This morning, I am careful in the hours before I am ready to be awake, when I am still in the first sips of coffee, and still with a full week ahead, where I let my eyes rest when I click open the morning paper. As one learns to be, depending on the day, calculating the risk of sliding into an abyss. Head at an angle, I slid my eyes quickly to the fringes like someone sneaking into a room, and down the right column, to rest on the image of a living face. He smiles, but not in the way people smile when they learn to leverage the image for gain. He smiles with puzzled amusement, like he is looking for the face behind the lens. His face, deeply contoured above the caverns at his neck, is a landscape unto itself, framed by an old man’s large ears.
His name is his language means dog without an owner. Dog in his language means something other than an insult. He is in his late eighties when he writes it at the table with his daughter, as his mother taught him. His mother was a memory keeper.
The language his mother taught him was the language of her grandparents and it was long considered extinct. It is the language of a people who had lost the land they lived on but not the words by which they had loved her.
We had learned over time, Jaime explains, not to speak to those who could not hear. But I exist, he says. I am here.
***
Inspired by Natalie Alcoba’s New York Times article about Blas Omar Jaime of Paraná, Argentina, who recently decided to speak Chaná, the language his mother had taught him, which had long been considered lost.
