I recently wrote about my fear that three decades after learning Spanish, I was now slowly losing my fluency, forgetting words I had once known, and mispronouncing others. This should come as no surprise. According to the experts on gray matter, my cognitive abilities peaked around the turn of this century. It has been a slow downhill run since 2000.
The aging brain works in strange ways. Consider the curious case of a friend I will call Saul. I first met him when I was running a cantina that was popular with tourists and expats. He had retired to Costa Rica some years earlier and spoke enough Spanish to get by. English was his native tongue and he was a great talker, a raconteur with interesting stories of his days in the US. He had been a bookie in the States and would come to the bar on NFL Sundays before kickoff to talk football and point spreads.
He was an unorthodox bettor, placing a number of bets each week on the over/under on the first quarter of games. (For non-gamblers, he was wagering on how many combined points would be scored by the two teams in the first quarter of play.) Saul would drink a couple club sodas with lime and watch an hour or so, just long enough to see how his bets turned out.
I moved on to other types of work and lost track of Saul. He was more than 20 years my senior and as the years passed I gave little thought to him. As far as I knew he had joined that permanent club we all hold out from joining for as long as we can.
Then one day at the beach, I had just emerged from an hour in the waves when I saw him, seated on a plastic chair in the shade of some palm trees. I was happy to see him, now grayer, more weathered and a bit hunched over. But it was him. I greeted him and began what I thought would be a conversation. He smiled and gave me a look of recognition, but his only responses were “Pura vida,” and when I asked him how things were going, he said, “Poco a poco.”
A few days later, I saw him again. Same simple responses in Spanish. The third time I saw him, in the same seat under the same trees, I spoke of our days at the bar and his football bets. I even asked him to respond in English, but all he did was nod and say “Pura vida.”
Was it dementia? I watched him arrive one day on the bus, and walk to his same spot, where he sat calmly and stared out at the sea. He would later catch the bus back home, unassisted. So it was not exactly dementia, as he still knew his way around. But I was never able to get anything more than the handful of simple phrases in Spanish out of him.
My amateur diagnosis, via the famous ‘research’ we can all now do thanks to Google, was aphasia. This is a language disorder that affects one’s ability to speak, read, and write. Bruce Willis has been diagnosed with it, which is why he no longer makes public appearances.
I am guessing that Saul had something similar. He died a few years back, so I will never know for sure. But he was for me unique: The only person I have ever met who seemingly lost the ability to speak in their native tongue while retaining a few words of a second language.
