Ser y Estar

Señora Ruiz had written on the board before they came in, in green, in her looping hand that looked as though it were dancing:

SER ESTAR

And under each, in smaller letters:

lo que eres cómo estás

“Siéntense,” said Señora Ruiz, without turning round. She was drawing a small sun next to ESTAR. “Sit. Sit, sit. Today we do the two verbs that every English speaker in the history of the world has got wrong, and you will get them wrong also, and that is fine, because I got wrong should and would for eleven years and I am still alive.”

They sat.

Señora Ruiz turned round. She was small and quick and had black hair in a knot with a pencil through it and a cardigan the colour of a pomegranate, and she had taught Spanish at Ellicott for nine years and had, Mr Ferrante said, the only classroom in the building where the plants were not dead.

“Ser,” she said, tapping it. “Estar. Both mean to be. In English you have one to be for everything. In Spanish we have two, because we are a more careful people.” She drew a line between them. “Ser is what you are. What does not change. Your name, where you are from, what you are. Soy profesora. I am a teacher. Soy de Sevilla. I am from Seville. This is ser. It is the bones.”

She tapped the other.

“Estar is how you are. Where you are. What you happen to be, now, at this moment, which may change. Estoy cansada. I am tired. Estoy en Nueva Westminster. I am in New Westminster, for the moment, until the summer, when I will estar in Sevilla with my mother. This is estar. It is the weather.”

“What about the weather?” said Felix.

“The weather is hacer,” said Señora Ruiz. “Do not start with me about the weather, Felix. It is a third verb and I have not the strength.”

---

Frederick was middling at languages.

He knew he was. It was in his school report and his article, which he had read once, in October, in the car, and then not again, and it said middling at languages, which had annoyed him at the time because he spoke Swedish and English and some German and some Wisconsindeutsch, which nobody else in his family had ever spoken, and could order coffee in Danish. But it was true about Spanish. Spanish was all endings. Spanish was about remembering that the end of the word told you who was doing it and when and how much, and he could never keep all of it in his head at once, and Theo, who could not light a Bunsen, could do it in his sleep, because his grandmother in Milwaukee had taught him the endings of German at three, and he said once you’d had German endings everything else was a holiday.

He sat in the H’s, and Theo sat beside him, and on the board SER and ESTAR sat side by side with the line between them, and he looked at them and found he could not stop looking at the line.

Lo que eres.

Cómo estás.

What you are. What you happen to be, now, for the moment.

He had a feeling, sitting there, that somebody had chosen this lesson on purpose, and that it was not Señora Ruiz.

---

The inspector came in at five to twelve.

He came in, this time, while Señora Ruiz was in the middle of a sentence, and she stopped the sentence and turned and smiled at him with her whole face, the way she smiled at everybody, and said:

“¡Buenos días! Bienvenido. Pase, pase, siéntese donde quiera.”

Mr Stroud stood just inside the door with the fresh sheet on his clipboard and the scorched one in his breast pocket, and looked at her.

“Buenos días,” he said. He said it very carefully, the d very hard, like a man stepping on a stone in a river. “Muchas gracias. Yo fui enseñado el castellano en Virginia en mil novecientos setenta y uno.”

There was a short pause.

Señora Ruiz’s smile did not move at all. But something behind it, Frederick thought, came very slightly to attention, the way the Guards on the terrace came to attention, not by moving but by becoming more completely still.

“Qué bien,” she said. “How nice. In Virginia. In 1971.”

“At the Fairfax Academy,” said Mr Stroud, in English, sitting down at the back. “We had a very good man. A Mr Halloran. From Pittsburgh. He had been to Madrid on two occasions.” He uncapped his pen. “Castilian, you understand. Not the other sort.”

“There are many sorts,” said Señora Ruiz pleasantly.

“There is a correct sort,” said Mr Stroud, and pressed the stopwatch.

Señora Ruiz looked at him for one more second. Then she turned back to the board, and Frederick, who was in the second row, saw her pick up the green marker and grip it, briefly, in her fist, the way you might grip the handle of a pan you had decided not to throw.

