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A Language Dies, I Die
What we lose when we let languages die
I remember to this day the smell of the room. It was a mixture of smoke, enclosure, dust. If the Patagonian winter had a smell, it’d be that one.
The minute I entered the room, the heat hit me in startling contrast with the sharp cold from outside. The day was bright, one of those icy cold, sunny winter days, and it was precisely why I did not see at first. It took a few seconds for my eyes to adjust to the dim light inside.
The first thing I noticed was the black iron salamander at the center and, at the back, the loom, where a blanket was laying half-knit, waiting to be finished to be sold at the market outside, whereas other blankets were readily folded on a table.
It’s 1996. My selective memory does not remember why I entered this house, but it does seem to want to hold on to the face that came to me, dark and furrowed with deep wrinkles as she offered me a hot mug of mate cocido, her big complexion wide open to receive me as she started talking.
She was a member of the Mapuche community in Pre-Andean Patagonia. They lived off the market outside, a collection of ten to twenty stalls, where they sold blankets, tortas fritas, artisan jewellery… the place: the middle of nowhere, not quite in the dry, desertic Patagonian meseta, not within…
