Adventures in Second Person Fog

 

With sharp edged, “excuse-me’s” we sliced through the crowds of tourists blocking aisles in the meat section of Alicante’s city market. In a back corner, fortunately only people from town grabbed numbers and waited in front of the two sides of a stand. 

We were attended surprisingly quickly. The man removed chicken legs and chopped them into two: thighs and legs.  “We just want thighs,  my friend said.” 

His reply? “You have to buy both!”

My friend hefted the package and paid, saying “muchas gracias” as she turned to leave. 

He quickly responded “a usted” (to you). 

Oh language. Even simple exchanges like this can call an ethnographers attention, especially when connected with other issues that speak to social change, or that are unexpected. 

I would have thought, being Spain, he would have said ”a vosotros”, since there were two of us, and Spaniards seem to seldom use usted, and usually not ustedes, even in formal circumstances where I would expect it. 

Since the stand is Argentine, I would have expected an “a vos”, but not an “a usted”.

I am also hearing Spaniards around here use vosotros to replace the singular usted, or tú” as vos already did, to a large extent in Argentina. 

Despite what they teach in Spanish classes, second person pronouns are a scary fog filled with fast moving semi-trucks and annoying sports cars all zooming around you while you have to quickly decide which lane (pronoun) to use.  Should you choose the wrong one, it feels like conversation can quickly snarl or even collapse.  

What they teach in classes is generally true. Ud.—the abbreviation for usted—is the more formal pronoun used tor older people and more formal people as a sign of respect, while tú is used with people your own age and status and to those younger or lower in status than you. 

These are “pronouns of power and solidarity”, as Brown and Gilman named them in a seminal paper from 1960 that still seems to hold for discussions of Romance language pronouns. 

While that classic discussion lays out a useful grid in the background, it does not necessarily identify which pronouns you should use in every Spanish speaking country or in every situation.  

To speak is to risk using the wrong pronoun or to make a social and political stance vis a vis pronouns, even if you are a native. 

I recently saw a Reel where a Mexican and a Costa Rican, I believe, laughed at a Spaniard when he produced the word vosotros for the second person plural pronoun.

That is how it sounds to Latin ears attuned to hearing vosotros in the rarified world of the Church or among snobs who are putting on pretentious airs in their home countries. Yet in Spain it is in common usage and, even more, it seems to have shaken off the constraints of that web of power and status to a great extent. Vosotros now is the standard second person plural pronoun at the same time it has stalked and snared the singular Ud. or Tú in much daily conversation. 

This came home to me last weekend when I, in a social gathering, conversed with a couple of Spaniards in their fifties, I think.  The group also consisted of some Colombians.  

I mentioned how people in Cali, Colombia seem to be taking the opposite tack. They appear to be losing tú and even their regional vos for second person singular. They replace it with a universal usted. 

I commented I was hearing the use of vosotros here in Spain for that pesky second person pronoun.  

They said they grew up using usted, and liked it, but that people here in Alicante especially of a younger generation get offended when you use it or tu with them; they demand vosotros. They spoke of a language shift in their experience to which they have conformed. 

You can see why my ears perked up with surprise when the butcher said usted. It made me wonder if he was Latin American, but as I replayed his conversation over meat in my mind, the accent was not the Argentine of his mates in the stand.  I do not know where he is from, but when I go back I will ask. 

In the meantime, his usted, was casually lobbed into parting in response to our volley without a pronoun.

While I could extend this small essay with an extensive set of thoughts on the Argentine vos, for the second person singular, I shall avoid it. 

Nonetheless, I will say that it is used in many other parts of Latin America besides Argentina. I fell in love with it in Bolivia as more intimate and warm that the dry and formal sounding tú which was less that the very distant usted in terms of pronouns of solidarity. Mexico along with its own set of conjugations. 

One final comment: It seems to me that the second person set of pronouns in Spanish has been under heavy historical and contemporary pressure to change. It has and probably will shift.

I suspect this has to do with the complex set of relationships in which it is used within that vortex of power and social differences and needs to express similarity and solidarity. 

Spanish teachers and texts tend to present this set of pronouns as set. As someone who has been using this language daily for more than fifty years, in a range of Latin American countries and now Spain, I do not see it as stable nor set in concrete. Instead it is changing in different ways and at different rates all over the Spanish-speaking world I think. 

