Think of it this way: Learning to use the subjunctive mood is like learning to drive a stick shift. It’s like falling in love with a car that isn’t new or sporty but has a tilt steering wheel and a price you can afford. It’s like being so in love with the possibilities, with the places you might go and the experiences you might have, that you pick up your new used car without quite knowing how to drive it, sputtering and stalling and rolling backward at every light. Then you drive the car each day for months, until the stalling stops and you figure out how to downshift, until you can hear the engine’s registers and move through them with grace. And later, after you’ve gained control over the driving and lost control over so much else, you sell the car and most of your possessions and move yourself to Spain, to a place where language and circumstance will help you understand the subjunctive.
Remember that the subjunctive is a mood, not a tense. Verb tenses tell when something happens; moods tell how true. It’s easy to skim over moods in a new language, to translate the words and think you’ve understood, which is why your first months in Spain will lack nuance. But eventually, after enough conversations have passed, enough hours of talking with your students at the University of Oviedo and your housemate, Lola, and the friends you make when you wander the streets looking like a foreigner, you’ll discover that you need the subjunctive in order to finish a question, or an answer, or a thought you couldn’t have had without it.
In language, as in life, moods are complicated, but at least in language there are only two. The indicative mood is for knowledge, facts, absolutes, for describing what’s real or definite. You’d use the indicative to say, for example:
I was in love.
Or, The man I loved tried to kill himself.
Or, I moved to Spain because the man I loved, the man who tried to kill himself, was driving me insane.
The indicative helps you tell what happened or is happening or will happen in the future (when you believe you know for sure what the future will bring).
The subjunctive mood, on the other hand, is uncertain. It helps you tell what could have been or might be or what you want but may not get. You’d use the subjunctive to say:
I thought he’d improve without me.
Or, I left so that he’d begin to take care of himself.
Or later, after your perspective has been altered, by time and distance and a couple of cervezas in a brightly lit bar, you might say:
I deserted him (indicative).
I left him alone with his crazy self for a year (indicative).
Because I hoped (after which begins the subjunctive) that being apart might allow us to come together again.
English is losing the subjunctive mood. It lingers in some constructions (“If he were dead,” for example), but it’s no longer pervasive. That’s the beauty and also the danger of English — that the definite and the might-be often look so much alike. And it’s the reason why, during a period in your life when everything feels hypothetical, Spain will be a very seductive place to live.
In Spanish, verbs change to accommodate the subjunctive in every tense, and the rules, which are many and varied, have exceptions. In the beginning you may feel defeated by this, even hopeless and angry sometimes. But eventually, in spite of your frustration with trying to explain, you’ll know in the part of your mind that holds your stories, the part where grammar is felt before it’s understood, that the uses of the subjunctive matter.
1. with “Ojalá”
Ojalá means I hope or, more literally, that Allah is willing. It’s one of the many words left over from the Moorish occupation of Spain, one that’s followed by the subjunctive mood because, of course, you never know for sure what Allah has in mind.
During the first months in Spain, you’ll use the word by itself, a kind of dangling wish. “It’s supposed to rain,” Lola will say, and you’ll respond, “Ojalá.” You’ll know you’re confusing her, leaving her to fi gure out whether you want the rain or not, but sometimes the mistakes are too hard to bear. “ That Allah is willing it wouldn’t have raining,” you might accidentally say. And besides, so early into this year of living freely, you’re not quite sure what to hope for.
Each time you say Ojalá, it will feel like a prayer, the “ja” and “la” like breaths, like faith woven right into the language. It will remind you of La Mezquita, the enormous, graceful mosque in Córdoba. Of being eighteen years old and visiting Spain for the fi rst time, how you stood in the courtyard filled with orange trees, trying to admire the building before you. You had a fever then, a summer virus you hadn’t yet recognized because it was so hot outside. Too hot to lift a hand to fan your face. Too hot to wonder why your head throbbed and the world spun slowly around you.
Inside, the darkness felt like cool water covering your eyes, such contrast, such relief. And then the pillars began to emerge, rows and rows of pillars supporting red and white brick arches, a massive stone ceiling balanced above them like a thought. You swam behind the guide, not even trying to understand his words but soothed by the vastness, by the shadows. Each time you felt dizzy you looked up toward the arches, the fl oating stone. Toward something that felt, you realized uncomfortably, like God. Or Allah. Or whatever force inspired people to defy gravity this way.
