Being a Teacher

Soon after we returned from Samoa in October 2009, I notified the educational institution where I was teaching Spanish that I would no longer be able to teach. At the time I only had one Advanced Spanish Conversation class, people whose company I truly enjoyed for two hours a week and whose enthusiasm for the language spurred the teacher in me more than anything else.

Most of them had been my students for a few years, but I thought I’d be doing them a great disservice if I tried to engage normally with the class, only to break down in front of them, say, twenty minutes into the lesson. I was of course suffering from Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, but was not totally aware of its symptoms and consequences.

When I migrated to Australia in 1996 I had to reinvent myself professionally. I had been a teacher of English in Spain for over ten years. I applied for a couple of jobs as an ESL teacher in Sydney, but was told (over the phone) that I “had an accent” (and who doesn’t?). I think that says a hell of a lot about Australia and the attitude we – please note the plural – have towards migrant workers. But that’s another story.

So I began teaching Spanish, one of my two mother tongues. My first job was two hours in Hunters Hill on Wednesday evenings, about an hour away from our flat in Coogee. Eventually more hours began filling my evenings elsewhere.

Since then I held many positions teaching Spanish, at many different places in Sydney and Canberra. Some were more enjoyable than others, but I can certainly affirm that one-to-one tuition is by far the mode where the teacher has to become the most involved, and give the most of their selves. Nothing, however, equals the pleasure and the joy of teaching a (foreign) language to your own children.

Clea had been my best and my favourite learner of Spanish from the day she was born. She loved the tongue twisters and how I would play on words all the time. Because we had been to Spain for a month when she was two, she had been able to pick up the language very quickly while we were there. She was able to read well in both languages, Spanish and English. On the night of September 28^th 2009, as we had done almost every day for many years, we all read a book in Spanish, a fairytale book, in the fale where we slept that night, under the stars, so very close to the Pacific Ocean, its peaceful lullaby of wavelets caressing the seashore.

The books were forever lost the next day, of course. They were gone with Clea's life, with so many other lives which were wiped away in an instant, along with so many of our dreams, along with the simple possibility of having a normal life.

Now I do not wish to teach the language to anyone other than Clea’s twin brothers. I feel particularly incapable of engaging in the kind of very close relationship implicit in teaching a language to a stranger. I sense there is too much exposure, and I do not necessarily want to open up.

Experience has shown me that not everybody has the guts to acknowledge you, your loss, your pain and your intolerable suffering. You may have been spending with someone three hours on a daily basis for nine months: you have been trying hard to support them; you have been encouraging them; you have done your best to try and instil some strength and self-confidence into them. Yet a few months later you may suddenly become invisible to them, you may cease to exist in their minds.

You have done nothing wrong, really. It’s just because you have lost your daughter, a six-year-old, in a tsunami.

The promise I was unable to keep

This is the first photograph of Clea. She was just a few minutes old. You can hardly see her, she was so small when she was born (barely two kilos). The somewhat impolite doctor who examined her after birth asked me if the mother smoked. As if. Observing my puzzled look, he proceeded to make the superfluous, silly gesture of moving his hand to his mouth as if dragging smoke from a cigarette. Perhaps he thought I had not understood his English. Who knows.

When she found out Clea was my first child, an immensely kind sister at the Calvary Hospital in Canberra insisted on taking this photograph with an old Polaroid she kept. I recall she mentioned the beaming smile in my lips. For my part, I remember feeling perhaps a little dazed, but mostly exultant, chuffed, joyful.

It was the photograph that inspired the opening poem of Lalomanu, the preamble. I have cropped it a little.

The Polaroid (3^rd January 2003)

Against an aseptic maternity-ward background

He holds her tiny hand

While he looks up smiling at the flash;

The Polaroid slits his happy eyes and captures

The greying hairy blur around his mouth,

A paling purple polo shirt – his wife’s birthday present from a few years back –

And the early January tan that the ruthless Australian sun

Gives those who grow beans, carrots or tomatoes

In a backyard garden.

He looks a happy man despite his many struggles,

Despite the long hours of driving and the stress.

