Note: The Italian alphabet contains twenty-one letters: j, k, w, x and y are absent.
A is for Andiamo
Pronounced: [Ahn-D’YAH-Moe]
Translation: Let’s go. Verb, plural.
Italian.
Yet in the Molisan dialect I have spoken my whole life we say
yammacheen. There is a great margin
for error then, for confusion and class system to enter into casual
conversations, trip up the tongue. I have this problem in two languages.
Witness the time I pronounced acquiesce as aqua-size,
making my roommate think a new class had been added to the schedule at the
nearby YMCA. Or when I said trapezing
but meant traipsing. “You can’t come trapezing through here whenever you feel
like it,” I say, accusing my boyfriend of being a Barnum and Bailey’s acrobat,
casually back-flipping and sailing through my apartment.
I have an intense connection to the
expression “Let’s go,” an attachment to the idea of: leave this place, go
elsewhere, come with me. I borrowed Eliot’s famous beginning from The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock—Let
us go then, you and I, When the evening is spread out against the sky—to use as a caption under my high school
grad photo, summing up my farewell thoughts in the yearbook’s allotted
twenty-five words or less. No “Keep in touch!” No “THANKS to A.H, J.K. &
G.T - YOU GUYS ROCK!!!” More a poetic invitation, let’s blow this popsicle
stand.
B is for Bonefro
Pronounced: [Bone- NAY-fro] noun. A village in Southern Italy, region of Molise.
Bonefro is
our beginning. According to my mother, this place gave birth to our fierce,
proud, better-than-everybody-else’s bloodline.
We go back to the
village for a summer the year I turn eleven. My mother’s health is
deteriorating and she is convinced the climate of her youth will offer the best
environment for convalescence. She wants to be close to her own mother.
Bonefro is tiny, chiseled out of the hillside, with
buildings covered in cool rock tile that offer some relief from the unforgiving
Mediterranean sun.
My Italian cousins find me curious. They find it difficult
to follow the conversation as my parents and I flip between Italian dialect and
mangled English in the same breath. Our speech is fragmented and sentences are
splintered over forgotten words or incorrect translations. No one notices the
problem until I ask Luisa to accompany me:
“Lu, yammacheen u – Papa,
come si dice store in Italian?”
My father doesn’t hesitate to reply, “Store è…is store.”
Luisa frowns. Store is clearly not how one says store in Italian.
“Wait minute…u sach è…I know is…” My
father is annoyed, frustrated that he cannot remember. He stares at the hand he
has just been dealt in the card game Scopa and asks my mother to assist. She doesn’t know, doesn’t care. The word is
gone, replaced. It’s not even on the tip of their tongues.
My
grandfather wins the round while my dad is distracted. Nonno shakes his head at
the floor and again curses Columbus for discovering America.