Pilgrim in the Palace of Words Read online

  Yes, languages are as organic as we are. And so Latin got old and eventually fossilized. It remains with us in a jumble of scientific phylums, though it rarely escapes the bonds of the written page any longer. The spoken variations, however, continue to grow and move and spring up into new dialects. Latin has already spawned not only Spanish, Portuguese, French, and Italian, but also Catalan, Provençal, and even far-off Romanian.

  Language can get very complicated. The mythical lines between actual tongues and their dialects become blurry and confused. In Italy, for example, so many dialects came out of Latin that it wasn’t until 1979 that what we commonly refer to as Italian, the Tuscan dialect, became the one spoken at home by more than 50 percent of all Italians. And, like many other countries, there are still pockets of other dialects spoken across Italy, including Sicilian, Umbrian, and Corsican.

  That’s how the Tower of Babel works. New dialects continually emerge from a mother tongue, usually the language of an empire. They blossom into dozens of other tongues, often leaving the host language a mere museum piece. They form families with all manner of odd uncles and drunken cousins.

  Perhaps this is strange to us in North America where you can travel for hundreds and even thousands of kilometres without hearing any major differences in speech patterns. But we are the anomaly. That situation exists nowhere else in the world.

  I was attacked in northern Spain by a pack of wild dogs. Well, okay, it was only two dogs, but one of them was a German shepherd and the other was a Rottweiler. They were big dogs, and the German shepherd had three legs. It was a real mean son of a bitch, so in my mind I was definitely assaulted by a pack of dogs. They ripped and tore at me, but why? Because I was on their turf.

  I was staying in San Sebastian, a small city on the northern coast of Spain. It’s set in a beautiful bay on the Atlantic Ocean. The entrance to the bay is guarded by two small mountains, and on one of them a statue of Jesus Christ glowers over the city.

  I had come to San Sebastian quite by chance during yet another major festival — Semana Grande, “The Big Week.” It’s really an enormous drunk. Deep into the night I wound through the ancient streets sloppily cavorting from tapas bar to tapas bar. It was a lot of fun.

  After a few sweet nights of this, my liver was beginning to shut down, and I needed to get away from the mayhem. So I moved to a quiet hostel high in the mountains behind the city. The views over the bay were spectacular, and all around there was a deep and tranquil forest.

  One evening my responsibility was to get the wine for dinner, which meant a trip to the village at the foot of the mountain. I set off, half walking, half jogging along a narrow path that wound through the trees. And that was when it happened. About halfway down, the dogs came out of the trees ahead of me, snarling and growling. I was jogging at this point, and I thought I could loop around them. That was a mistake.

  I felt their teeth rip into my legs, and I realize now that if I had tripped and fallen it might have been all over for me. For some reason, though, I halted, turned, and yelled at them, even as they were tearing at my legs like piranhas. It was only a wordless howl of protest, but to my surprise the dogs backed off a step or two. My jeans were shredded, and I could feel warm blood dripping down my left leg. The German shepherd with three legs continued to snarl and bark, white flecks of saliva spraying from its mouth. The Rottweiler, though, had edged farther back. It was barking at me, too, but without much enthusiasm.

  I continued down to the village with a bloodied leg and torn jeans. I didn’t resume my mission out of a sense of responsibility. It was more like I really didn’t know what else to do. When I returned to the hostel, everyone gathered around in concern. I called up Lesley, who was now back in England, and according to her instructions, we cleaned the wound, though I’ve still got a nasty scar there. I’m kind of proud of it. That was the leg the German shepherd got hold of. On the other, the pant leg was ripped, but the Rottweiler didn’t break the skin. I’ll remember that in future: four legs good, three legs bad.

  Of course, I had no right to charge out of the trees at the dogs. That was their place, their turf, their empire. I should have understood immediately, since there’s no animal more territorial, more vicious, or more self-possessed than humans. We mark our turf emphatically, we raise our legs and piss around our borders, and we do it with language. Our accents and inflections, and the way we write, speak, and understand, indelibly mark us and the territory to which we belong.

