industry with scientists to find out—for instance, can you get
cellulose from eucalyptus? These kinds of questions.
Ursula and Giuseppe Grattapaglia, receiving the Medal of Tolerance in Brasília, 2013
[Ursula and Giuseppe Grattapaglia]
“And the other, who studied agriculture, then economics, then
worked in a bank, then came here and worked in construction for
six months—at only twenty-five, he became an economist in the
Italian embassy.
“So you see,” he says, weighing the air with both hands, “on
balance…”
It’s a phrase my father used to use, when he talked about
marriage: On balance.
* * *
All over rural Brazil, cars are parked at crossroads, waiting for
buses. In a few hours, I’m to catch the “Class Bus” line to Brasília,
which runs a morning bus and an afternoon bus, but has no schedule
to speak of. Giuseppe and Sebastian will drive me the four miles to
the highway, and we’ll park and wait. “It shouldn’t take more than
two hours,” says Giuseppe. After two hours with no traffic at all, the
bus glints in the distance; my last photo is of Sebastian sitting in the
middle of the highway in a lotus position.
At breakfast, Nelida and Luisa gave me a tiny notebook they’d
made, a few ripped pieces of paper nested into one another. I asked
all the kids to autograph it; one by one they signed their names,
slowly, carefully. When it was Leandro’s turn, he wrote his name
and a dark round period, then paused. “May I write my mother’s
name?” he asked. I nodded and he wrote in cursive, “Dina.”
Clemente reached for the pen, but Leandro held it tight. “May I
write my other mother’s name?” he asked, already writing: “Ester.”
On the terrace, Ursula gave me the phone number of an
Esperantist in Brasília whom she’d commandeered to show me
around the city. Giuseppe suddenly walked by from his office. “Just
tell me what lies she’s been telling you,” he joked, “and I’ll tell you
all the other ones.”
“What I want to know, Giuseppe, is this: What can you tell me
about Ursula that she would never say about herself?”
He exploded in laughter, clapping his hands. “Well! Ursula!” His
head bobbed left and right like that of a punch-drunk boxer. “The
thing you need to know about Ursula is that she loves lost causes.
Give her a lost cause, and she throws her arms around it. She loves
everybody.”
Her lips set, Ursula nodded, approvingly, and caught my eye: This
is why I married him.
“And Ursula—what can you tell me about Giuseppe that he’d
never say about himself?” She looked him up and down. “Giuseppe,”
she said, laughing, “is Buddha. Always, always happy.”
Buddha smiled beatifically, and said he had an appointment with
a machete; the banana groves needed tending before we left.
Once he’d gone, Ursula asked, as if it had just occurred to her, “So
what kind of book are you writing?”
“What kind of book?” I was stalling, and she knew it. “It’s a
hybrid, history and memoir. It’s about Zamenhof, his language, his
dreams, and the people he entrusted to build Esperanto, then and
now. It’s about Esperanto as a bridge of words, and all the ‘internal
ideas’ that have crossed it. And it’s about my wanderings in
Esperantujo, the people I’ve met in Europe, Asia, California, here.…”
I didn’t tell her it’s about me, too, though I never meant it to be;
about how Esperanto helped me to navigate my middle-aged
anguish, to get across what I needed to say. “And the last chapter is
about Bona Espero.”
She was unsettled. “Bona Espero doesn’t need a whole chapter,”
she admonished, then softened. She took my hands in hers across the
table, and tears came to her eyes.
Now I was unsettled; I was the writer, she was my subject. We
shouldn’t be holding hands. My tears shouldn’t come out to meet
hers.
Neither of us spoke, but her voice was in my ear—
… love is the essence of life
—and Giuseppe’s—
She loves everybody
—and Paulo’s—
Because I want to love everybody!
—and Sebastian’s—
Love always pays.
“Don’t worry,” I said, “it’s about what you’re doing here in Bona
Espero. It’s about love among the androids.”
Coda: Justice in Babel
During my travels among Esperantists in Europe, Asia, and Latin
America, I’ve come home to the United States to encounter a few
perdurable myths about Esperanto. Sometimes it seems that these
myths about Esperanto are more robust than Esperanto itself; three
in particular stand out.
The first is the “heyday” myth: Esperanto had its heyday, but isn’t
it … over? Whereas languages may become dead or extinct, this
myth assumes that Esperanto was merely a fad, having gone the
way of hula hoops, stuffed hummingbirds on ladies’ hats, and other
caprices of mass culture. This myth creeps up on late-night TV in
Stephen Colbert’s recurrent references to Esperanto—“the most
popular human animal hybrid fantasy franchise ever published in
Esperanto”—as a shorthand for absurdity, obscurity, and
irrelevance. In fact, Esperanto was never a massculture
phenomenon, except occasionally as a metaphor.
In the past half century, Esperantists, who are highly self-
conscious about language and communication, have tended to strain
against the current of mass culture. To those who hold with the
“heyday” myth, it makes no impact to point out that Esperanto, in
its second century, has a community that extends over six continents
and sixty-two countries. To “heydayers,” Esperantists are simply
people who did not get the memo that Esperanto is over. It never
occurs to them to wonder why they are still quick to opine about
Esperanto, if it is indubitably a thing of the past.
The second myth is what filmmaker Sam Green calls “the gray
jumpsuit” myth: that Esperanto, in its aim for universality, leads us
toward a world of uniformity and cultural homogeneity. It’s a myth
first voiced in the nineteenth century, during the romance of
nationalism; voiced again, in a Marxist key, by Gramsci a century
later. And it is prevalent in the United States, a country that refuses
to put its schoolchildren in uniforms, leaving such gear to those who
serve their country (soldiers), their locality (police), or time
(prisoners). But one does not see jumpsuits, gray or otherwise, at
Esperanto gatherings, where people wear colorful national
costumes, celebrate diverse cultures, buy anthologies of national
literatures in Esperanto, and take daily lessons in the host country’s
language.
This, at least, is the current state of affairs; as far as Esperanto’s
history is concerned, the cultural diversity question is a bit more
complicated. Zamenhof, characteristically, espoused different
opinions in different contexts, sometimes within a single essay. To
the French Academy of Sciences he argued that Esperanto would
only strengthen national languages, though in the same text, he
wrote, “We confess that however much we knock our head about, we