He holds her minuscule body wrapped in a white hospital cotton blanket,

And knows those tiny hands are a cherished treasure for him:

They’re a promise of lasting love and laughter,

They’re a pledge of long days and nights, of songs, of fun-making by the swing.

They hold a future he can look forward to:

A giggling girl who will laugh at his tongue-twisting wordplay,

A devoted daughter who he will walk on his back while he tells her the stories

Of faraway lands, of placenames like Morella, San Pedro de Atacama or Nam,

Of so many people she will never get to meet.

It was only recently that I realised I was actually wearing a red and white patterned shirt, not the faded purple polo sweater I thought. I suppose I could blame PTSD for that.

I was enormously privileged to have Clea with me as soon as she left her mother’s womb. Trudie had to go into theatre and so I was left with my newborn daughter, a tiny bub, so fragile a child in the hands of an inexperienced father. Nothing had prepared me for that moment. I felt clumsy and insecure, but the exhilaration of having my daughter in my arms was beyond all words. I am sure there will be many fathers out there who will relate to the feeling I describe.

While we waited for Mum to come out of theatre so we all could start the learning process of becoming parents and child, I was sort of whispering secrets into Clea's ears. Among many things, I told her she need not be afraid of anything, because Papá was there with her and would always, always protect her.

I was unable to keep that promise. The love of the parents cannot stop a tsunami; it cannot ensure your child can fight and survive a mountain of water suddenly coming out of the ocean. Nothing prepares you for breaking that sort of promise, just as a parent can never get over the loss of their child.

Bushwalking

Although it was a very hard thing to do and I never used nicotine patches or anything else, I definitively quit smoking about three months after Clea was born. One of the best decisions I’ll ever make.

At Easter 2003, we were the still inexperienced parents driving northwards to Coonabarabran (NSW), where for the first night we stayed in a dreadfully tobacco-smelling motel. Clea cried her heart out all the way in the car because she was teething. On top of the not unexpected stress I felt because of my own nicotine withdrawal symptoms, our daughter’s relentless crying in the back seat was driving the driver (me) insane. I recall stopping the car in a biggish town (Was it Parkes? Or maybe Forbes?) halfway to our destination, and getting out of the car to swear loud and clear. Letting off steam. A good lady who was passing by eyed me curiously, obviously a little shocked by what she had witnessed.

I have always liked walking, and Australia has plenty of bushwalks to offer. That Easter we did a couple of short walks in the Warrumbungle Mountains, near Coonabarabran. That was the first bushwalk Clea did, placidly asleep against my chest in a pouch-like pack that hanged from my shoulders.

Throughout the 6 years and 9 months of her lifetime, Clea had developed a penchant for bushwalking and exploring. When we lived in Yass, New South Wales, Clea and I would take long walks around town, her body comfortably perched on a baby backpack; she would often pull my ears and squeal with delight at my fake groans of pain.

By far, the most enjoyable walks were those taken outside town. In Canberra we would often walk in Mulligan’s Flat or Goorooyaroo Reserves, which are not far from home and are rich in native wildlife. This photo was taken quite a few years ago. We went to the Mundoonen Nature Reserve outside Yass; it was a cool spring morning and fog was still swirling among the gum trees while feeble sunbeams eerily intersected with the shades of trees. We spotted an echidna that day, and Clea was very excited at seeing such a little creature burrowing into the ground.

There are moments I see myself like the echidna, burrowing into a reminiscence of time, a warm place whence I might not want to get out.

An Amazing Voice, an Amazing Woman

A few days ago I was again wonderfully surprised by someone whose musical skills and talents are only matched by her profound sense of understanding and her big-hearted display of friendship.

More than a year ago, months after I had written and printed Lalomanu, I learned that musician and composer Faye Bendrups had put music to one of my poems, ‘Roto’ [‘Broken’]. Faye transformed my poem into a beautiful milonga, a type of Argentinean melody that preceded the internationally better-known tango.

‘Roto’ was first performed at University House, in Canberra, in 2011. There is a video on Youtube that I recorded (here) and, despite its poor quality, you can get an idea of Faye’s amazing voice and musical flair in TangoMundo’s extraordinarily beautiful rendition of the poem. Even today I cannot comprehend how Faye was able to give such beautiful music to my words.

