THE WALL
There is pain in every joy. In every violent passion a dark side.
The second year in Rome, after Christmas, I go with my family to see the temples at Paestum, and afterward we spend a couple of days in Salerno. There, in the center, in a shop window, I notice some nice children’s clothes. I go in with my daughter. I turn to the saleswoman. I tell her I’m looking for pants for my daughter. I describe what I have in mind, suggest colors that would suit, and add that my daughter doesn’t like styles that are too tight, that she would prefer something comfortable. In other words, I speak for quite a long time with this saleswoman, in an Italian that is fluent but not completely natural.
At a certain point my husband comes in with our son. Unlike me, my husband, an American, looks as if he could be Italian. He and I exchange a few words, in Italian, in front of the saleswoman. I show him a jacket on sale that I’m considering for our son. He answers in monosyllables, Sure, I like it, yes, let’s see. Not even an entire sentence. My husband speaks perfect Spanish, so he tends to speak Italian with a Spanish accent. He says sessenta y uno instead of sessantuno (sixty-one), bellessa instead of bellezza (beauty), nunca instead of mai (never); our children tease him about it. My husband speaks Italian well, but he doesn’t speak it better than I do.
We decide to buy two pairs of pants plus the jacket. At the cash register, while I’m paying, the saleswoman asks me: “Where are you from?”
I explain that we live in Rome, that we moved to Italy last year from New York. At that point the saleswoman says: “But your husband must be Italian. He speaks perfectly, without any accent.”
Here is the border that I will never manage to cross. The wall that will remain forever between me and Italian, no matter how well I learn it. My physical appearance.
I feel like crying. I would like to shout: “I’m the one who desperately loves your language, not my husband. He speaks Italian only because he needs to, because he happens to live here. I’ve been studying your language for more than twenty years, he not even for two. I read only your literature. I can now speak Italian in public, do live radio interviews. I keep an Italian diary, I write stories.”
I don’t say anything to the saleswoman. I thank her, I say goodbye, then I go out. I understand that my attachment to Italian is worthless. That all my devotion, all the passion signify nothing. According to this saleswoman, my husband can speak Italian very well, he should be praised, not me. I feel humiliated, offended, envious. I’m speechless. Finally I say to my husband, in Italian, when we’re on the street, “Sono sbalordita” (I’m stunned).
And my husband asks me, in English, “What does sbalordita mean?”
The episode in Salerno is only one example of the wall I face repeatedly in Italy. Because of my physical appearance, I’m seen as a foreigner. It’s true, I am. But, being a foreigner who speaks Italian well, I have two linguistic experiences, remarkably different, in this country.
Those who know me speak to me in Italian. They appreciate that I understand their language, they gladly share it with me. When I speak Italian with my Italian friends I feel immersed in the language, welcomed, accepted. I take part in the language: in the theater of spoken Italian I think that I, too, have a role, a presence. With friends I can talk for hours, at times for days, without having to rely on any English word. I’m in the middle of the lake and I’m swimming with them, in my own way.
But when I go into a shop like the one in Salerno I find myself abruptly hurled back to shore. People who don’t know me assume, looking at me, that I don’t know Italian. When I speak to them in Italian, when I ask for something (a head of garlic, a stamp, the time), they say, puzzled, “I don’t understand.” It’s always the same response, the same scowl. As if my Italian were another language.
They don’t understand me because they don’t want to understand me; they don’t understand me because they don’t want to listen to me, accept me. That’s how the wall works. Someone who doesn’t understand me can ignore me, doesn’t have to take account of me. Such people look at me but don’t see me. They don’t appreciate that I am working hard to speak their language; rather, it irritates them. Sometimes when I speak Italian in Italy, I feel reprimanded, like a child who touches an object that shouldn’t be touched. “Don’t touch our language,” some Italians seem to say to me. “It doesn’t belong to you.”
Learning a foreign language is the fundamental way to fit in with new people in a new country. It makes a relationship possible. Without language you can’t feel that you have a legitimate, respected presence. You are without a voice, without power. No chink, no point of entrance can be found in the wall. I know that if I stayed in Italy for the rest of my life, even if I were able to speak a polished, impeccable Italian, that wall, for me, would remain. I think of people who were born and grew up in Italy, who consider Italy their homeland, who speak Italian perfectly, but who, in the eyes of certain Italians, seem “foreign.”
My husband’s name is Alberto. For him, it’s enough to extend his hand, to say, “A pleasure, I’m Alberto.” Because of his looks, because of his name, everyone thinks he’s Italian. When I do the same thing, the same people say, in English, “Nice to meet you.” When I continue to speak in Italian, they ask me: “How is it that you speak Italian so well?” and I have to provide an explanation, I have to say why. The fact that I speak Italian seems to them unusual. No one asks my husband that question.
One evening, I’m presenting my latest novel in a bookstore in the Flaminio neighborhood of Rome. I’ve prepared for a conversation with an Italian friend — also a writer — on various literary topics. Before the presentation begins, a man whom my husband and I have just met asks if I’m going to make the presentation in English. When I answer, in Italian, that I intend to do it in Italian, he asks if I learned the language from my husband.
In America, although I speak English like a native, although I’m considered an American writer, I meet the same wall but for different reasons. Every so often, because of my name, and my appearance, someone asks me why I chose to write in English rather than in my native language. Those who meet me for the first time — when they see me, then learn my name, then hear the way I speak English — ask me where I’m from. I have to justify the language I speak in, even though I know it perfectly. If I don’t speak, even many Americans think I’m a foreigner. I remember running into a man on the street one day who wanted to give me an advertising flyer. I was returning from a library in Boston; at the time I was writing my doctoral thesis, on English literature in the seventeenth century. When I refused to take the flyer, the man yelled: “What the fuck is your problem, can’t speak English?”
I can’t avoid the wall even in India, in Calcutta, in the city of my so-called mother tongue. There, apart from my relatives who have known me forever, almost everyone thinks that, because I was born and grew up outside India, I speak only English, or that I scarcely understand Bengali. In spite of my appearance and my Indian name, they speak to me in English. When I answer in Bengali, they express the same surprise as certain Italians, certain Americans. No one, anywhere, assumes that I speak the languages that are a part of me.