La Tramuntana - Chapter 5
Follow Jinner as he tackles subsidy managers, weird boyfriends, and new languages.
Part 5 of La Tramuntana, continuing from the aftermath of a spicy scene
Back in the main room, thinking.
“So, we'll be sleeping on the shitty sex rooms?”, i asked.
“Yeah. Maybe we could buy some old caravan”, said Onita.
“That'd be nice”, said Anista.
"Imagine that, the domestic northern life; a little caravan park just for us, we cook something together, we a bunch of hippies", said Onista.
"And where do we put the caravans?", I asked
"Errrr...", said Onista. "In the parking spaces?"
"That'll be a cost", i said. "And we'll also be liable to the public."
"Fuck." Said Onita. "Eh, I'll figure something out."
"Why not commute?", i asked. "Maybe there's a flat for sale."
"Maybe", said Onista. "Seems like the kinda thing a subsidy will cover"
“Eh, i want to sleep within the place”, i said. “Makes it feel more like a home and i like that.”
“Yeah”; said Anista.
And we went to each our own sex room, finding places to sleep.
Mine smelled of feces.
Yet again the clerk. A young woman, sitting passively.
“Y quien quieres?” And who do you want
Can't be arsed with foreign languages. The horriblesmell still danced in my nostrils. “The normal”, i said.
A confused face, and then a “S5”. So, we went to the room.
“We'd like to have a grant to get a caravan”, said Onita.
“Is this your accommodation problem again?”, asked the grant provider.
“Yeah”, said Onita. “I've only been here two days and my back is killing me.”
“Hmm”, said the Subsidy Provider. “So it's causing you health problems… have you considered a doctor?”
“Well… it'd be better to have our own place”, said Onita. “Seperate work and life, y'know?”
“I see…”, said the Subsidy Provider. “And you're absolutely sure it's the best option…? You know how it is with the southern government taking away our government money.”
“Yeah, it's the best”, said Onita.
The subsidy provider shrugged. “I best see evidence, then.”
I glanced a dart to Onita. She shrugged.
“Well…”, said the Subsidy Provider. “Do you seriously need housing? Your sex rooms are quite good, after all.”
“Yeah”, i said. “A caravan, at least.”
And she stared at me. “You do realise that the sex rooms were built on government money? You realise that the brothel was built on government money? That the prostitutes were paid on government money?”
“We've literally just arrived.”, i said. “I don't even know the manager's real name!”
“For all the stuff we've given you, you've given us not enough. Half of enough. You're in debt. Why should we do anything for you?”, said the subsidy provider. “Plural you, of course, including the… drug-seller”
“Look, an ultimatum", said Anista. “Just give us one try. Give us enough to build the accommodation w'all need and we'll prove to you that this Mr Wire guy is the worst, le pire littéralement.”
“Aha, lokues español del fepentrio! Que bo!”, exclaimed the subsidy manager. “Well… i can hear your… very foreign accent, not even sure if you're using Northern words through the accent, but eh, i'll get you the subsidy.”
I nodded quietly. Onita did too. We both knew it was Anista's Quebecois French, but it seems to have won. An under-table thumbs up from Onita!
“So, i expect you want me to go cancel your other subsidies”, said the Subsidy Manager, y'know, so we can make space for the big one."
“That's fine”, i said.
And we smiled at each other.
On the way back.
“Do that again, Anista”, i said. “Honestly i don't care if it's knockoff Catalan, it's still epic you can trick them like that.”
Anista glared at me. “French is a separate language.”
I shrugged. I hailed from Britain, it was in my nature to make French speakers angry, after all.
Onita saw, though. “Go gettem, old 'guvn'r!”
I cringed yet again. An accent hitting too close to home.
But i chuckled, allowing her to. It was a joke, Anista. So she chuckled.
How funny it was that we were bringing our little stereotypes from earth, little fights.
I was glad i hadn't seen the bigger fights brought back, not yet anyways.
