Summertime in Genoa
So I’m back in Italy: Don’s service was last Wednesday, and by Friday everyone but me had left Charlotte. I flew out on Saturday, because I was fighting with the Chase Travel Center to reschedule my ticket; I spent most of the time on hold, not because I was waiting for someone to help me, but because the people who were helping me needed to get approval for telling me whether I was allowed to get a travel voucher and how much the value of said voucher would be. From the ammount of time it took to divide $1500 by 2, it seemed as though she had to go JP Morgan himself to get permission. I imagine, though, that they don’t trust the call center operators to do math, lest they give some wrong information and anger somebody. It was all extraordinarily tedious, and I ended up just buying another round trip—my plan is still to get the voucher refund, which I have to do before June 1st or so.
But I made it to Genoa by train, plane, and automobile—or rather, by automobile, plane, train, plane, plane, bus, train, and a fair amount of walking. It took about 18 hours in all, which wasn’t terrible. I went by a rather circuitous route—Charlotte–Chicago–Stokholm–Milan–Genoa— because it was the cheapest option at the last minute. It felt good to travel, though, and I sat next to a very nice gentleman on the Chicago–Stokholm leg: he was a Swede who had moved to the US seven years prior with kids aged 12 to 16; we spoke about my experiences moving back from Switzerland, and my father’s still being there. He was worried about maintaining a relationship with his children as they began to return to Sweden for university: he asked me about my relationship with my father, and I answered by saying that his absence was more his fault than the distance’s. This seemed to reassure Henrik, who was glad to hear that it depends more on the individual family members than on physical location. I think he already thought that way before we spoke, but he seemed glad to have the confirmation from the child’s side. I guess the kids are alright, or something to that effect.
In Genoa I’m staying in a hostel, as I have done for most of this trip. My first night I met some nice Netherlanders and Swedes (no connection) and we hung out before being joined by some Genovesi. These last were friends of the bar tender and got free tokens for the basketball arcade game in the basement; I was delighted to speak Italian with them, though I essentially abandoned my Northern European friends. I don’t know—the Italians were having a much more interesting conversation, and at a certain point I just didn’t want to speak English anymore. In my travels I’ve observed that speaking a foreign language when drunk and tired is much harder than sober and alert. Putting it that way it sounds obvious, but the effect it quite striking: frankly, I feel guilty for my English—it’s very good, because it’s the language my parents and I speak and the primary language of my education.
I think that it’s ordinary that people should want to speak their home language when they have the opportunity; it’s tiring, stressful, and limiting to be forced to speak in a language we’re less comfortable with. There’s an abstract desire to learn a language, but not everyone wants to be learning a language all the time; and since our competence in the language varies, it may be easier or more difficult to speak at different times. Sometimes, we just want to speak the home language; sometimes we want to practice a new language; often we’re just happy to be able to communicate however we can.
I met an Arabic speaker (Egyptian) who has lived in Italy for more than two years and speaks the language beautifully; we spoke Italian because I wanted to practice. Yesterday I saw him speaking Arabic with another person from the hostel, and he sounded so himself, so happy. I met a French speaker (Quebecois) and was delighted to speak to him in French; he seemed overjoyed to have found another Francophone. I met some Germans and a French girl who studies in Germany, and when I left the table, they switched to German. Between the three of us, though, the common language was English, which felt profoundly unfair (though the Germans didn’t speak French, so I don’t feel too bad). In some sense, I feel as though it is my duty to speak all of the languages, but they’re endless: even if I learned a dozen more languages, there would still be thousands of which I have no grasp. Even if I covered a large part of the world’s population by learning the top however many languages by number of speakers, I would still not be able to speak, really, to this person or that person: there’s just too many different languages, so there’ll always be someone I can’t talk to. The only way to meet a person is to speak to them in their language; maybe I exaggerate slightly, but I can see how different people are speaking their own language than they are when speaking another.
But frankly, I digress: Genoa is beautiful, and hot. It’s a very walkable, social city: it’s known for its vicoli, the narrow alleys crisscrossing through the city buildings. Most of the heart of the city is on tiny streets that can barely fit a car, tied together by paths wide enough for a single person at a time. Still, during the day it’s lively and colorful; right now I’m on a patio in the center of town that would be the snack bar at a pool if there were one, but it’s a café/restaurant instead. There are a heap of Italians reading, working, or hanging out. Over to the side a group of them are cutting out pieces for a model building—they’re working at a table covered in a sheet of paper that has the outlines of every piece they’ll need to assemble the model, grouped by section of the building; they’re cutting pieces of painted balsa wood and laying them out—next to them is the foosball table, in use. My neighbor at the table next to me just shut her human anatomy textbook; I suppose she’s probably in medical school. There isn’t much to see here (besides some extravaganzas in the harbor), but it’s a wonderful place to be. I mean to tell you it’s warm, but lovely. Vivaldi wasn’t from here, but I’m beginning to understand the Summer movement of the Four Seasons. Slow, languid, still; I met a Finnish girl who was travelling with her friend and staying in the hostel; we spent the day and evening together, and then I ran after her to say goodnight; I caught her in the hall outside her room: “why did you come?” she asked; I said, “I wanted to see you again”; close, hot, heavy; we stayed in an alcove of the emergency stairwell—the hallway wasn’t that private—till her friend got worried, then mad; now they’re off to another part of the country, and I won’t see her again; but we both have the Italian summer to melt in: calm, comfortable, safe.
