Mother Tongue

Italian was not my mother’s mother tongue. When she and my father moved to Italy in 1953 so, she took language classes at the Dante Aligeheri school for foreigners. When I heard tell of this as a child, the name of the school stuck in my head without further referent. The Inferno surprised in many ways; one of them was that it seemed to have been written by my mother’s teacher. Even as a young girl I was a little supercilious about my mother’s, to me, long ago lessons. I could not imagine her in a school situation. She had told me long before that she was not “good at school” and I believed her, smug in the knowledge that I was. My father and I shared, at least I thought so, a loftier Italian, more (but not terribly) grammatical. The truth was, of course, that my mother used her Italian in a way we did not have to. She bought fish from the fish man, tomatoes from the tomato woman, asked questions and argued with them. She had words for the various qualities a fish or tomato might or might not have, and words for bonding with the market stall owners over her pregnancy. After a time, she developed a language of good-natured suspicion, which resulted in the tomato woman, who was also the onion woman, ceasing to charge her for the etto what she was supposed to charge per kilo. She had to learn some words on the fly, like when the butter man came to the door with a new offer of pigeons which my mother suspected had been culled from the street below. When the faucets leaked or the heating failed—this happened a lot—it was she who called and argued with the landlord. Although she was not good with the future tense, she was able to make appointments and to challenge people when they broke them. Her Italian was the Italian of everyday life, of exchanges on the street and in the market.

It was also the language of bodily intimacy. My mother’s best friend, my beloved Tio (short for Mathilde), was a dressmaker/designer who spoke no English. My mother must have been able to explain in rich detail what she wanted: lunch and dinner suits in heavy silk with wide cuffs; floral party dresses cinched at the waist but never quite like the pastel dresses being churned out in America; light as a feather tweeds coats in unexpected purples and yellows. The two understood each other, must have built with each other, and out of deep affection, a lexicon of words for fabrics, buttons, and trims, but also for the way bodies are shaped and present themselves.  To this day, I do not know whether these articles of clothing were gifts, or whether my mother paid for clothes designed and made by someone always on the verge of fame.

But clothes were only part of the story of this friendship conducted exclusively in Italian. Together my mother and her friend unraveled the operatic complications of Tio’s long and volatile affair with a senator and the subsequent illegitimate birth of her son. Together they concocted a plan to make me—a nine-year-old non-Catholic—the godmother of Tio’s son. For this violation of the rules, Tio had to find a sleazy priest. And she found one who molested me in the back of the car on the way to—or perhaps from—the ceremony.

When English-speakers ask if I speak Italian, I say that I do—but that it is the Italian of a ten-year old overlaid by the Italian of Dante. There are many things I can talk about in Italian: food, emotions (positive, negative, and even complicated); nature, sports, and of course, from a later date, more touristy topics like hotel reservations and driving directions.  I cannot talk about my scholarly work without sounding really stupid. When Italians ask me if I can speak Italian I tell them I can, but that it is ugly. I use the childish word “bruto,” as if to prove my point. On good days, I am told that my Italian is “chiaro” or clear; this makes it feel less ugly. “Chiaro” is an interesting term for what comes out of my mouth. Since many people have used the same word, I am either strikingly clear (unlikely) or the word is more generally associated with moderately successful language use. It might simply mean that, despite many mistakes, I get my point across. I like to think that “chiaro” means more, that my words are distinct, that they sound good as I form them—that I am speaking, despite years and miles of distance, a mother tongue.

Since leaving the country when I was ten I have been to Italy, I think, six times, always with my husband and sometimes with others—my children, a couple I travel with, and once, Scott’s niece.  Although one of my friends understands Italian and speaks some, I often take the role of translator or group representative. The most famous instance of my Italian speaking actually happened in France when we rented a house in Provence with our friends. Our friends got there first; we were much slower, in part because my older son was violently carsick. After hours of driving on twisty roads and much vomiting, we arrived at the rental house at dusk to the smell of lavender and the sight of a gorgeous outdoor pool whose water was almost violet in the setting sun. The pool was a promise that vacation might, would, begin the next morning when my son would have recovered.

Early the next morning I put on my suit to make good on that promise, only to find that there was no water in the pool. It had slipped away with the night. We called the caretaker, a Mr. Sasso, who, as it turned out, preferred to curse in his native Italian. It was in Italian that he told us that it was all our fault, that we must have gone to the garage and turned on the faucet to empty the pool. My niece remembers her Aunt Helena becoming unrecognizable. Exhausted by travel and caretaking, I was somehow able to access a vocabulary that I had never used before. It probably owed much to bad novels, or films, or perhaps to the Italian romance epics I had studied in graduate school alongside Dante. I believe I mentioned our family honor. I found that I could also produce less dignified language—not quite curse words, which I had never learned, but insults from my elementary school playground. Mr Sasso was “pazzo,” crazy, perhaps even “stronzo,”, an asshole. What I remember most from this encounter was a feeling of triumph, of linguistic agency, of having carried my ugly Italian over the border with France to confront a man in his mother tongue and mine.

Some of my later trips to Italy have been less triumphant. During the last two trips to Rome and Sicily, I have found many Italians, particularly those in the service industry, immediately default to English when I begin to speak Italian. This is ironic, because it is only in the last few years that I have begun to study Italian and to use Italian sources in my scholarship. I still make mistakes, but my language skills are better than they have ever been. My Italian is often, but not always, significantly better than the English of the hotel concierges who explain charges in English, or the waiters who automatically proffer the English menu. It doesn’t matter if I translate the menus back into Italian when ordering, or even, as has happened several times, if I serve as a translator when they run into issues with other guests. Part of this has to do with the fact that my husband does not speak Italian; in their minds they are being polite. I have largely given up on forcing my ugly Italian on my interlocutors. I save it for times when I am speaking to someone who has no pretentions of speaking English: our VRRBO host at a house we rented for three weeks in Cefalu in 2017; the old man in the ceramic shop in Lipari last week; the docent in the archeological museum, also in Lipari.; the manager of our wonderful hotel in the countryside near Noto, who did not seem entirely well and, as the day wore on, ran out of English words.

Before a trip to Italy, I always vow to take Italian classes, to return to basic grammar of the kind I learned in my English school in Rome. This year I did it, moving my way unevenly through an Italian workbook. I could skip some lessons, but was shocked—and ashamed—by how little I knew about matters as basic as when to use which definite articles. This is baby stuff that I did not learn as a baby, or as a ten year old. I bought a more advanced book, called Verb Tenses in Italian which I opened only to affirm, with dismay, that there were about 13 of them, depending on how you count. I use five of the 13 tenses: the present, the simple past, the past perfect, the present perfect, and the simple future. I can use a version of the imperative around dogs, who do not mind my mistakes. I cannot express doubt, uncertainty, conditionality, or openness—at least through verbs. This means I cannot be truly polite. I cannot write formally, or relate two things that happen at different moments in the past. I cannot invoke what the grammar books call the “deep” or “historical” past, which means, once again, that I cannot properly describe my work. If my tenses are few, what I would call my mode but what might properly be expressed as my attitude is simple and consistent. I may be speaking in the simple past, the present, or future, but in shaping a sentence—any sentence—I am speaking in a form of the continuous past.