Later, after ten years have passed, after you’ve moved to Oviedo and become fascinated with the contours of language, the man you left behind in New York will come to visit. You’ll travel south with him, returning to La Mezquita on a January afternoon when the air is mild and the orange trees wave tiny green fruit. He’ll carry the guidebook, checking it periodically to get the history straight, while you try to reconcile the place before you with the place in your memory, comparing the shadows of this low sun with the light of another season.
You’ll be here because you want this man to see La Mezquita. You want him to feel the mystery of a darkness that amazes and consoles, that makes you feel the presence in empty spaces of something you can’t explain. Approaching the shadow of the door, you’ll each untie the sweaters from around your waists, slipping your arms into them and then into each other’s. He will squint and you will hold your breath. Ojalá, you’ll think, glimpsing in the shadows the subjunctive mood at work.
2. after words of suasion and negation
In Oviedo, you’ll become a swimmer. Can you imagine? Two or three times a week you’ll pack a bag and walk for thirty-five minutes to the university pool, where you’ll place clothes and contact lenses in a locker, then sink into a crowded lane. The pool is a mass of blurry heads and arms, some of which know what they’re doing and most of which, like you, are fl ailing. You keep bumping into people as you make your way from one end of the pool to the other, but no one gets upset, and you reason that any form of motion equals exercise.
Then one day a miracle happens. You notice the guy in the next lane swimming like a pro, his long arms cutting ahead as he glides, rhythmically, stroke-stroke-breath. You see and hear and feel the rhythm, and before long you’re following him, stroking when he strokes, breathing when he breathes. He keeps getting away, swimming three laps to your one, so you wait at the edge of the pool for him to come back, then follow again, practicing. At the end of an hour, you realize that this man you don’t know, a man you wouldn’t recognize clothed, has taught you to swim. To breathe. To use the water instead of fighting against it. For this alone, you’ll later say, it was worth moving to Spain.
Stroke-stroke-breath becomes the rhythm of your days, the rhythm of your life in Oviedo. All through the fall months, missing him the way you’d miss a limb, your muscles strain to create distance. Shallow end to deep end and back, you’re swimming away. From memories of abrupt mood shifts. From the way a question, a comment, a person walking past a restaurant window could transform him into a hunched-over man wearing anger like a shawl. From the echo of your own voice trying to be patient and calm, saying, Listen to me. I want you to call the doctor. In English you said listen and call, and they were the same words you’d use to relate a fact instead of make a plea. But in Spanish, in the language that fi lls your mind as you swim continually away, the moment you try to persuade someone, or dissuade, you enter the realm of the subjunctive. The verb ends differently so there can be no mistake: requesting is not at all the same as getting.
3. with “si” or “como si
Si means if. Como si means as if. A clause that begins with si or como si is followed by the subjunctive when the meaning is hypothetical or contrary to fact. For example:
If I’d known he would harm himself, I wouldn’t have left him alone.
But here we have to think about whether the if-clause really is contrary to fact. Two days before, you’d asked him what he felt like doing that night and he’d responded, “I feel like jumping off the Mid- Hudson Bridge.” He’d looked serious when he said it, and even so you’d replied, “Really? Would you like me to drive you there?” As if it were a joke.
If you knew he were serious, that he were thinking of taking his life, would you have replied with such sarcasm? In retrospect it seems impossible not to have known — the classic signs were there. For weeks he’d been sad, self-pitying. He’d been sleeping too much, getting up to teach his Freshman Composition class in the morning, then going home some days and staying in bed until evening. His sense of humor had waned. He’d begun asking the people around him to cheer him up, make him feel better, please.
And yet he’d been funny. Ironic, self-deprecating, hyperbolic. So no one’s saying you should have known, just that maybe you felt a hint of threat in his statement about the river. And maybe that angered you because it meant you were failing to be enough for him. Maybe you were tired, too, in need of cheering up yourself because suddenly your perfect guy had turned inside out. Or maybe that realization came later, after you’d had the time and space to develop theories.
The truth is, only you know what you know. And what you know takes the indicative, remember?