“Bueno,” she said, very brightly. “Ser y estar. Let us practise.”

---

They practised.

Señora Ruiz gave them sentences in English and they had to put them into Spanish, and choose which to be, and she went round the room asking, quickly, the way she did, pointing at people with the marker like a conductor bringing in the violins.

“I am a student. Felix.”

“Soy estudiante.”

“Bien. Ser. Because you will always be a student, Felix, God help us all. The coffee is cold. June.”

“El café está frío.”

“Bien. Estar. Because it was hot once and it may be hot again, if Mr Abernathy ever fixes the machine in the staff room. My mother is a nurse. Theo.”

“Mi madre es enfermera.”

“Bien. Ser. It is her bones. I am in Spanish class. Marcus.”

“Estoy en la clase de español.”

“Bien. For now. Until the bell, and then, gracias a Dios, you will estar somewhere else.”

At the back of the room, after every answer, Mr Stroud wrote something down. After Marcus’s he leaned forward slightly in his chair.

“Clase de castellano,” he said.

Everybody turned round.

“If I may,” said Mr Stroud. “In Virginia we were taught to say castellano. Mr Halloran was very firm. Español is, strictly, a modern usage.”

Señora Ruiz did not turn round. She was looking at the board. Her back was very straight in the pomegranate cardigan.

“Gracias,” she said, to the board. “Muy amable. Marcus, you were quite right. Español. We say español in this room. We also say it in Seville, where I was born, and in Madrid, where I studied, and in Mexico, and in Argentina, and in Los Angeles, and in about twenty other countries, and in all of them, señor inspector, I promise you, the coffee is cold.”

There was a silence.

Theo took his planner out from his back pocket under the desk and opened it, and wrote, without looking down, a new line, and Frederick read it:

SEÑORA RUIZ v INSPECTOR: 1-0

---

“Now,” said Señora Ruiz, turning round, entirely composed. “A difficult one. Who will try a difficult one?”

Nobody put a hand up. It was that sort of morning.

“The King is fifteen,” said Señora Ruiz.

She said it without looking at anybody in particular. She said it the way she said every sentence, brightly, to the room in general, with the marker held up ready, and it was only after she had said it that the room went still, and only after the room had gone still that Señora Ruiz seemed to hear what she had said, and her marker came down a little.

“Ah,” she said.

Nobody said anything.

At the back, Mr Stroud wrote.

“It is,” said Señora Ruiz, after a moment, very bravely, “a perfectly good sentence. Grammatically. It is a very useful sentence. It is in the textbook.” This was not true. Frederick had the textbook open in front of him and it was not in the textbook. “The King is fifteen. Who will try?”

“Is it ser,” said Felix, slowly, “because he’s always the King? Or estar, because he’s only fifteen at the moment?”

“Neither,” said Señora Ruiz, with relief. “Neither! It is a trick. Age in Spanish is tener. You have years. El rey tiene quince años. The King has fifteen years. It is a third verb. I warned you about the third verbs.” She wrote it on the board, under the line, in the middle, between SER and ESTAR, belonging to neither.

El rey tiene quince años.

“So the King’s fifteen,” said Felix, frowning, “is a different verb altogether from the King being King.”

“Exactly.”

“So you can have fifteen years and still ser King.”

There was a pause.

“Grammatically,” said Señora Ruiz, very carefully, not looking at the second row, “yes.”

At the back, the stopwatch clicked.

---

Frederick looked at the board.

SER. Lo que eres. The bones. What does not change.

ESTAR. Cómo estás. The weather. What you happen to be for the moment, which may change.

El rey tiene quince años. Between them, belonging to neither.

He had thought, all his life, since he was old enough to think it, that he would be King one day, and that when he was King he would be it the way you are a thing in ser, from then on, in the bones, until he died, like his name. He had thought that the first of November had been the day the weather changed. He had thought that what he was now, between the first of November and the second of May, was a kind of estar. King for the moment. King in the garage. King under the weather.

