The Other Language (39 page)

How do they manage to look always so groomed and elegant even when they can’t afford to buy expensive clothes? How is it possible that the most desolate trattoria on the back road of a nondescript town will serve you the best dish you’ve had in years? And how can Italians appear so confident and full of life despite the fact they live in one of the most malfunctioning countries, run by the Mafia and corrupt, shifty politicians, a country basically going bankrupt? So why, despite these failings, do Italians come across as positive, gregarious, always ready to laugh? This book is going to teach you how to make your life more enjoyable, how to gain confidence, taste and charm—without trying too hard. Nonchalance is the key factor: the less you try, the easier it will be to feel as stylish and charismatic as the Italians are, deep down in their skin. The secret is very simple. It’s called the Italian System
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She set the alarm for seven and wrote every morning till lunchtime, as she had planned. She usually reached the school by five. Let’s Speak Italian was located in a small town house on the Upper East Side; it was sparsely furnished with folding metal chairs, Formica desks and cheaply framed photographs of famous Italian monuments and movie stars. Her classes started at five thirty—she taught evening classes to people who mostly had full-time jobs—but she liked to get there early, take time to look at the students’ papers and have a cup of coffee with some of her colleagues. To be teaching Italian in a school, surrounded by other Italians who had the same poorly paid part-time jobs—some of them had come to New York because of a marriage, others had
had higher literary ambitions that failed—only enhanced her feeling of being trapped inside a circle of outsiders. All her students spoke with terrible accents and hated the
congiuntivo
and the
condizionale;
they were either coming to the school because of their line of work—fashion, wine, travel—or were affluent retirees who liked the idea of being able to engage with the locals on their next Italian holiday. And it was for their sake that she felt she was supposed to retain all of her Italianness while at work. Her students loved her accent, the way she moved her hands and certain grammatical mistakes she still made when speaking in English. The act of writing the book not only partly relieved her of the frustration she’d begun to feel, but also let her put that feeling of otherness to use, make something positive, anchoring, out of it.

For the very first time she was able to isolate small details that shone like jewels among the ruins, the corruption, the vulgarity of her country of origin. So many immigrants are embarrassed by the place they come from, she thought, it’s probably inevitable. After all, it has to be a love-hate relationship. Without the hate there would be no voyage.

Memories from her childhood started to come up like gnocchi in boiling water, at the most unexpected moments. Food always came up first, for her.

Stop being afraid of calories, they are not your real enemies. The problem is not the pasta, pizza, or your
cornetto
and cappuccino. It’s not the carbs that will make you fat, but the complications that are the essence of the American meal. Just think of the endless layers that form a hamburger: bread, mustard, cheese, bacon, meat, onion, pickle, ketchup. Why so many ingredients in one dish? What’s the point of such a crazy medley?

The first time I checked the list of flavors inside an ice cream parlor in America my head spun. All I wanted was chocolate. But I was forced to choose between chocolate–chocolate chip, caramel-chocolate-pecan, double chocolate chip–walnut cookie, triple choc-fudge-pecan-walnut and choco-choco-superdark-almond-caramel-crunch. In Italy we grew up with chocolate, hazelnut, coffee, cream and vanilla. In the fruit department we had only lemon and strawberry. In the early days, that was it and we were quite content. These simple, straightforward flavors were superbly executed and delicious. They were like clothes in solid colors as opposed to some mad flowery psychedelic pattern
.

There were things that suddenly caught her attention. Everywhere she looked now, wandering around the aisles of a supermarket, or on the Q train coming back from work, she noticed things that suggested another observation, another idea. The book was like a magnet that attracted the tiniest particle. Everything, no matter how small, stuck. She took brief notes on a Moleskine she tucked in her pocket. The notes sounded like a secret code, but she knew what they meant and she would decipher them later on, once at home: “gutting fish,” “what’s inside a chicken?,” “lack of frontier.”

A word about dairy. Our milk goes bad in five days. Mozzarella, ricotta? You have to eat it the same day. Forty-eight more hours and the cheese tastes like yogurt. We don’t mind about the bacteria that the FDA army has ordered killed in every dairy product sold on American soil. That bacteria boosts our immune systems and no American tourist visiting Rome, Venice or Florence has ever contracted salmonella from a cappuccino or a caprese salad. It’s a celebration and a ritual to buy something that will spoil in one day, knowing we are eating it only a few hours after it was made
.

On the same note: every Italian knows how to gut a fish under the faucet and clean it, how to pull the gizzards out of a chicken, how to tell liver from brains or kidneys, tail from tongue in the butcher’s display. Feathers, blood, entrails, everything that is part of an animal is still visible and tangible, and that means we are still in touch with natural elements at least to a certain degree, whereas in America most children can still barely grasp the connection between a steak and the animal it comes from
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She was slowly gaining confidence. Her writing had become more fluid, more agile. It was like a muscle that stretched and gained speed. Dared she admit, even to herself, that a book like this could have a voice? And that she was actually beginning to find it? Now and again she threw in a funny line, a little humorous spark. She was getting bolder. One day, as she was having coffee with her colleagues before class, she mentioned that she was writing something. It felt good to come out and say it, as it would make her work real and stop her from treating it like a hobby, a secret pastime. There were words of approval along with a few patronizing smiles. When one of her colleagues asked whether she had a publisher, she laughed. It’s an experiment, I’m just having fun with it, she said breezily. Later, on the train back home, one of the teachers—Clelia, a sad woman from Pisa who had married an Iranian in New Jersey and then had had a tragic divorce—asked her what her book was about. She answered vaguely, afraid that Clelia, with her thick glasses and old-fashioned clothes, might think she was making fun of her, that she might be making caricatures out of all of them—a bunch of Italians who still spoke English with thick accents, small people who lived in small apartments, who didn’t have the glamour of the fashion designers, the visual artists or the famous architects who’d made their country such a salable commodity.

