Ciao belle!
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Ciao for now,x ash
I’m an American millennial, which is an easy shorthand for all manner of sins.
One of them is that, yes, my mother did see me through rose-colored glasses. Don’t get me wrong, she could somehow also see through all of my bluster and b******t to the most secret parts of my soul, but damn, when I did anything even marginally well, she talked about it as though I was set to be a gold medalist in the Olympics. That is, if they had an Olympics for things like not being a pushover or making pies from scratch. Well, they sort of do have an Olympics for the latter-- I’ve seen Great British Bakeoff-- and if they don’t for the former, they should.
Be that as it may. One of the things my mother liked to brag about pretty frequently before her untimely death was my supposed skill with languages. You see, I’d learned fluent German fairly quickly when we moved to that bratwurst-ful country when I was just seven years old and dropped into the local school with only a handful of half-hearted family lessons in the language. To my mother, this clearly meant that I was a language savant.
Unfortunately, this is a gross over-exaggeration.
I’ve dallied in other languages, but Italian is the first language I’ve really needed to learn as an adult. And as a sidenote, I chose the word “dallied” over “dabbled” because I think of language as a place one spends time in rather than a craft one spends time doing: a subtle difference, but an important one, I think. There’s a reason they talk about language “immersion”: you need to feel a language all around you, get to know its strengths and strangeness, its quirks and idiosyncrasies. Language isn’t words deployed in a logical, careful rhythm. Language is an entire ecosystem that encapsulates not only your individual thoughts, but your culture, history, and understanding of your place in this wild west that is our world. This is the crux of esteemed author Jhumpa Lahiri’s angst in her beautifully written book In Altre Parole:
“The disorientation I feel in Venice is similar to what possesses me when I write in Italian. In spite of the map of the sestieri, I get lost. The Venetian maze transcends its own map the way a language transcends its own grammar. Walking in Venice, like writing in Italian, is an experience that throws me off balance… there are moments in Italian, just as in Venice, when I feel suffocated, distraught. Then I turn and, when I least expect it, find myself in an isolated, silent, shining place.”
It is only when you are in a real life situation in which you do not speak a language natively that you fully realize just how alienating and challenging language barriers are. You’re not just saying translated versions of your own tongue; you’re in a completely different universe. Incidentally, this is why kids in the United States can spend four years of high school studying French only to have a complete meltdown when they show up in Paris and try to order a croissant. To be fair to them, in my experience Parisians are particularly grumpy about the indignity of their beautiful language in the clumsy mouths of foreigners, but still.
Which brings me to my own journey through Italian.
Learning a foreign tongue is akin to taking a mistress: each one a world of fresh possibility, each one a completely new experience. Italian is the mysterious type-- enthralling, enigmatic, delighted to flirt and spend her time with you as long as her own goals are met. Kind of like an Anne Boleyn or a Cleopatra. (If you’re wondering: French is the kind of grand, lavish dame on whose upkeep you spend your life savings- and then some, English asks for nothing but takes you on a string of increasingly bizarre and sometimes dangerous dates, German is a reasonably healthy relationship, if perhaps a bit stuffy and prone to unexpected bursts of anger).
And as one would expect with a particularly beautiful and enigmatic mistress, I am utterly besotted with Italian. The rolling sounds, the flowery expressions, the delightful quirks. I’d run away with her if I could.
This is why I spend much of every day in Turin feeling like a complete failure. Despite the fairly high number of foreigners living in the city, it is thoroughly Italian, and few strangers I interact with speak any English at all, forcing me to practice my clumsy language skills.
“C’e un bagno?” I asked hopefully, raising my eyebrows expressively to make up for the fact that a mask covered the lower half of my face. There was, after all, still a global pandemic on. Is there a bathroom?
“Che?” the woman behind the bar looked utterly confused to a degree that did not feel commensurate with the question, as though I’d asked her to explain string theory. What?
“Un bagno?” I repeated slowly. A bathroom?
The woman shook her head, a puzzled, practically angry expression knotting her eyebrows together.
The sides of my face grew hot and my chest tightened. Maybe it’s not my Italian, I thought to myself reassuringly. Maybe they don’t have a bathroom. Unfortunately, that isn’t uncommon, though it would be quite a shame. I’d just downed my fourth espresso of the day solely in order to justify using the cafe’s bathroom, a practice that was becoming increasingly common but that was certainly not helping my stress levels, which were skyrocketing mostly due to the challenge of navigating a city, country, and bureaucracy that spoke very little English.
