right after college graduation there had been the Outward Bound job in Wyoming with a small tribe of teenagers who were not half as dangerous as the kids he grew up with in Brooklyn. Affairs with the athletic, earnest young women who worked with him, slipping into each other's sleeping bags at night, was the unofficial benefits program. No employee stayed longer than two years and Will was not an exception.

Outward Bound was followed by one year as a bike courier in Manhattan.
Bike courier
was less accurate than bike warrior, flowing between cars and trucks, pumping hard, tucking his arms close to his body, until he had felt a strange unity with all the other drivers, flowing like water. His bike warrior career ended with a fractured collarbone and a mangled bike. But the last weeks of delivering documents by bicycle led him to the office of a public defender, Richard Curtis, who needed a translator for his Spanish-speaking clients.

“Why not hire a native speaker?” Will asked.

“Manhattan is a lot smaller than it looks,” said the lawyer. “I got burned once when my translator was overly involved with the outcome of a criminal case.”

Will didn't like the lawyer, didn't like the scent of bigotry that lingered on him. When Will advised two Spanish-speaking women to find a different lawyer, Mr. Curtis got wind of Will's advice and fired him.

“Didn't I tell you this was a small town? Try the Peace Corps, if you want to save the world.”

The throwaway advice stayed with him. He started in the Peace Corps in 1987; by 1989 he considered signing up for a second term. The high mountains of the Chiapas region of Mexico suited him. The area bordered Guatemala and was heavily populated by the Maya, the indigenous people of the region.

By the time Will was in the Peace Corps, he was already the envy of all the other PCVs who struggled with Spanish. When he heard a Mayan woman speak for the first time in the open market, everything else stopped. Suddenly there was velvet and birdsong, the snap of a branch, cooing in the background, followed by something crisp that lasted only a second.

He wanted to know this language, wanted to let it glide off his tongue. He changed his assignment so that he worked right on the border of Guatemala and Mexico in the light, cool mountain air, building a school with the Mayan men. He had known nothing about building schools and so he became a student of the local masons. He worked alongside the small men, carrying stacks of adobe bricks that dried in the sun. He learned to put just the right amount of mortar between the bricks and how to space them. He kept his head down and worked, clear that his manual labor counted more than anything.

While he stacked and mortared, Will learned their language. The method was always the same: First listen, find the tune, let it settle in, picture the shapes and colors, the taste of a language, then let the words roll through you and sink in. By the time the sod bricks were formed, dried, put in place, and the tile roof added, Will could tell a joke in the northern Mayan dialect, tease his dark-skinned coworkers and tell them about his mother who taught English to the immigrants who moved to Brooklyn.

 

“You're a language savant,” said Amy, the Peace Corps volunteer closest to him geographically in Mexico. They were traveling by bus into the Peace Corps headquarters in Mexico City for the annual Christmas party where, for one evening, they were wined and dined by the diplomatic corps.

“Not so. If I were a language savant, then I'd be piss poor at everything else and languages would be my only talent. Check out my adobe building technique if you want to see true skill. I think they might hire me as a laborer when I'm out of the Peace Corps. I can see my future at last.”

Amy wrapped her sweater around her shoulders.

“How's that present tense Spanish coming along?” he asked her. Amy was the only one he teased because he liked her. Her boyfriend was due to visit in a few weeks. “Shall I teach you some lovely dirty words in Spanish for your conjugal visit?”

Will knew lots of dirty words from Brooklyn. The bus trip lasted six hours and he whispered each dirty word he knew in Spanish, punctuated by Amy's squealed protest.

“No, I could never say that!” Then, “Tell me another one.”

He met the American ambassador, David Markman, and his wife, Helen, at last year's Christmas party, surrounded by a small circle of earnest PCVs, all vying for the diplomat's attention. This would be the last big gathering that Will would attend before his term was over and he would have to decide where to go and what to do. The American ambassador worked his way across the room and approached Will, separating him from the herd.

“You can continue to be a big help to Central America and to your own country,” said David, a tall man whose facial flesh had loosened into mounds from his cheekbones and jaw. Will guessed that he was from Texas by the accent and boots. The embassy was thickly walled with massive cuts of stone, making it nearly impenetrable, and acoustically disastrous. The crescendo of voices that reverberated in the formal hall was painful.

