Translated from the Spanish by Alice Whitmore
A doubly perfect map, that’s what they imagined. On such a map, every place in the world corresponded to a country, and each country corresponded to a single language. So the first modern philologists dreamed it, back when nations and the anthems that celebrate them were first invented. The concept of a doubly perfect map was new, although the problem was not. For centuries, humankind had been contemplating the origins of the multiplicity of languages, and a long time ago they had decided that they must be to blame for something, because blame and origin stories always go hand in hand. And so they invented an immeasurably tall tower, and with it the myth of Babel, to explain the divine mystery and castigation of it all—the punishment being difference, plurality. Even with the advent of reason and the slow decline of mythology, incomprehension, yoked to new explanations, continued to run its course.
Later centuries introduced technology, and machines. There came a yearning for universal tongues. Languages were widely taught; traditions and customs were considered. Humankind began translating night and day. Languages strove into new domains, like armadas on a world map. Absolute faith was placed in radios and communications. Countless journeys, agreements, conferences, were conceived and carried out. And yet, to this day, languages remain foreign to one other. Misunderstanding spreads, and mistrust grins at us from every corner.
Foreigners know this: we arrive in an unfamiliar place, leave the luggage at our feet, and of all the sounds surrounding us the one that interests us the most is the song of language. Russian or Greek rings out like a litany, or a declaration of love. We might arrive at a hotel, in Moscow perhaps, or Shanghai, and never quite arrive. We are struck dumb, and to our ears the foreign language is nothing but a complicated and monotonous melody; its song neither moves nor shocks us, but rather inspires a sense of profound, age-old disquiet. We are twice naked: we can neither speak nor understand.
The traveller recognises this experience, and takes note of it. Unconsciously applying the commutative law, he discovers that, if a place corresponds to a language, then a language must also correspond, strangely, to a place. Then he sees that the language of others has its own trails, its own palaces and valleys. To speak from within this geography is to move beneath the breeze of accents—here, words are things, texts are nooks or pinnacles where one can stop and stay a while. But to enter a language is not like entering a room, one cannot simply walk in and sit down.
The authentic foreigner, the kind driven by an inescapable necessity, obtains a visa and makes his way to a different country, and even if he lives a long time in that place, he never truly arrives until he learns to speak like the others, until he is able to navigate the streets of the city at the same pace with which he navigates the passages of the language. It is as though his arrival in that unknown land were twofold. There are those foreigners who strive to conquer the spoken territory because they have the means to do so, since a non-native language is acquired either in childhood or with time and cash, it is a commodity. Then there are those who know they cannot afford this miniature colonisation, and so don’t bother. This last group of exiles form an island, on which they continue to speak their own language, not in a lonely way but in a conversational way. These language islands—the Chinese island outside China, the American island in Europe—are, like most islands of perennial sunshine, a kind of daydream. It is possible for the foreigner to live a large part of his life in such a place, but as long as he does so he is condemned to remain a stowaway, whether in his own home or among the trees of every park in which he utters a language that is not the same one the wind sings, carries and unravels. It is not only a question of speaking or being silent; languages are also about hope, and fear. Each language is assigned certain defects and virtues, as if it were a piece of clockwork or a many-edged tool. German, for example, has the twin virtues of not sounding beautiful and possessing a discrete vowel system. In universities and bedrooms across the world, German’s many admirers flirt with declensions and vocabulary tables. In the final years of the past century, the city of Heidelberg attracted great numbers of Kurds and Maltese, Eritreans and Argentinians. A considerable portion of the local population dedicated itself to teaching these newcomers German, but none of the teachers knew a thing about the native tongues of the outsiders, none could read the stories in those worldly faces or see the sweat that was poured into their daily efforts at comprehension. Each morning, on their way down the stairs after class, the foreigners would exchange the phrases they’d been taught; outside, they would breathe in the rigours of the air and smoke cigarettes out of packets from all over the planet. Those who came from cities with rivers would look at the Neckar with a mixture of strangeness and familiarity, as though comparing it. Comparison: this seems to be the destiny of those who exist outside of land or language. They look at the river that curves away from them, that is grey or brown or green depending on how the sky sees it. What could be the harm in comparing this river with their own? The word river is twice spoken, but it is not the same each time. Compare this river to the Mekong and it is a disappointment; compare it to the Riachuelo in Buenos Aires and it is the cleanest river in Europe.
