Beginners' Spanish, Year Four
Piotr has taken Beginners' Spanish four times. The same language school on Milwaukee Avenue, the same room with the loud heater, the same first evening in September.
He knows the shape of it by now. Week one, everybody learns how to say hello and their own name. Week two, numbers, and somebody always laughs at the sound of their own voice. Week three, a woman in the back row explains that she used to study Latin at school, so this should be easy for her. It is never easy for her.
Those three weeks are the best three weeks of Piotr's year. Nobody in the room can say anything yet, so everybody is equally bad and nobody is embarrassed. When Piotr makes a mistake, four other people have already made it.
Then October comes, and people start to improve at different speeds. Somebody comes back from a week in Madrid. Somebody's girlfriend is Colombian. By November, when Piotr gets a verb wrong, the room goes quiet for half a second, and then a kind person gives him the right word.
He has never finished a term. He stops going in week eight, every year, and tells himself he will start again properly in September, from the beginning, because a strong base is necessary.
Four years of strong base.
This September the teacher looks at her list, and then at him. “Piotr. You’ve done this class three times.”
“Four,” he says.
She doesn’t laugh. She writes something down and turns the paper around so he can read it: Level Two, Thursdays, seven o’clock. “You’d be the worst one in that room,” she says. “That’s the point. Everyone in there will correct you.”
He thinks about it all week, and the thinking is short, because he has known the answer for four years. Level one is where nobody can hear your mistakes. Level two is where people can hear them and say so, and that is the whole reason he has stayed safely below it since he was thirty-four.
On Thursday he goes. He gets two words wrong in his first sentence. A man with a bicycle helmet on the desk in front of him gives him both of them back, gently, in front of everyone, and it is awful, and Piotr writes them down.