Intimate worlds. I am learning his language Dutch with my father. I don’t know how good it is for me, but it’s a way to love him and be together.

Who in their right mind starts learning a new language after forty years? Several possibilities come to mind: expats who end up in a foreign country and desperately need to adapt; Culture lovers who dream of reading the classics in their original versions; and finally, people who have an outstanding debt. A debt? Yes. I belong to the third group.

“You don’t learn Dutch overnight,” says my father, who was born on Curaçao in 1947. And as a reproach he adds that as a child I began to cry inconsolably as soon as I heard the characteristic guttural sounds of his language. I grew up in Spain at a time when the internet didn’t exist and getting educational materials in other languages ​​was an odyssey. In Sprookjesbos in Liedjestuin (“In the Forest of Fairy Tales and in the Garden of Songs”) was the only record in our club that was practiced luister (Hear). Plus, plane tickets cost an arm and a leg. Curaçao is part of the Kingdom of the Netherlands, but is located in the Caribbean SeaTherefore, the flight there was an extraordinary event, an adventure that we could only undertake on very special occasions. When we crossed the Atlantic, my goodness granny (Grandmother) spoke to me in wonderful Spanish, which she knew thanks to Venezuelan soap operas, and mine grandpa (Grandfather), in an English I could barely understand. I’m not saying my dad didn’t try, but he always spoke to me in Spanish.

Five years ago I decided to make up for lost time. It was good advice from my friend Mercedes Cebrián, a writer who couldn’t understand my lack of interest in my family’s language. Since then, my father and I sit down for a few hours a week to translate together. With “Doing Dutch” we describe this exercise as if it were a leisure or sports activity, as if it were mountain climbing or apple pie. He recites the text very slowly, sentence by sentence, out loud. Then I repeat what he says, but I think most of the time he doesn’t understand me, or maybe he’s going deaf, I tell myself, to comfort myself. «!Zee It’s sea, with ee (And:)! Don’t you hear it? Is ee (e:), like Edu, insists. AND Houseit’s home, with orI (œy), like an ox. Let’s see, say ox. I don’t think I’ll ever be able to do it because some differences are subtle, barely noticeable nuances for me.

The truth is that it is not an easy language. The grammar is very complicated: in many cases the verbs are at the end of the sentences and sometimes they are made up of two different particles that drive us Spanish speakers crazy when separated. For example, aandoen (put on): I’m already there (I put on my coat), it falls on one side doe and on the other side aan.

Learning a language means not only incorporating new vocabulary, but also new sounds. It’s as if a musician who has always played jazz suddenly becomes interested in the baroque. Patience is essential, and patience is the very thing that almost always runs out between a father and a son.

At least I can understand the news Makkelijke taal (Easy Language) from NOS (Nederlandse Omroep Stichting). I don’t do it because I want to communicate with the old spirits of my family. Nor because I want to read the books of my great-grandfather, the folklorist Nicolaas van Meeteren, without having to resort to Google Translate. Sometimes I wonder if I do it out of fear, afraid that as my father gets older he will forget Spanish and I won’t be able to speak to him anymore. Sometimes he gets so caught up in the explanations that I lose track and end up having no idea what he’s telling me.

Shortly before my death, my granny He began to mix the languages ​​he spoke (Dutch, Papiamento, Spanish and English). as if she herself were a victim of the punishment that God inflicted on the builders of the Tower of Babel. My efforts are immense. During the breaks that I rest, I do exercises with Duolingo. I also have a teacher with whom I practice my exercises Dutch. Thanks to Anneloes Schoenmakers I expanded my basic vocabulary –tasty (yummy), dead ziens (see you soon) or Thanks, Jewel (Thank you) – the words poet (Poet), navel (belly button), kicker (Frog), vreemdeling (Stranger)… And also the tongue-twisting word hottentottentoonstelling (Hottentot tent exhibition), which I won’t use often but which, like me, all Dutch students learn by heart.

Now I understand that when my grandparents called home and my dad said Cousin, cousin And premium (Okay, okay, okay), it wasn’t his cousin he was talking about.