The Old Bridge in Heidelberg swells with tourists and movement; the Avellaneda bridge, straddling a fictional boundary within the Argentine capital, is at once old and new, and burdened with indefatigable cars.
In that same German city, looking at that same river, a poet like Hölderlin had also ruminated on the nature of languages, on the selfness and otherness that has defined all tongues since the confusion of Babel. He had dreamt of Greek, in search of the territory of possible poetry, and discovered that he who seeks something of his own will in fact meet with what does not belong to him. Exhausted, the foreigner, too, succumbs to imperfect comparisons. He walks the same forest trails that Hölderlin travelled in Heidelberg, and of course they are not the same. The path may even be a kind of cemetery; one comes and goes along the path and encounters nothing at all. There is no sense of elevation, nothing of old Europe emerges or sweeps like a wind over the walker’s head. Enchanted by the poetry of the past, the foreigner stumbles over the white blemish of a roaming plastic bag.
Then and now, here and there; comparisons continue to proliferate. In medieval times, people walked those same trails through cities like Heidelberg, musing these same ideas. I compare one bridge with another. And I find no similarities between the two, except for the fact that both are bridges. One is Old, while the other is simply old. One is occupied, for the better part of the day, by Japanese tourists, the other by endless and slow-moving streams of traffic. The comparison-maker seeks identity and finds only a slack thread fastening the differences between things. Escorted by hordes of tourists and the odd motor vehicle, the foreigner crosses the Heidelberg bridge to visit a magnificent old house. A century ago, the house was home to an illustrious sociologist. Now it serves as a meeting place for students of German, who distribute themselves throughout the various rooms among chairs and tables that feel at once familiar and alien. Who wouldn’t recognise a chair, and its famous four-legged counterpart? Each object named, labelled. There are lights and spaces; there is a gloss to the laminate tabletop. Already, the foreigner has silently compared so many things since leaving the student accommodation earlier this morning. He took a bus down the hill to the bottom of the valley, almost to the river; he walked and crossed a bridge, all the while making comparisons, unrecognising and accepting. Now it is eight in the morning and he has just arrived, and without language he lets his body fall into the chair, and he doesn’t even know the word for chair.
The teacher draws a river on the whiteboard. Now he strikes two lines across it and says: Brücke.
The foreigners repeat the new word, and momentary ghosts appear in their heads: true and false bridges, remembered or invented bridges, the same bridge spoken in the alphabet of their own tongues, their tongues like bridges. They repeat the word poorly. If they could, they would take the word and keep it in their pockets, the way one does with things that are offered. But language is only half a place; names are notoriously immaterial, for centuries people have been divorcing them from the world of objects. So they say bridge—they say it badly—and they repeat bridge and the next day they have already forgotten it, although at night they will have foreboding dreams about the Pueyrredón bridge in Buenos Aires, where the police suppress a protest and murder two young men, where two people will be murdered and the foreigner, in the middle of the night, wakes and sees it happen.
