Se Aprovechan

Your tongue rests within your mouth. Its arched shape resembles a dragon resting in its cave. Your tongue also rests inside your brain, in a non-physical lair that lives in the nowhere above the nose. I have two tongues resting inside my brain. I think about them a lot.

There is a phrase in Spanish that interests me very much. People like to say Se aprovechan. Well, they don’t like to say it, but sometimes they just have to. But it is not really a phrase, in the sense that “barking up the wrong tree” is a phrase; and it is not a saying, in the sense that “make like a tree and leave” is a saying. It’s just words people say, because words mean things and sometimes different people feel the need to say the same thing. 

Se aprovechan, despite being just two words, serves as its own complete sentence. I’ve been thinking about these two words a lot.

The way I’d translate it to English would be: “They take advantage of.” But the funny thing is that none of those words are present in the original sentence. Spanish has a perfect equivalent for ‘They’, for ‘take’ for ‘advantage’ and for ‘of’; but none of those words are there in Se aprovechan. There is no ‘Ellos’, no ‘toman’, no ‘ventaja’ and no ‘de’.  And still, these phrases aren’t equal. One of them is complete. “They take advantage of” is missing words. 

There is no ‘Us’ in Se Aprovechan. There is no ‘them’, there is no ‘it’. Someone is taking advantage, and when the statement is made, there is no need to clarify who. When the phrase is exclaimed, the world caves in to fill the gaps. Invisible words that have not yet graced the roof of our mouths are shouted loud and clear from that miniscule space between cuddling atoms.

I think about the tongues inside my brain, how they take kindness to different words in different situations; how in one language they love a word but don’t care for it in another. Are these two appendages of the same beast, or two dragons that live in vitriolic arrangement with each other? 

I think of my first dragon, the language I heard in cartoons. I think of people far away who share this dragon, people I’ve never met and that I will never meet, and how they know the very same phrase that I do. 

Somewhere in a white-walled room, there is a student doing a group project. Her teammates message her on the group-chat: ‘We’re going to head out. You got this, right?’ She doesn’t reply; she is too busy typing. Softly to her coffee mug, she says: Se Aprovechan.

There is a painting, a dry point etching in black and white by Spanish artist Francisco Goya. He made it in 1810, his heart sickened by the horrors of the Peninsular War.  In it, French soldiers are pulling the clothes from the Spanish commoners they have just killed. Their hands forcefully drag their bodies through the dirt as the uncaring, nonchalant soldiers make themselves richer from the suffering of the meek. Beneath the corpses and the dirt, a single phrase appears in cursive below the painting. It reads: Se aprovechan

Somewhere in South America there is a brick and mortar house, where the bricks are torn and shattered, and the grass outside is dry. Inside this house, an elderly woman stands in the kitchen sink washing flour off her fingers. Her feet stir in her sandals, an electric fan blows in the corner of the room, the water tank above the house drains away. She wipes the sweat off her forehead and exclaims to the mortar between the bricks: Se Aprovechan.

They take us for granted. It makes me mad.

Se aprovechan.