While in a recent visit to Melbourne, Faye surprised us again by giving the most beautiful gift a friend artist can give: she has put music to another one of my poems in Lalomanu, ‘Epilogue’. ‘Epilogue’ is the final poem in the book. I could never thank Faye enough for the gift she has created and shared.

Given the muted response Lalomanu received from some quarters, I am not only immensely moved but also forever grateful for this amazing woman’s respectful, artistic homage to my poems. I still believe the Lalomanu poems are simply words of immense sorrow, of unspeakable terror, of indescribable pain.

Let the world know that I feel privileged beyond measure. Thank you so very much, Faye.

New Life

In April 2009, while in Spain for a work-related trip, I bought several CDs, among them Ojos de Brujo’s Aocaná. Clea took an instant liking to the music – I had got her used to the music of this eclectic Barcelona-based band earlier, so it was no surprise to me that she liked the new tracks.

The CD sleeves included the lyrics (in Spanish) and some quite competent translations into English. At the time we used to drive around a fair bit, and Clea would sit at the back of the car, between her twin brothers, and carefully read the words as the music played on. Her favourite song was this, Nueva vida:

Nueva vida was the final song that was played at her funeral. We chose to play a few tracks from this CD. I know not what people thought of our choice of music; it may have seemed unpredictably cheerful for a funeral. In any case, it was not about them or even us, but about Clea. This was her favourite song at the time death took her in the form of a tsunami.

Even a six-year-old can develop certain musical tastes and follow trends. It was indeed unusual for an Australian girl to like a Spanish band. But Clea was perfectly bilingual and had developed a taste for other things.

I can vividly remember seeing Clea in the mirror, intently reading the lyrics of Nueva vida in the car as the song played and I drove on. It was late September 2009 and we were on our way to Sydney Airport, from where we were to board a Polynesian Blue plane that would take all five of us to Apia, Samoa, where we were going to have a wonderful holiday, the first overseas holiday since we had been to Spain, when she was only two.

Clea would ask to play the song over and over again. She loved the looks of Marina, the singer, her unusual hairdo and clothes. She would say she wanted to look like her when she grew up. I sent Marina an email a few days after Clea’s funeral, thanking her and the band for having filled Clea’s life with music. I never got a reply.

Why did she like this song especially? It is of course a catchy song, probably the most commercial one in the whole album, but there must have been something else that appealed to her.

We will never know what that something else was.

99 pumpkins?

Lula

One of the purposes of this blog is to give the reader some sort of account of Clea's life and to provide some insights into the sort of person Clea was. Preparing these notes helps me remember things I do not want to forget, but I also hope they will help the reader have a meaningful perception of who she was, if you never met her; or to help  create a better defined picture of my daughter, if you were fortunate enough to meet her.

Just like every child, Clea loved watching cartoons on TV. She had many favourite shows (“Arthur” was one of them), but as a toddler she had discovered the Spanish program Los Lunnis, which she was able to see in Spain over a month. Here in Australia, I would record episodes for her whenever I was able to from the internet.

Her favourite character was Lula, a bit of a femme fatale in the magical world of Lunalunera. Clea had learnt all the Lunnis songs and loved listening to them when she was little.

Though she was bilingual, there were of course many idioms she could not understand. One day I downloaded the videoclip of a song titled ’99 calabazas’, which was a play on words, based on a Spanish idiom, ‘dar calabazas’ [to give someone the brush-off, to give somebody a cold shoulder]. The song is rather an amusing ballad about how Lula has given the brush-off to Lulo (the extraterrestrial rapper) 99 times, and pleads for her not to give him ‘number 100’.

The clip shows a forlorn Lulo considering all the pumpkins he has been ‘given’, while in every other scene Lula appears to be truly annoyed or fed up with him.

Clea laughed every time she saw Lulo regarding his many pumpkins with a glum air about him. I suppose what she found hilarious was that someone would give pumpkins to express dissatisfaction or annoyance.


I hope you will enjoy seeing one short videoclip Clea liked.

Last Words

‘Run!!!! Everybody run!!!!!!’

Those were the last words my daughter Clea heard in her far too short a lifetime. A few seconds before them she heard me say very much the same in Spanish: ‘¡Corred! ¡Corred!’