No, for now it was these little moments of banter.
We walked down the streets. It was nice.
We found a square. Mulumu square, the central part, where the city first started.
Named weirdly. The sign featured some symbols below it. Three circles in a triangle shape, a box drawn around a capital-printed “MULUMU”, a chevron, a ticked arc with a circle atop it, a double-chevron, a vertical line with a chevron pointing up, and a down-pointing arrow.
“What does it mean?”, i asked.
“Fuck knows”, said Onita.
It was a nice square, airy and breezy. Trees, beautiful luscious ones. Some bore fruit. Some bore mentofruit and some my favorite, tartfruit.
An apple inside a lemon. Sour, tart. Just what the name said.
“I heard the liquor industry for those green-yellow things is really big”, said Anista.
"Probably", i shrugged. Well, said with a shrug.
"We should try some", said Anista.
So, we walked to a shop. And we found the liquor. 40% volume, delicate casing. "I bet you could have a gas lamp using this", said Onista.
"Not possible", said some randomer. They were looking at a book. They didn't look away. "You'd make a big stink and the flame would last 0."
"And how would you know", i asked.
"Someone tried to arson my house with it... Some fucking stupid debt.", the person, still gazing at the book said.
"And then i think i heard some big meeting", they said. “Fuck… i'm being too open."
“Continue”, i said.
“No”, they said. And they went back to reading.
We left, having bought some novelty north-specific itemss.
A sign. “Qidivifo de los edmilles se necesiten otalichar.”… and i learnt the word Edmill; a humanoid. Either werewolf or human. A catch-all term. Translated into Edmiy and Edmiyii… weird. Non-Spanish pluraliser for a mostly-Spanish loan word.
It was weird, Northern Spanish. The most common verbs and most particles seemed to be conserved, but the less common words obsuficated. How would a Japanese speaker feel without the ability to read Kanji, only the little particle-syllables? This was how i felt. Probably. I never learnt Japanese.
I remember years ago, when i was told about all the benifits of being bilingual. But there weren't any to be had here. There weren't any to be had back in Barcelona. Everyone around me was more than bilingual, knowing at least the two local languages and then English as a compliment, or maybe Italian or Portugese. And than non-English-speaking immigrants came over and only added to the polylinguottism; Romanian, Darija and MSA, Italian, French... i almost felt overwhelmed, i merely bilingual.
But then i realised at one point that i saw this as the normal. It was no longer strange. It was simply a bare minimum. At the very least, you'd need one to communicate with those locally, and another for those in South America and the rest of the country, and if one so desired,
And i looked back at the Edmiyii. Northern Spanish, Standard Spanish. Interchanged, mixed up, code-switched. Not a care for purity. And another edmiy arrived. And i heard English words dropped in. This only happens when everyone speaks the language. WTF...?! Did three languages just become an ad-hoc single?!
And then i looked at Onita. She was the odd one out. Anista was at least bilingual. I trilingual, soon to be quadlingual. The Edmiyii here trilingual.
"Yeah, creo que es... pon-importante que otlichamos", said one of them.
And i sat there. An English connective. Spanish content words... and some Northern words.
I guess i'd look up what pon and otlichamos... maybe otlitchar? meant.
This is what code switching does. It unites languages, brings them together, takes the most obvious of each. There had been times i let down the floodgates and mixed languages freely. Somehow, my subconscious knew how to keep languages confined to what i knew others spoke.
And it was happening here, a live conversation.
But we had to leave, said Onita.
And we reached the brothel. Lunchtime.
“Hi”, i said to a short person here. It was the same one i saw last time, the one who spoke the strange language. I sat near him. I looked back at Onita… we're dating…? a little help here??
“We don't even know each other's name”, said the short person. “So.. mine's Michael”
“Yeah… Well, mine is now Jinner…? Used to be Newbie”
“It is”, said Onita. “We made it together, Anista and I- Onita… i'm Onita. Or Onista. Depends on whether you like clustered consonants, doesn't matter either way.”