Unfortunately I did not hear the Argentines in that meat stand speak vos—maybe they do not use it as much when in Spain.

In any case the chicken we bought to make a pollo negro turned out to be unusually delicious. 

Treacherousness of Good-bye

 

At the moment, I am in a larger coffee house, one owned by an American—I am told. It is more attuned to an international clientele. I can see that in the subtlety of practices. Here, when people come in and out they do not say hello or goodbye. 

Is that because it is large or because it is American / International.  I do not know, but the combination leads to this lack of greeting and leave taking similar to Starbucks. There you simply do not expect people to enter and say hello or to say bye when they leave.

Trying to understand this exercises my professional mind—though I am retired. I have heard lectures and read articles about such things in a field called the ethnography of speaking, related to socio linguistics and anthropological linguistics more generally. For me, the focus is on the speech people actually use in different times and places and how they relate to social demography and identities. 

As I may have said here, since I have arrived in Alicante I have heard two different ways of taking leave: first adiós and, second, hasta luego. 

I would find myself getting irritated when people would say adiós to me.  My inner response is “fine, then, I will never come back.” because to my ears, Adiós carries implications of finality. It should be used for big leave takings where a good time or forever will elapse before you return to be together. 

My irritation led me to ask many people about their impressions. Broadly, South Americans agreed with my interpretation. And, to be sure, I realize that was where this idea was inculcated into me.  In fact, in saying goodbye there are also degrees of formality in some places.

To put it simply, hasta luego is more formal than ciao which is also widely used. In the US ciao carries implications of claimed coolness for some social groups, and Italian-ness, while in South America it is the ordinary goodby for most circumstances unless one wants to insist on status, your’s or the other person’s.

Of course, there is a rich repertoire of ways of saying goodbye, just like in US English. In my Spanish, there is nos vemos which may well be an anglicism based on see you, though that is not how I learned it. I learned it in Spanish as simply Spanish. The anglicism for me would be to say ahi te watcho, or nos watchamos. Sometimes, among friends, I will pull these latter—based on an English verb conjugated in Spanish “to watch” which replaces the English to see: hence I’ll watch you instead of I’ll see you. 

You start seeing here in my linguistic history some of the complexity of this little space of communication. 

Thinking about nos vemos, has made me think about Bolivia where ciao (or chau as it is often spelled locally) is the dominant way of saying goodbye, presuming some kind of familiarity or equality among speakers. You can also duplicate it to create the common formula chau chau, kind of like the English bye bye, used on many occasions from ending phone calls to saying goodby to people face to face. It implies a bit of warmth and solidarity. 

However, in the Aymara language, one of the two min indigenous languages of Bolivia which were numerically dominant when I first started going there in the seventies, the main and most common way of saying good bye I experienced was jikisiñkama, or jakisiñkama, the verb here is about meeting together or encountering each other. 

In the Quechua of Bolivia I learned kutimunkama, also until we return. In Cusco{s Quechus, on the other hand, while that is understood, I was quickly corrected with their form, tupananchiskama, until we encounter each other again.

In Spanish in Bolivia and Peru, I have heard, especially young people use the English bye when taking leave. 

Choices of ways to take leave taking bring in lots of variables of which I have mentioned 1) relative permanence of the separation, 2) formality or informality, 3) status of the speaker and the hearer—this also included perceived coolness, generation, and social status, 4) language and code switching, although subsumable in the variable of status, I will leave that for social difference such as class or ethnicity, we can also see status group membership such as rockers, generational groups, marihuanos (weed smokers), and so on, which also involve identities and social forms that cross national boundaries. 

I want to go back to the beginning of this ramble: the relative permanence of the goodbye. 

I already mentioned the contrast between ciao and adiós and how, based on that, I often feel when people say adiós they are telling me to go away and never come back. This has made me think about how I learned to say good bye in my home towns on the border and among Mexicans and Mexican American in Utah.  Adiós was simply the neutral way of saying goodbye, without the emphasis on permanence or transitoriness.

Of course there were other ways, such as ahí te wacho, from the English see ya I imagine, and so on. If that normal English informal way of saying Bye entered border Spanish, of course the road had two ways. Adiós entered English, without the accent and with a short a and an elongated o. Similarly hasta luego became English in some circumstances. In all of them, you could measure relative formality or informality, but none of them had that meaning of just go away or the implication of not seeing each other again, the finality of the Andean adiós. 