For example: You knew he was hurting himself. The moment you saw the note on his office door, in the campus building where you were supposed to meet him on a Sunday afternoon, you knew. The note said, “I’m not feeling well. I’m going home. I guess I’ll see you tomorrow.” He didn’t use your name.
You tried calling him several times but there was no answer, so you drove to the apartment he shared with another graduate student. The front door was unlocked, but his bedroom door wouldn’t budge. You knocked steadily but not too loud, because his housemate’s bedroom door was also closed, and you assumed he was inside taking a nap. If you’d known that his housemate was not actually home, you would have broken down the door. That scenario is hypothetical, so it takes the subjunctive — even though you’re quite sure.
The human mind can reason its way around anything. On the drive to your own apartment, you told yourself, he’s angry with me. That’s why the door was locked, why he wouldn’t answer the phone. You thought: If he weren’t so close to his family, I’d really be worried. If today weren’t Mother’s Day. If he didn’t talk so affectionately about his parents. About his brother and sisters. About our future. If, if, if.
When the phone rang and there was silence on the other end, you began to shout, “ What have you done?”
In Spain, late at night over chupitos of bourbon or brandy, you and Lola will trade stories. Early on you won’t understand a lot of what she says, and she’ll understand what you say but not what you mean. You won’t know how to say what you mean in Spanish; sometimes you won’t even know how to say it in English. But as time goes on, the stories you tell will become more complicated. More subtle. More grammatically daring. You’ll begin to feel more at ease in the unreal.
For example: If you hadn’t gone straight home from his apartment. If you hadn’t answered the phone. If you hadn’t jumped back into your car to drive nine miles in record time, hoping the whole way to be stopped by the police. If you hadn’t met him on the porch where he had staggered in blood-soaked clothes. If you hadn’t rushed upstairs for a towel and discovered a flooded bedroom floor, the blood separating into water and rust-colored clumps. If you hadn’t been available for this emergency.
As the months pass in Spain, you’ll begin to risk the then. His housemate would have come home and found him the way you found him: deep gashes in his arm, but the wounds clotting enough to keep him alive, enough to narrowly avoid a transfusion. His housemate would have called the paramedics, ridden to the hospital in the ambulance, notified his parents from the emergency room, greeted them after their three-hour drive. His housemate would have done all the things you did, and he would have cleaned the mess by himself instead of with your help, the two of you borrowing a neighbor’s wet-vac and working diligently until you — or he — or both of you — burst into hysterical laughter. Later this housemate would have moved to a new apartment, just as he has done, and would probably be no worse off than he is right now.
You, on the other hand, would have felt ashamed, guilty, remiss for not being available in a time of crisis. But you wouldn’t have found yourself leaning over a stretcher in the emergency room, a promise slipping from your mouth before you could think it through: “I won’t leave you. Don’t worry, I won’t leave you.” As if it were true.
4. after impersonal expressions
Such as it is possible, it is a shame, it is absurd.
“It’s possible that I’m making things worse in some ways,” you told the counselor you saw on Thursday afternoons. He’d been out of the hospital for a few months by then and had a habit of missing his therapy appointments, to which you could only respond by signing up for your own.
She asked how you were making things worse, and you explained that when you told him you needed to be alone for a night and he showed up anyway at 11:00 PM, pleading to stay over, you couldn’t turn him away. She said, “It’s a shame he won’t honor your request,” and you pressed your fingernails into the flesh of your palm to keep your eyes from filling. She asked why you didn’t want him to stay over, and you said that sometimes you just wanted to sleep, without waking up when he went to the bathroom and listening to make sure he came back to bed instead of taking all the Tylenol in the medicine cabinet. Or sticking his head in the gas oven. Or diving from the balcony onto the hillside three stories below. There is nothing, you told her, nothing I haven’t thought of.
She said, “Do you think he’s manipulating you?” and you answered in the mood of certainty, “Yes. Absolutely.” Then you asked, “Isn’t it absurd that I let him manipulate me?” and what you wanted, of course, was some reassurance that it wasn’t absurd. That you were a normal person, reacting in a normal way, to a crazy situation.
Instead she said, “Let’s talk about why you let him. Let’s talk about what’s in this for you.”