“Dov’e il bagno?” I tried again. Where is the bathroom?
“Ahhhhhh, il bagno,” the woman suddenly exclaimed, clapping her hands together. She pointed to a door in the back and explained a complex series of steps (through the door, to the left, through the second door on the right, use this key) to find it. Her Italian shot out of her mouth like the bullets of a machine gun. Fortunately, I understood most of the key words, though the rapidity with which they were delivered only frustrated me further. She obviously knew Italian wasn’t my native language.
As I made my way to the bathroom that I prayed contained an actual toilet instead of one of the hole in the ground styles that somehow still exist here, I went over the exchange in my head, trying to figure out why she’d had such trouble understanding me. She, and it seemed like every other barista I’d encountered so far.
Was it the mask? Was it my terrible accent?
What puzzled me the most was her response when she finally did understand me, as though I’d asked a truly novel and surprising question. In a previous life I spent years working in coffee shops, and I must say that the number of unique questions I was asked on a regular basis was fairly limited. Overwhelmingly, they were limited to the following options:
* Requesting another coffee
* Asking for directions to major points of interest in the area
* Inquiring about the bathroom situation
* That’s it
* No, really, that’s it
How hard could it possibly be, I thought, to guess what I wanted? Was she feigning ignorance on purpose to make me feel even more shame and awkwardness than I already did?
I’ve thought about that moment many times over the last several weeks, especially during our recent, unexpected trip back to the US to visit my terminally ill grandfather. It felt strange but comfortable being back in the land of customer service, where every interaction with a stranger is charming and friendly-- but by necessity, also somewhat hollow.
It’s no surprise that many non-American individuals find the unassailable American smile as distasteful as a piece of hair in one’s soup. Disingenuous, off-putting, weird-- all words I’ve heard to describe the American customer service experience.
And I get it. A random service person doesn’t know you personally, so they aren’t actually thrilled to see you. No human can consistently maintain a genuine excitement for taking strangers’ food orders for the several hours necessary to complete a shift. And sure, it feels a little weird and more than a little transactional when you realize just how much of a service person’s wages are made up of tips they need to elicit from you.
Yet, having been such a worker in the United States myself, I can also confidently say that the truth is more nuanced than that. Yes, I would smile and adopt a signature bland, pleasant tone to earn tips. But I also do pretty much want most people I meet to have a good day, truly. I genuinely enjoyed my work in service, for the most part: someone can do something because it’s their job, but also because they mean it.
This is clearly not the case in Italy or most of the European countries to which I’ve travelled. Or rather, it’s not necessarily that people don’t want you to have a nice day, it’s just not expected that a stranger - service worker or not - should have to contribute to the niceness of said day, or go out of their way to assist you outside the standard realm of their job description.
Language is, of course, absolutely critical to these interactions, and meditating on this subject has made me realize how particularly sensitive I can be when trying to operate in a foreign tongue, because I feel utterly lost. Combine that with a very different cultural experience and perceived gruffness, and no wonder I feel like I have to emotionally prepare myself for each public excursion like I am gearing up for a climb up Everest. At my core, the deep shame I feel over being unable to appropriately communicate becomes an additional layer of projection onto even simply neutral experiences I have with strangers.
What I’ve had to begin reminding myself of is that the lack of general blase customer service kindness in Italy means that when individuals do seem happy, or excited, or extra kind-- they really, really mean it.
And frankly, these are also experiences I’ve had over and over again in our short time here. A pizza waitress quite literally clapped with glee at my clumsy Italian and told me to keep practicing. A friend was nearly brought to tears at the thought of me learning the language half of my ancestors spoke. A bartender ran across the street to tell me I looked so glamorous she thought I was Adele.
It’s often human nature, isn’t it, to sear into our brains our shameful, negative experiences, conveniently forgetting about the beautiful, positive ones, isn’t it?
I honestly couldn’t say what I genuinely prefer: the honesty of Italian service interactions or the general ease and pleasantness of American ones. It probably depends on the day. As with most things, I’m grateful I get the chance to experience both.
But one thing is absolutely clear, cultural debates aside: devo imparare a parlare meglio l’italiano! I need to learn to speak better Italian!
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