  In San Sebastian there was a large poster on the wall outside the station. It read in English: TOURISTS, YOU ARE NOT IN SPAIN. YOU ARE IN BASQUE COUNTRY.

  San Sebastian is all about turf and language. This is Basque country — a fiercely separatist region. In fact, no one here would even call the city San Sebastian. In Basque it’s called Donostia.

  The Basques are a curiosity. They speak a language called Euskara in their own tongue. It’s an isolate language, meaning that it’s completely unrelated to any other language on the planet. They’re very rare these isolates. There are only a handful of them on Earth, and the Basques take great pride in the fact that their language is one of them.

  Euskara, for the most part, is a cacophony of k’s, r’s, and x’s. Here, for example, is a random sentence from a pamphlet I picked up: “Zuraren askotariko erabilerak giro bat sortu dugu orduko bizimoduaren kutsua emateko.” Try saying that three times fast.

  The Basques believe they were actually the first inhabitants of Europe. They have a saying: “Before rocks were rocks, before God was God … the Basques were Basques.”

  A couple of hundred kilometres north of Donostia are the famous prehistoric caves of Lascaux whose rock walls dance with red ochre bisons and antelopes. The paintings date back almost fifteen thousand years, and to some degree they’re not much different from Michelangelo’s marks in that little cellar in Florence. The prehistoric people were marking territory, calling their mountainous world their own. The Basques believe the caves were painted by their direct ancestors, and there’s a good possibility they’re right.

  A series of genetic tests seem to indicate that the Basques are the only pre-Neolithic population left in Europe, which means they might well be the first people to have arrived there. Undoubtedly, Euskara derives from something very ancient, something much older than Spanish or even Latin, older even than Indo-European. At the very least it’s distinctly different. There are still about eight hundred thousand people fluent in Euskara and another two million who speak at least a little of it. Even though the language has been surrounded by Spanish for a thousand years, even though it was banned completely under the fascist dictatorship of Generalissimo Francisco Franco, it has somehow managed to survive.

  The Basques have been pushed into corners of Spain and France where the Pyrenees protect them. But they’ve been able to hold on to that bit of turf. They are and always will be something apart, something different, something that came before.

  When I was studying linguistics at university, there was one name that kept popping up — Noam Chomsky. In 1957 he produced a work called Syntactic Structures, and my field of study has never been the same.

  Chomsky claimed that our brains are hardwired to produce language. We all have certain built-in mechanisms, sort of behind-the-scenes cogs and wheels that spin out our languages. The hardware in the brain is the same for all of us. It’s only the software, or “wetware,” that differs from language to language. What that means is that the grammars of all languages are simply variations on a basic underlying foundation. With a bit of imagination you can take that to mean there really is only one language and that everything you hear around the world, all six thousand languages and tens of thousands of dialects, are simply variations of a fixed template.

  It’s something like taking a mathematical formula, say (a + b)2, and imagining it as a grammatical sentence in one language. In another language the grammatical structure might look like a2 + 2ab + b2. But, if you remember high-school mathematics, you
realize that it’s actually the same formula. It’s just been factored in a different way, or as Chomsky would say, the deep structure is the same.

  I’ve never really liked this sort of mathematical model, though, this computer metaphor that seems so popular in academic circles. It’s too cold, too sterile. It’s like defining water as a molecule wherein two hydrogen atoms are bonded with an oxygen atom. That’s all quite accurate, but it tells you nothing about the shimmering, splashing, gurgling properties of water.

  In my own graduate work in linguistics I’d been taught how to map out noun phrases. I’d been educated to decipher the rules by which a transitive verb might be able to move to a different part of the sentence. We spent great gobs of time looking at different grammar.

  Blah, blah, blah, I thought. What about the toot and whistle of all the tongues of the Earth? What about the way language snaps and sparkles? What about poetry? What about philosophy?

  What about the way a language makes you feel? What about the way it makes you think? What about the way it makes … you?

