Fluency
By Jacqueline Goyette
July 15, 2024
July 15, 2024
It's October and we are in Verona. We are walking across the bridge of the River Adige, and I say the word out loud as we walk: Ah - di - jay, adding my clumsy American diphthongs to the language of pure music. You correct me. You lean in and repeat the word so that I can say it with you, in your voice. Without meaning to, both of our voices rise like smoke intermingling floating up into the same sound. Of course that would happen here. Who doesn't fall in love in fair Verona? Love is written in its very stones, cut into the corners of the piazzas, carved into balconies, built into the arches of the massive Arena -- that ancient amphitheater, right in the middle of town, its Roman stones beating like a heart for the entire city to hear.
October in Verona is neither showy nor bold. The trees are not ablaze in crimson and gold like the ones back home in Indiana. My father sends me photographs of our street back home and the afternoon rain that makes the asphalt glisten. Maples and Sycamores hold their shimmer of scarlet and amber. The ginkgo drops its carpet of gold on the front yard in curly cues of leaves, a blessing for the year that remains. Verona has none of that. It speaks in fog tucked into the folds of the hills. In a few patches of color, thin threads of bright red leaves -- candy appled -- stitched into the landscape of green and brown. Here autumn, if anything, is built into the architecture of the city itself: the auburn bricks of the lofty Ponte Scagliero that spans the Adige, the palazzo facades painted honey gold and burgundy, with frescoes that fade into fall. The soft pink marble, smooth wide slabs of it, that pave the city roads. We count the ammonites that we find in the marble, each one curled up like the fallen leaves back home. By day's end, we are at 21.
October in Verona is neither showy nor bold. The trees are not ablaze in crimson and gold like the ones back home in Indiana. My father sends me photographs of our street back home and the afternoon rain that makes the asphalt glisten. Maples and Sycamores hold their shimmer of scarlet and amber. The ginkgo drops its carpet of gold on the front yard in curly cues of leaves, a blessing for the year that remains. Verona has none of that. It speaks in fog tucked into the folds of the hills. In a few patches of color, thin threads of bright red leaves -- candy appled -- stitched into the landscape of green and brown. Here autumn, if anything, is built into the architecture of the city itself: the auburn bricks of the lofty Ponte Scagliero that spans the Adige, the palazzo facades painted honey gold and burgundy, with frescoes that fade into fall. The soft pink marble, smooth wide slabs of it, that pave the city roads. We count the ammonites that we find in the marble, each one curled up like the fallen leaves back home. By day's end, we are at 21.
*
We were sitting at a table in the trattoria Da Ezio in Macerata when I told my parents about you. You may not know this. It was a Thursday night twenty-one years ago and we were at dinner. There we sat, just the three of us, eating forkfuls of gnocchi al pomodoro off of white ceramic plates. In the clink and clatter of our silverware, they asked me: “Are you two together?” Dad dug his elbows into the green paper tablecloth and leaned in: his eyes fierce. “It's not serious, is it?” I dropped my napkin on the white-tiled floor and ducked down in a nervous hush to retrieve it.
*
Language learning, they say, takes time. Anywhere from 400 hours to 2500 hours and sometimes even longer. Up to three months of intensive learning to reach 95% fluency. Some promise a quick fix: a week and you're fluent! Sign up today! There are websites that sell packages of language learning, one week at a time: pronunciation, grammar, vocabulary, you name it. Italian in six weeks, Arabic in two months, English -- complete with a native speaker -- in ten super-packed days! I sat on a cold wooden chair in East College Hall at DePauw University (six months before meeting you) and flipped through the pages of my Italian textbook, listening as the Italian teacher explained the strange sounds that are distinctly Italian. The GN in gnocchi and lasagna. The GL in biglietto (ticket) or in aglio (garlic). We sounded them out: bee - YET - oh: and my tongue, like it was taking its very first steps, tripped over all of the syllables and failed to say anything right.
