Truman Capote cited one of his major failings as not being able to speak Italian despite having lived in Italy for a combined total of nine years. I've lived here seven. Two more years and this magnificent writer and I will finally have something in common.
Although I've availed myself of costly classes, tiresome tapes, and a laminated four-page guide which lists nearly every major rule of the Italian language and the declensions of all tenses of regular and irregular verbs, I still have difficulty remembering that the word "flower" is masculine. But then, too, so is "feminist."
Parent-teacher conferences are excruciating. When my children were in first grade, I possessed the comprehension of a first grader. Now that they're in eighth grade, I'm up to fourth. I begin each meeting with a plea for the teacher to speak very slowly and remind her that my Italian is weak. We can sometimes pass an amiable three or four minutes unless joined by a second or third instructor. Then all hell breaks loose and a rapid clicking approximating language ensues as they become increasingly animated and I discouraged. On the upside, my limited comprehension allows me to blithely assume that my children excel at school here and have perfect behavior (a marked contrast from their performance in America). Unable to read the lengthy comments on their report cards, I am satisfied.
Being American and choosing to live in Italy with children is taken as a compliment by Italians. Living here without kids means you've simply retired, read Frances Mayes's books, purchased her calendars or products from her home furnishings line, attended her Under The Tuscan Sun Festival, or all five. So I find myself in rarefied settings from which I would certainly be excluded in the United States if people knew my family background, where I was educated, or how uninteresting I actually am.
When spoken at in rapid-fire Italian by a renowned psychiatrist in a 15th-Century palazzo, I find gestures amazingly helpful. Ditto when asked to peel sausage with an unusually dull knife in an intimidating aristocrat's rustic weekend retreat. I thank God for making the human head able to swivel no and nod yes. Those two words are really all you need to travel the globe: let foreigners do the heavy lifting.
Sure, I could try to express myself in Italian, but I don't yet know the words for "dull," "sausage," or "inexperience peeling Italian sausage with an unusually dull." I do, though, know the word for "knife." I could always shift to English (anyone who has attended school in Italy in the past 15 years, uses computers, teaches, or travels knows our language), but Italians often share my reluctance to sound stupid in someone else's vernacular and insist we speak Italian since we're "in Italia." When conversation flags, I gesticulate more frantically, making clear that my hands speak Italian even if my mouth doesn't.
As a fan of Tim Parks's writing, I was overjoyed to read that after a decade in Italy, he understood 80 percent of what was said to his face and 50 percent of what was uttered in his presence. This explained my low percentage of word recognition when answering the phone. I can now identify telemarketers (friendly), teachers (angry), and neighbors (friendly, then angry). On all others, I hang up.
Meanwhile, further research into Tim Parks's achievements (beginning with his graduation from Cambridge, continuing through his publication of numerous novels, memoirs, and critical studies, and culminating in his tenured position as a professor in Milan) revealed we had little in common. "And," said my wife helpfully, "he's married to an Italian."
Nonetheless, it's always possible to model yourself on someone and hope appeared on my horizon in the guise of a dismayingly limited American woman who's been here nine years. Watching her struggle to order tuna (tonno) at the fish market, Capote sprang instantly to mind. She expresses herself so boringly in English that I always suggest we speak Italian in order to salvage something of value from the encounter. I notice she makes many of my grammatical mistakes and is also not married to an Italian. Though we have little else in common, she's actually become one of my closest acquaintances. Particularly after she asked me how long I'd lived in Italy. "Seven years," she gasped, "but your Italian's so good."
