We converse with Gabriele in Italian. We converse with everyone here in Italian – Saturday 26 April 2014.
Gabriele asks if Hilary and I will join him to visit Ken and Linda. Ken and Linda are a retired couple who originate from the north of England and have lived in this area of Italy for seven years. We wonder why Gabriele is so keen we should accompany him and his wife and son on this visit, for we have only ever met Ken and Linda once before.
There are a few false starts, first it was going to be Wednesday afternoon, but then no, Gabriele had to work Wednesday, maybe Thursday. Thursday passed with no word from Gabriele, then he turned up on the doorstep, could we make Friday? In the end it was Saturday afternoon when Gabriele, Grazia, Simone, Hilary and I squeezed ourselves into Gabriele’s silver Opel Corsa for a trip to visit Ken and Linda.
Wouldn’t they like to go in our car? More room. No, Gabriele will drive.
The Corsa drives down into the valley and turns left past D.U.M. There as usual stands Ricky and I give him a wave, but he does not see us as he does not recognise the car. I explain about Ricky to Gabriele and Grazia. I notice on our return from visiting Ken and Linda, Gabriele takes a more circuitous route, bypassing D.U.M.
We get the reason why we’ve been invited when we get there; Ken and Linda speak only the barest few words of Italian; we are there as translators.
They weren’t expecting us. Gabriele says he’d phoned, he probably had, but Ken will not have understood properly what Gabriele was saying. Gabiele had to shout to gain someone’s attention: ‘Kenna! Kenna!’ Seems we wake Ken and Linda from their afternoon nap.
Ken and Linda’s house is on the sides of a valley, down a rough and rutted steep track from the road that leads up to Falerone. The Corsa got down it with five people in, but we did not risk it getting up so laden. The house is quite remote, not large, they have a swimming pool in the garden, which Linda describes as an expensive luxury and a mistake. Small bright green lizards scuttle about the rockery, Ken and Linda frequently see wild boar and deer in the fields below them, they are kept awake at night by the croaking of the frogs in the stream below, and periodically they have to deal with snakes that they find in annoying places such as wrapped round the pump for their swimming pool.
But despite being in Italy full-time for the past seven years, Neither Ken nor Linda can really hold a conversation in Italian, and in this they are by no means unusual with the Brits who live either full- or part-time roundabouts. We by contrast, after a fashion, can; yet we’re only here for a few weeks each year.
Why is it then, that Hilary and I can speak considerably more and better Italian than nearly every other Brit in the region? We think one reason is that we live in a village; if you live in the countryside as Ken and Linda do you might see no one for days on end. You have to get in your car for your shopping and so will tend to go to a supermarket where you can silently pick things off the shelves. We by contrast walk to the local shops and have to ask for things and talk to people on the way there and back.
But perhaps the biggest reason is our motivation for being here. We bought our house in Italy for a very clear reason: it was to learn something of life in a different culture, and by being here to learn about that in some depth. To do that you really have to learn something of the language, for the language and its intonations are part of what makes people think the way they do.
There are many different reasons why British people live for all or part of the year in this part of the world, but very few of these people, or possibly even none at all, share the same motivation as us. Many would say that they like the open space, sunshine, the relatively low-cost booze. Many say, too, that they like the people, they find them kind and helpful and characterful, which indeed they are. Some say they have a kind of love affair with Italy. But that does not mean they see the need to learn much of the language, or, as you often hear them say, they would love to but find learning the language too difficult.
It is difficult. Very difficult. But still needs doing if you are to be able to communicate effectively and learn something new every day.
Gabriele finds Ken amusing and calls him pigro. I say ah, yes, I know that word but cannot just at this moment think of the correct English translation. Pigro, pigro, hmmm it’ll come to me. Probably I’ll wake up in the night saying, ‘Ah yes, that’s it, I remember now. Of course’.
Pigro means lazy. I chicken out. I cannot tell Ken that Gabriele is calling him lazy for in English that is not something you would laughingly and affectionately call someone. Presumably it is OK in Italian. I simply lie that I cannot remember the meaning of the word. Later on in the conversation Gabriele refers to Ken’s pigranza, laziness, but I am on the ball, I say to Gabriele that there’s that word again, the one I don’t know and will have to wake up in the night with a sudden recall. I try to think of a word in English that gets over the idea that Gabriele is trying to put across, but oh dear, I just cannot think of one.
At this meeting Hilary does really well, both of us are doing something approaching simultaneous translation between English and Italian – albeit not with complex technical words. Gabriele and his wife Grazia know that Hilary has Alzheimer’s but possibly do not recognise that that might make remembering Italian words difficult, and in fact this meeting seems to have been very positive for Hilary’s language recall, though she is not sure she could do it again.
On our return home from visiting Ken and Linda, as part of the winding detour, we call in at a garden centre, for Grazia has to get some plants for a do or function they are attending the following day, the Sunday. We travel back up the hill from the shop with blooms perched precariously on our laps. They’re a funny lot, Italians, complex. You can call them all manner of things, though whatever epithets they might attract, never would you ever think of pigro!
