language school

there is a school in a country where the teachers teach the language of that country. students arrive from foreign lands and the first day they watch a video about the massacres of the country. then the director talks to them about the dictators and the military regimes and invasions and subversive movements. students nod and yawn. they understand little. the director keeps talking passionately.

the teachers teach time: past, future, and past...mostly the past. all times can be progressive and perfect. but the teachers like to share the exceptions of a not so perfect past or present, of the non progressive moods of the past that create the present. they spend less time explaining the future. they leave that for advanced studies.

the school was created to make money off of foreign money to create schools over the hill. foreigners with a conscious come to give and learn.

one of these foreigners had come before, years ago attracted to the social services, pleased to know that her money went to the teachers and not a company. she has returned for a week to polish off smudges. however, she is not young like the others. she is no longer that ignorant little girl wowed by the impunity and horrified by the atrocities.

this student is paired with luis. luis is a pamphlet. no, he is many pamphlets cut up by paragraphs, then thrown in the air, then glued back together.

he asks the new student what she knows about guatemala not to listen to her knowledge of the language to then plan appropriate lessons. no, he listens to tell her what she doesn't know. they can talk the same language of transnational this and psychological that, but soon the woman doesn't want to talk. she stops asking questions. his scattered knowledge of political paradigms bores her when she realizes it is copied materiel. she wants the subjunctive, the imaginary. she needs more instruction in what can not be localized well in space and time.

after having her copy all forms of the imaginary and hard to locate, he doesn't know what to do with her. he writes a fancy word which means “words that have more than one definition”, but she knows the ones he lists. she pulls out her literature book and asks for clarification. he stares and stares, speaks superfluously about language being relative and up to interpretation. he does this when he doesn't know.

he seems to know a little about a lot. a sentence about zionists taking over the world followed by the acquisition of the fabric of latin american life, meaning the patenting of beans and corn. he likes the fifties and to talk about a book he hasn't read, but that she has, as if he read it first.

what bothers her most is his lack of humor. only twice does he try to joke, and it is the same joke. he answers "no" to two of her questions and then chuckles slightly, repeating again and again, its a joke, its a joke, of course, of course.

when they shake hands on friday afternoon, they shake hands in farewell without looking each other in the eye. he, still considering her just another foreigner to educate, and she, not quite sure how to recommend a class in rhetoric.