 

A Walk into Shadows

Last evening, while leaving a sadly closing bookstore I love, I had an intriguing conversation. IN my stroll to my path home, I walked a ways with a colleague from my writer’s group. He is a film-maker and is seeking stories from Alicante.

As we walked in the now dark streets—amazing how quickly the sun sets now and how late it rises—I was struck by the lugubriousness of the street. 

Even in broad day, there is a strange quality to these streets, or maybe it is just in the eye of this beholder. I do not know about the latter and so will just give you my observations. 

Alicante was heavily bombed during the Spanish Civil War by Italian bombers (although I believe Germans were also involved) in alliance with the fascists who carried out a coup against the elected Republican government. 

People talk about the market bombing—I wrote a poem about it, I was so. moved when I found out—when at the height of shopping for lunch, the bombers dropped their load on the public market and killed some 300 people in one fell swoop. 

When I think of that, the images that come to mind are immediately those of warred-out cities in the Middle East, including horribly Gaza. But I also think of the core of Berlin and the places they have left unreconstructed as memorials, such as the missing dome of the Reichstag, the congress building.  

Yet I did not hear about how the market bombing was just one of hundreds of explosions in this city as part of the war effort. 

I noticed the shed-looking, small metal buildings with gates to stairwells. These go down to bomb shelters; people can take tours into them. I did not realize that there were many more entrances and bomb shelters; a network in this central part of the city. I read somewhere that at the time, they could accommodate most of the residents of the city.

However, during the long Franco dictatorship whose victory over the republicans ended the war, the shelters languished and decayed. Many have still not been restored. Though I do not know, I imagine others disappeared in the construction of the web of parking lots under parts of the city’s center.  

I imagined these underground spaces, dank and filled with cobwebs and probably rats, maybe even bats. They seemed eerie to me, witnesses to a past preferably forgotten and hidden.  

It seemed likely that over the decades youths and maybe unsheltered people had entered them for their own ends: residence or spaces beyond control for parties or to just be for a bit. That reminded me of graffiti-ridden decaying buildings in other cities, like the bombed out spaces the anarchists took in Berlin to make cooperative living spaces and government-free spaces. 

This made me recall the bat is an important symbol to Valencians. Called the Rat Penat, it is an official heraldic symbol of Valencia. 

Legends tell of how bats, which the Arabs used to control the inevitable mosquitos in the very swampy land of Valencia’s capital city and hinterlands of the same name, turned against them and enabled Christians to become victorious. As a result, the bat is seen as a protector and vanquisher.

I assume as a symbol it can switch and also speak as a denizen of the night. 

to the dangers of official power.

Alicante has a castle above it, on whose slopes the Arabic city was built. Of course there are stories, such as of the king who had a beautiful marriageable daughter. He set up a contest among two suitors to see who could build a canal to bring water to this ultra-dray place. One of them won, but also lost as the princess died leaving the space of epic in which to construct adventures. 

However, the city bravely expanded away from its walls and down the coast into the domain of fisherfolk. I do not know these tales but I am sure the people had many about the sea. Some probably remain today. 

Houses were not built, unlike today, to maximize views of azure waters and the expansive sea.  People constructed with uninterrupted back walls to the sea for protection. Only in the nineteenth century with the fall of Tangiers did this change. The result is a small warren of narrow and odd angled streets. 

From the sea, before this, came pirates to steal cargo and crops, murder and rape, as well as enslave Alicantinos. Many Spaniards, not just Alicantinos were captured, enchained, and taken to the Maghreb in north Africa.  

I am sure there are (or were) amazing stories about the pirates, the pirate wars, and family members captive among the Arabs

Today the pirate wars are a key part of the celebration of Moros y Cristianos, Moors and Christians, a feast and drama that is central to festivities throughout the region. Sword fights with the pirate king occupy a key place in the re-portrayals.

In fact, the cinema’s of the city have just opened Amenabar’s new film—the Captive— just opened in this city. It relates how the great writer and icon of Spain, Cervantes, as a young man was enslaved in Algiers. This work marks a change in Spain’s portrayal of self and its understanding of masculinity, just as Cervantes’ Don Quixote does if read and examined. 

With the destruction of the Alicante’s walls, one of which ran along the coast, the city built a  modern fin-de-siècle town, simply called El Centro today. From a hundred and fifty to maybe forty years old, these constructions are either decaying or being restored. One see abandoned buildings, or gaps where buildings were with their tiles still pasted against the neighboring building’s wall. 