But you could not estar King. He knew that without being told. It was wrong. Estoy rey. It sounded wrong; it sounded the way a wrong note sounds, the way I are sounds. Being King was not where you were for the moment. It was not how you were today. It was what you were.

You ser King.

And you have fifteen years, which was a different verb, and had nothing to do with it at all.

“Frederick.”

He looked up.

Señora Ruiz was looking at him. Not at the room. At him. She had never once, since September, looked at him in a way that was different from how she looked at anybody else, and she did not now; her face was exactly the same, bright and quick and ready. But she was looking at him, and she was holding the marker very still.

“Nosotros,” she said. “We. Ser. Conjugate.”

It was the easiest thing on the board. It was the first thing you learned. Somos. We are. It had been in the first lesson in seventh grade.

He opened his mouth to say somos.

What came out, because he was still looking at the line between the two verbs, and still thinking what you are and what you happen to be, and still, somewhere underneath, hearing the Clerk’s flat careful voice saying do now proclaim, was:

“Somos?”

As a question.

There was a small pause.

“Somos,” said Señora Ruiz gently. “Yes. Without the question mark, Frederick. We are. We simply are. It is not a question.” She turned back to the board. “Bien. Marcus, vosotros.”

At the back, Mr Stroud wrote, and Frederick did not need to see it, and saw it anyway, upside down, in his head, in the upright strict little hand, on a fresh sheet:

Spanish. Mrs Ruiz (Castilian, incorrect). Boy in the H’s, inattentive.

And the circle.

3.

---

“Three,” said Theo, under his breath, writing it.

“I know.”

“You answered ser with a question mark.”

“I know, Theo.”

“That’s not inattentive. That’s philosophy.” Theo wrote it in the planner, very small, at the bottom of the column, as a note. “That should get extra marks. In Virginia they’d give you extra marks for that, I bet. Mr Halloran from Pittsburgh would have wept.”

---

Lucía’s telephone buzzed.

It buzzed in her bag, on the floor, in the row behind, a long angry buzz against a pencil case, and everybody in the room heard it, and Señora Ruiz, without turning round from the board, said “Lucía. Apágalo,” in the voice of somebody who had said it many times before to many people and expected to say it many times again.

“Perdón, señora.”

Lucía reached into her bag to turn it off. Frederick, who could see her out of the corner of his eye, saw her look at the screen as she did it, and saw her stop, with her thumb over the button, and read.

She read for quite a long time, for somebody turning off a telephone.

Then she put it face down in the bag and sat up, and looked at the back of Frederick’s head, he could feel it, and then she leaned forward over her desk, as if to look at the board more closely, and whispered, very low, so that only the second row could hear:

“It’s on the radio.”

Theo stopped writing.

“What is?” said Frederick, without turning his head.

“The board. My cousin’s at work, she’s got it on in the shop. It’s on the phone-in. Potomac Talk. The man’s asking people to ring in.” Lucía’s whisper went even lower. “He’s saying Is the King the King? A school in the capital says no.”

Theo made a small, high, entirely involuntary sound, like a kettle that has just begun.

“Sorry, Señora Ruiz,” he said. “Hiccup.”

“Hipo,” said Señora Ruiz, writing on the board, without turning round. “Hiccup is hipo. Tengo hipo. I have a hiccup. Tener. Another third verb. They are everywhere today.”

The clock over the door said twelve minutes past twelve. Eight minutes to lunch.

Frederick looked at the board, at SER and ESTAR and the line between them and the sentence underneath belonging to neither, and at the little green sun Señora Ruiz had drawn next to ESTAR at the very beginning, the weather, what you happen to be for the moment, and he thought, very clearly, for the first time, and in English, with no question mark:

I think I got it wrong.

And then, because the thought was so large and the room was so small and the clock was so slow, he put it away again, carefully, the way Castellanos had put away the thing at the corner of his mouth, and conjugated estar in the third person plural for Marcus, who had got stuck, and got it right.