Unquestionably, our rekindled friendship benefitted me. The girl from Milan managed to definitively find firm footing and her new life settled into a revitalized backdrop, rich in details. I didn’t risk writing about her, though. I still didn’t feel like I had the right tools. But one day, in glottology class, I discovered that the professor thought that transcribing a famous prose passage into phonetic writing was an excellent exercise. It could be a short story or a page from Promessi sposi or one from I Malavoglia. I recall a few lines from a well-known fable: “I due litiganti kom’vennero alloːra ke ssarɛbbe ritenuːto pju ffɔrte ki ffosse riuʃʃiːto a ffar si ke il viaddʒatoːre si toʎʎesse il mantɛllo di dɔsso.” That exercise proved to me that even the most elegant writing profited from being enriched with phonetic symbols, and so I practiced often and eagerly. I planned on becoming an expert in the language and using it to write an avant-garde story about the girl from Milan, based on my memory of her unparalleled Italian.
Meanwhile, however, the time was fast approaching when I would have to buckle down and study, which is to say memorize long passages in textbook Italian by reciting them out loud. I wanted to begin my university career with the glottology exam, and then immediately after, I’d take papyrology. But when I went to buy the books and lecture notes at the Libreria Scientifica, I learned that the professor’s whispering and mumbling had deprived me of one important bit of information: not only was the exam based on the toponyms of Abruzzo and Molise, but we also had to fill out five hundred index cards in phonetic writing, each one dedicated to a different word in Neapolitan dialect.
I went home and shut myself in my room, I stopped seeing Lello and even Nina for a while and resigned myself to hard labor. I realized that the task meant collecting linguistic material in the very moment it was being spoken. I realized that, first and foremost, I’d have to put aside my own way of hearing in order to transcribe other people’s speech without bias. I realized I’d have to go out into the fields and talk to people who were busy tilling, find a way to get into the farmer’s shed and the old witch doctor’s hovel, weasel my way into the mountain hermit’s hut and artisan’s workshop, and extract words from the mouths of random people—more or less resistant to any form of intellectual discipline—whom I encountered on my wanderings as an aspiring glottologist. I realized that the job entailed finding out if the speakers had ever left their native villages, if they had only and always spoken in dialect, if they had all their teeth and perfect hearing. I realized that my own ears needed to be free of obstruction so that I could detect all the consonant sounds uttered by my interlocutors, especially split and doubled consonants, as well as the entire range of open or closed vowel sounds. I realized that I’d have to invent subtle tricks to get people to talk, people who were naturally shy, sometimes simple, often mistrusting, and occasionally nasty. I realized that I’d have to repress the air of books that surrounded me, hide my papers and pen, and win over the trust of people who were unreasonably suspicious of having their words “etternalized.” Finally, I realized that to prepare for this task, I would have to draw on my own knowledge of dialect, show that I could sidle up to unsuspecting folk, and prove I had acquired a high level of competency in transcribing the phonetics of Neapolitan. My task, if I wanted to pass the glottology examination, was to fill out those five hundred index cards as best as I could.
I don’t want to exaggerate because eventually I grew to love the very questions and problems I mention above. But, on first impact, I have to confess that it felt like the exam was a debasing of the university, academia in general, and phonetic writing in particular. I thought I had been rising toward an oral and written Italian that was far more elegant than the one used in secondary school, and I had even started formulating promising notions about the complex relationship between speech and sign. Instead, to get my university degree, I was forced to lower myself, and ask the highly uneducated—which is to say people who spoke a dialect that hadn’t been corrupted by Italian—the word in Neapolitan for, let’s say, the hoop that goes around a wine barrel, a cow’s teat, the verb used for draining pus out of a boil, or what a person would say to a loose woman, exposing myself to the risk that my informers, struggling to make ends meet despite their advanced age, would say, get lost, guagliónummerómperocàzz.
Why did I have to waste my time like that, digging around in a language I had known since birth and that had caused me, over the years, more than my fair share of problems with teachers (“You’re saying it wrong, you’re writing it wrong, that’s Neapolitan, you don’t know how to speak Italian, you make too many spelling mistakes”)? Only a few weeks earlier I’d been wondering how to immortalize—because that’s the function of literature, Mr. Benagosti had said once after revealing to me that he, too, was a poet—the gracious figure of the girl from Milan by having her speak in writing exactly how she had spoken to me at the fountain. I had wanted to use phonetic writing to reproduce her delightful language as well as I could. But now everything had been downgraded, now I had to go and bother old men and women and ask them for the name of, let’s say, the kind of basket they were weaving and when they replied cuófeno, I’d have to use my new signs and symbols to write down cuːofənə. How idiotic, what a total waste of energy. Was I really renouncing the pleasure of seeing Nina to complete this childish task of filling out index cards?
I was in a terrible mood when I caught sight of my grandmother. As usual, she was standing at the stove, a withered Vesta next to her sacred fire. After our most recent conversation, she had retreated into her role of attentively tending to my each and every need, whether it was providing me with clean socks or a glass of water, her determination compounded by the fact that I had shut myself in to study and therefore she could be my servant around the clock and I her distracted lord. I interrupted her musings with a startling announcement: Nonna! Good news! The university needs you.