A Language

I had heard the story before about the two prisoners, alone in the same cell, and one gives the other lessons in a language. Day after day, the pupil studies hard— what else does he have to do?—and year after year they practice, waiting for the hour of release. They tackle the nouns, the cases, and genders, the rules for imperatives and conjugations, but near the end of his sentence, the teacher suddenly dies and only the pupil goes back through the gate and into the open world. He travels to the country of his new language, fluent, and full of hope. Yet when he arrives he finds that the language he speaks is not the language that is spoken. He has learned a language one other person knew—its inventor, his cell-mate and teacher. And then the other evening, I heard the story again. This time the teacher was Gombrowicz, the pupil was his wife. She had dreamed of learning Polish and, hour after hour, for years on end, Gombrowicz had been willing to teach her a Polish that does not and never did exist. The man who told the story would like to marry his girlfriend. They love to read in bed and between them speak three languages. They laughed—at the wife, at Gombrowicz, it wasn’t clear, and I wasn’t sure that they themselves knew what was funny. I wondered why the man had told the story, and thought of the tricks enclosure can play. A nod, or silence, another nod, consent—or not, as a cloud drifts beyond the scene and the two stand pointing in different directions at the very same empty sky. Even so, there was something else about the story, like teaching a stunt to an animal—a four-legged creature might prance on two legs or a two-legged creature might fall onto four. I remembered, then, the miscarriage, and before that the months of waiting: like baskets filled with bright shapes, the imagination run wild. And then what arrived: the event that was nothing, a mistaken idea, a scrap of charred cloth, the enormous present folding over the future, like a wave overtaking a grain of sand. There was a myth I once knew about twins who spoke a private language, though one spoke only the truth and the other only lies. The savior gets mixed up with the traitor, but the traitor stays as true to himself as a god. All night the rain falls here, falls there, and the creatures dream, or drown, in the lair.