The next morning he again crosses the Old Bridge in Heidelberg, without giving a thought to the German word, since he has his own word to name it, which he keeps somewhere between his brain and his heart. As he walks, a round man wearing a puffy jacket looks at him, maligns him, pushes him. He believes it is accidental; it only lasts a moment. Later, he is standing in a square. He is half-aware that this same square, where he now pauses to eat a sandwich filled with unidentified ingredients, was used centuries ago by others to discuss, in Latin, the universality of names, synonymy, the very kinds of comparisons he has just been making. A few minutes ago, in front of the display counter where he purchased his lunch, he would have liked to enquire about the contents of his sandwich—is there cheese on the sandwich? He manages, barely, to order the food and pay the attendant in coins, and now, standing in the square, he tries to imagine what he is devouring. It tastes good. A woman in a veil walks by, pushing a baby’s pram. Perhaps she, like him, has not yet truly arrived; the accent dangles from her shoe, just as it did for a Peruvian poet who lived in Paris and whose poem the foreigner now recalls. In this paved square—but what kind of square is this, compared with any other, compared with the oldest plaza in Buenos Aires, if it has no grass?—scholars of meaning used to sit, centuries ago, and debate the universality of names; how to say bridge and name all bridges in existence. The foreigner stands, eating and daydreaming, with his back against the stone wall of the old library, and in some discreet chamber of his mind something stirs the old voices to life. He doesn’t trust his comparisons: puente and Brücke are not the same thing; when I say bridge, I don’t mean the same thing each time. The Avellaneda bridge at the edge of Buenos Aires, the Heidelberg bridge in Germany: at certain moments these two bridges have almost nothing in common. The thing is, everyone wants to name them in the language of their own land. Against the stones of the library building the foreigner unwittingly meditates on the same universals the scholastic monks spent lifetimes arguing about—whole lifetimes spent praying to God and contemplating the names of things. Holding his lunch in one ice-cold hand—the foreigner is always too cold or too hot, either freezing or suffocating—he finishes it in four bites, then walks briskly to the tram, boards, and disembarks at the outskirts of the city. In the afternoons he works in a factory, alongside other foreigners and locals, sorting roller bearings and various other industrial parts, the names of which he doesn’t need to know since each compartment has its own small drawing, like a cameo, and his job is to place the different parts into the correct compartments, pulling them one by one from giant bags where they are as mixed up as all the things in the world. He names them with soft, malleable words: this, that. His co-workers provide details, and he replies yes or no. But today, the same day he stood in the square and thought against the stones of the old library, one of the others shows him a semi-soft, slightly twisted rubber part with a spring on one end and says: ‘Brücke.’
‘Brücke?’ he asks.
‘Brücke,’ says the other.
The German teacher’s sketch—two parallel lines crossing a river—is broken. This part, this soft rubber object, crowned with a spring, small enough to hold in one hand, has the same name as a bridge in Heidelberg. The next day again the bus, the walk, the crossing. The teacher makes up a sentence and asks the students to complete it, and the foreigners write the words down in their notebooks, in handwriting adorned with arabesques or fringes or little wings. The teacher asks where they have come from this morning: where did they take the bus, where did they walk, where did they cross? Where? he asks. Nobody responds. To do so would mean choosing a grammatical case for Brücke, and a preposition to precede it. Nobody dares. The foreigner holds the word in one hand, but he doesn’t trust it. That day, at midday, he eats lunch outside again, and since the day is unusually mild he sits down on the sun-warmed stones of the square. The medieval thoughts return to him, without his knowledge, and though he sits he does not sit completely, since he is incapable of saying the words I am sitting. He has been inserted into a long series of age-old questions. In the geology of ideas, the bones of Homo heidelbergensis do not belong in a natural science museum; rather, the figure recalled is that of a tonsured monk, a Homo universitatis of the late Middle Ages, professing equal faith in Christianity and nominalism. Before the poet Hölderlin imagined the correspondence between languages as places—Hyperion marching to Greece in search of German—others, speakers of medieval Latin, a language purified over centuries, had long been losing sleep over the question of names. In the beginning, humankind’s understanding of the world seemed straightforward: their way of giving names to things corresponded to a way of thinking, and that way of thinking in turn corresponded to the Being of things. To say the word bridge—pons, pontis—was to say something about the nature of the structure, with its stone components suspended over the river as though coaxed there by the white magic of science. But the true meaning of that nature, and of those correspondences, provoked insomnia in medieval scholars. God, the great guarantor of world order, both wants and does not want knowledge. Is our voice alone the name of things, or is it something more? Is saying puente the same as saying pons or Brücke? God the guarantor, in his primitive paradise, had given Adam the gift of naming the plants and creatures around him. Adam obliged, and gave titles to all the beasts, and for this knowledge he suffered his own biblical downfall.