  I took the long train down into Spain proper to Madrid, the capital. On the train I met Mark from South Africa. He had been a tour guide leader for three years all over Spain.

  “Have you ever been to a real bullfight?” he asked after we arrived in Madrid. He had taken it upon himself to show me Spanish culture and had quickly pointed out the bullfight posters in the train station. I admit I was intrigued, though slightly alarmed. I didn’t want to see any animals killed for sport.

  “You can’t understand Spain,” Mark said, “until you’ve seen a bullfight.”

  “But —”

  “There’s a famous young matador appearing tonight. We should go.”

  And so we did, but it was sickening.

  “What did you think of that?” Mark asked after the first bull was killed.

  “It’s awful.” I’m sure my face was pale.

  “You eat meat, don’t you?”

  “Yeah,” I said, unsure where he was going with this conversation.

  “Well, the cows you eat are penned up and force-fed. They live a miserable life. These toros —” he swept his hand over the arena “— they live their whole lives on the open range.”

  “And then they die a horrible death.”

  “No,” he said. “That’s exactly where you’re wrong. They die a noble death. They die fighting.”

  “A death all the same,” I argued.

  “Have you read Hemingway?”

  “Yeah, well … some of his stuff.”

  “Then you must read Death in the Afternoon if you want to understand.”

  And I did want to understand. For hundreds of years the Spanish have been flocking to see this spectacle. It’s as deeply ingrained in their culture as Catholicism. So why was it, to me, a sickening and disgusting affair?

  One of the important features to know about a bullfight is that in Spain every bull is killed one way or another, which doesn’t seem fair. They stick things in the back of the bull, for God’s sake. Eventually, they slide a razor-sharp sword into the bull’s neck. Properly done, the sword severs the aorta, and the bull dies instantly. That almost never happens, however. The sword bounces off ribs and slides between organs. It usually takes a minute or two for the beast’s knees to buckle. Blood spews out of the bull’s mouth, and then when the animal finally buckles, the matador takes something resembling an ice pick and slams it into the creature’s forehead. The bull’s legs quiver once and then the animal is still. The carcass is dragged away after that, and though I’m told the meat is divided up and eaten, I was still shocked at the brutality of everything.

  Mark shook his head sadly. “You don’t understand. Perhaps foreigners never do.” He seemed to have forgotten that he was a foreigner, too. “All things die,” he continued. “Even you’ll die one day. The whole thing’s a metaphor.”

  Another bull was entering the ring.

  “It’s not unusual for a matador to be gored and horribly wounded even in this day and age.” Mark looked hard at me. “I can see that this is what you’re hoping for. You’re cheering for the bull now, but you’re wrong. All things must die. That’s not open for debate. The real question is how we live. Do we live bravely? With courage?” He paused and took a deep, self-satisfied breath. “The matador lives and dies bravely, and so does the bull. It’s all about pundonor.”

  “What?”

  “Pundonor. In Spanish it means honour, but it’s something more than just honour. It’s also courage, self-respect, and pride all in one word. Pundonor to a Spaniard is as ‘real as water, wine, or olive oil.’” Mark was quoting Ernest Hemingway, and Papa was right. This was the key to understanding it all.

  Later I did have a look at Hemingway’s Death in the Afternoon. The book isn’t a novel. It’s an extended essay on the bullfight for which Hemingway was an aficionado. “Bullfighting,” he said, “is the only art in which the artist is in danger of death.” The people still talk of the great matadors of the past. They talk of their bravery, their moves, their gory deaths.

  Every move has a name and a history, Mark explained as we watched. When the matador swept his cape over the back of the bull, several thousand voices shouted “¡Ole!”

  “You see,” Mark said, “that was a veronica.”

  “A veronica?”

  “Yes. Listen, are you Catholic?”

  “No.”

  “Well, then when Christ carried his cross from the trial to the place of his crucifixion, all the little events that happened to him were detailed. They’re called the Stations of the Cross.”

