APPARATUS

New Zealand Listener, Volume 34, Issue 874, 4 May 1956, Page 14

APPARATUS

‘THERE are only two things you need know to have a whale of a good time speaking border-Mexican Spanish. It’s easy to have a good time because you (the foreigner-novice) naturally fall in with the healthy native custom of hurling yourself wholeheartedly into conversation. No mumbling, lip paralysis or lower jaw constriction is possible, as we habitually practise it in New Zealand. The odd thing is that in spite of their facial immobility at home, New Zealanders abroad (and Englishmen, for that matter) seem to like hamming it |up in a Latin tongue, chewing and _grimacing with the relish of a Wallace | Beery. | The two things you need to remem- | ber are. what happens when you double | the letter R, and jhe absolutely essen-

| tial apparatus. Pronunciation wise, as the Hollywood dictionaries say, it’s a must to trill the double R. Pero, the harmless conjunction but, is trilled into Perro, the vibrant Mexican dog. Caro, expensive, becomes on the border, the truly awful’ but still trilling carro, a motor car. Every Mexican city slicker wants to own that most caro of carros, the Cadillac, but while he’s raising the necessary he’ll make do with some other apparatus. That’s the word. Aparato. When you can’t translate something, say un’ aparato for doing so and so, and illuminate with gestures. You'll get by just fine. But don’t confuse the word with apartado, which means a private post office box. At La Rosa I first learnt about the endless uses of aparato from Lucie Silva, a lady who was seldom baffled either in Spanish or English. She was a full-blooded American Indian, or Red Indian if you want to be Buffalo Bill about it. She battled her way off the Reservation when she was still young and took to paleface life with great gusto. Somehow or other, she got herelf a scholarship from secondary school to the University of Mexico, a wonderfully international institution, where your brain and your heart count for more than the colour of your skin or your ancestry. Among the two and a half million people in Mexico City at the time was Felipe Silva, a Mexican

lad in from the provinces to do his military service. He and Lucie were married, and after some hard times in Southern Mexico and Northern California, where the gold on the streets is seldom picked up by Negroes, Mexicans. ot Red Indians, they came back to Tecate, Mexico, where Felipe’s family were living, and Felipe got a job at La Rosa. Soon he was promoted to Majordomo, or foreman, and Lucie came alorig, too, to help out on the housekeeping side. Felipe’s father appeared next, and was sent off to manage Rancho Tres Estrellas, one of El Profesor’s outlying properties, where most of the vegetables were grown. Soon Felipe’s young sister Abigail came to help Lucie, and then Abigail’s cousin Paz came to help Lucie and Abigail. Daniele, Felipe’s younger brother, who had a wife in the U.S. and was having visa trouble, used to put in time on the La Rosa payroll, too, when he was especially unpopular north of the border. This set up was an aparato in itself, but Felipe was no free loader and drove his family hard. If he slacked off Lucie would drive Aim. Lucie was a bit scared of mice and black widow spiders, but she was complete master of Mexican and US. officialdom. She’d come up the hard way, she knew the angles, and she had documentation to cover her whether she was in Mexico City or Washington, D.C..She didn’t exactly deal her birth certificates like playing cards, but as she said comfortably, dual citizenship was all she needed at present, and if she decided to light out for Costa Rica or Chile, she could surely create the necessafy aparato. I was even more modest. All I wanted to know from her when I first met her was. the Spanish for a particular kind of lampshade, rather like a sombrero, which sits above the chimney of a kerosene lamp. I wanted to buy one for a friend whose ceiling was smoking over. "Heck!" Lucie said. "I dunno. Ask for una aparato para la lampara." I did, with gestures. As I became acclimatised to La Rosa, I found the place was a mass of anaratos(s). Some of them are worth

telling about.

G. leF.

Y.