In Capri, I make my presentation in Italian. I read aloud my piece on winners and losers. I see the English text in blue on the left-hand side of the page, the Italian, in black, on the right. The English is mute, fairly tranquil. Printed and bound, the brothers tolerate each other. They are, at least for the moment, at peace.
After the reading I have a conversation with two Italian writers. Sitting next to us is an interpreter who is to translate what we’re saying into English. After a few sentences I stop, and she speaks. This echo in English is incredible, fantastic: both a circle completed and a total reversal. I’m astonished, moved. I think of Mantua thirteen years ago, and of the interpreter without whom I couldn’t express myself in Italian in public. I didn’t think I would ever reach this goal.
Listening to my interpreter, I trust my Italian for the first time. Although he’ll remain forever the younger brother, the little guy pulls through. Thanks to the firstborn, I can see the second — listen to him, even admire him a little.
THE SECOND EXILE
After spending a year in Rome I return to America for a month. Immediately, I miss Italian. Not to be able to speak it and hear it every day distresses me. When I go to restaurants, to shops, to the beach, I’m irritated: Why aren’t people speaking Italian? I don’t want to interact with anyone. I have an aching sense of homesickness.
Everything I absorbed in Rome seems absent. Returning to the maternal metaphor, I think of the first times I had to leave my children at home, just after they were born. At the time, I felt a tremendous anxiety. I felt guilty, even though those brief moments of separation were normal, important both for me and for them. It was important to establish that our bodies, until then connected, were independent. And yet now, as then, I am acutely conscious of a painful physical detachment. As if a part of me were missing.
I’m aware of the distance. Of an oppressive, intolerable silence.
The absence of Italian assails me more forcefully every day. I’m afraid I’ve already forgotten everything I learned. I’m afraid of being annihilated. I imagine a devouring vortex, all the words disappearing into the darkness. In my notebook I make a list of Italian verbs that signify the act of going away: scomparire, svanire, sbiadire, sfumare, finire. Evaporare, svaporare, svampire. Perdersi, dileguarsi, dissolversi. I know that some are synonyms of morire, to die.
I suffer until, one afternoon on Cape Cod, a journalist from Milan calls, to interview me. I can’t wait for the phone to ring, but as I’m talking to her I’m worried that my Italian already sounds awkward, that my language is already out of practice. A foreign language is a delicate, finicky muscle. If you don’t use it, it gets weak. In America, my Italian sounds jarring, transplanted. The manner of speaking, the sounds, the rhythms, the cadences seem uprooted, out of place. The words seem irrelevant, without a meaningful presence. They seem like castaways, nomads.
In America, when I was young, my parents always seemed to be in mourning for something. Now I understand: it must have been the language. Forty years ago it wasn’t easy for them to talk to their families on the phone. They looked forward to the mail. They couldn’t wait for a letter to arrive from Calcutta, written in Bengali. They read it a hundred times, they saved it. Those letters evoked their language and conjured a life that had disappeared. When the language one identifies with is far away, one does everything possible to keep it alive. Because words bring back everything: the place, the people, the life, the streets, the light, the sky, the flowers, the sounds. When you live without your own language you feel weightless and, at the same time, overloaded. You breathe another type of air, at a different altitude. You are always aware of the difference.
After living in Italy for only a year, I feel a little like that in America. And yet something doesn’t add up. I’m not Italian, I’m not even bilingual. Italian remains for me a language learned as an adult, cultivated, nurtured.
One day on Cape Cod I happen on a secondhand book sale, outside, in a small square. On the grass are a lot of folding tables piled with all types of books. They’re very cheap. Usually I like rummaging for an hour or so and buying a bunch of things. This time, however, I don’t want to buy anything, because all the books are in English. Feeling desperate, I look for a book in Italian. There are a few boxes devoted to foreign languages. I see a beat-up German dictionary, some tattered French novels, but nothing in Italian. The only thing that attracts me is a tourist guide to Italy written in English; it’s the only thing I buy, and only because it makes me think of returning to Rome at the end of August. All the other books, even a copy of one of my own novels, leave me indifferent. As if they were written in a foreign language.
Now I feel a double crisis. On the one hand I’m aware of the ocean, in every sense, between me and Italian. On the other, of the separation between me and English. I’d already noticed it in Italy, translating myself. But I think that emotional distance is always more pronounced, more piercing, when, in spite of proximity, there remains an abyss.
Why don’t I feel more at home in English? How is it that the language I learned to read and write in doesn’t comfort me? What happened, and what does it mean? The estrangement, the disenchantment confuses, disturbs me. I feel more than ever that I am a writer without a definitive language, without origin, without definition. Whether it’s an advantage or a disadvantage I wouldn’t know.
Midway through the month I go to see my Venetian Italian teacher, in Brooklyn. This time we don’t have a lesson, just a long chat. We talk about Rome, about her family and mine. I bring her a box of biscottini, I show her photographs of my new life. She gives me some of her books, paperbacks, taken down from the shelves: stories by Calvino, Pavese, Silvio d’Arzo. Poems of Ungaretti. It’s the last time I’ll come here. My teacher is about to move, she’s leaving Brooklyn. She’s already sold the house where she lived for many years, where we had our lessons. She is preparing to pack everything for the move. From now on, when I return to America, to Brooklyn, I won’t see her.
I come home carrying a small pile of Italian books, and with these, in spite of a pervasive melancholy, I am able to calm myself. In this period of silence, of linguistic isolation, only a book can reassure me. Books are the best means — private, discreet, reliable — of overcoming reality.
I read in Italian every day, but I don’t write. In America I become passive. Even though I’ve brought the dictionaries, the exercise books, the notebooks, I can’t write even a word in Italian. I describe nothing in the diary, I don’t feel like it. As far as writing is concerned, I remain inactive. As if I were in a creative waiting room, all I do is wait.
Finally, at the end of August, at the airport, at the gate, I am surrounded by Italian again. I see all the Italians who are going home after their vacations in New York. I hear their chatter. At first I feel relief, joy. Immediately afterward I realize that I’m not like them. I’m different, just as I was different from my parents when we went on vacation to Calcutta. I’m not returning to Rome to rejoin my language. I’m returning to continue my courtship of another.
Those who don’t belong to any specific place can’t, in fact, return anywhere. The concepts of exile and return imply a point of origin, a homeland. Without a homeland and without a true mother tongue, I wander the world, even at my desk. In the end I realize that it wasn’t a true exile: far from it. I am exiled even from the definition of exile.