  I remembered that, of course, from the Via Dolorosa in Jerusalem. I recalled the pilgrims weeping and carrying their rented crosses across the cobblestones.

  “The sixth station,” Mark said, “is where a woman, Veronica, came out of the crowd to mop Christ’s forehead.”

  Okay, I was starting to get it. The cape of the matador became the cloth of Veronica wiping the brow of the condemned prisoner. She mopped the brow of the one who was about to die. An interesting analogy. So there was a lot more to this than met a tourist’s eyes.

  It was, I realized, another one of those symbolic systems, as full and as subtle as any other. Once you understood what the symbols stood for, once you understood that it was a metaphor, well … you were almost there.

  But I still didn’t get it.

  Down even farther into Spain, into Andalusia, I came to Seville and Granada, the ancient Moorish capitals. The Moors were Muslims who had come up from Africa in the ninth century. This Moorish paradise lasted for more than five hundred years. It was a time of great scientific advance, an era of religious tolerance and true enlightenment.

  In1469 Ferdinand, king of Aragon, married Isabella, queen of Castile. With their combined military might they expelled the Moors from Spain in what was to be the final battle ever fought by armoured knights on horseback. Granada was the last of the Moorish strongholds to tumble. The palace fell in 1492, the same year Christopher Columbus sailed to America for Ferdinand and Isabella, a strange but true convergence of history. It was the end of one world and the beginning of the next, a massive sea change in human history. For a while Spain would become the most powerful nation on the planet.

  Also in 1492 a linguist named Antonio de Nebrija put together the first book of Spanish grammar. When he presented it to Queen Isabella, she was confused. “What is this for?” she asked.

  “Your Majesty,” he replied. “Language is the perfect tool for building empires.”

  In the Alcázar palace in Seville a wide tapestry hangs on a wall. It shows the first Native brought back by Columbus from the New World. He has fallen to his knees in the massive cathedral of Seville, humbled before the altar. To me, though, he isn’t prostrate before the power of the Catholic Church; he’s collapsed in the face of the absurdity of everything. From the distant thatch huts of the Caribbean Sea to a stone edifice as big as a mountain was more than his fragile heart could b
elieve.

  In Granada I lined up to see the Alhambra, the fabled Moorish palace. In its heyday it was a place of sunlit rooms and gardens, a magnificent edifice that shamed the grim Dark Age castles of the Europeans.

  The queue snaked around a garden. Even early in the morning the line was hundreds of metres long. For two hours I stood there by myself. Everyone around me was speaking Spanish, so I sort of withdrew into myself. After an interminable time, the young man behind me, who had been speaking Spanish to his girlfriend, suddenly said in perfect English, “Listen, if you want to take a break, we can hold your place.”

  I can’t begin to tell you how surprised I was. I went to the washroom, and when I returned, we started talking. His name was Carlos, and he had studied for a year in the United States. Carlos, I’d noticed earlier, was from the New World. Judging by the features of his face, it was plain he had an indigenous ancestry. As it turned out, Carlos was from Colombia.

  Spain’s empire once covered half the world. It’s gone now, but the language remains so that even in the deepest jungles, even in the most inaccessible mountains of South America, the indigenous peoples speak the tongue of a faraway land.

  “Colombia,” Carlos said, “is a beautiful country, but no one thinks of it that way.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Well, what do you think of Colombia?”

  The answer was plain. “Cocaine, drug lords, guerrillas … lots of bad stuff.”

  “That’s right. I’m an economics student, but everywhere I go, as soon as I pull out my passport …” He paused for a moment, then continued. “Flying here, I was held at the airport in Madrid for ten hours.”

  “Why?”

  “Because,” he said, “I’m a rock climber. I’m climbing here in the north and also in France. There’s some of the best climbing in the world in both places — a Mecca for climbers. Well, you know, climbers use a kind of talcum powder for their hands. You have to keep them dry.” An impish grin appeared on his face. “Whenever I show my passport, they take me aside and tear my bags apart. In one bag they found my talcum powder and, of course, they thought …”