We had our routines by then. I used to pick her up at Mathematics, she’d wait for me at Papyrology, and she often accompanied me to the Cortile del Salvatore, where Glottology was held. Back then it felt like I loved her more than any of my classes, so I was almost always late to my next class because I wanted to spend as much time as possible with her.
Glottology wasn’t crowded but nor was it entirely deserted. If I was late, I had to sit in the last row. Generally speaking, if you sit in the last row or the first one, it doesn’t make a lot of difference, but this professor—who was around fifty, and therefore in the prime of life—spoke in such a soft voice it was as if he had decided to teach only the people sitting in the front row. He leaned towards his most faithful followers and trilled delicately but indistinctly, sharing his rich linguistic and etymological knowledge, ignoring those of us who arrived late. In fact, after straining our ears for the first ten minutes, we always gave up and spent the remainder of the class getting to know each other, sharing phone numbers and addresses, and organizing dance parties.
I managed to overhear something only on the rare occasions when I obtained a seat in the second or third row, which was when I discovered that the professor was especially interested in the toponyms of the regions of Abruzzo and Molise, in particular those formed by two nouns or by a noun and adjective, such as Monteleone or Campobasso. But I also learned that language is in constant flux, that voices sound and resound in many more ways than the twenty-six letters of the alphabet can communicate, and that there was a constantly growing need to invent more letters; for example, there was a strange -z, a thin capital -s, and a backwards -e.
Even more than in Papyrology, I only needed to hear a few comments and off I’d go on a tangent, as they say. The proof lies in my notebooks from that first year, chock full of frenzied notes. Abruzzo and Molise—places I had never seen—became detailed landscapes of smooth or craggy or jagged rock faces, filled in the springtime with huge swathes of green leaves and flowers, and striated with dark or yellowing bare branches in the winter, always slashed through by strips of grey-blue falling water that went on to flow between the mountains, across the valley floor, occasionally getting lost in flat bogs or dark grottoes, but for the most part becoming gurgling, rolling, foaming streams, dappled by the variegated songs of birds and the hum of voices rising from human settlements that huddled here and there in warm and sunny spots, either on a mountain or in a valley or in a clearing near the ravines or by cascading brooks and rivers, by ditches, canals, willow trees (whose branches were used to make baskets), and pools and dams and weirs, by brush and scrub, the sterpo and its metathesis streppo, so that when humans encountered each other, they started saying I live in the valley, I live on the mountain, I live by the river, and so on, from one generation to the next, they and their descendants going on to live in places that were named after geographical formations: Vallocchia della Grottolicchia, Solagna della Foia, Stroppara di Fosso Vrecciato, the very same way that we lived in Naples, Nea Polis, the new city, and how we marched down the Rettifilo, a taut line, or sat around bored at Mezzocannone, which to my mind meant half, a wartime weapon that shot half-sized cannonballs.
But I have to admit that I was more interested in language generally, in the way sounds are formed by windy tempests inside oral cavities, in the way sound waves broke into infinitesimal fragments against the teeth, in the way most of the flowers of the voice blossom in the air only to wither without ever getting transcribed, while others find a place within the alphabet, and yet are short-lived and never entirely stable: one scribble chases away its predecessor merely because the scribe was Emilian or Calabrian or Neapolitan and pronounced things differently than the Tuscan or Ligurian, so, for example, etterno became eterno, sanza became senza, schera took on an -i and transformed into schiera; with the abandoned forms falling tragically into nothingness, and all this taking place back when it seemed that the sun would never set on pen and paper, when erudite people confidently and clear-headedly wrote out etterno with beating heart, by candlelight, and then—just like that—one -t is gone, considered superfluous, to the extent that if today you write etterno, somebody will circle it in red: spelling mistake.
I also learned how phonemes are classified, and discovered that -a -e -i -o -u was really nothing more than a children’s song, and that, actually, vowels are much more complex: there are the basic ones (-i, -a, -u) and there are the middle ones (-e and -o) and that the combinations of -i and -a or -a and -u are, in theory, infinite. When writing the letter -i, what specific vibration was I referring to? Where exactly does my tongue go? And when they get written out, aren’t those signs (-i, -a, -u) inherently flawed and deficient? Don’t they leave out, precisely because of their inadequacies, imperceptible phonic alloys and all the colored filaments of voice? While the professor lectured, I saw silvery layers of sound—I’m still copying from my old notes here—get chiseled away by the movements of the tongue in the mouth, I saw articulations and explosive bursts of breath more colorful than those illustrated by Rimbaud in his sonnet about vowels. And then I discovered that all those alloys, all those long-ignored colors could be captured with phonetic symbols. That alphabet came as a true revelation to me, and when the professor wrote out some of the symbols on the chalkboard, I felt a surge of optimism: ð Ɯ Ɵ ɱ ʕ ʯ ɸ ʂ ç ɹ ʝ. I couldn’t wait to master them and figure out how to adapt them to my literary goals, and even invent new ones, if needed.
Back then I used to get excited easily. I’d start to sweat, and blood pounded through my veins. The next time I saw Nina after one of those classes, I wrote down: ę ẹ ö ü ɛ ɑ ɔ ʉ. She replied with a look that said: ?