In Other Words (7 page)

I
'm constantly hunting for words.

I would describe the process like this: every day I go into the woods carrying a basket. I find words all around: on the trees, in the bushes, on the ground (in reality: on the street, during conversations, while I read). I gather as many as possible. But it's never enough; I have an insatiable appetite.

I gather words that seem obscure (
sciagura, spigliatezza:
disaster, casualness) and ones that I can easily understand but would like to know better (
inviperito, stralunato:
incensed, out of one's wits). I gather beautiful words that have no exact equivalents in English (
formicolare, chiarore:
to move in a confused fashion, like ants, and also to have pins and needles; shaft of light). I gather countless adjectives (
malmesso, plumbeo, impiastricciate:
shabby, leaden, smeared) to describe thousands of situations. I gather countless nouns and adverbs that I will never use.

At the end of the day the basket is heavy, overflowing. I feel loaded down, wealthy, in high spirits. My words seem more valuable than money. I am like a beggar who finds a pile of gold, a bag of jewels.

But when I come out of the woods, when I see the basket, scarcely a handful of words remain. The majority disappear. They vanish into thin air, they flow like water between my fingers. Because the basket is memory, and memory betrays me, memory doesn't hold up.

I feel a bond with every word I pick up. I feel affection, along with a sense of responsibility. When I can't remember words, I fear I've abandoned them.

I feel emptied, depressed, the way you feel the morning after a fabulous dream. The woods seem like a paradise, a hallucination. Then I wake up.

Although defeated, I don't feel too discouraged. If anything, I feel even more determined. The next day, I return to the woods. I don't think my project is a waste of time. I know that its beauty lies in the act of gathering, not in the result.

Yet it's not sufficient, or even satisfying, merely to collect words in the notebook. I want to use them. I want to draw on them when I need them. I want to be in contact with them. I want them to become a part of me.

I review the words in order to learn them, memorize them. I think about them while I'm talking to someone. I know they're there, written by hand in the notebook. If I were a genius, I would remember everything, and would be able to speak much more precisely, fluently. But when I need them the words are elusive, ungraspable. They exist on the page but don't enter my brain, so they don't come out of my mouth. They remain stuck, useless, in the notebook. I am aware only of the fact that I've recorded them.

Rereading the notebook, I notice certain words that I have to write more than once, that resist my memory.
Simple but stubborn (
fruscio, schianto, arguto, broncio:
rustle, crash, sharp, sulk), maybe they don't want to have any relationship with me.

All the words in the notebook are the sign of a physical, methodical growth. I think of my children's first weeks of life, when I went to the pediatrician every week to have their weight checked. Every ounce was recorded, evaluated. Each was concrete proof of their presence on the earth, of their existence. My understanding of Italian grows in a similar way. I acquire my vocabulary day by day, word by word.

And yet my lexicon develops without logic, in a darting, fleeting manner. The words appear, accompany me for a while, then, often without warning, abandon me.

The notebook contains all my enthusiasm for the language. All the effort. A space where I can wander, learn, forget, fail. Where I can hope.

I
arrive in Rome with my family a few days before the mid-August holiday. We aren't familiar with this custom of leaving town en masse. The moment when nearly everyone is fleeing, when almost the entire city has come to a halt, we try to start a new chapter of our life.

We rent an apartment on Via Giulia. A very elegant street that is deserted in mid-August. The heat is fierce, unbearable. When we go out shopping, we look for the momentary relief of shade every few steps.

The second night, a Saturday, we come home and the door won't open. Before, it opened without any problem. Now, no matter how I try, the key doesn't turn in the lock.

There is no one in the building but us. We have no papers, are still without a functioning telephone, without any Roman friend or acquaintance. I ask for help at the hotel across the street from our building, but two hotel employees can't open the door, either. Our landlords are on vacation in Calabria. My children, upset, hungry, are crying, saying that they want to go back to America immediately.

Finally a locksmith arrives and opens the door in a
couple of minutes. We give him more than two hundred euros, without a receipt, for the job.

This trauma seems to me a trial by fire, a sort of baptism. But there are many other obstacles, small but annoying. We don't know where to take the recycling, how to buy a subway and bus pass, where the bus stops are. Everything has to be learned from zero. When we ask for help from three Romans, each of the three gives a different answer. I feel unnerved, often crushed. In spite of my great enthusiasm for living in Rome, everything seems impossible, indecipherable, impenetrable.

A week after arriving, the Saturday after that unforgettable Saturday night, I open my diary to describe our misadventures. That Saturday, I do something strange, unexpected. I write my diary in Italian. I do it almost automatically, spontaneously. I do it because when I take the pen in my hand, I no longer hear English in my brain. During this period when everything confuses me, everything unsettles me, I change the language I write in. I begin to relate, in the most exacting way, everything that is testing me.

I write in a terrible, embarrassing Italian, full of mistakes. Without correcting, without a dictionary, by instinct alone. I grope my way, like a child, like a semiliterate. I am ashamed of writing like this. I don't understand this mysterious impulse, which emerges out of nowhere. I can't stop.

It's as if I were writing with my left hand, my weak hand, the one I'm not supposed to write with. It seems a transgression, a rebellion, an act of stupidity.

During the first months in Rome, my clandestine Italian
diary is the only thing that consoles me, that gives me stability. Often, awake and restless in the middle of the night, I go to the desk to compose some paragraphs in Italian. It's an absolutely secret project. No one suspects, no one knows.

I don't recognize the person who is writing in this diary, in this new, approximate language. But I know that it's the most genuine, most vulnerable part of me.

Before I moved to Rome I seldom wrote in Italian. I tried to compose some letters to an Italian friend of mine who lives in Madrid, some emails to my teacher. They were like formal, artificial exercises. The voice didn't seem to be mine. In America it wasn't.

In Rome, however, writing in Italian is the only way to feel myself present here—maybe to have a connection, especially as a writer, with Italy. The new diary, although imperfect, although riddled with mistakes, mirrors my disorientation clearly. It reflects a radical transition, a state of complete bewilderment.

In the months before coming to Italy, I was looking for another direction for my writing. I wanted a new approach. I didn't know that the language I had studied slowly for many years in America would, finally, give me the direction.

I use up one notebook, I start another. A second metaphor comes to mind: it's as if, poorly equipped, I were climbing a mountain. It's a sort of literary act of survival. I don't have many words to express myself—rather, the opposite. I'm aware of a state of deprivation. And yet, at the same time, I feel free, light. I rediscover the reason that I write, the joy as well as the need. I find again the
pleasure I've felt since I was a child: putting words in a notebook that no one will read.