Communicating with the natives

After a hectic first week in Florence Laura started to understand the bus routes and make her way to the city centre without having to ask for help. She was proud of her accomplishments and the fact that she could move freely, but it wasn't enough. Laura wasn't your average, everyday tourist who wanted to visit the sights, snap photographs and eat delicious food. She was someone who wanted to get to know the people more than their art, their present more than their past, and to do that she needed to speak the language. She had, of course, taken Italian language courses to prepare her for the trip, but it was all so different here. 

It was one thing to write a clever sentence down in a notebook with the use of a dictionary, or copy an elaborate phrase from the blackboard, but really understanding a language was something else altogether, and the fact that she could not speak Italian without making a total fool of herself was rather frustrating. She had counted on learning through total immersion, but Florentines spoke so quickly. They ran their words together, pronounced the letter “c” like “h”, the “s” like “sh” and at times even the “l” like “r”. It was all too complicated. A simple straight forward: “Dov'è il Duomo, per favore?” stammered slowly while pointing to a picture of the cathedral in her guide book was readily followed by a mystifying, indecipherable “L'èdahuellaparte...” rattled off at the speed of light. 

Maybe she would never speak anything but English, she feared, and never learn to understand other cultures. No, she decided, she would just have to work harder. And she did. She bought a second guide book, in Italian this time, and underlined all the new words. She then searched the dictionary for enlightenment and her English Baedeker for confirmation. She wrote everything down neatly in a black Moleskin making sure, as her professor had encouraged her to do, that the sequence was always Italian-English-Italian so that the last word to leave her mind was a bright, new Italian word to use the next day.

On her day trips to churches and museums, dazed by the beauty of a city that held more art than she had ever imagined existed, Laura created sentences. Eloquent sentences. She put nouns and verbs together rather well, remembering to conjugate male and female, when, of course, she remembered whether the word was male or female. And in her head the words sounded like music. They were perfection. Yet Florentines did not understand her. She wondered if it had to do with the interlocutor.

She decided that once  her perfect sentence was formed she would have to find the right person to recite it to. Old people would have to be excluded. They were wary of young people who spoke with heavy English accents and came from America but insisted on calling it Canada. Middle aged people seemed to be pressed for time, even more wary, and frighteningly elegant. Teenagers - designer-jean-adorned, yet tattered and torn- often sent her in the wrong direction. Yes, choosing the right person was essential. Better female than male – men tended to hit on her; better young than old, though never teenagers. 

She decided that a tactical approach was also important. You couldn't just sneak up on a person and blurt out your sentence. It had to be done with grace. A smile was always endearing, the formal third person would transmit respect, and then, of course, her perfect sentence would clinch it.

This is how she imagined herself finally communicating with the natives, but when she found the courage, the right person and the right moment, Laura, red-faced, stammered and then went blank. A total, unforgivable, unprepared for blank. Desperate, she would then revert to English, a language that many Italians understood and some could almost speak. 

This, however, often caused further confusion. The directions were accompanied by an abundance of hand movements, which, though designed to clarify, had a hypnotizing effect on Laura. Once their hands started moving Laura lost all interest in their words. The result was always a great disillusion.   

Notwithstanding this, Laura spent half her time travelling through Florence creating sentences in her head, and the other half trying to understand the hidden powers of gesticulation.

It was on one of these excursions to a museum that Laura, while sitting on a bus silently composing the perfect Italian sentence, noticed a very beige distraught woman dangling from a handle rail and desperately searching the streets outside the bus window. There was no question of the woman's origins: beige Burberry, beige bag, beige shoes, beige face and beige hair. English. It could not be otherwise, thought Laura.

She forgot her eloquent Italian sentence and leaned over to the woman.

“Excuse me, can I be of any help?”

“Oh, thank you dear! Thanks so much.” Gushed the words from beige lips, “ I was looking for Santa Maria Novella. Would you happen to know where I might get off?”

The sound of English was music to her ears. Must be from England, thought Laura observing the mumbled execution of the words. Oh, English, her language, her native tongue, how wonderful. She felt at home. She could speak without having to edit or correct. She could be certain that her words would be understood, certain that she, too, would understand. Oh, English, her tongue, her home, and a fellow English speaker she could identify with: two foreigners in a strange land battling to be understood. 

Laura gave the woman instructions. They chatted briefly; they commented on the weather and said their good-byes. A slight wave of the hand, a timid smile, a thank-you, and just as the beige woman was getting off the bus she turned to Laura and asked, “By the way, dear...Where did you learn to speak such lovely English?”

Matilde Colarossi