*
When my parents realised that it was indeed serious, and that I had every intention of moving back to Italy so that I could marry you, my mother sat me down. She sat me down that very day, five months after the dinner in Da Ezio, a few months before I returned to you. We'd had a few talks like these, but not many. She'd seen me cry before about past boyfriends. She'd waited for me at the end of the day to tell me that I could find someone better. But this time (I don't know why) she liked you. She sat on the couch with me on that September evening with the curtains drawn and we talked. We talked and I cried about the life I was about to choose. About the how-tos. About the what nexts. “Jackie,” she said. She reached out for my hands and took them in hers, like a whispered prayer. “You should go. You should go where love takes you.”
We do not take the Shakespeare tour. Nor do we stop at Juliet's balcony to recite star-crossed soliloquies. Instead we walk to the church of San Zeno, in the farthest corner of town, past towering bridges that are fodder enough for fairy tales, past columns that twist into Rapunzel braids, past Roman city gates. San Zeno waits quietly in its pink and white facade. I've been here before, to see the Renaissance triptych by Andrea Mantegna that I fell in love with years ago: the festoons of fruit and flowers; Mary with her son sitting on her lap; Mary's halo that echoes the rose window of the church of San Zeno itself. I ask if you've ever been and you can't remember. Even as you say that, I can picture us here together. I remember my dad here too -- all of us wandering in the corridors of the cloister, admiring the stitches of crimson brick. Did it even happen? Maybe I've dreamt it up. In my head these memories do not have a language. It is only now, speaking with you, that I hear it. It gives voice to the pictures that float dreamlike in my head. It allows me to share them with you.
We do not take the Shakespeare tour. Nor do we stop at Juliet's balcony to recite star-crossed soliloquies. Instead we walk to the church of San Zeno, in the farthest corner of town, past towering bridges that are fodder enough for fairy tales, past columns that twist into Rapunzel braids, past Roman city gates. San Zeno waits quietly in its pink and white facade. I've been here before, to see the Renaissance triptych by Andrea Mantegna that I fell in love with years ago: the festoons of fruit and flowers; Mary with her son sitting on her lap; Mary's halo that echoes the rose window of the church of San Zeno itself. I ask if you've ever been and you can't remember. Even as you say that, I can picture us here together. I remember my dad here too -- all of us wandering in the corridors of the cloister, admiring the stitches of crimson brick. Did it even happen? Maybe I've dreamt it up. In my head these memories do not have a language. It is only now, speaking with you, that I hear it. It gives voice to the pictures that float dreamlike in my head. It allows me to share them with you.
*
The best language learning, they say, is immersive. Book your ticket now! Move all the way to another country! Sit on its wobbly metal chairs, drink out of its glasses, sleep on its lumpy mattresses in the name of fluency. Go to the grocery store. Get lost at the post office and try to buy stamps (just try), try to send a package home, try to exchange money (if you're up for a real challenge!). All of these will be minor victories, but they will seem major. And they are! Celebrate now. It will get harder later. Actual people, speaking all at once around you, all of their thoughts on display as you try to decipher, as you try to answer them, tongue tied. Sometimes (not all the time) it will wear you out, leave you in tears on the bed in your apartment on Via Gioberti when words don’t come, when entire conversations go unanswered. I wake up in the morning now to the sound of Italians on the radio, laughing in fits, telling jokes that I must strain my ears to understand. But I understand. Not all of it -- never all of it! -- but enough.
*
Love took me across two continents. Love flew me Economy class from Chicago to Rome, where you were waiting at the airport. Love took us to Macerata together, past towns that gleamed in the January sun, past castles perched imperfectly above us, peering down from their crumbling hillsides as we drove. Love took me head first into this life, a life with you -- an apartment and a kitten and a brand new language for me to learn and borrow. When my mother was dying, she sat with my father, hands in his at the square wooden patch of kitchen table that they had picked out together years before. She asked him if they could put those words on her tombstone. Go where love takes you. As if love could be stronger than the extra stuff. The in-betweens. The distance. Stronger than my grammar and your punctuation. Isn't that the truth of love? That it does not always speak to us in our own language. Perhaps it does not speak in any language at all.
