MargenThey sent me up the mountain to record a language before it died with its last speaker. She was ninety-one and there was no one left in the world to talk to. I went for words. I came back with something no recorder knows how to capture.
Her name was Amaya and she lived alone in a stone house at the end of a track the asphalt never quite reached. The university gave me three weeks and a list: it wanted the vocabulary, the grammar, the songs if there were any. An entire language, according to them, would fit on a memory card.
The first days were work. She would point at things and give me their name in that language of round sounds that resembled nothing else. Fire. Rain. Bread. I wrote, recorded, classified. I was filling the card up.
Until one afternoon I asked her for the word for «loneliness», and she sat silent for a long while, looking at the fire.
"We don't have it," she said at last, in the laboured Spanish she used with me. "In my language that word doesn't exist."
"Then how do you say it when someone is alone?"
She smiled with her whole wrinkled face.
"We say they are 'waiting for people'." She searched for the sound in her language and pronounced it, long and warm. "Being alone isn't the same as waiting for people. The first is a closed door. The second, an open one. We only had the second."
I switched off the recorder. All at once I understood that I had spent three weeks stealing words from a language without listening to what the language thought. Because a tongue isn't a list: it's a way of looking at the world. And that one looked at the world in a way where nobody was ever entirely alone, only momentarily without company.
The last two weeks I stopped recording vocabulary. I sat with Amaya by the fire and learned to look the way she looked. The mountain wasn't «a dangerous place»: in her language it was «what holds us up». Old age wasn't «the end»: it was «the wide shore». Death had no word of fear; it had one that meant, more or less, «going back into the big conversation».
Amaya died the following winter. With her, they say, the last speaker of that language went out, and the newspapers reported it as an extinction, one more, one language fewer in the world.
But I learned her words. Not all of them: the ones that mattered. And now, when somebody asks me whether I'm not afraid of living alone in this enormous city where I know nobody, I answer no. That I am not alone.
I'm waiting for people. It's different. The last person who knew how to say it taught me that.