5. after verbs of doubt or emotion
You didn’t think he was much of a prospect at first. Because he seemed arrogant. Because in the initial meetings for new instructors, he talked as if he were doing it the right way and the rest of you were pushovers. Because he looked at you with one eye squinted, as if he couldn’t quite decide.
You liked that he was funny, a little theatrical and a great fan of supermarkets. At 10:00 PM, after evening classes ended, he’d say, “Are you going home?” Sometimes you’d offer to drop him off at his place. Sometimes you’d agree to go out for a beer. And sometimes you’d say, “Yeah, but I have to go to the store fi rst,” and his eyes would light up. In the supermarket he’d push the cart and you’d pick items off the shelf. Maybe you’d turn around and there would be a whole rack of frozen ribs in your cart, or after you put them back, three boxes of Lucky Charms. Maybe he’d be holding a package of pfeffernusse and telling a story about his German grandmother. Maybe it would take two hours to run your errand because he was courting you in ShopRite.
You doubted that you’d sleep with him a second time. After the first time, you both lay very still for a while, fl at on your backs, not touching. He seemed to be asleep. You watched the digital clock hit 2:30 AM and thought about finding your turtleneck and sweater and wool socks, lacing up your boots, and heading out into the snow. And then out of the blue he rolled toward you, pulled the blanket up around your shoulders, and said, “Is there anything I can get you? A cup of tea? A sandwich?”
You were thrilled at the breaks in his depression, breaks that felt like new beginnings, every time. Days, sometimes even weeks, when he seemed more like himself than ever before. Friends would ask how he was doing, and he’d offer a genuine smile. “Much better,” he’d say, putting his arm around you, “She’s pulling me through the deathwish phase.” Everyone would laugh with relief, and at those moments you’d feel luckier than ever before, because of the contrast.
Do you see the pattern?
6. to express good wishes
Que tengas muy buen viaje, Lola will say, kissing each of your cheeks before leaving you off at the bus station. May you have a good trip. A hope, a wish, a prayer of sorts, even without the Ojalá.
The bus ride from Oviedo to Madrid is nearly six hours, so you have a lot of time for imagining. It’s two days after Christmas, and you know he spent the holiday at his parents’ house, that he’s there right now, maybe eating breakfast, maybe packing. Tonight his father will drive him to Kennedy Airport, and tomorrow morning, very early, you’ll meet him at Barajas in Madrid. You try to envision what he’ll look like, the expression on his face when he sees you, but you’re having trouble recalling what it’s like to be in his presence.
You try not to hope too much, although now, four months into your life in Spain, you want to move toward, instead of away. Toward long drives on winding, mountain roads, toward the cathedral of Toledo, the mosque at Córdoba, the Alhambra in Granada. Toward romantic dinners along the Mediterranean. Toward a new place from which to view the increasingly distant past. You want this trip to create a separation, in your mind and in his, between your first relationship and your real relationship, the one that will be so wonderful, so stable, you’ll never leave him again.
Once you’ve reached Madrid and found the pensión where you’ve reserved a room, you’ll get the innkeeper to help you make an international call. His father will say, “My God, he can’t sit still today,” and then there will be his voice, asking how your bus ride was, where you are, how far from the airport. You’ll say, “I’ll see you in the morning.” He’ll reply, “In seventeen hours.”
The next morning, the taxi driver is chatty. He wants to know why you’re going to the airport without luggage, and your voice is happy and excited when you explain. He asks whether this boyfriend writes you letters, and you smile and nod at the refl ection in the rearview mirror. “Many letters?” he continues, “Do you enjoy receiving the letters?” In Spain you’re always having odd conversations with strangers, so you hesitate only a moment, wondering why he cares, and then you say, “Yes. Very much.” He nods emphatically. “Muy bien.” At the terminal he drops you off with a broad smile. “Que lo pases bien con tu novio,” he says. Have a good time with your boyfriend. In his words you hear the requisite subjunctive mood. 3
7. in adverbial clauses denoting purpose, provision, exception
How different to walk down the street in Madrid, Toledo, Córdoba, to notice an elaborate fountain or a tiny car parked half on the sidewalk, and comment aloud. You’ve loved being alone in Spain and now, even more, you love being paired.