You will never read these words. Not these exact ones, in English. You will never be able to hear them the way I do. You will never know the pen to paper, the tying up of loose ends, the way the language leaves my lips, pursed at times, open at others -- producing the hardened letters, then the softer ones. Nor will you know the way I meant for these words to go together. If there is poetry in them, it will be lost on you. I've learned Italian as best I can, and you've picked up bits and pieces of English along the way, and I've never asked more of you (nor have you of me). But still, we fight in fits of language lust, of longing for the words to come -- can't there be words that are just our own? I call you amore everyday. You call me your signora. We say I love you with ti amo (we always have). When I want to, I read to you. I sit on the hard tile floor beside you at the foot of the sofa where I can rest my arm and my shoulder against your legs. I translate for you. I say the words again and again, as best I can. And you lean in and listen.
You will never read these words. Not these exact ones, in English. You will never be able to hear them the way I do. You will never know the pen to paper, the tying up of loose ends, the way the language leaves my lips, pursed at times, open at others -- producing the hardened letters, then the softer ones. Nor will you know the way I meant for these words to go together. If there is poetry in them, it will be lost on you. I've learned Italian as best I can, and you've picked up bits and pieces of English along the way, and I've never asked more of you (nor have you of me). But still, we fight in fits of language lust, of longing for the words to come -- can't there be words that are just our own? I call you amore everyday. You call me your signora. We say I love you with ti amo (we always have). When I want to, I read to you. I sit on the hard tile floor beside you at the foot of the sofa where I can rest my arm and my shoulder against your legs. I translate for you. I say the words again and again, as best I can. And you lean in and listen.
*
We have left Verona now. We have the whole night ahead of us. Five hours in the car and I am reading you an article in Italian about the artist James McNeill Whistler, who we are studying together. They are paintings written in the names of music, each one. The portrait of Whistler's Mother is called Arrangement in Grey and Black No. 1. The fireworks over the Thames is Nocturne in Black and Gold. You drive: patient, awake. This long razor blade of a highway sneaks us past castles and churches and the smooth ribbon of coastline with its fierce and flowing waves. The night gathers in pockets. It gathers in corners. In the crevices of the hills and the shadows on the shore. The cities and their lamplights cannot compete with eleven o'clock at night. The stars peer down at us, and I read to you. I read each line, each strand. Pulling, pushing the words around, chess pieces of my voice moving through. It is tricky to read in Italian, and consonants get lodged in my throat, vowels spill too quickly off my tongue. It is late, I am tired. But I read. The tug, the choke; a whisper, a breath. You stop me when I say improvvisamente all wrong. It's im-prov-visa-men-te, you say. And here in the middle of the night, I repeat with you. We are fluent, you and I. My lips forming the words your lips are forming, doubling the v, tightening the t at the end. Two voices -- an echo. Then one single voice: Our own.
|
Jacqueline Goyette is a writer from Indianapolis, Indiana. Her work has been nominated for Best of the Net and has appeared in both print and online journals, including trampset, JMWW, Heimat Review, The Citron Review, The Woolf, Cutbow Quarterly and The Good Life Review. She currently lives in the town of Macerata, Italy with her husband Antonello and her cat Cardamom.
|
|
Author’s Note:
I had wanted to write a piece about language for some time, and “Fluency” came from a moment in Verona with my husband when I was trying to read an article out loud to him. We'd been studying art and sometimes I would read to him on drives, but always in Italian. Sometimes the Italian came easily and other times it was harder, the words would get stuck and I couldn't always say them right. I feel like the whole idea of language can be a metaphor for a relationship, for love, for the journey we are on. And so this piece really tries to get at my struggles with language and with living in a foreign country, and growing up -- watching my life change around me.
“Fluency” is one of my longer pieces, so there are a lot of lines that I like from it. But this line felt like such a valid question, in the midst of me trying to find out what falling in love in a foreign language meant, mixed in with just trying to figure out what love is: “Isn't that the truth of love? That it does not always speak to us in our own language. Perhaps it does not speak in any language at all.”
“Fluency” is one of my longer pieces, so there are a lot of lines that I like from it. But this line felt like such a valid question, in the midst of me trying to find out what falling in love in a foreign language meant, mixed in with just trying to figure out what love is: “Isn't that the truth of love? That it does not always speak to us in our own language. Perhaps it does not speak in any language at all.”