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There was a time perhaps when everyone spoke the same language, before the debate about whether it was the object or the sound that came first. Back then, no one cared if we imitated nature’s noise in our own way, or whether we imposed ourselves on the world, reducing its mighty possibilities to our limited vocabulary.

When we were of one language, no one argued about whether tree or árbol best fit those leafy creatures wrapped in rough bark out in the woods. Everything was understood, there was unanimity in the universe. I’ve often imagined that we must have spoken a language of the senses, a speech strictly of vowels: ooooh-aaaah-iiiiiii.

It is not so limiting to speak in these open-mouthed ways; there are a myriad subtleties. Think about newborns, about the sounds made by the dying, the howls of animals in heat, the babbling of the insane. It is, I think, a kind of glossolalia: ecstatic and pure and boundless.

Imagine for an instant the genuine sounds made by the deaf, before they’re taught how to pop their lips specifically for Ps, or humming for Ms. Theirs is our sound, all of ours, before it’s contaminated by the world and by each other. That trumpet blast, the murmuring, the shrieking like cats, the gorgeous stillness—that’s our hearts, the atonal music of our holy selves. It has a rhythm that defies culture and class, defies time: What tones emerge from the throats of the deaf have nothing to do with grammar or any set of rules about propriety. In their most authentic, uninhibited form, they’re about desire and need: the most direct, the most religious kind of communication.

As a child, I held on to that uninfected, primal language long after I had heard my mother say bottle or botella, after my father had pronounced moon and luna with his flawless lips. For me, these were simpler: uuuooo and ooo-eh.

It’s not that I couldn’t grasp consonants—I understood the essence of their brashness, the way they worked like sturdy beams in construction—but I believed, firmly and instinctively, that they should be used sparingly, that it was more natural to ponder the possibilities of forming my mouth in an O than in a T, to explore diphthongs instead of flashing those dramatic double Rs Spanish loves so much.

When I was a child, Mami was aaah-oooh, Papi was iiii-oh. My own name was quickly reduced from Alejandra—so imperious, so long!—to Alef, Aleh, Ale—the L a concession, a compromise worked out by my mother and me because my father was terrified by my resistance.

It is precisely in how we handle language that my father and I connected and diverged. We were both in a wrestling match with the gods but the rules were different: His, on the page, was as defined and classic as Greco-Roman competition; mine, in the air, is as messy and organic as a playground scuffle.

For his decoding, my father needed contemplation, the meticulousness afforded by time. He liked his subjects: poetry about nature and the human condition, philosophical tracts about history, literature. For him, the search for meaning was endless: After a job was officially finished, he collected and rearranged his notes by his own method, a compendium of reflections and ideas on each work and what it provoked. Sometimes, years later, he would return to these writings, adding new explanations, new questions that had occurred to him.

Although my father worked with many living Latin American writers (except Gabriel García Márquez who, as one of Fidel’s best friends, sent my father admiring notes but knew, as my father also knew, that hiring him, an exile, would be both controversial and unseemly), translation for him had little to do with the rough and tumble, the magic of the New World.

For my father, translation was a spiritual return to Spain— although he never went there in real life, never booked a tour, demurred every time he received an invitation to lecture or receive an award. It was his way of creating and preserving Spain, of explaining his otherness in the United States without the blatant trauma of racism. That travel ban was not extended anywhere else but to Cuba, so that he became a regular at Mexican and Argentinean universities instead, the gracious visiting scholar whose painstaking manners impressed everyone as old-fashioned and very Spanish.

Each night, after his paid work was completed, my father would pull out the writings of Pedro Salinas or Ramón José Sender, Elena Quiroga, Abraham de Toledo, or any other ancient Spaniard. Some of what he labored over was archaic, different kinds of Ladino and judeo-español in fact, but he would never admit it, or his fascination. His favorite was the Sephardic poet Judah Halevi, possibly the most eloquent voice ever on the subject of exile (in both Ladino and Hebrew).

As I watched him scribbling (always by hand) late at night, he struck me as a direct descendant of Maimonides, writing his own guide to the perplexed, trying to rationalize godly acts, as if there were mortal ways to reason with things that are both sacred and mundane, like language itself. He would spend hours staring at his own responsa, the letters losing meaning and becoming light.

I told him once that the rabbis quoted in the discussions in the Talmud are known as amora’im, Aramaic for translators, making his entire career an inadvertent but quintessentially Jewish act. I told him this as a dare, as bait, expecting him to at least wince.

Instead, he paused, then looked up at me quizzically. “What does that say about you?” he asked.

My father was unimpressed by my work. He saw it not as a part of what he did, but as something else entirely.

He was irritated by the inevitability of the lost word or phrase in oral interpretation, by the fact that in a minute or two he could have found a better, more exact expression. Without a dictionary, he didn’t know what to do with his immaculate hands, and he despised paraphrases and approximations. “You’re just running division,” he would say, betraying the translator’s oldest prejudice. Moreover, he was always flustered by the complicated ordinariness of most interpreting work, by the frequent drama of its concerns.

But me, I’m an empath. I slip my client’s words through my mouth as if they were formed by the electrical impulses of my own brain. I don’t think, I hook in, I mind-meld, I feel, and I articulate all the agony or joy or confusion the client is experiencing, no matter how horrible or banal the proceedings. When I’m in my reverie, I have no clue about what I’m actually saying. It’s all aaaah-uh-eeeeeeeeeeeeee.

It’s not that I don’t appreciate exactitude. Indeed, my professional reputation is based on my precision, on my talent for harnessing it all, no matter how frantic the situation—say, a hospital emergency room—or the intricacies of the dialogue—consider, for example, the conversation between a Guatemalan immigrant, a Mayan whose own Spanish is spiced with Quiché and a doctor using English-language medical terms to explain why the immigrant’s only son will be a vegetable for the rest of his life because of the random bullet lodged in his brain.

My father may have tortured himself looking for a Spanish heaven, but I simply pluck the best word, whether cielo or paraíso or porvenir and give it motion and meaning with my utterance. I talk and talk, negotiating between intention and message, and when we arrive at agreement, my voice falls silent, as fleeting as the spirit of the boy in the coma as it disappears into the sky.

My father may have been of the ages, but I relish the moment. It is one of the few ways in which I am inescapably Cuban.

According to the Bible, the universal language I’ve dreamt about existed once, in what was the nascent city of Babylon. Its people were the descendants of Noah, prosperous but much too ambitious. They thought they could build a stairway, a tower to heaven. The Bible doesn’t mention any dissension, not a single voice that questioned the wisdom of such a crazy notion. And so the Babylonians set about their impossible labor.

God, of course, was unimpressed. The punishment inflicted on the early Babylonians for their presumption was not merely to level the Tower of Babel but to create babble itself: Language was fractured into a confusion of tongues, chaos ripe for misunderstanding, hatred, and revolution.

Years later, when the Jews were expelled from Zion by the Babylonian king, he took the best and the brightest of the Israelites back to his kingdom. The Jews lamented this forced separation from their land, family, and friends.

Yet, nostalgia aside, the Jews flourished in exile: married, built homes, had children, became known for their splendid handicraft and established themselves as merchants. In short, they built a community along the Babylonian shores.

Seventy years or so after the Jewish exile began, Babylon was conquered by King Cyrus of Persia, who offered the Jews an opportunity to return to their own land. Perhaps not surprisingly, most of the Jews decided to remain in Babylon, tending to their families and businesses, continuing to lead the only life they really knew, sending monies and goods back to those who had stayed behind in now mythical Israel.