Dile a tu papá...

Early in our marriage Catalina and I were visited by a Vision of our old conjugal selves. The senescent Catalina is a happily carping fishwife, thick of ankle and sharp of tongue, tenderly wagging on about my indolence, my idiocy, my thick waist and my bad cooking, while I, a jaunty old crank with a shock of electric white hair, shoot it right back, blow for blow, an unvarnished and unrepentant old coot who sings his passion in an endless stream of petty slander. Our dream house is filled with flying frying pans, the sounds of shrieking and tinkling glass, ritual Arabian curses that touch on the other's mother's strange passion for camels, fierce looks that brim with love. A couple whose intimacy has been codified and preserved within the grammar of insult.

The household shtick has a ways to go, of course, before it reaches these levels: we still slip into straight talk, still dig for sense and intention within the semantic (rather than the gestural or intonational) nuances of speech. But for reasons that I don't fully fathom, Benjamin has brought us one step closer to the Carping Old Couple In The Sky. Not as an object of contention (quite the contrary) but as a Third Voice, an Objective Other, a cool and neutral consciousness capable of relaying messages of protest, indignation, and instruction in ways that mimic the affectionate detachment of the Old Couple in the dream, but without actually committing us to the flying frying pans.

That a child who cannot talk should be considered a Third Voice may strike some as odd. But Benjamin's silences are very different from the empty silences of something inanimate or insentient; they are long, spiralform spaces that absorb echos of the future, and buzz with the promise of projected dreams. When Catalina discovers one of my mud-speckled stockings on the kitchen table and cackles, not at me but at her beaming baby boy, "dile a tu papá que no deje sus medias sucias en la mesa", laughing and pulling faces as she hurls this horrible, caked black monster from the table, she is placing a seed-signal in the spiral, one that will be amplified and transformed with the passage of years. She is communicating a message whose true meaning has nothing to do with socks or hygiene or order, but rather with the joy of language itself, the pleasures of telling, and telling to tell, and the transformative human potential that lies at the heart of these iterations. She is speaking to Benjamin, but really she is speaking to me; she is speaking to me, but really she is speaking to the future Benjamin. It is in the tension between the me-through-Benjamin and the Benjamin-through-the-excuse-of-me that abstraction is born, and with it, the cultural traditions to which, for better or worse, we seem to have pledged our lives.

At the moment, the ritual intercession of our pre-babbling son is mostly for laughs. "Dile a tu mamá", I tell this bug-eyed blob on returning home and finding plates strewn like freeform floral arrangments in every nook and cranny of the house, "que el agua no hace ningun daño a los platos." And with fire-rimmed eyes the wife shoots back "dile a tu papá que á los matematicos tampoco", wrinkling her nose as she blows me a welcome-back smooch. Benjamin, meanwhile, does his job perfectly: every message is relayed with neither alterations nor omissions, bounced directly from fat cheeks to chuckling spouse. They come crashing into the ear canal, this succession of tender jibes, spurious outrage, and mock indignation, and as they rattle the tympanic membrane, some small fraction of the signal power gets redirected into those spiral spaces in the soul, strange, secret cavities in which the integrated self slowly echoes into being. And there, with any luck, they will continue their slow, ripening resonance, building and reinforcing one another so that the signal that emerges in 30 years is a perfect pan wave, a harmonic skillet that we can hurl with amorous rage from one end of a marriage to the other.