We ended with the kiss. My grandmother fished around for more words, couldn’t find any, and declared that she had said everything there was to say. While retreating with my index cards into the small room where I studied with the door closed, I heard her singing with surprising vigor, carefully pronouncing the endings: vento, vento, portami via con te. Then she stopped and I don’t recall ever hearing her sing again.
I often thought back to her nostalgia for kisses. Maybe I kissed Nina hurriedly. Her eyes and her mouth bewitched me, but I was always overcome with desire for other parts of her body. If my grandmother still remembers her husband’s kisses after forty years, I told myself, maybe kisses are important to Nina, too, maybe she wants to be kissed more often and with greater intensity. I had no time to remedy the situation, though; as exam day was fast approaching, I talked to her rarely and saw her even less. At that point in time, I was concerned more with the oral cavity not as it pertained to lovers but for the sake of glottology. I had to memorize charts and be able to distinguish all different kinds of consonants: bilabial, labiodental, dental, dento-alveolar, retroflexed, palato-alveolar, alveolar-palatal, palatal, velar, uvular, pharyngeal, laryngeal. And while this lexicon gradually and increasingly erased Nina’s mouth, I found that it increasingly had me thinking about the mouth of the girl from Milan, what hers would’ve been like if she’d been able to grow up and utter occlusive, nasal, vibrant, fricative, semi-vocals, and vocals in the same elegant tone that she used when she spoke to me at the fountain. Who can say what she would’ve gone on to study, in addition to dance, of course, maybe modern literature and languages, or maybe ancient languages, like me. We could’ve discussed phonetic writing together, we could’ve talked about Boehmer, Ascoli, Battisti, Merlo, Jaberg and Jud, and Forchhammer. And in the meantime, who knows, I might’ve enjoyed kissing her (or rather, ˈkɪsɪŋ hɜr) and whispering sweet nothings into her mouth while she whispered them into mine, ad infinitum.
Now and then I stepped out of my room in a daze and tried to call Nina. When I managed to find her at home, our conversations usually went like this:
“How’s it going with algebra?”
“Fine. How about you with glottology?”
“Studying hard.”
“Are you done with your grandmother?”
“Yes.”
“Want me to come over?”
“Better not, I’m behind on the toponyms of Abruzzo and Molise.”
“Do you still love me?”
“Yes, what about you?”
“Yes.”
Then one day she said, “I talked to your friend. He’s having a hard time with math.”
“Ah.”
“I offered to tutor him.”
“What about your algebra exam?”
“You do a lot of tutoring and still study. So can I.”
“But I get paid.”
“Actually, he wants to pay me.”
“When will you start?”
“Tomorrow.”
“Will he come over to your house?”
“No, it’s too noisy here. I’ll go to the cemetery.”
“You’re going to give him lessons in the chapel? Next to the burial niche where he keeps his bread and salami?”
“Yeah. I’ll make a little money, and it’ll also be fun.”
It upset me but I didn’t say anything. She seemed irritable and I didn’t want to argue. My imagined cemetery annoyed, but a real one was fun. For the first time, I noticed the Neapolitan cadence in her Italian. Like me, she sometimes Italianized her dialect (for example, when she thought I was playfully teasing her, she’d ask, “Mi stai sfruculiando?”). Like me, she often used Neapolitan syntactical structures in Italian (for example, she’d say “Quello è lui che mi prende in giro”). Like me, she had a hard time holding onto the vowel endings of words (for example, on the phone she always said “Prontə” instead of “Pronto”). I went back to my books thinking that if I wanted to write with absolute truth about our relationship, and therefore also about our conversations, the resulting text would be twisted, corroded, readable by few, and impossible to translate; the opposite of what was required to fulfill Mr. Benagosti’s prophecy, which saw my works traveling from city to city, country to country, language to language, appreciated by millions of readers.