They say learning a second language guards against cognitive decline.
From childhood I exclusively identified with my father’s Italian heritage, and not my mother’s Polish. I formally started learning Italian comparatively late, though as a child I could somehow communicate with my Italian immigrant grandparents, who spoke very minimal English. If the brain researchers know something, I might have a shot. Once a good friend and I were in a fabulous enoteca in the Tuscan countryside. Everybody calls him “Primo” after a character in that funny, sad, nostalgic movie Big Night, which is centered on two restaurateur brothers anticipating the arrival of the then-popular singer Louis Prima (whose presence would advance the restaurant’s reputation, but who in the end, spoiler alert, never materializes); it is equally centered on the creation of a timballo, an incredibly elaborate and delicious pasta and pastry concoction that (trust me) you need to free up a couple of days in order to construct. Our enoteca owner had zero English, but we were emboldened and we jabbered self-assuredly. Then a fairly gorgeous, statuesque, blonde German woman sauntered in, overheard our nattering, and ventured in Italian with a crafty smile, “You guys speak pretty good Italian.” We preened and tut-tutted, modestly full of ourselves. She proceeded to qualify precisely what she meant: that we spoke pretty good Italian “per Americani.” Sheisse, fräulein, auf wiedersehen. Nowadays, after ten years of studying, in classes and with private tutors and by frequent travels and after matriculating at language schools in Italy and California, my Italian skills are receding by the day. I can feel the loss, to my mournful disappointment and sadness. There must be a suitable aria to sing from Puccini, because isn’t there always? I hope the loss is temporary, fleeting. Once I had pretty good command of the two past tenses and the fucking ridiculous subjunctive (which they call the fucking congiuntivo, don’t get me started). I rambled through books by Alberto Moravia and Italo Calvino and Natalia Ginzburg among other great writers in the original Italian. For fun, I powered through the Italian translations of The Great Gatsby and Catcher in the Rye, which might have constituted dirty pool on my part, because I knew every English sentence by heart already. As I studied, I could easily draw on idiomatic expressions from my brain’s linguistic ATM. In class I could venture an R-rated joke in Italian my endearing Italian teacher chuckled over. (My teacher, who was amused and who herself had very little English, once memorably mentioned that she had recently done some excellent shopping in a store she called Bed, Bath, and Behind, which name I think should be adopted immediately.) My wife is off the scale when it comes to language. She can speak in many tongues, so she is very useful in airports (and everywhere else), and her French is absolutely perfect (so I have heard a hundred native speakers tell her). Her Italian accent isn’t quite as good as mine, but she can communicate effortlessly in Italian. Only now my Italian is like an overconfident swimmer who has swum out too far from the Mediterranean shore, swept gently along by the caressing tide. I’m hoping the currents will turn and bring it back to me someday. That would be a lifesaver.
They say learning a second language guards against cognitive decline.
•
Movie clichés of the Italian home: big, bombastic, boisterous feelings, usually of rage and injured merit. Platters of pasta and sausage. Reeking garlic sautéed in the pan. This was my grandparents’ home, but it was not my Greenpoint home. My mother didn’t really cook Italian, and she would sooner eat glass than garlic. My Polish mother’s stock take on the whole Italian thing: “They’re all fucking barbarians, these Italians.” I didn’t care what she thought, I mean I did care because she was my mother, but I wanted to be a barbarian like that.
•
Some friends of mine got married in Rome on a beautiful June night. He is Italian, she is Canadian, they met in Paris, and theirs was a lovely wedding and a great celebration at a museum. In case you ever wondered about an Italian wedding party, rest assured that no Judd Apatow or Adam Sandler movie bromance ever threatens to break out. The food and wine are better than the typical catered American event. People dress better, too, all of the guests looking effortlessly, almost thoughtlessly stylish. But hand an Italian guy a mic at the reception and, surprise, he doesn’t croon like Dean Martin or Andrea Bocelli. Because Italian wedding toasts are pretty much on par with the toasts at your second cousin’s postprandial roasting in Philadelphia or Seattle—remember high school, remember his old girlfriend, remember when she threw onto the street his T-shirt collection…
At this wedding, there was one remarkable development. During those endless, repetitive toasts, a news flash shuddered through the assemblage like mainlined gelato headache. Two guests, a man and a woman, had been come upon in the women’s bathroom and, umm, interrupted, right there in the act, in flagrante. Both of them married, too. That’s not the unprecedented part. There are a lot of Italian movies with a scene similar to that—could be tragic, could be comic, you never know for a while in an Italian movie. Yet here at this wedding the Italians were horrified. Also not unusual: their theatricalized horror. Italians do high dudgeon with the best Turkish rug traders, who are fake-insulted by your daring to bargain.
No, the Italian wedding guests were horrified, not because these two wedding guests were cheating, randy married people, but because they were married to each other. The act was conjugal. What, had they no connubial dignity? Did somebody lose a bet? Why didn’t somebody think of the children!
The band was cued, and the night went on. And on. Like in Philly or Seattle. With better food and wine.
•
Probably obvious, so apologies, but to review, in case:
Ciao, bella: used familiarly to address a female.
Ciao, bello: used familiarly to address a male.
In other contexts, where you might risk sideways glances after presumptuously saying ciao to the wrong person, you cannot go wrong saying Salve (hi or bye) or ArrivederLa. But you save the Arrivederci, or the sweeter Ci vediamo dopo (we’ll see each other later), for more familiar contexts.
