Learning A New Language; Or Calling a Nun a Whore

In July of 1974 I found myself in Castelfranco Veneto, a large town northeast of Venice. The “old” medieval part of the town was encircled with a moat and crenellated walls while the circular road around those walls was surrounded with renaissance (or later) buildings, most with archways (called “portici” in Italian) over the sidewalks.

We were staying at the Albergo (Hotel) Roma, just off the main square. Astonishingly, the hotel is still there, although greatly changed. At the time it was a middling affair, mostly catering to business travelers.

This was where the reality of my changed circumstances truly hit me.

My parents and I had originally arrived in Italy on June 24th. We landed in Rome and proceeded to travel for a few weeks, visiting many famous locations while making our way to the north of the country.

As my father was working in Castelfranco, we settled into the hotel while the search for a more permanent home was underway.

I spoke not a word of Italian, and vividly recall the radio (RAI Uno) talking, talking, talking over every breakfast we had at the hotel. It all sounded incomprehensible to me, but over the next few days and weeks, words started to surface from the jumble of sound. There is a great scene in the movie The 13th Warrior where the protagonist, an Arab, has just begun his journey with the “Northmen”. He does not know their language, but in the act of intense listening he begins to understand. Although it wasn’t that easy or quick, the scene reminds me of that Italian radio.

My father, likely through gentle coercion, had some younger women from the company “volunteer” to take me around. I was 16 years old, and they were in their early 20s. I found them sophisticated beyond measure. Their names — Loredana, Tiziana and Isabella — still remain with me. Fashionably clothed, wearing unbelievably high-heeled platform shoes, they drove Fiat 500s with unsynchronized clutches that required a toe-heel double-clutching technique when changing gears.

I later acquired my own Fiat 500 and learned how this was done. First you depress the clutch with your left foot, place the gear shift in neutral, and with the clutch still engaged, you use the toe of your right foot to brake and your heel to give the car some gas. Then you move the gear shift to the desired gear and pop the clutch.

These incredibly agile young Italian women executed this task while wearing vertiginous platform heels, speeding through traffic and keeping up a steady stream of conversation with accompanying hand gestures. I was utterly entranced. Oh yes, this — this was glamour.

I was less entranced with the clouds of mosquitoes. Although the moat may sound romantic, it was a sluggish, polluted, and shallow waterway, home to billions of mosquitoes. By sunset, the sky was filled with the little droning creatures and with thousands of small bats who would feast upon them.

The mosquitoes were everywhere at night, and as no windows had screens, they were everywhere indoors as well. In the morning you would find many of them on the walls and ceilings, stuck there completely satiated and engorged with blood from their nightly feeding. And I would awaken to lumps that seemed reminiscent of medieval paintings portraying the buboes of the plague.

In any case, the young ladies took me around the town at night, and we would sit for hours with their friends at an outdoor café, talking into the small hours of the night. The group decided to help me learn Italian, teaching me expressions and what I later learned was salty vernacular.

Fast-forward a week or two later, and I found myself having an emergency appendectomy. When the anesthesiologist put the mask over my face, he told me to count backwards from 100. Being a stupid teenager and completely muddled by the circumstances, I asked if I should count backwards in English or Italian. The whole room started laughing and someone said that English would be fine.

I later learned that when coming out of surgery, but still under the effects of the anaesthesia, I had been in some pain and was cursing loudly in the hallway. Apparently, I kept yelling “Jesus Christ” and the orderlies would then launch into a resounding chorus of “Jesus Christ, Superstar” which was quite popular at the time.

Later I was placed in a room with a nun who was also recovering from surgery, but who was more mobile than I was. I needed to ask her to get me something but was completely unsure how best to address her. “Signora” (meaning a married woman) seemed inaccurate, “signorina” (meaning an unmarried girl) also seemed inappropriate. I did not know the word for “sister”, but then recalled a female form of address I had learned at the bar with my sophisticated friends. They told me this word was used when one was unsure of the marital status of a woman. That seemed perfect.

I then called out “mi scusi, troia”.

“Troia”, I later learned, means “slut”, “whore”, “sow” or a low-class streetwalker.

Oops.

The kindly nun turned around and looked at me with eyes of the size of dinner plates. She pointed to herself and said “sono una suora” – “I am a sister”. And then, with delicate courtesy, fetched whatever it was I had wanted.

If ever I needed motivation to learn the language, it had been given to me that day.