I have often wondered if Clea was able to detect the absolute panic in my voice. It all happened so quickly that we did not have a chance to do anything other than run. I have never asked her twin brothers if they remember the sheer panic in their father’s voice, the urgency, the fear of the monster I saw coming towards us.

In fact, I don’t really want them to remember. Whereas I cannot forget. One day, probably in quite a few years’ time, they may want to know more. As a matter of fact, the story has already been written for them, and I don’t mean Lalomanu. They’ll be able to read it and find out about things they will have forgotten or we have kept away from their innocent childhoods. I wrote it in Spanish.

Every night, they both come into the study to say good night. They always find me writing something on the PC: it might be my own things, or a review, or for the blogs I keep. Stuff, as someone would say. They often stare at the screen and read little bits of what I’ve written. Their curiosity has been increasing lately. They know I have written poetry and have (awkwardly at times, of course) listened to me reading out to them. They seem a little uncomfortable, though not embarrassed.

I also wonder how they will react to my words in maybe ten, fifteen years, whether I am alive to discuss it with them or not. At the time I wrote it, I felt it was necessary to record it, just as I felt it was necessary for me to write the book of poetry.

Yet I confess I made a mistake. I shared the recount of that morning with people who probably did not want to read it. Perhaps they did not deserve to read it. My bad judgment? Possibly. There was too much to confront? Too much horror to witness through my words?

Who knows, it may have been too human… And that, it seems, is the scary bit.

Communicating

This happened quite a few years ago, maybe six or seven years; it was after we moved out of Sydney. I was engaged in a conversation with a friend, discussing the issue of keeping in touch with friends and acquaintances as months and years go by. Suddenly this friend of mine said to me something like, “You know, the problem is that you don’t communicate”.

At the time I found the charge quite bizarre, let alone absolutely untrue and inaccurate, since my whole professional life of over twenty-five years has been based around communicating. I have been a teacher of languages for nearly thirty tears; I have translated between languages and interpreted for people who did not share a language, both in professional and familial settings. Words have always been part of my daily work; the act of communication – either my own thoughts and ideas, or those of others across languages – was, is, and will continue to be bread-and-butter for me - presumably for a long time.

Following my daughter’s death in the 29 September 2009 tsunami in Samoa, not to mention the extremely traumatic experience of surviving such a catastrophic event, I wrote Lalomanu. The book – at least that’s the way I see it now – was my initial form of grieving. Lalomanu was also a very painful effort to convey things impossible to express, that is to say, it was a sorrowful attempt to communicate the experience I (or rather, my whole family) had gone through.

The book was written mostly in the very early mornings of January, February and March 2010. Some mornings I would write of the recurring nightmare of the water swallowing my son J. and me, our seemingly endless spinning and my struggles to ensure we could come up for air. I wrote about the unspeakable terror; about the aftermath, the horror; I wrote about coming back home without our daughter and sister. I also wrote about what Clea’s short life means to me, about all the things she deserved to have lived but was deprived of enjoying.

Someone said to me the book is ‘beautiful and terrible’.

It was the book I needed to write. They were the feelings and thoughts I needed to communicate. The book’s design and layout was very kindly made by a friend, María, for free. She sent the Indesign files to the Canberra printers, and 300 copies were made. With my poems, I was trying to tell the reader what happened on 29 September 2009, what happened afterwards. I did communicate SO VERY MUCH.

I personally mailed numerous copies. Many were posted overseas; I even spent a whole autumnal day driving around Canberra and leaving a copy in my students’ mailboxes. It can hardly be said that I did not make a huge effort to communicate.

Some people did respond, in one way or another; others never did. Some never bothered to acknowledge the book, ie, to acknowledge the unbearable pain of a human being they knew. Highly educated people on the other side of the world kept silent or chose not to search for words, as I explained here.

Whatever communicating means, I think it is not about forwarding a PowerPoint presentation or the link to a video or an article. Never before has ICT (Information and Communications Technology) used so often to actually avoid communication. Instead, it seems to be (ab)used to pass on trivial stuff, or to appear to be “staying in touch”. So powerfully useless.

But then again, I might be wrong. And does it really matter?