Insights and Reflections

When I left for Buenos Aires in February, our first book was to be The Tunnel (El Túnel) by Ernesto Sabato. I asked our Argentine friends to suggest an Argentine author that would not be too difficult so that I could read it in Spanish. My first week in B.A., I found the book, walked over to a café, started reading and to my delight, I became completely engrossed. Getting lost in a story while reading in a second language is a kind of ultimate virtual reality. I often say that I like the way my brain feels when I speak a second language–the way I have to think ahead and plan a strategy to express what I’m going to say if I don’t have the vocabulary. When reading in a second language there are all of these marvelous discoveries of idiomatic and syntactic usage that pull me into this other world. The level of difficulty with this novel was perfect because I rarely had to look up more than one or two words per page, but I was able to puzzle out the meaning of expressions that had recognizable roots but were phrased in ways I had never seen before. I hope my students feel this same delight when they are reading in English. Since many of the teachers contributing to this blog are non-native English speakers (but whose English is a whole lot more fluent than my Spanish!) I hope you will share some of the interesting cultural and linguistic gems you notice along the way.

Now, a word about El Túnel. In the very first sentence the narrator, Juan Pablo Castel, tells us that he is a painter and that he killed a woman named Maria Iribarne. In retelling his account of how this murder occurred, Sabato immediately draws in the reader. The first time Juan Pablo saw Maria was at one of his exhibits where she stopped and stared at a corner of the painting, at the essential core of the painting, at the part that revealed the whole story, at the part that everyone else had missed. Observing her observing his painting, Juan Pablo was obsessed to track down this woman.

Strangely enough, my first weekend in Buenos Aires, I went to the district called La Boca where there are brightly coloured houses and many art galleries. I noticed that the paintings that appealed to me the most in all of the galleries were by the same artist, so I searched out his own personal gallery and met the artist himself. I had a delightful chat with him and found that he was absolutely passionate about what he did–painting canvases from morning to night, always searching to express himself in his artwork. I thought how I would love to study art under him, to see how he takes a virgin canvas and turns it into these masterpieces…and then Sabato’s characters started playing games in my head and I felt like Maria talking to Juan Pablo, and just wanted to get away before I had a chance to become another artist’s victim! The power of literature!

As the story progressed and Juan Pablo became more and more obsessed by Maria–wanting to know where she was and what she was doing every moment of the day, I kept asking myself, Is this because he’s crazy or Latino? Does machismo breed this kind of insecurity, or did he have such tunnel vision that he could no longer think clearly? Is Sabato warning us of the danger of viewing life as a tunnel?

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