It might indicate something profound, or at least comforting, that ciao means both hi and bye. Something about the fluidity and mutability of time and social circumstance, which the Italians know all too much about. Or maybe it’s simpler: it’s such a universal, perfectly supple mouth- and ear-pleasing word.
•
Italians love their automobiles; Fiats seem to outnumber pedestrians on the thoroughfares of Rome, where I was once struck by one—another story. During the World Cup every Italian is certifiably pazzo for soccer, but racecar driving is right up there, too, in the fanatical national consciousness. Ferrari and Lamborghini and Bugatti and Maserati and Alfa Romeo—these are iconic, stunning, jaw-dropping vehicles and hundred-mile-per-hour works of art.
For as long as I can remember, I yearned for an Italian car of my own. It’s awkward to own up to such an adolescent fantasy, but there it is, and it isn’t my sole adolescent fantasy, as was transparent to my exes if not yet to you. In any case, much later in life, I realized I might be able to make this fantasy come to life.
Now, the hedonic research indicates that happiness proceeds not so much from possessing things as from enjoying experiences. I got that. But driving a certain kind of Italian car would be an experience disguised as a thing. So perhaps one day I could get lucky, could swing a deal for a used one. And it would be all-right-just-give-me-my-speeding-ticket-already flame red. Ideally it would not merely be fast, but gorgeous.
According to his estate, my father had bequeathed me his newish upscale Japanese car and some cash. (Long before he passed, I had seized the keys and his driver’s license, and parked the car at my home, where he couldn’t gain access to it; his doc determined that in his impaired state he was a danger to himself and others behind the wheel.) His Lexus was a very sound car, and practically in mint condition, except for the series of door dings and scratches accumulated in his bumper-car senescence. Unexpectedly, I had to process complicated emotions. I didn’t want to keep his car; it wasn’t my kind of car. No disrespect, as New Yorkers offer before being disrespectful. But was I being disloyal to his automotive memory? And to my mother’s? The personalized license plate did read CAZA, which was her nickname, short for Cashmera.
I wasn’t sure, but two years after he died I decided to go for it. Parlaying the trade-in with the inherited small cash windfall, I had enough to buy an Italian beauty, and it was fast, too. Onlookers thought it was a babe magnet, and it sort of was, but it was maybe more of a teenage boy magnet.
Fathers and sons, men and boys, and their cars: this whole book might be a footnote in a study of the subject.
I took possession of the dream about a month before a buddy’s father passed. Billy’s big Irish family counted as a kind of second home to me in high school, and I always liked his folks and his brothers and sisters. In fact, three of Billy’s sisters sometimes babysat Mario when he was a little fellow, and all of us guys cultivated chaste crushes on these adorable colleens. The last time I had seen his now-deceased dad was at the funeral for his mom, a couple of years before. Bill Senior may have been in the advanced stages of dementia, but when I approached him to express my condolences, before I could get out more than a word or two, he said, with a wry smile and question mark, “Joe Di Prisco?” We shook hands and that was the entire, moving exchange. Billy couldn’t believe his dad’s memory had kicked in for a moment.
The family was holding an Irish wake in a Catholic church across town on a Friday night. Italians and the Irish, Irish and the Italians: both susceptible to ethnic stereotypes. Irish invented talking, Italians invented never shutting the fuck up. Poets and brawlers, both. Both cops and mobsters, sometimes simultaneously. Stereotypes may come in handy, as each contains a germ of truth. Therefore it takes a fool to subscribe. Italians and Irish. They are exactly the same, only completely different. Though only one has a cuisine. But I wouldn’t dare say as much in that gathering.
It was a dark and stormy February 6. This meant a memorable anniversary for me: the date on which my beloved brother Eddie died in 2002 in New York City, and also the date on which my beloved dog, also named Eddie and also now dead, was whelped in 1998. The most direct route to the services for me was over the hills, Wildcat Canyon Road through Tilden, the beautiful regional park. It might be unwise driving in such tempestuous weather, but the car had such fabulous traction, perfect for blustery conditions, and I could not resist. I could also rationalize it needed to be run out—there were few miles on the odometer.
Once on my way, true to form, the car was handling like a thoroughbred, with assurance and command on the twisty two-lane roads devoid of all other traffic. Huge winds were gusting and rain was pouring down, a catinelle, as the Italians idiomatically put it, in buckets. It may have been crazy, driving up here in a gale, but it was exhilarating as a roller coaster ride.
I made the wide turn, coming around a blind, as I approached Inspiration Point, and…
Have you ever watched a hundred-foot-tall pine tree crashing down in your direction? Me, either, till that night. It was a surreal vision. I slammed the world-class brakes and came to a stop a mere couple of feet in front of the tree. Funny thing about the flood of adrenaline—it doesn’t jack you up, it slows everything down, and you become preternaturally calm. It was the next day that reality slammed home and I sought out the Valium.
What if I had been driving five miles faster? No doubt about it: one second, maybe a half second, away from a formerly pristine and now scrap-heaped Italian car, and its crushed Italian American driver.
If things had turned out differently, I could imagine the eulogies delivered by my wiseass friends. Talk about luck of the Irish. What kind of mook gets permanently pancaked on the way to a funeral? Leave it up to a crazy Catholic, giving up the ghost on the way to honor the deceased. And after all his close calls and risky moves throughout his life, it was a tree that took out the guy. A fucking tree. What a sad, sad waste—of such a gorgeous car.