“Seems like we all have the pseudonomic names”, he said. “I changed mine to better align with those here. My original name wa-”
Wait.. is this just the internet? We all have handles, it seems, and we all seem to be in a space we can vibe together…?
No, push out the distracting thought. But Michael's mouth had closed. No matter, everything is fine, everything is normal. I am normal. We are all normal. This is a Perfectly Fine Social Situation and i do not feel out of place.
“So…what brought you here?”, i asked him. “Like, why did you come to the brothel?”
He thought for a second. “Horny jail… i was told to go to horny jail… i went to the place with the most horns, then :p.”
Contemporary meme culture… how did it permeate into here?
This conversation feels.. artifical. What are we doing wrong?
“So, what do you do on… weekends?”
“The first or the second?”
I frowned. “What?”
“Have you forgot? The week is different here. 10 days, dee-1 through dee-10… one two-day weekend and one one-day weekend… it's too simple for you to have had forgotten!”
I shrugged it off. Anxiety surrounded me like a blanket of pins. This is getting awkward.
“Let's… er, talk about your little language”, i deflected us with.
“It's personal, i'd rather not discuss it.”
“Please do tell”, i said.
“No.”, he said.
A no is a no. I learnt that lesson the hard way too many times.
“Hmm… how are your foreign languages?”
“Shit… i only really know Spanish, English, and our language.”, he said.
“Me too… only English, Spanish, and Catalan.”, i said.
Onita leaned closer. “And i only know English. Oh look at you poor guys! Oh how horrible, you're trilingual!”
Micheal shrugged. “It's a tough world… unless you're at the very least bilingual, you're fucked.”
“I know French, too”, said Anista. “English and French… how's that?”
“Shitty. There's no French here”, said Michael. “And no Catalan here, either.”
“You'd be surprised… Latin roots, just like Northern Spanish.”
He shrugged a bemused expression. “Northern Spanish is a fucking hodgepodge. I don't even bother.”
“Your loss”, i said. “It'll open a buncha doors.”
“Trust me… i have plenty enough doors open.” He leant in closer, i could smell his breath. Ew. “Want some?”
“Maybe”, i said. “What are they?”
“Money, power, the grand tawapona.”
That's weird. “What's this tawapona thing?”
“Absolution, the great coming the good afterlife.”
Onita, my new boyfriend is being weird.
“Let's part ways, then”, said Michael. “I'll leave the doors open a little while.”
I shrugged. “Yeah.”
I stood up.
And he left, leaving us alone-ish again, in this brothel.
Silence. Nice. No awkwardness, just those i have come to know.
“Have you heard their stories?”, asked Anista. “The ones homeless, our less fortunate employees?”
“No, not yet”, i said.
“Well…”, said Anista. “It's so sad actually to think about what Mr Wire did to them. All sorts of abuse, from wrongful employment to wrongful work.”
“You should publish an autobiography”, i said. “There are so many people here with no voice… be theirs!”
That was not my words… where did i get them?
Anista nodded. “Yeah… i could also probably make the translation into French too.”
“Nobody here speaks French”, i said.
A mad-house… in ten days… wait. “Oh i read this book once, one of the earlier examples of investigative journalism.”
Anista widened her eyes. “Do tell.”
“10 days in the mad-house, some woman pretended to lose her memory, got admited to this crazyplace, found out that ‘doctors’ were abusive. Big article in the news about it.”
“Ah, just like you do with your ADHD.”
I frowned. “No, i don't.”
“Anyways… the prostitutes here have such troubled history… they love us because we actually treat them like humans, not some machine to make money”, said Anista.
“We didn't do much…?”, i said.
“Just goes to show how horrible Mr Wire was.”
I shrugged. “Power corrupts"
“Yeah”, agreed Anista.
And i retired to the management room.