Each of those has stories and is source material for stories, along with the prison camps and the mass killing of Republican captives not quite a century ago. 

One can only imagine the despair of Republicans gathered in Alicante’s port for transport out of Spain as the war came to a bitter end. Surrounded by fascists, Italian and Spanish, weapons raised, they were never rescued and their bodies now occupy mass graves around the city. 

This is a city of stories, many unheard and untold though they leave traces for those who wish to read them. 

 

My colleague and I parted company, he to seek stories and tread on in the domain of film, and I towards home and the shadows of my anthropological mind.

Where a Geranium Blooms

 Miles are a measure of distance in space; they do not accurately measure connections of the heart or the soul. 

I’m perched, having migrated to retire, on the edge of the Mediterranean, very close to Africa though within Europe.  Large ferries depart from the port near my flat several times a week for Algeria. Everyday, I cross paths with Algerians and Moroccans; often women in beautiful scarves, although there are also men with families and men alone, as well as numerous sylph-like youths who show great soul. I also see and hear Europeans of every type on the streets around me, many tourists, others refugees, and some retirees like myself.  The majority of people, like the National Police having breakfast across from me, are from here, Spain, a rich and varied country with its own terrors as well as rich political traditions and joys. 

Still my heart and soul are tied to people on the other side of the Atlantic, and to the vast country that used to uphold vast ideals and dreams to humanity, It saw itself as a torch lighting the way, a vision of hope for humanity. Now most everyone shakes there head and wonders what happened. 

Those things tear at me. More so, the recent assassination at Utah Valley University. It has filled me with a generalized anxiety, interrupting sleep and demanding my days, and I am across the world, on the other side of the Atlantic Ocean and Iberia. 

This morning, the television news is filled with images of police attacking protestors who interfered with a major, international bicycle event’s final in Madrid. Yet my heart cannot escape what happened, the faces of my students, and a governor’s tears when he realized his state and people were not a safe haven but a part of a vast and cruel world. He would reduce it to the influence of social media and the dark web, but it is so much more. 

My questions here are not what happened. We know the bullet and the name of the assassin and the fallen. We know their backgrounds and we even know what is engraved on the bullet’s companions.

My desire is to find peace, for myself and others, and move past this event. I wonder how to strengthen and cultivate that peace in my soul and among those with whom I associate. 

My name is not Polyanna—far from it. I have never been an optimist. Storm clouds are simply storm clouds and a riot a riot.   

For self preservation, I need that peace inside. 

I think of people that to me are images of peace and how it accompanies them like robes moving in the air.  It also emanates from them like a wonderful and fragrant perfume where, when you walk by, you smell it for a moment just feel good. 

Were I a religious leader or a guru I could propose a path to it for other people, a kind of nirvana. I cannot, That is not my path nor my reality. 

However, to find it, I turn both outward and inward. Though the TV blasts images of violence in Madrid and in Gaza, I see green plants and flowers around me. I look into the heart of the flowers to see the multiplicity of colors inside and dream of the bees that may have visited them. 

I lift a basil leaf or a mint leaf, rub it and smell it.  Its redolence fills me and calms me as I focus on it.. 

I see the beauty of the sky—though I am also aware of how quickly that can turn. Still I see it and let it inside, where I also hold to the majestic sea with its calm waves lapping at the beach and the feet of children and their elders. 

But I also turn inward to create peace.  For me that involves writing. But, according to a conversation I had yesterday afternoon, it also involves cooking: the satisfaction of preparing ingredients—even pungent onions that make me cry, seeing the cook and smelling them on the stove, and then serving homemade food to my friends. 

In the conversation it also came out that many people crochet or knit, mostly women but increasingly men. Manual arts like that focus the body and can also calm themind and the heart. 

I go out and walk. While moving I focus on what I am seeing, including something out of the ordinary to photograph and perhaps post on my social media. 

And, I pay attention to my breathing, the how the oxygen enters my body and flows through my blood relaxing tension inside me. 

This is no manual. It is simply a list of practices and desires. Though anger and anxiety may visit, I shall do little more than greet them, hear them, and bid them farewell. 

Today, I shall work to cultivate peace and till my garden where it is planted and grows next to bougainvillea and geraniums as well as hot peppers.