Voyassitude

I find it amusing how in a day filled with picturesque views of the Australian natural scenery and an evening dedicated to a stargazing tour, a fleeting detail that lasted no more than ten or fifteen seconds aboard a bus is still so vivid in my mind that it has become the kind of moment I simply can’t forget, one I’ve felt tempted to write about for a while.

There were three of us in the last row of seats all the way in the back of the bus. A Taiwanese teacher by the right window, the Zimbabwean girl in the middle seat and I, the guy with his face glued to the left window because he couldn’t get enough of the landscape. After each stop, when we got back to the bus, a conversation took place to talk about the places we just explored, to narrate previous trip experiences or to discuss possible answers to the trivia game our tour guide created.

At one point Frances, the woman from Zimbabwe, started talking about food and then the prodigy occurred. She said a word that grabbed my attention because of her peculiar way of pronouncing it. I had already noticed her unique accent, which was far too distant from the American English I’m used to or the Australian accent that had surrounded me for the past several days. No, hers was another approach to the English language, one I hadn’t heard before but was thoroughly enjoying, and so when she said that word my ears fell captivated by her inflection.

Butter. She said butter in a way that differed from the harshness of the American accent or the delicacy of the British one. There was a musicality in it, something about the mechanics of her mouth creating the sound of the double ‘t’. I got distracted by it and tried to replicate the pronunciation in my mind a couple times. Frances had grown quiet and I’d gone back to looking through the window, but I couldn’t shake the lyrical sound still floating in the air. After a few seconds I was unable to contain myself and spoke out loud.

“Butter… I like how you say that word.”

So she said it again. Not so much to entertain me but to find in its resonance whatever it was that captivated me about it. She repeated it once, twice, played with it absentmindedly while I was enchanted by such an exquisite intonation. Having found nothing interesting in it, she just shrugged and kept trying to capture a brief nap in between stops. But I was elated, stupidly happy and all because of how butter sounded coming from Frances’ lips. I guess sometimes the pleasures of life reside in something as simple as a Zimbabwean girl talking of butter.

 From Frances herself I learned about her fifty countries visited, the five weeks she spent in Colombia, her excellent Spanish even if she was modest enough to repeat time and again she’d almost forgotten it all, and some other tiny details that made her a truly wonderful traveler to meet. But most of all, what stuck with me was the music to my ears she produced when she uttered the word butter.