“Subsidy came through”, said Onita. “We're going to contract a new floor, just for us!”
“Cool!”, i said.
And i looked at the bookshelf. A book i'd missed; A guide to the agglutinative morphology of Northern Spanish. And i opened it.
It was shocking to me; some basic grammar, append morphemes and dashes and again and again and form a weird new meaning.
"Concepts can be formed from somewhat generalist roots. Agglutination is potentiall infinite and speakers will understand novel agglutinations from context."
And i saw a list of seemingy endless affixes, usage tips, little groups. And the first were the continua. 1-5 of everything, from 1 being "a little more" to 4 being "a lot more" and 5 always being "too much more". Well, unless you added men before the continua and then it became little instead. But they weren't just for quantity. They could express much more. Useful was degree, 1-5, or maybe even classify nouns.
And that answered my question. It was men-fepentrio that led south, the not-north. I was probably men-men-tramuntana, maybe. And pon... it just meant mucho... it just meant molt. It was a Northern Spanish version.
Beautiful, i thought to myself, skimming pages. Wait, -vid...? Liquid. And rubero...? Dunno. Wait, example; vid-rubero. Liquid [blood red]. I smiled.
And i skimmed through the book. I felt fluid. Big concepts, general patters, grammar's big ideas… it was all falling into my head. Northern Spanish isn't that bad. Possibly better than Spanish, if you ignore the lexicon.
How typical of me, getting lost into these languages.
How useful of me, getting these languages into my head.
And get ready, pon-massa, because i'm getting better every day.
Stay tuned for part 6, in which we watch an interaction fail because of ?overconfidence?
Some notes:
Languges
The code-switching and stuff is based off my very own experiences on Discord. I've been in spaces where i could just drop in toki pona words into English sentences to cover a different semantic space or put in a Spanish verb or switch to a different language... hell, there have even been times i put toki pona AND English into Spanish sentences, just because i knew i'd still be understood.
And then it gets even weirder on the Catalan server where everyone is expected to be able to read English and Catalan but not so much Spanish so then there's en even weirder ad-hoc creole that someone could go make... imagine Catalan clitics but attached t'words d'English (pronounce it Dinglish :p).
Code switching is amazing. I love the feeling, the freedom, the way it can restrict who understands. Code switching gives me power, lets me sneak pasts new concepts. Toki pona for some concepts in English sentences, Catalan into an English sentence to hide info from my family, Russian into a Spanish sentence to hide other info. It's also useful for semantic spaces; "otlichar" is quite a specific word in Northern Spanish.
If you want an English version, go use "Oatlichair". Sneak it in. Maybe even sneak it into Spanish; i added vowels to make it sound less slvaic. "Creo que nosotros, como un sociedad, necesitamos otlitchar.", and they say "q en la" and then you can go explain just what it means :p.
I hope you don't mind if i use Google Translate for Anistas's French. Jo sé sol un poc de llengües i és molt dificíl por mejorar en mis idiomas si estudio tres a un vez.
And fuck i went from Catalan to Spanish in the above extract, and i let it happen mainly to illustrate my point.
Those long paragraphs i wrote one night directly into my journal. I didn't even bother saying what happened to me, i just wrote down what happened to JInner.
Jinner is quickly becoming a character i look up to in some ways, mainly the fact he's fluent in the languages of his region and (was and just again started) doing well for himself.
A big theme of these two series will be time-seperated parralelism. Both protagonists go to the same places but in different ways with different implications. When Jinner visits the grant provider, he struggles as just another normal citizen. When Alexander does, he gets money for free. When Alexander drinks tartfruit liquor he gets drunk. When Jinner does... Fuck i havent planned that part yet :p
I really like linking these stories. You don't miss information with just a single story but reading the two together gives you so much more context and helps show the full extent of the story.
(yes the week system is a knockoff of Catalan's di- prefixes and Chinese's numbers :p)
To hear about Micheal, i suggest you go read AAp14.