On the fifth day you reach Granada, find lodging in someone’s home. Down the hallway you can hear the family watching TV, cooking, preparing to celebrate New Year’s Eve. In the afternoon you climb the long, slow hill leading to the Alhambra and spend hours touring the complex. You marvel at the elaborate irrigation system, the indoor baths with running water, the stunning mosaic tiles and views of the Sierra Nevada. Here is the room where Boabdil signed the city’s surrender to Ferdinand and Isabella; here is where Washington Irving lived while writing Tales of the Alhambra. Occasionally you separate, as he inspects a mural and you follow a hallway into a lush courtyard, each of your imaginations working to restore this place to its original splendor. When you come together again, every time, there’s a thrill.
He looks rested, relaxed, strolling through the gardens with his hands tucked into the front pockets of his pants. When you enter the Patio of the Lions — the famous courtyard where a circle of marble lions project water into a reflecting pool — he turns to you, wide-eyed, his face as open as a boy’s.
“Isn’t it pretty?” you keep asking, feeling shy because what you mean is: “Are you glad to be here?”
“So pretty,” he responds, taking hold of your arm, touching his lips to your hair.
The day is perfect, you think. The trip is perfect. You allow yourself a moment of triumph: I left him so that he would get better without me, and he did. I worked hard and saved money and invited him on this trip in case there’s still hope for us. And there is.
Unless. In language, as in experience, we have purpose, provision, exception. None of which necessarily matches reality, and all of which take the subjunctive.
On the long walk back down the hill toward your room, he turns quiet. You find yourself talking more than usual, trying to fill the empty space with cheerful commentary, but it doesn’t help. The shape of his face begins to change until there it is again, that landscape of furrows and crags. The jaw thrusts slightly, lips pucker, eyebrows arch as if to say, “I don’t care. About anything.”
Back in the room, you ask him what’s wrong, plead with him to tell you. You can talk about anything, you assure him, anything at all. And yet you’re stunned when his brooding turns accusatory. He says it isn’t fair. You don’t understand how diffi cult it is to be him. Your life is easy, so easy that even moving to a new country, taking up a new language, is effortless. While every day is a struggle for him. Don’t you see that? Every day is a struggle.
He lowers the window shade and gets into bed, his back turned toward you.
What to do? You want to go back outside into the mild air and sunshine, walk until you remember what it feels like to be completely alone. But you’re afraid to leave him. For the duration of his ninetyminute nap, you sit paralyzed. Everything feels unreal, the darkened room, the squeals of children in another part of the house, the burning sensation in your stomach. You tremble, fi rst with sadness and fear, then with anger. Part of you wants to wake him, tell him to collect his things, then drive him back to the airport in Madrid. You want to send him home again, away from your new country, the place where you live unencumbered — but with a good deal of effort, thank you. The other part of you wants to wail, to beat your fists against the wall and howl, Give him back to me.
Remember: purpose, provision, exception. The subjunctive runs parallel to reality.
8. after certain indications of time, if the action has not occurred
While is a subjunctive state of mind. So are until, as soon as, before, and after. By now you understand why, right? Because until something has happened, you can’t be sure.
In Tarifa, the wind blows and blows. You learn this even before arriving, as you drive down Route 15 past Gibraltar. You’re heading toward the southern-most point in Spain, toward warm sea breezes and a small town off the beaten path. You drive confidently, shifting quickly through the gears to keep pace with the traffic around you. He reclines in the passenger’s seat, one foot propped against the dashboard, reading from the Real Guide open against his thigh. “Spreading out beyond its Moorish walls, Tarifa is known in Spain for its abnormally high suicide rate — a result of the unremitting winds that blow across the town and its environs.
You say, “Tell me you’re joking.” He says, “How’s that for luck?”
Three days before, you’d stood in Granada’s crowded city square at midnight, each eating a grape for every stroke of the New Year. If you eat all twelve grapes in time, tradition says, you’ll have plenty of luck in the coming year. It sounds wonderful — such an easy way to secure good fortune — until you start eating and time gets ahead, so far ahead that no matter how fast you chew and swallow, midnight sounds with three grapes left.
In Tarifa, you come down with the flu. It hits hard and fast — one minute you’re strolling through a white-washed coastal town, and the next you’re huddled in bed in a stupor. He goes to the pharmacy and, with a handful of Spanish words and many gestures, procures the right medicine. You sleep all day, through the midday meal, through the time of siesta, past sundown, and into the evening. When you wake the room is fuzzy and you’re alone, with a vague memory of him rubbing your back, saying something about a movie.
