The Spelling Bee

Valentina Reyes was eleven years old when she walked onto the stage of the national spelling bee, in a huge hotel ballroom just outside Washington, D.C. More than two hundred children from all over the country had arrived at the beginning of the week. By Thursday afternoon, only twelve were left, and she was one of them.

Her parents had moved to Houston from Honduras before she was born. At home the family spoke Spanish, at school she spoke English, and for a long time Valentina thought that the two languages lived in separate rooms of her head. It was her grandfather, Tomas, who showed her that the rooms had doors between them.

Tomas had been a schoolteacher in Tegucigalpa for thirty years. When he moved in with the family, he had nothing to do in the evenings, so he offered to help Valentina with her spelling lists. Every night after dinner, they sat at the kitchen table with a dictionary that was older than her mother. He could not pronounce half the words, which made her laugh, but he always asked the same question: "Where does this word come from?"

At first, she thought the question was a waste of time. Who cared whether a word was Greek or French? But slowly she began to see patterns. Words from Greek often hid a "ph" where you heard an "f". Words from French liked to end in silent letters. And words that came from Spanish, her grandfather said proudly, were the easiest of all, if you remembered how they were spelled at home.

The final rounds were broadcast live on television. Valentina could imagine her grandfather sitting in his armchair in Houston, too nervous to drink his coffee. He had wanted to travel with her, but the doctor had said the journey would be too tiring for him. "If I were younger," he had told her at the airport, "I would be sitting in the front row. Instead I'll be sitting in front of the TV, which is almost the same."

In the ninth round, the girl next to her misspelled "rhododendron" and sat down in tears. A boy from Ohio went out on a German word that Valentina had never even heard of. Then it was her turn. She walked to the microphone, and the pronouncer read out a word that sounded exactly like "gorilla".

For a second, her mind went completely blank. If she spelled the animal, she would be out; she was sure of that. So she asked for the definition. "A member of a small, unofficial fighting force," the pronouncer said. She asked for the language of origin. "Spanish."

Valentina almost smiled. Suddenly she was back at the kitchen table, and her grandfather was tapping the old dictionary. "Guerra," he had said once. "War. And a little war is a guerrilla. Two r's, because we roll them, and two l's, because Spanish loves them." She had laughed at the time. Now she could hear his voice as clearly as if he had been standing right behind her.

She spelled it slowly, one letter at a time, and waited. There was a short pause, and then the bell rang. Correct. In the audience, her mother covered her face with both hands.

She did not win. In the twelfth round, she was knocked out by "chiaroscuro", an Italian word she had studied once and then forgotten, and she finished in fourth place. But when she phoned home that night, her grandfather did not mention the Italian word at all. "If you hadn't asked where it came from," he said, "you would have spelled the animal and gone home in the ninth round. I have never been so proud."

The next morning, a reporter asked her how she had prepared. Valentina thought about the long evenings, the old dictionary and the question she had once found so annoying. "I had a coach," she said. "He doesn't speak much English, but he knows where every word comes from."