Julio, My Poetic Spanish Teacher

I’ve had a lot of Spanish teachers, and Julio Delgadillo was one of the best. Julio is a Mexican architect who lives in San Pancho, and he and I first met in 2003. The architecture business was slow, and Julio was playing guitar and singing in a local café. Between songs he often recited a poem that drew the crowd’s rapt attention. His delivery was perfect: a deep baritone, flawless diction, just the right amount of dramatic emphasis. I asked him about the poem, which he said was La Casada Infiel (The Faithless Wife) by the Spanish poet Federico Garcia Lorca.

I strained to understand the words Julio recited, but my Spanish wasn’t up to it, so I bought a dual-language anthology of Spanish poetry and read the poem in English. Sensual and mysterious, it was the story of a gypsy’s romantic encounter with a woman he had believed was unmarried.

Knowing I was a fan, Julio stopped to say hello when we saw each other around San Pancho. We chatted as best we could, given that neither of us knew much of the other’s language. Soon Julio was stopping for morning coffee on my porch, toting his English books. Eager to practice Spanish with a native speaker, I was ready with my Spanish dictionary and "501 Spanish Verbs".

Julio and I talked for hours about social customs in the U.S. and Mexico, music, politics, the best places to shop, Mexican art, Julio’s architecture projects, and his love life. We checked with each other regularly for new chisme (gossip) from the village. But our most interesting topic was poetry. Julio’s favorite poet was the Chilean Pablo Neruda. In the ‘90s I had seen the Italian film Il Postino, a story based on Neruda’s year in Capri, but I hadn’t read his poems. Now Neruda became a favorite of mine, too.

Though Julio came from humble circumstances, he is a person whom Mexicans might describe as educado. More than “educated,” the word connotes “well-mannered, polite.” He was born in 1959 to a poor family in a tiny village near Tepic, Nayarit. Julio’s parents had split up, and he was cared for by a grandmother and an aunt. As a young boy he tended the family’s cows and goats, and, although his father was a teacher, Julio’s schooling was not a priority. In 1973 he and his father moved to San Pancho, where his father found work.

By the time Julio was in secondary school, he showed talent for drawing and reciting poetry. His teachers picked him to do the customary poetry recitation at end-of-the-year ceremonies. At first he did it simply because he had to, but then he realized his recitations distinguished him from the other kids, and he began to enjoy them. Julio demonstrated for me how he had perfected his diction: He placed a pencil crosswise between his teeth, and then practiced the words to the poem. A teacher gave him a poetry book -- “Five Hundred Famous Poems” -- and the first poem he memorized was “The Faithless Wife.”