MAGIC AND FAIRYDUST
Casa Elena: Magic, Fairy Dust, and the Imperfect Subjunctive
by Roberta Schine
A few moons ago, I stayed in Casa Elena, a magic cottage, in San Miguel de Allende created with care by Lena Bartula. Just me, a mountain of Spanish grammar books, a pencil, and some fairy dust. I intended to immerse myself in Spanish. Maybe this would be the year I lined up my grammar, including those despicable imperfect subjunctives.
Before leaving New York City, I told a friend, "If I die and end up going to hell, the first thing I'll do is find the guy who invented the imperfect subjunctive and tell him to go to hell. So, to speak.” She said, “It’s your fears, Roberta. You need to open up more.” My response was succinct, yet, profound. “OY!” was all I could say.
For my flight to Mexico, I brought along some novels by Elena Poniatowska and Gabriel Garcia Marquez. As soon as the plane took off, their words began seeping out of my backpack, words like, "fear, mystery, magic, immortality..." Gabriel Garcia Marquez kept insisting that I unfasten my seat belt. "No way!" I yelled.
The first morning at Casa Elena, I brought my clay teapot out to my roof deck. Surrounded by beautiful mountains and participles dangling from purple Jacaranda trees, I drank in nouns, adjectives, gerunds and stem-changing verbs. It was all very pleasant. I thought to myself, “This must be what they mean by present perfect.”
Grizelda, my beloved Spanish teacher and friend, stopped by in the afternoon to work on vocabulary. When she told me the word for breast, (pecho) was masculine, (EL pecho) I wondered, “How could breast be a masculine word?” Jokingly, I told Grizelda I knew she was part angel and I asked her if she had a magic spell that could make breasts feminine (LA pecha). She said her divine powers were limited. (Looking back, that surprises me because teaching me to speak Spanish was nothing short of a miracle.) “But,” she continued, “I know an incantation to make the word “penis” feminine (LA pene). She jumped out of her chair and shouted “Abracadabra” as she spun herself around in circles eighteen times — counterclockwise, of course. And then, POOF! Penises throughout the land became feminine!
That night, I collapsed onto the turquoise blanket that covered Casa Elena's bed and, with my head submerged in a cocoon of Mexican pillows, fell into a deep sleep. The spirits who inhabited dozens of Lena's Indigenous huipils many past preterites ago left her downstairs art gallery and ascended the stairs where they cavorted around my room. The one with a lot of tattoos asked everyone what our pronouns were while another prepositioned me.
Then, the whole coven began sprinkling imperfect subjunctives into my brain. I heard them say, “Let’s do an exorcism for ridding fears. Gringos have a lot of fears, especially of the imperfect subjunctive.” More “Abracadabras.” My body began shaking.
When I finally stopped shaking a few days later it was time to emerge from my retreat, I stepped out of Casa Elena. Grounded in the cobblestone streets of barrio Guadalupe, I opened my mouth to speak and flocks of imperfect subjunctives flew out.
"Si hubiera sabido sobre del poder de la magia, no habría tenido miedo."
"If I had known about the power of magic, I would not have been afraid."
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