The Mayor's Tongue

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It was June when Eugene Brentani took the job at Aaronsen and Son Moving Company and subleased an apartment in Inwood from a man on his crew named Alvaro. Like many of the men who worked at Aaronsen and Son, Alvaro had recently emigrated from the Dominican Republic. Unlike the others, however, Alvaro was from the Cibao Valley, a small rural region in the northern part of the country. Separated from the rest of the island by the Cordillera Septentrional mountain range, the isolated farming communities of the Cibao Valley had developed their own dialect. This dialect, Cibaeño, was virtually incomprehensible to natives of the other Spanish-speaking countries in the Caribbean. Cubans thought that it sounded excessively affricative, like Catalan; Puerto Ricans found it soft and melodious, like Portuguese. Even the other Dominicans on the moving crew were baffled by Alvaro's speech. To Eugene, it sounded like Alvaro was speaking with a mouth full of porridge. Alvaro's attempts to learn English were, despite his most strenuous efforts, pitiful, but he was able to make himself understood in other ways. Since words failed him, he communicated through vivid intonation; forceful hand gestures; and dynamic facial expressions, made with contortions of his rubbery face, the muscles of which were flexible to an uncanny degree. An arched lip or a wiggled ear was a disquisition in itself, conveying meaning far more articulate than, say, one of Eugene's father's monosyllabic lectures. After several weeks, it no longer mattered that Alvaro couldn't speak a word of English. Eugene believed that he could understand him just fine.

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