My Island of Inglese

We have just returned from three weeks of travel, which included time in England, Italy, and Portugal, and I'm still in the strange, disoriented twilight state that inevitably follows. I am resolved, however, to try to make sense of my journal jottings and write up a few blog posts in the days ahead.

Since I am arbitrarily beginning with an Italian moment, I've chosen the picture above. It's special and meaningful to me because I took it in the region where my grandfather was born and lived until he emigrated to the United States. That's Mt. Vesuvius in the distance.

So...one evening I went to a party with my cousin Luca in a town near Pompei called Scafati, a surprise birthday celebration for a man turning forty. We arrived early, ascended two floors in an elevator the size of a phone booth, and entered a bright white-walled apartment, cheerful and immaculately clean. Guests ranged in age from senior citizens to little children.

The countdown began after the birthday celebrant rang the buzzer downstairs. The host (his sister) turned off the lights, we waited with hushed giggles, and everyone shouted "Sorpressa!" when he entered. He went around the room greeting each guest with kisses and hugs...there was a wonderfully unrestrained sense of affection and friendship and family.

And there was food, of course, the Italian way, a sequence of courses like the chapters of a novel. I drank a glass of wine, devoured a serving of memorably delicious baked pasta, and then, unable to find a seat, stood awkwardly in a corner of the living room trying to arrange my face into a pleasant expression and look like someone who belonged there.

The problem was entirely mine. All around me the air was filled with Italian conversation...Neapolitan, to be exact...and I was stranded on my island of Inglese. Italian was of course my grandfather's native tongue and a language my father spoke fluently, but although I have dabbled in it often over the years, I have never approached it with the kind of discipline and immersion that would have been necessary to master it.

Now and then some kind soul with a few words of English would take pity on me, attempt a bit of chit-chat, grow understandably bored and wander off. Occasionally I would catch a glimmer of meaning in the Italian I was hearing, a word or phrase I recognized, a clue as to the subject, but no thread I could follow. I felt isolated.But it began to seem like an altered state of consciousness. Voices rose and fell in liquid mellifluent vowels with small clatters of consonants, and sometimes there was laughter.

I started thinking about the miracle of language, how words convey meaning and create worlds, how they join us together or keep us apart, and the sounds in themselves became a kind of music, as indeed Italian tends to be, and even without understanding there was something beautiful about the waves of conversation encircling me.

So I stood on my island and listened.