We will not always, I think, be so out of place. We will blend in; eventually we will gain some foliage, some camouflage. But not tonight, crossing and recrossing from shadow into light as evening advances over the motionless waters. Tonight we are migratory creatures, washed in by a powerful current, traversing the bay and pondering the intricate mystery of land.
ITALIAN IN THREE MONTHS
I have taken up with a new textbook: Italian in Three Months. This one is a little more personal in its drive toward socialization, though no less prescriptive. Forgive me, but I’m too tired to play tennis just now. And indeed, there is no time for tennis, nor any other trivial pursuit: the three months are flying on wings of fire, passing over great continents of vocabulary, mountain ranges of irregular verbs, oceans of tenses and subjunctives where indirect object pronouns swim, sharp-toothed and voracious, awaiting a victim. We are expected to have gained a knowledge of these landmarks merely by gazing at them from a great height. Almost as soon as they come they are gone, into the linguistic past, a place of fundamental risk and confusion where things become unlearned and ungrasped, where pitiful reserves of knowledge are swept away like a pensioner’s savings in a financial crash. Unlike the historic past, the linguistic past is subject to incessant change: whole landmasses sink overnight, settlements are razed to the ground, insecure structures are swept away. It matters not that yesterday I knew the central modal verbs and demonstrative adjectives: today they are nowhere to be found. I begin to see that the principle of acceleration is the solitary scientific tenet to be found in Italian in Three Months. They have merely removed from language-learning the impediment of time. I might as well be reading Living in Three Months, and get the whole thing over and done with.
It is in the area of vocabulary that I feel my resources can be most securely invested. An identifiable object has a kind of neutrality, like Switzerland: it is a place that seems to offer the possibility of agreement. I have no difficulty with an armchair being una poltrona or a rug il tappeto; indeed, I almost prefer calling a mirror uno specchio, for it seems to suit it better. These things, so fixed, make a little circuit of language, as simple as a child’s toy. They go and come back punctually along their single track; not heading off into wilderness, among mist-shrouded peaks where meaning mislays itself. I can collect them, solid nouns with a face value, like fat gold coins; I can store them up and exchange them for goods. I ask for formaggio and I get it; I request burro, zucchero, mele, and they fall into my lap. But sometimes I cannot escape the feeling that the coin in my hand is counterfeit money, for there are other words that have no ring of truth about them at all. They are false somehow; I can’t believe they’ll work. How could a scarpa, for instance, be the same thing as a shoe? If I went into a shop and asked for a pair of scarpe, I would surely be handed a brace of woodland fowl, or two fish with particularly bony spines. I am unwilling, moreover, to relinquish the serviceable properties, the reliable-shoe-ness, of my native word. What will become of these qualities when they pass through the dark tunnel of translation? They will be lost, as so much else is lost between languages: nuances and puns and rhymes, all gone astray in the general disorder, like the bags and umbrellas and knitted scarves that accumulate in the Lost Property office at Clapham Junction. I feel a new respect for that go-between, the translator: this, I now see, is a person opposed to waste, to chaos, to the easy-come, easy-go disposability of the modern world. Patiently the translator reunites those bags and umbrellas with their owners, or finds some other use for them, for just as language can lose its raiment so it can accept some borrowed finery. There is a way, I don’t doubt, of doing justice to the shoe; the scarpa itself probably has some special qualities, though I can’t yet imagine them. The Spanish for shoe is zapato, which I think of as a very pointed kind of dancing shoe, while the French chaussure is a somber gentleman’s slipper made of brown leather. The scarpa is as yet indistinct. I suspect it has very high sharp heels, and is the sort of thing that might be used as the murder weapon in an Agatha Christie novel.