Were there bridges in Adam’s paradise? Paradise was a great garden; perhaps a river ran through it, and perhaps a bridge surmounted it. Treatises on the nature of the first human tongue filled countless books and parchments, were copied and reproduced throughout the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. Then the scholars, on the verge of surrendering good God the guarantor to the warm sanctum of oblivion, having abandoned the idea of Hebrew as the language of truth, invented a mathesis universalis capable of naming the entire world. In this perfect mathematical language, bridge is named 54, let’s say. But such a language could only exist inside the pages of books; it was both too small and too enormous for the mouths of men, and would simply have dissolved inside them.
Others, sitting or standing against those same lunchtime stones, must have debated just as the foreigner does now, internally and unconsciously. A silent baroque bird has landed on his shoulder. Out of nowhere, he thinks: what if the bridge were named 54. He shakes his head: impossible. Of all the words inside the trousseau the foreigner carries with him, bridge is the most apt and the most beautiful. Later, he will meet and fall in love with a young Italian woman, and she will say ponte, and ponte it will be; he will travel with her through the landscape of Italian, believing he recognises many of its depths and valleys. After many months of ponte, most will appear like a planet in the sky, spoken by a Russian woman who caresses his cheek under the stars as they cross the Old Bridge in Heidelberg.
Over the course of the months he has entered, without realising it, into the midst of a storm of designations. At night, in his bedroom, he feels the breath of a century-old wind, blowing in from the time when European thinkers finally returned to their speculations on the dark and light of language, following the trails left by their medieval predecessors. Looking for examples, a philosopher and a linguist sought to resolve the mystery surrounding the word cheese—not unlike the foreigner with his sandwich, or the metaphysicians with the names of God. A kabbalistic mysticism ebbs and flows through the centuries, expanding and thickening, settling like a murmur in the minds of men, or else biding its time birdlike among the trees. Contemplating these renewed thought experiments, some began to think of language as a kind of magic wand: everything it touched—providing the wand was waved correctly—was transformed into truth. Which is to say, into the only version of truth possible for human understanding. New books were written, spawning more conferences and symposia debating the precise manner in which the wand of language ought to be wielded. But one philosopher remembered that words are not enough, that if one seeks to understand the meaning of the word cheese one must have or have had a personal acquaintance with cheese, some kind of perceptive contact with the thing itself. One must have placed a finger on it—eaten the sandwich, so to speak—just as the foreigner did before he left to sort industrial parts in the factory.
So he goes, so he went: from the trails to the valley, across the bridge to the other side of the city. One day, someone greets him; one night, a stranger insults him, pushes him. A year passes, then another, and, although he knows little of Heidelberg beyond his habitual routes, he has now thoroughly explored and is familiar with the terrain of the language. He possesses a number of texts, which he inhabits like suits; hundreds of new words have lodged themselves between his heart and his head. He has left the factory, enrolled in university. Lovers have come and gone. When someone asks what he is looking at from the window of his house he says Brücke, and it is no longer the bridge in Heidelberg but one in north-east Germany, in that city divided, until recently, by the wall. Every day, on his way to work, he crosses a new bridge over the old border, with no river beneath it. He loves a woman, he loves a child. He lives in languages, collects words like coins in his pockets, handing out the right one to the right person, in Castellano or in German. At home, sometimes the world is spoken twice—first in one language, then in the other—and everything corresponds exactly the way the first scholars dreamed it might. At the table he requests Käse, and his lunch or dinner companions bring him cheese.