Carefully you rise and make your way to the bathroom — holding onto the bed, the doorway, the sink — then stand on your toes and look out the window into the blackness. By day there’s a thin line of blue mountains across the strait, and you imagine catching the ferry at dawn and watching that sliver of Morocco rise up from the shadows to become a whole continent. You imagine standing on the other side and looking back toward the tip of Spain, this tiny town where the winds blow and blow. That’s how easy it is to keep traveling once you start, putting distance between the various parts of your life, imagining yourself over and over again into entirely new places.
Chilly and sweating, you make your way back to bed, your stomach fl uttering nervously. You think back to Granada, how he’d woken from a nap on that dark afternoon and apologized. “I don’t know what got into me today,” he’d said. “This hasn’t been happening.” You believe it’s true, it hasn’t been happening. But you don’t know how true.
You think: He’s fine now. There’s no need to worry. He’s been fine for days, happy and calm. I’m overreacting. But overreaction is a slippery slope. With the wind howling continuously outside, the room feels small and isolated. You don’t know that he’s happy and calm right now, do you? You don’t know how he is today at all, because you’ve slept and slept and barely talked to him.
You think: If the movie started on time — but movies never start on time in Spain, so you add, subtract, try to play it safe, and determine that by 10:45 PM your fretting will be justified. At 11:00 PM you’ll get dressed and go looking, and if you can’t find him, what will you do? Wait until midnight for extra measure? And then call the police? And tell them what, that he isn’t back yet, and you’re afraid because you’re sick and he’s alone and the wind here blows and blows, enough to make people crazy, the book says, make them suicidal?
This is the when, the while, the until. The before and after. The real and the unreal in precarious balance. This is what you moved to Spain to escape from, and here it is again, following you.
The next time you wake, the room seems brighter, more familiar. You sit up and squint against the light. His cheeks are fl ushed, hair mussed from the wind. His eyes are clear as a morning sky. “Hi, sweetie,” he says, putting a hand on your forehead. “You still have a fever. How do you feel?” He smells a little musty, like the inside of a community theater where not many people go on a Sunday night in early Janu ary. He says, “The movie was hilarious.” You ask whether he understood it and he shrugs. Then he acts out a scene using random Spanish words as a voice-over, and you laugh and cough until he fl ops down on his stomach beside you.
Here it comes again, the contrast between what was, just a little while ago, and what is now. After all this time and all these miles, you’re both here, in a Spanish town with a view of Africa. You feel amazed, dizzy, as if swimming outside yourself. You’re talking with him, but you’re also watching yourself talk with him. And then you’re sleeping and watching yourself sleep, dreaming and thinking about the dreams. Throughout the night you move back and forth, here and there, between what is and what might be, tossed by language and possibility and the constantly shifting wind.
9. in certain independent clauses
There’s something extraordinary — isn’t there? — about learning to speak Spanish as an adult, about coming to see grammar as a set of guidelines not just for saying what you mean but for understanding the way you live. There’s something extraordinary about thinking in a language that insists on marking the limited power of desire.
For example: At Barajas Airport in Madrid, you walk him to the boarding gate. He turns to face you, hands on your arms, eyes green as the sea. He says, “Only a few more months and we’ll be together for good, right sweetie?” He watches your face, waiting for a response, but you know this isn’t a decision, something you can say yes to. So you smile, eyes burning, and give a slight nod. What you mean is, I hope so. What you think is, Ojalá. And what you know is this: The subjunctive is the mood of mystery. Of luck. Of faith interwoven with doubt. It’s a held breath, a hand reaching out, carefully touching wood. It’s humility, deference, the opposite of hubris. And it’s going to take a long time to master.
But at least the final rule of usage is simple, self-contained, one you can commit to memory: Certain independent clauses exist only in the subjunctive mood, lacing optimism with resignation, hope with heartache. Be that as it may, for example. Or the phrase one says at parting, eyes closed as if in prayer, May all go well with you.
“In the Subjunctive Mood,” is from the book Grammar Lessons: Translating a Life in Spain, written by Michele Morano and published by the University of Iowa Press. Copyright © 2007 by Michele Morano. Used with permission. All rights reserved.
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