When I told him that I wanted to learn his language, my father was very happy. He was proud that at least one of his children was finally interested in his culture. In this way he could once again feel the authority that parents lose as they grow older. The next day he gave me a folder with some pages. On it he had written the first sentences he should know in different colors. For example: “Ik ben Ignacio Vleming” (I’m Ignacio Vleming); “My father worked in the business sector and my boyfriend was more successful in the dormitory.” (my father worked in the wine industry and my mother was a hospital nurse); “I was born in Madrid” (I was born in Madrid) or “Van beroep be ik journalist, but in my jn vrije tijd rijf ik poems” (I’m a journalist by profession, but in my free time I write poetry).

The last statement stunned me. “Dad, you don’t take my work very seriously!”I told him to defend himself. “In my free time I don’t write poetry, I’m a poet, a poet who has published several books.” The one time he tried to read my first book of poetry, Artificial Spring Climate, he told me that he wasn’t sure whether the forest would end up burning or not. But which forest? But who has read this handful of poems as if they were a novel? At home I was never taken too seriously. My effort to learn Dutch is probably a way to justify myself.

Sometimes they ask me quizzically why I never learned my father’s language. I always answer the same: Curaçao is part of the Netherlands Antilles, but in Curaçao they also speak Papiamento, a creole language derived from Spanish. Regardless of how much Spanish is spoken in Curacao, I think that when I pass through customs with my passport from the Kingdom of the Netherlands, I will do a surprise test to check that I can speak effortlessly. ij (ɛi̯) or ch(X). I wish languages ​​were inherited the way eye color is inherited. I would like to ask Steven Pinker or Noam Chomsky if one day my father’s language will emerge from my mouth through spontaneous generation. It is more likely that the artificial intelligence we have access to through our mobile devices will become a simultaneous translator, an interpreter that repeats our words in another language even in our own voice. So why learn a new language? Why memorize endless lists of irregular verbs?

Many of the books we read together are classics of Antillean literature. My first Negro (“My Little Black Sister”, 1935), by Cola Debrot, and Double play (“Double Play,” 1973) by Frank Martinus Arion, we loved it. Sometimes he not only wants to translate the book with me, but also explains it to me. When I’m tired, I let him talk; after all, “learning Dutch” is an excuse to spend some time together.

Having good conversations, just like music, rhythm and harmony. Sometimes they speed up, at a lively pace, and sometimes they slow down, a proverb. Some of the movements may go unnoticed, others may make you cry. The fact is that I let him talk about his island like I was listening to a trumpet solo. It’s getting harder and harder to listen to meHe spends many hours alone and when he sees me appear at the door he starts to resent me. There are inevitably times when I skip because it makes my head spin and I don’t have time to show him how much progress I’ve made with my Dutch.

What offended me the most in those five years was what my father said to his sister, Aunt Heddy. When I was little, I called her “Stupid Aunt Heddy” to make fun of her, which she found very funny. We’ve always spoken Spanish, but now you can tell him: “Hey, Heddy, I’m Nacho (Hello Aunt Heddy, I’m Nacho). And she answers me: “How are you, Nacho?” I spoke in the Netherlands (How are you, Nacho? You speak Dutch very well)». I understand it without difficulty, although my answers mix Dutch with English. He’s probably too accommodating to me. When I tell her that it is very difficult, she tells me that Spanish is also a very difficult language for her, especially because of the grammar. We already know: the subjunctive, the difference between the past imperfect and the past perfect, pronominal verbs… I remember this before Heddy defended himself quite easily. In this way he lets me know that every time we saw each other he went out of his way to be able to talk to us.

My father tells his sister, perhaps not to believe that I already speak his language, that he doesn’t understand me, that he understands practically nothing I say to him. I don’t know if it’s true. Maybe he doesn’t hear me or listen to me. Or maybe he just made it up so that I wouldn’t stop coming to his house a few times a week and “learning Dutch”. In any case, I’m pretty frustrated and wondering again who in their right mind starts learning a new language after the age of forty.