Italian in Three Months has the usual cast of characters, with the addition of a number of traveling businessmen who are generally to be found propping up the hotel bar in Bologna or Rome, engaging passing females in witless conversation. These men are mostly Americans: they urge alcohol on their gentle companions and loudly insist on paying. Occasionally they are glimpsed at large, on the streets, defending their rights as citizens and refusing to be hoodwinked by dishonest Italian shopkeepers. No, it is your fault. You gave me the wrong change. Please call the owner. The Italians, meanwhile, pass the time in melodious flights of cultural self-satisfaction, purchasing buffalo mozzarella from the delicatessen, ordering gnocchi at Mamma Rosa’s restaurant, taking their coffee espresso, with a shot of spirits if they’re in the mood. They are brisk but not impolite toward Hugh O’Sullivan, who wants to buy a casa di campagna, and remain quite calm with Jeff and Bill, who present themselves almost daily at the doctor’s surgery in a condition of mild hysteria. Peter, a solitary Englishman, is glimpsed every now and then hopelessly trying to make his way to an assignation with an Italian woman called Luisa. He wanders the streets asking directions; later he is seen at a bus stop, importuning passersby: when he finally locates Luisa as agreed on the Piazza Navona, he blurts out that he has just witnessed an acquaintance being run over by a scooter. I sense the hand of E. M. Forster somewhere deep in Peter’s past: this is the type of Englishman whom the Luisas of this world will forever try to understand but fail, whom they will follow diligently around the hospitals of Rome, searching for his injured “friend,” whom he seems to care for so profoundly.
I learn the word for boring, which is noioso, and for fear, which is paura. I learn the words for hunger, truth, kindness, passion, tragedy, success. I learn to say, I am in a hurry. I learn to say, I am a shop assistant.
The Garfagnana is cloaked in cloud; the melancholy hills of Barga make giant shapes that vanish upward into mist. There is a whole community of Scots that originated here: within the steep, narrow streets of the town a Scottish museum occupies two floors of a palazzo with pitted pale plaster like a bad complexion. Apparently, a delegation from Prestwick makes its way to Barga every year. The new direct flight from Prestwick to nearby Pisa has been a cause for celebration, in this place where tiny three-wheeled Piaggios buzz like hornets along the ancient alleyways and people hang their washing out of high windows; where the cathedral stands on its lonely hilltop, a vision of travertine austerity, and gazes out of its weathered face at the Apennines.
We came here over the white Apuan mountains, leaving behind the rose-colored light of the coast, the belle époque charm of Santa Margherita and Portofino; up and up into regions of dazzling ferocity where we wound among deathly white peaks scarred with marble quarries, along glittering chasms where the road fell away into nothingness and we clung to our seats in terror. The Italians, we have learned, are supreme artists in what I had thought to be a humdrum science, that of road building. When we crossed the border at Ventimiglia we were immediately initiated into these arts: there was, it seemed, to be no more tedious snaking around, no timid twisting and turning, no quarter given to the lush mountainous terrain that tumbled down toward the sea. The Italians do not drive around a mountain, no, no: they go straight through it. We must have driven through forty or fifty of them in our first two hours in the country. We have become blasé: that is why the road to Garfagnana is so unnerving. Clearly we have done something incorrect by coming up here, something an Italian would never do, unless he was driving one of the giant dusty lorries heaped with rough chunks of rock that we encounter at hairpin bends on their way from the quarries down to the coast. Each time we find one there, we scream like people in a horror film. The road ravels on and on, through vertiginous passes like the eye of a needle, through desert-like valleys, creeping along a shelf high over a vast drop where a moonscape of peaks extends to the horizon, the white marble glinting like death in its fastnesses of rock. Consulting the map, we see that there was a businesslike road from the coast that skirted the mountains and would have delivered us in an hour or so to our destination. We ought to have taken it; and yet it seems strange, the thought that we might have remained ignorant of this cold and savage place, might never have known the real truth, in our somnambulant treading of well-worn paths. Instead we are having a thorough and passionate encounter with fear. During the nights that follow, I wake up several times dreaming that I am still on that road, for I am certain that one day I will see its like again. Amid its voids and vacuums I discern a detailed image of my own mortality.