The window is open. In the distance he hears construction tools as loud as the bombs that fell decades ago in this exact place. The same war that ended with the erecting of the wall unleashed a new desire for the perfect language: a code in which every word uttered was decipherable and automatically transmissible, understandable without translation thanks to the work of magnificent new devices. A renewed mathesis universalis. The secret services, like the renaissance scholars, dreamt of infallible names. Universal communication, fiercely sought for so many centuries, was now less a matter of facilitating understanding between people than anticipating the movements of the enemy. Just like the monks in Heidelberg, modern linguists spend their time naming and un-naming. They, too, are contemporary Adams. So is the foreign father teaching his son the Castellano of objects in the street or on the table. One day, over lunch, the foreigner participates in a conversation about his home country, and the violent events going on there—in Buenos Aires, specifically, although there are shootings and beatings happening all over Argentina. His companions mention the Pueyrredón bridge at the end of the world, the bridge the foreigner used to cross every day to get from his house in Avellaneda to school, back in that other, southern life. A few days ago, two young men were murdered on that bridge. That’s what the news is saying. The foreigner says he needs to go and walk off the sadness. After lunch, father and son head out for a stroll. How do you say Brücke in the father’s language? The foreigner teaches him: you say puente. He keeps naming things for the son: the dog barks—el perro ladra; the sky has clouds—el cielo tiene nubes. They travel the streets of Berlin on a little island of Castellano, rolling the words alongside them. Bridge is easier than puente, says the son. The son wants to know if the Pueyrredón bridge where those deaths occurred is like this bridge they’re crossing now. It’s modern, yes, but it’s not as new as this one. The comparisons blow in, as if tossed on a wind. Unlike this bridge, the southern bridge goes over water. Over a river? Not quite—it goes over a dark, foul-smelling thing called the Riachuelo. Here, there, in the city of the wall, there are also foul-smelling days, and it’s not just the garbage seething in those big dumpsters in the summertime. What is it, then? Something else, says the foreign father. They slide by as if on an ice floe, except it isn’t cold. The son asks again the word for bridge; he knew it for a moment but now he has forgotten.
The philosopher said: in order to know a name we must conduct an experiment. The man repeats puente, just as the experts repeated and will continue to repeat their quarrels on language. He touches his son’s head. The monks’ descendants do the same; they are fascinated by brains, they use screens and electrodes to look inside the neurons and minuscule territories of the mind for its understanding of cheese and the word that names it. Before it was intellect and soul, reason and emotion. Now it is chemical and electrical elements working within the eye and the occipital lobe, travelling from the hemispheres of the brain to the tongue that speaks, that says cheese, to the tongue that has tasted cheese. At midday, in all the laboratories of the world, scientists eat cheese in bread and all of them without exception call it by its English name: cheese.
The son walks beside his father, over the bridge in Berlin, enclosed in the magnetic field of Castellano, and repeats the word puente, and tries to remember it. Someone overhears them talking. He is one of those people who, though they have only a minimal grasp of grammar, believe that if language is a territory then there are those who own it—its legitimate inhabitants—and those who are merely trespassing. This someone, a tall man in a bulky jacket, confronts the foreigner and his son on the bridge in Berlin. They have never met, but the stranger believes he knows exactly who they are.
The stranger accuses the foreigner of having the nerve to wear that skin, to sail that foreign ship in these parts.
Since his son is present, the foreigner doesn’t dare withdraw the way he did in the past, in Heidelberg, on his way to or from work. Instead, he challenges the human specimen before him. He believes he is defending something, in his accented and small-statured way, something that is not quite his language nor his lineage.
He tries, in vain, to make himself tall in the eyes of his son. They don’t realise it, but both are neck-deep in the experience of a bridge, and that experience will etch a name in the son’s memory. The stranger, bald and dressed in black, uses the force of his arms to grab the foreigner by his coat. He shakes him. He hurls threats, spitting his words. The foreigner replies, defends himself. Then the stranger lifts him in the air and hangs him over the side of the bridge, which is called Brücke and has no other name. Is that clear? Anyone who claims otherwise will pay the price.