She went home that night and decided it was time to do something about the huge pile of laundry that had amassed over the
kitchen table. Laundry was something she had always tended to postpone, as she found the whole procedure boring and unpleasant. She took the elevator down to the basement, and started loading the washing machine. Under the tremulous fluorescent light in that dark space she realized why doing the laundry in the city could be such a depressing chore.

The dryer
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We, as a people, are against it: no Italian possesses one. Dryers are the only bit of American culture that we still firmly and unanimously resist. We dry our sheets, towels, shirts, T-shirts, etc., on a clothesline, letting wind and sun take care of them. We still believe in the power of natural heat and we love the smell of bedsheets dried on a sunny, windy day. In any Italian city, you’ll see our garments hanging on a line outside our windows, balconies, roofs or strung across an alley. We don’t mind, we actually love the sight of our underwear flapping in the wind. Our eyes have gotten used to it, it’s part of the landscape; tourists love to take pictures of it, they think hanging laundry is quintessentially Italian, the way it dots the landscape in bright colors. Sometimes their photos appear on Instagram or on Flickr, or as a lovely postcard, and we think that’s quite sweet—our underwear, socks and panties have become a work of art!

There’s another advantage that comes with hanging laundry on a line. Not only do we save energy, but our clothes don’t get floppy and slack like they do in America because of that killer dryer spin that—it is common knowledge—destroys the weave of any fiber. Can’t you see how dead and stale your socks and T-shirts, blouses and pants, feel on your skin after just a couple of spins? That floppiness soon translates into slovenliness, and before you know it you’ll look like a slob if you don’t run out and buy something new
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Part of what is internationally known as “Italian style” is simply a sense of crispness, which derives from the wind and sun that rejuvenates the very fabrics we wear. What I’m talking about is something deep and archaic, linked with a ritual that has been performed for millennia. To hang your clothes out to dry in the sun as opposed to throwing them inside the belly of a metal monster in the depths of your dark basement is a drastically different choice. If you agree that the world is made up of billions of particles aggregating in different shapes and forms, then you’ll see what I mean when I say that dryers not only kill clothes but tamper with your energy and charisma
.

A student of hers, a young corporate lawyer in love with Tuscany and its cypresses, asked her for private tutoring. They met twice a week in a coffee shop in Midtown near his office and had conversations over his lunch break. They always ordered a scoop of tuna and potato salad on a bed of lettuce and he insisted on paying the bill. It was awkward at first (having these dates with a complete stranger and being paid twenty dollars an hour in order to make small talk?) and she worried she might have nothing to say. Because the man was mildly attractive she felt shy around him and for both reasons early in the week she’d start making a list of possible subjects, in order to arrive prepared. The conversation languished at first, they struggled, pretending to be interested in the bland topics she’d picked—the weather, summer holidays, and, of course, favorite foods—then they became more comfortable with each other as the weeks went by and they began to talk about films they’d seen, music they loved, TV series they watched. One day he told her about a show in an art gallery in Chelsea he’d read about and asked her if she’d like to go with him on the weekend. They could do their lesson in motion and speak about art. She said yes, that would be a really good idea. Then he said he liked her style. What style? she asked, feeling her cheeks redden. I don’t know. The things you wear.

Let me tell you about my mother
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Her number one rule is
“meglio morta che in pigiama”
(better dead than in pj’s). That means that even if she has nowhere to go and no one to see, half an hour after waking up, she’ll be coiffed, dressed, lipsticked, in sheer stockings and patent leather shoes, a dot of perfume dabbed on each wrist. In my entire life I’ve never seen my mother in slippers, or what some people call a housedress or a nightie, past 8 a.m. I am not talking about a grand dame, but an ordinary housewife in her late sixties living off her dead husband’s meager pension. What she wears are tweed skirts and low pumps bought twenty or thirty years ago that—according to her—never went out of fashion. And although they certainly did, if your average Americans were to see my mother walking with her shopping bag out for groceries on a side street of the
centro storico
wearing her old-fashioned dark glasses and cultured pearls, they would ask each other, “How do Italians manage to always be so chic? Just take a look at that old lady across the street.” The recipient of this compliment would be wearing an ensemble worth no more than twenty-five euros max in a vintage store, one that any American would have thrown out fifteen years earlier. Italian style is not a matter of designers or labels or fashion, it’s a question of details—of a certain formality. It’s not so much about what we wear as what we don’t. You’ll never see an adult Italian walking around in shorts other than at the beach, or wearing a baseball cap. Sneakers made a brief appearance in the eighties, flip-flops are a no-no footwear other than at the beach or the spa. For Italians, comfort is not a value and has never been aspiration. Good construction comes with constriction, and we are perfectly used to being uncomfortable in our ingeniously tailored clothes. In Rome the only people in shorts, baggy T-shirts and baseball hats are the flocks of tourists wandering between the Forum and the Colosseum. They seem to be completely unaware of the fact that they look like slobs, especially when they are over sixty years old, dressed like fat teenagers. My grandfather wore hats and jackets till the day he died. To think of him, even as a young man, in shorts and a baseball cap is not only inconceivable: it would be grotesque. I am convinced that having the image of your ancestors in hats and jackets embedded in your memory will translate into a bonus—i.e., it must and will affect your behavior and ultimately your self-confidence
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