The last time I began studying a foreign language, I was in a classroom on the Upper East Side of Manhattan watching a heavily made-up sixty-year-old play out conversations between hand puppets she had named, cleverly, Pierro, Pierrete, and Papa Pierre. Papa Pierre kept getting angry with Pierro and Pierrette for being late to school, but it was our fault. The puppets had to wake up, shower, get dressed, and have breakfast, and it took us, 14-year-old Americans just beginning to learn French, way too long to conjugate all of the reflexive verbs.
My classes in castellano, the dialect of espanol spoken in Argentina, started off in a familiar way, albeit without puppets. My teacher in Buenos Aires, Natacha, quickly taught me a few verbs: to be, to go, to have. I learned a few simple conversations by heart – about who I am, where I’m from, what I do – and armed with that and a few more basics (numbers, letters, food and drink, clothing), I was ready to take my castellano to the calle. And although everything had to be happening in the simple present tense (yesterday I watch a movie; today I walk to a cafe; tomorrow I work at home) I managed to get around.
Everyone always says that the best way to learn a language is to go and live in a place where it is spoken. What they don’t always acknowledge is everything else you’ll learn about that place, besides the language. My lessons here haven’t only been a means to acquire the language in order to better understand the culture; they have offered me a window onto the culture itself, albeit a window with a very specific point of view.
What follows is a vocabulary lesson from Argentina today. Hopefully, in these few words, I can show you what I mean.
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Inflacion
When Natacha taught me how to order food in a restaurant she pointed out that although the menu reproduced in our textbook was very typical of Buenos Aires, the prices of the items had changed remarkably since the textbook’s publication. She looked with nostalgia at this relic of 2004, when a milanesa (a breaded piece of meat that is a lot like schnitzel, but which is made more often with beef) cost four pesos.
At the time of that class, about six weeks ago, four pesos bought only a café con leche. (Now, in Buenos Aires, the price is probably closer to five pesos.) Sitting in the restaurant where we had our one-on-one classes three mornings a week, Natacha and I compared the real restaurant’s menu with the outdated one in the textbook. Sure enough, the prices of nearly every item had doubled in the four years since the textbook’s publication.
Inflacion is on everybody’s mind in Argentina, from the newspaper reporters who are tracking its effects internationally to the shoppers at the grocery store finding that the prices of basic foodstuffs keep going up. While the sticker shock news from the US appears to be primarily focused on the price of gas, here the focus is on food, and I’ve been noticing the different ways in which restaurants change their prices here in Cordoba. Some have the foresight to use ink that can be easily removed. Others put opaque stickers over the original prices listed on wall-mounted signs. When looking for a nice restaurant to take Beki to for her birthday, I came across a well-dressed maitre d’ working in his off-hours, erasing the penciled-in prices on the leather-bound menus and penciling in new ones.
I had seen reports of changes in the price of food here before, but never one as concrete as the one La Voz del Interior published this past week. They listed the prices of an imaginary basket (la canasta) of typical foods collected the previous Saturday (June 26th) in four major Argentine supermarkets, and compared them to the prices of the same foods on March 1. Nearly everything an Argentine family of four could need had gone up in price over the four-month period. Ground beef (a kilo was up 39.3%), spaghetti (500 grams, up 31.9%), butter (200g, up 7.4%) Coca-Cola (2.25 liters, up 10.5%), and toilet paper (six rolls, up 35.7%) had all risen in price. Even if fruits and vegetables were a mixed bag (the prices of apples and lettuce rose by more than 30% each, while those of potatoes, carrots, and oranges all fell by 10% or more), the overall effect was that the basket now costs 16.5% more than it did when the farmers first struck.
That farmer’s strike (huelga) will bring us to our next word, but first one more new word, one I thankfully haven’t heard in a little while: desabastecemiento. Though it has no English equivalent, it could be defined as “the inability of a society to adequately supply or provide for its citizens.” Perhaps you’ve seen newspaper reports of the food shortages that have been afflicting this country. Perhaps you’ve heard about the rationing of certain products. Perhaps you’ve seen pictures of bare refrigerator shelves in supermarkets, shelves that would normally be stocked with fresh bags of milk and dairy products, with kilo upon kilo of the grass-fed beef for which this country is famous, the beef which also once made it rich. The roadblocks (paros) have been lifted, and the most recent of the three farmers’ strikes has been called off, but the disagreement between the major farmers’ associations and the government of Cristina Kirchner over how to tax exports of soybeans – the crop that is currently making some people in this country rich – and how to distribute the wealth the beans bring, is far from over.
Something worth considering: When there’s a stoppage in the usual provisioning of Argentina’s population with food and other necessities, there’s a long and technical-sounding word for it, desabastecemiento. People in middle- and upper-class neighborhoods bang pots and pans in protest. But not too long ago, tens of thousands of people gathered to draw attention to the fact that many of their countrymen, the ones who live far from the wealthy capital, far from the soybean-stuffed provinces of Cordoba and Entre Rios, go without food on a regular basis. The words were much shorter and simpler: Hambre. Pobreza. And, as is evidenced by the ever present garbage-pickers who roam the streets of our neighborhood here in Cordoba, their situation hasn't improved much in the past year.
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Huelga
This week is my last in a month-long Espanol Para Extranjeros class at the National University of Cordoba. Three hours a day, five days a week, for four weeks. To learn the past tense, our teacher Veronica had us read a postcard that describes a trip to Bariloche. The writer devotes her last paragraph the delay she experienced on her return: “Tuve problemas para volver porque había huelga de personal de aeropuerto así que llegué a Buenos Aires dos días de demorra.” What kept our fictional speaker from reaching Buenos Aires on time? A huelga, or strike. “Just like the one being waged by municipal workers here in Cordoba,” Veronica explained.
Wait, wait. I had known about the farmers’ recurrent strikes. But the municipal workers of Cordoba?
When Beki and I first arrived in Cordoba, one of the most unusual things was to see street vendors selling choripan, a local sandwich of chorizo and bread (pan) on the main city square, the Plaza San Martin. “Chori, chori, chori,” they would call out from their hastily erected stands, usually no more than a table of ingredients, a grill mounted on two metal sawhorses, and a ring of linked sausages, cooking slowly. The lines of people were long – just like the lines for the buses, and at the banks, and waiting at the kiosks where bus tokens were sold – and when the wind changed, the line would waver as everyone in it moved to try to avoid the smoke from the grill. By 11am every day, the plaza was filled with the smell of chorizo, and felt vaguely festive.
Like most festivals, this was short lived: Most of these food vendors are now gone. The municipal workers have returned from their strike – the patrolmen who write tickets for illegal street peddling included.
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Colador
Life has been, by linguistic necessity, pretty basic. Then you need to buy things.
How would you describe a strainer if you didn’t know that word? What about a metal collapsible drying rack for laundry? Trying to find the simple necessities that don’t come with your “fully furnished” apartment (departemento amoblado) in Cordoba isn’t easy. I described what I later learned to call a colador as “a thing that is something like a spoon, but which is used for tea, where the water goes through it, but the tea leaves do not.” And after nearly five minutes of hand gestures, broken Castellano, and explanations that I was not looking for an electric clothes-drying appliance in a supermarket, I finally managed to find a drying rack that holds a load of clean, wet laundry. I can’t remember what the word was, but now that we have one, I don’t think I’ll need to discover it again.
