Stuttering Cities

Use Alternative Routes

There’s a man down there, in the courtyard of the building, who’s rhythmically hitting a chisel with a mallet. He’s been at it for several hours. At eight in the morning, I went down to ask him what he was doing and, like someone stating the obvious, he said: Working. I didn’t bother to ask the next question—the one that was really worrying me—and went back inside. I’d been standing under the shower for a few minutes before I realized that the surface of the shared courtyard we cross every day to go out into the street wouldn’t be there when I next opened the door of our apartment.

I haven’t yet felt like looking out into the courtyard. I wonder how we’ll manage to get out of here—if perhaps the man will improvise a bridge with wooden planks or if he’ll at least reach out a hand to help us across; if the cavity under the now nonexistent surface will be deep; if it’ll be like that forever or if the last summer rains will end up turning our building into a blue concrete island surrounded by gray waters.

The sound of metal hitting stone doesn’t stop and, as the threat of the gaping hole in this courtyard grows, in some other part of the city they are breaking up a sidewalk; in another, someone is knocking down a wall; and in the small, rounded head of a child, gently resting against the window of a metro carriage, the crack of an idea opens up—the fissure of a new word.

Bridge under Repair

When I returned to live in Mexico at the age of fourteen, after twelve years away, I spoke Spanish correctly but not well. I was able to say a phrase but not twist it around, take it apart. The Spanish I spoke belonged to slow, dispassionate conversations around the family breakfast table. The Spanish spoken by people in the street was a living language, rapid and vibrant, and I found it impossible to get my teeth into it. I stuttered, I trembled when I spoke, suddenly went gravely silent in the middle of a sentence. My language was full of holes.

Men at Work

If the cranium were what it seems to be—a hemispherical receptacle, a cavity, a reservoir—learning would be a way of filling an empty space. But that’s not what actually happens. It’s possible to imagine that every new impression digs another hole, bruises the unformed material a bit, empties us out a little more. We’re born full of something—gray matter, water, blood, flesh—and in all of us, at every instant, the slow alchemy of erosion and loss is at work.

Language breaches our direct relationship with the world and words are an attempt to cross the unbridgeable gap: “Mama” cements a fragile bond with the now unattainable breast and “Me” is a mere echo of that face of mine on the other side of the mirror. In prelinguistic infancy, when the shadow of syntax hasn’t yet eclipsed the radiance of the world, the rumbling of r s and the murmuring of m s are enough to say everything. A child, before it can talk, speaks the world—speaks it to himself—with a pointing finger and babbling. But one day the soft sound of the m becomes attached to the a, and is repeated—mama. Then, something snaps. The moment we pronounce the name of that bond, our first and most intimate one, some link with the world is broken.

Names are the glove covering a prosthesis, the wrapping of an absence. A child who learns a new word acquires a bridge to the world, but only in compensation for the chasm that opens up within him the moment that word is imprinted there. Almost all of us have heard the story about our first “Mama” (and we know that the interest of the person hearing it is usually inversely proportional to...