“What do you mean?” said Will, shouting to be heard.

David ran his hand over his belt buckle as if checking to see that all his parts were still tucked into place.

“We have an agency that needs Mayan speakers. They asked me to select a Peace Corps volunteer who has a sharp ear. Your ability with languages is your main selling point, young man. I can't say more than
please
and
thank you
in Spanish and I've been here three years.”

The ambassador's lack of effort with Spanish made Will wince. “Which agency are you talking about?”

He took Will's arm and led him to a balcony overlooking the inner courtyard. “Don't ever say anything too specific inside an embassy,” he said. “You probably think I'm some politically appointed good old boy who doesn't know Jorge from Jesus. Speaking in mind-numbing generalities of politico talk takes more practice than you might think. I hear you can learn any language in existence. That true?”

“I haven't tried every language in existence, sir.”

“Relax. Let me get you another drink.” He pulled a dark plastic rectangle out of his pocket about the size of a credit card and pressed a button. A waiter with a white jacket appeared.

“Roberto, please bring two beers to the courtyard. Mr. Buchanan and I need to find a quiet spot to talk.” David slid the device back into his jacket pocket. “I love techno toys. They're the future.”

The waiter turned and left.

Will followed the ambassador down the balcony steps to the courtyard and they settled into uncomfortable wrought iron chairs near a fountain that gurgled erratically.

“It's not uncommon for various agencies and private industry to recruit among the Peace Corps. You're heading into the end of your time here. You must know the drill. We're selective. We don't let any yahoo come in here and recruit. We've got laws about who can and who can't. For example, it's against the law for the CIA to recruit. Do you understand?”

“So far. We can be recruited by some organizations and not others. Got it.”

The waiter brought two beers on a serving tray. Will took a tentative sip from his. He had a feeling that this was a good time to stay sober.

“The Mayan languages have us pretty stumped in parts of Central America. I hear that you can speak several of the languages from Chiapas. Few Mexicans have ever bothered to learn it. Odd, don't you think?” The ambassador leaned back in his chair and stretched out his long legs.

Will tried to lean back in the chair but an iron bar hit him squarely on a vertebra. “It's a class issue. The Mexicans prefer to claim only Spanish heritage and the Maya are on the lowest rung of the ladder. Not too many people in the States study Navaho. It's the same thing,” said Will.

The ambassador tipped his beer up and downed it in two gulps. Will guessed that he had learned that in college. “Interesting that you should mention Navaho. In World War Two, we counted on the obscurity of their language. We used it as a code. The Germans couldn't crack it.”

Everyone knew this. Where was this guy going? Will looked longingly at a trio of Peace Corps workers who had stepped out on the balcony and were hooting with laughter.

“Do you know how many Mayan languages there are?” asked the ambassador.

“Twenty-two, if you count the ones in Guatemala, sir. But some are dialects of a main branch while others are distinct.”

“That's correct.” He crossed one leg over the other and leaned forward. “We have an agency that would like you to learn all twenty-two languages. They're called Department Thirty Seven. Do you think you could do that?”

The idea of learning twenty-two languages was better than sex, food, or clean tap water. Maybe not sex, but it was a very close second. He already knew two of the Mayan languages from Chiapas. The thought of learning all of them was like a shot of liquid euphoria injected into his arm.

“What else would I need to do?”

“The job description is called Language Specialist. The group in question knows that the Peace Corps has one of the best language training programs around, better than the goddamned Rosetta Stone. As I understand it, they need a man to learn Mayan languages so that Department Thirty Seven can communicate with them. Communication is the key. See, once you learn a few languages, you could teach it to the Department boys. I guess you'd say the job is like being a college professor without the fuss of academic meetings and ass-kissing.”

Will looked ahead to his future, moving back to Brooklyn with the meager stipend from the Peace Corps, applying to graduate schools, studying one language or two, enduring a slow path to a degree that might enable him to teach if he was very lucky. He was being offered a deal that had never come his way before. Was there a feral scent of deception on the ambassador's breath? His high school friend Cesar had said, “When someone is trying to get over on you, they stink like cat piss.”