It was serious I had been summoned. My landlady had to speak to me. I was a little worried. My Italian wasn't brilliant and my landlady spoke fast in between puffs on her cigarette. I entered her office. She and her husband owned a shop which was furnished with a small desk and a large TV. In the corner was a pile of, what to my untrained eye, was scrap metal and some tank-shaped objects.
If you had a problem with a gas boiler her husband could fix it, that much I knew. The shop was above my basement flat, (this was my second flat in Rome, my first alone) which meant that I could never avoid either her or her husband at any given time of the day as walking to the flat from the bus stop involved walking in front of the large glass window and usually open door. If her husband was there he could be found reclining in his chair, feet up on the table, watching some kind of talk show or soap, hidden in his natural breathing atmosphere of a thick cloud of smoke. The wife was sterner, more rigid and was usually at the desk on the phone puffing away as if she were a contestant in some kind of smokers' Olympics. Most of the time I dealt with her husband.
I walked up the steps into the office. She told me to shut the door. I did. I wondered if she was going to tell me I had to move out, or try to up the rent again.
"I need to talk to you about those people who were in your flat whilst you were on holiday. We do not want those kind of people in the building," were her greeting words as I sat in the chair opposite her. I was trying to follow her words, concentrating. Too slow in my answer, she continued, "they made too much noise, had loud parties and left a mess in the courtyard. The neighbours don't want people like that near their homes."
People like that? I protested, "What? My brother and his girlfriend!? They were animal sitting for me." It had been a convenient arrangement, I'd gone on holiday to Spain with a friend and they had come down from the cold North for a Roman holiday.
Besides, what was she talking about? Parties? My brother didn't know anyone in Rome.
She continued, "my husband had to come out at night, at night! ... to see what they were doing... he managed to convince the neighbours not to call the police..."
I was gobsmacked, not so much by the news that my neighbour was at the origin of the complaint, but at my landlady's attitude: "those people?", "all those foreigners?" My continued silence, I really didn't know what to say, prompted her final salvo: "never let people like that into the flat again." A wave of her hand followed with a final "you can go now." Her gaze turned towards the TV in the corner as she reached for the remote control.
The crux of the problem, in this case, was my neighbour. She had disliked me on sight. Her first words as I had come across her in the stairwell were: "Don't let the dog into the courtyard." Before I could answer, even introduce myself, she'd disappeared into her flat.
Later, she took to shaking her tablecloth over my terrace, often over my just-washed clothes that were drying there. And there was also her little habit of going to my landlady with whom she had a cordial relationship, and make up stories about what I was doing. Her dislike stemmed from the fact that I was a foreigner (and I had a dog).
Moving to another country, of course, meant adapting to different ways of doing things. For the most part they were little things such as shop opening times (small shops mean big lunch breaks), queueing rules (or not), food habits (absolutely no cappucino after 11am, and most certainly not after lunch or dinner).
It also meant getting used to the people, fellow Europeans so surely not that different, and how they communicated. Hand gestures, here, constituted a whole new and fun language to learn. Eventually I too started punctuating my words with demonstrative hand gestures. I'd cracked it, I'd gone native. Well, almost.
After a few years I began to think of Italy and Rome as my home. A sense of relief accompanied the moment the plane touched down. The background sound of people chatting was now as comprehensible as my native languages.
So it always came as a slap in the face when every now and again the words: "lei é straniera," were shot back at me as conclusive proof that I couldn't understand, whatever the issue might be. No amount of protesting, no amount of years, 10, 12, 15.... years, could ever erase the fact that in their eyes I was forever a foreigner. "No, veramente. Lei non puo capire." (no, really you can't get it).
What I couldn't understand ranged from the fairly trivial such as the above cappuccino rule (there actually is a logical explanation for it), to the amazement at the content of some TV programs, to pasta rules (I'll explain some other time), to the illogical, often incomprehensible bureaucracy, to the tortuous Byzantine legal system..... If I didn't understand, it was because I was a foreigner.
I wasn't the only one who experienced this continued feeling of dismay. I have a colleague who has been married to a Sicilian for over thirty years every time she goes to see her relatives in Sicily they call her 'la straniera' and in family conversations her husband is referred to as the one who married 'la straniera.'
Another friend lamented on a social networking site: Will I ever not be a 'straniera?' Yet another likes to think of it as almost a term of endearment as she makes her rounds of her local market. "It's rather sweet really."
After all, who could dispute the facts we were not born here.
No comments:
Post a Comment