Close Encounters: Part 2
Something that I’m always circumlocutory about admitting is that my sense of direction is comparable to that of a carrier pigeon’s, if carrier pigeons were known for their lack of a sense of direction. On the morning of my departure for Italy, I found myself alone and marooned in a small silver line station somewhere out in Boston, looking for the bus to Logan airport…two hours before my flight.
Carrying close to 30 kilos of luggage, I walked the entire length of the station before finding a very foxy Latina woman sitting behind a trash can, looking quite seductive and ready to help me out. I asked if she knew where the platform for the Logan bus was. She looked at me for a bit and said slowly and steadily, “Excuse me, but I do not speak English,” carefully enunciating each syllable as if she had rehearsed it many times before — so much so that one would not mistake it to have been spoken with anything less than an American accent. She even remembered to smile afterward.
I recount this story because of the countless times I’ve felt so isolated here as a result of the language barrier that separates me from the common populace of Italy. Although I remembered to read up on most of the Italian grammar before coming here, I do not know many Italian words and am learning them painfully. An encounter with an Italian native showed me just how much of a problem this has become.
I came home early from work this Tuesday, which brought me the pleasure of running into our cleaning lady as she was beginning her afternoon shift. After we exchanged Ciao’s, I went straight into my bedroom to get briefly naked. As I was beginning to undress, the lady came into my room and started mumbling something in Italian. I heard the word pulisco, which I quickly recognized from Chapter 1 of Barron’s Complete Italian Grammar Review as the Italian word for “I am cleaning”. I sat down in my chair, nodded, and said in English, “Okay. I will stay here,” waving my arms around my work area. She then started pointing to random spots on the floor and speaking more Italian to me at a speed quicker than I was capable of processing.
Confused, I began to hurriedly pick random things off of my floor, to which she reacted with hostility, throwing her arms up and shouting something along the lines of, “My mother! My mother! I hate my job!”
I naturally yelled back in English, “What do you want me to do?!”
She gave me a stern look, pointed right at my chest and said in a deep voice, “Seet downa!” My fight-or-flight senses obliged her command and I immediately planted my ass on the bed, my mouth gaping and my arms still firmly wrapped around my backpack, shoes, and the many jeans that had been lying on the floor.
The lady had another fit of frustration before she started talking to me again. She kept repeating this one sentence whose words I couldn’t make out at all. But a solution came to me — I told her, “scrive! scrive, per favore!” While she searched for her notepad, I tried logging onto Google Translate, the purported best language translator in the world. To my terrible misfortune, the Wi-fi connection sucked in my bedroom, and what sucked even more was trying to explain to her that I had to go to the kitchen to get a stronger signal. I didn’t do a very good job, seeing as she chased after me, screaming at the top of her lungs, as I ran into the kitchen. At this point, I think she was about to cry. The website wasn’t loading, so I took the notepad from her hands and read the sentence that she had scribbled:
Pulisco la tua camera, poi rimani in camera e io pulisco il resto delle stanze, cucina e bagni
I attempted to translate it to myself, “I am cleaning your bedroom, …something in the bedroom and I clean the rest of the rooms, the kitchen and the bathrooms.”
“What is poi?” I asked. Judging by her difficulty to explain the word with hand motions, I figured it was something abstract. I continued, “What is rimani?”
She patted the seat in front of me. “Rimani! Rimani!”
I gave her a blank stare. Then it hit me. Rimani. Rimanere. Remain. FML. I chuckled hesitantly to lighten the situation and said, “Oooh…I was totally going to do that…” Of course she didn’t understand me, but I walked back to my room and pointed at my chair, saying “Ah, Rimano! Rimano!”
“NO,” she stated firmly. “ri-man-GO.”
At this point, I realized that I had been being a total idiot. And that the verb rimanere is irregular. I apologized profusely to her, stumbling on the pronunciation of spiacente (which is “sorry” in Italian, but, unbeknownst to me at the time, has the same connotation as something like “apology” in English. Italians just say mi dispiace instead).
As she cleaned my room, we spoke a bit in broken Italian. She asked for my name, my age, my permanent city of residence, my occupation, and whether I was cinese or giapponese. She told me her name was Manuella, a 48-year old mother living in Trento. I told her that I’d like to learn Italian someday, to which she responded (here translated to English), “Ah. It’s very difficult. Also, you are Chinese.” Heh, stereotype number 3.
During this short conversation, I couldn’t help but think back to my encounter with the Latina woman. Only a short time ago, I was on the other side of the language barrier, enjoying all the luxuries and securities of being the native speaker, and now I had been recast into the same position as the woman in the Boston bus station. I recalled her vacuous smile, how I must have appeared just like she — helpless and uncertain yet so eager to please.
As Manuella was leaving, I decided to bid her farewell in a more elaborate way than the common Ciao. The phrase, “See you next time,” seemed appropriate at the time. So I said with moderate excitement, “Vendró prossimo tempo, Manuella!”
She gave me an odd look, sighed, and said, “Mamma mia…”
I had meant to use the verb vedere, which means “to see”, but I had confused it with the verb vendere, which means “to sell”. So my intended message had been distorted a bit. What a Hamming distance of 1 can do… I proceeded to lock myself in my bedroom and listen to Kanye West speak haughty, but nonetheless American, English to me. Bliss.
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