The Weight of Words

Clara had come to Galway to look after two small boys and to improve her English, in that order, although by October she suspected the order had reversed. She was twenty-three, from Montevideo, and she had brought with her a suitcase of warm clothes that turned out not to be warm enough and a notebook of poems she had written in Spanish and was afraid to show anyone. In Uruguay she had wanted to be a writer. In Ireland she wanted to be a writer in English, which felt, most days, like trying to dance in someone else's shoes.

She met Mr. Fahy on the promenade at Salthill, where she walked every afternoon while the boys were at school. He was very old, very thin and dressed as if for a funeral, and every day he walked the full length of the prom and kicked the wall at the end, as Galway people do, for luck. One windy afternoon his hat blew off and Clara caught it. He thanked her in Irish, then in English and then, when he heard her accent, in surprisingly good Spanish. He had been a poet, he said, "and a teacher, which paid for the poetry". He asked what she did. She said, a little too quickly, that she wanted to write.

"In English?" he said. "God help you. It's a wonderful language for it, but it's full of traps." She asked what kind of traps. He stopped, leaned on the railing and looked out across the bay at the gray hills of Clare. "The kind you can't see," he said, "because you're standing in them. Tell me, how did you spend this morning?" She told him: she had spent an hour on the boys' homework and wasted another looking for a lost shoe. "There you are," he said, delighted. "You spent time and you wasted time, as if it were money in your purse. Nobody taught you that. The language did."

That was the first lesson, though neither of them called it that. They walked together most afternoons after that, up the prom and back, and he showed her the metaphors hiding in plain sight, like birds in a hedge that only appear once you know how to look. Arguments, he pointed out, were wars: you attacked a point, defended a position, shot down an idea, won or lost. Ideas were food: some were half-baked, some were hard to swallow, some were food for thought, and some took time to digest. Understanding was seeing. People said "I see" when they meant "I understand", and a good explanation shed light on a problem.

Clara began to hear them everywhere. Her host mother said she was feeling a bit low, and her husband told her to cheer up because things were looking up. The boys' teacher said that one of them was going through a difficult patch. The radio said the economy had hit a wall. At dinner one evening she caught herself saying she was at a crossroads about her future, and stopped in mid-sentence, astonished, as though she had found a stranger's hand in her pocket. "Life is a road," Mr. Fahy said the next day, when she told him. "Feelings are weather, good things are up, bad things are down, and important things are heavy. That's why we talk about a weighty matter, or a heavy heart."

"Spanish does this too," Clara said. "We say someone is heavy when they are boring, and that a person is light when they are not serious." "Of course it does," he said. "Every language is a museum of dead metaphors. The trick, for a poet, is to notice which ones are only sleeping." A bad poem, he told her, used the metaphors everyone used without noticing; a good poem woke them up. It took a phrase like "a heavy heart" and made the reader feel, for one moment, the actual weight of it, like a stone in the chest. "Don't avoid the ordinary words," he said. "Listen to them. They're much older and stranger than they pretend to be."

In November the weather turned, and the walks grew shorter and wetter. One afternoon Mr. Fahy was not on the promenade, nor the next day, nor the day after that. Clara asked in the newsagent's on the corner, where everyone seemed to know everyone, and learned that he had had a fall and was in the hospital, "but he's grand, he's grand, sure he'll be out in no time". She visited him on the Saturday with a bag of oranges. He was sitting up in bed, thinner than ever, reading a newspaper with a magnifying glass, and the first thing he asked her was whether she had written anything.

She had. She had written her first poem in English the night before, at the kitchen table, after the boys were asleep. It was about her grandmother in Montevideo, who had died the year Clara left, and about the heavy suitcase she had carried onto the plane, which contained, the poem said, more than clothes. She had been afraid it was too simple. Mr. Fahy read it twice with the magnifying glass. Then he laid it on the blanket and was quiet for a while. "You took a dead metaphor," he said at last, "and you woke it up. That suitcase weighs something. I can feel it from here."

He was back on the prom by Christmas, slower now, with a stick, and they walked the length of it together on the last afternoon before she flew home for the holidays. At the end, as always, he kicked the wall. Then he nodded at her to do the same. She hesitated, then kicked it, gently, feeling slightly ridiculous. "For luck," he said, "and for the writing." On the plane, somewhere over the Atlantic, she opened her notebook and began a new poem. It started with the wind on the promenade and ended with the weight of words, and she wrote every line of it in English.