The Letter

I'm starting to get back on track here, we are alll sleeping at normal times now, even Livia. Now when I start singing "Baby Mine" she puts her head on my shoulder for a moment and pats my back, then sort of straightens up, looks at me as if to say, "You are still singing?" and then tries to free herself from my arms to drop into bed. And this is when I've barely sung the first verse! Guess my singing is worse than I thought, though Giulio likes me to sing the whole song anyway. I've also started running again, eager not to let go of the endurance I worked so hard at pounding the hot streets of downtown Cincinnati with my brother, and after the heat of the mid-west the cool air here makes running feel really easy. Something has changed since I first came to live here. Six years ago when I would try and go running around town I would get these cool looks from people like, "Whatever you are doing, please don't do it around me." I would occasionally see the odd dedicated, weathered male jogger about but otherwise I felt so conspicuous, like I was doing The Wave at a funeral that I joined a gym so I could do my running in peace, free to sweat as much as I liked. The memory of these stares has kept me off the streets and in the gyms for over six years now, rarely, if ever venturing out into the open air to pound the pavement, but in the meantime suddenly lots of people, at least in Northern Italy, have taken up running. And not just men either, women too, young, old, middle aged. Yesterday was a gorgeous day, the sky swept clean by the strong breeze which shows off the Alps to its' best and clearest advantage, and running down country roads with meadows and cornfields all around me and the sun warming my back was, well, let's just say, Cincinnati it was not. Maybe it was the good weather but I couldn't get over the scores of people I saw out running, including people running in packs. I felt like something out of The Wizard of OZ, Glinda the Good Witch waving her wand and telling us joggers to "come out come out wherever [we] are..."
Terry, my downstairs neighbor, has her sister Marta, Marta's two children, and Marta's dog staying with them for the week. It also turned out to be a blessing for me to have them because each morning this week and next Livia is doing "orientation" at her new day care center. As this daycare will have to be a topic of its' own posting I will leave it for now, but in any case I couldn't take Giulio with me so he's been staying downstairs with Eugenio and Marta and all the kids until I get home around 12. Giulio doesn't start school til Monday, but as he loves Terry's daughter Vanda, he's really enjoyed playing with her and her cousin Federica in our yard each day, and so when Marta asked me if I would be able to help Federica with her English summer assignment I quickly agreed.
This was not the first time I have been asked to help with homework. Occasionally, late in the evening there will be a quiet knocking on our door and Vanda or Stefano will be standing there clutching an English textbook and smiling sheepishly, needing help on a homework exercise. Once my neighbor across the street asked me if I would mind translating her niece's account of her class trip to Rome. Apparently she was expected to tell all about it in her 8th grade English class and just didn't feel up to the task. While I did suggest that if this niece didn't feel up to it then she probably often didn't "feel up to it" when she was in class and therefore the teacher would certainly know when the girl who had probably never used the past simple test correctly in her life suddenly presented this gramatically correct essay using all kinds of tenses, including ones she had never even been taught. Not to worry, my nieghbor said, showing me a neatly handwritten report, the niece would just be so relieved if I could do it! In the end I agreed to do it, though not because I think it is OK for an adult to do a child's homework for them, but because, as many of you are painfully aware, I never know when a babysitting emergency might strike and it might be good to have a favour owing from this woman. Ten days later she rang my bell and over the intercom told me that the niece got an "Ottimo" on her homework. Good to know that college education was good for something!
Federica's summer assignment was similar, the topic of so many back-to-school essays the world over, What I Did On My Summer Vacation. I was pretty sure I knew what to expect from Federica; a dull, straight forward account of her summer, most of it centered on her two weeks down in Calabria at her grandmothers. I told Federica just to write the letter like she was writing to someone in Italian and not to worry about translating it, we would do that together. The children and I were invited to lunch at Terry's house today, and as we were cleaning up the remains of the lasagna it came out that Federica still hadn't written the letter much to her mother's despair. "At this point," she said to Terry, "I will just let her get the bad grade at school and let her deal with the consequences." Terry snorted. "Is that what you want?" she asked her niece, "Nice way to start off the school year. Haven't even done your homework for the first day. You don't have to tell the truth, you know. Make something up, keep the teacher interested. Say you went all over Italy, seeing the amazing landmarks of each region. That way your teacher will know that you know something about history and geography too." In the end, with Terry wrangling the girls it was decided that at 2:30 Vanda and Federica would come upstairs to me, Vanda would keep Giulio entertained and I would help Federica with her letter.
At home I got Livia down for her nap, put a DVD on for Giulio, and went to work attacking my week's ironing, including one of Lorenzo's uniforms. (Do policemen's wives in the US have to iron their husbands' uniforms or do they have a laundry service?) At precisely 2:30 there was the timid knock announcing the girls' arrival. I should mention a little about Federica, she is two years older than Vanda, so she will be going into the eight grade this year and she seems like a nice enough girl, a little on the heavy side, polite, nice to Giulio, doesn't talk back to her mother, but very quiet around me.
"You got your letter?" I asked.
"My Aunt Terry wrote it."
An act of love? Or an aunt not knowing her boundries? I still can't decide but Terry's love/inability to respect limits filled two pages, single spaced. The letter started out Dear Chiara, and went on to tell a lively (fictional) account of Federica's fun filled 24 hours in Rome, complete with a tour of the Coloseum, breakfast in a "typical and characteristic Roman bar", a shopping spree in the Porta Portese market, and dinner at "quaint and delicious trattoria." Great attention was paid to what was eaten at meals, Pasta all'Amatriciana and a typical Roman dish involving fish at the trattoria, a cornetto and a frothy capuccino at the bar. Then it was back in the car and onto Calabria where they drove through the night, arriving in time to find that Grandma had lunch all ready. (Tagliatelle with tomatoes and peas, oven roasted potatoes, and fresh mozzarella.) Days passed on the beach taking cool, refreshing swims, and evenings spent at the outdoor candy stands that sold cotton candy before walking around with girlfriends through the town, engaged in wonderful conversations, until Mamma, sometimes passed midnight, called her home to bed. The letter closes with "Federica" saying she could fill a whole book with all the interesting things she had done that summer, but unfortunately dinner was on the table and getting cold so she had to sign off here. While Federica did spend two weeks at her Grandmother's, one would have been hard pressed to get even the barest details of her vacation out of her, and there was something remarkably touching about this hearty, epic letter complete with its detailed accounts of meals, as though it was the vacation Terry wished her niece had actually had, rather than the quiet, hum-drum one that had passed in its place. And now I was going to have to translate it.
My plan had been to see how much Federica could say on her own, and then help her shape that into complete sentences, but it turned out, in part because of the wordy text, that there was little if nothing that she could get out herself. When I help Vanda she always manages to come up with some possibilty of the answer, heading in the right direction if not immediately completely correct. Federica chocked on the first word and never recovered, though maybe she never had it in the first place, starting the opening sentence with "This summer..." and writing "this" as "dis." With my eye on the clock and an actual paying student coming within an hour, our little translation exercise quickly became a dictation exercise, a long tedious one at that. Part of the problem was that Federica had great difficulty spelling in English, perhaps nerves, or being unfamiliar with my pronounciation, or just not really knowing what I was trying to say, but whatever the case "and" kept showing up as "end", "at" as "et", "the" as "de". Due to the length of the letter and the waning time I found myself writing whole sentences myself without explaining what I was writing, and as she didn't seem very interested or bothered to know why something was written the way it was, I kept on doing it. When we ended with Love, Federica I reminded her again that "and" always starts with an "a", she nodded, took the letter, said thank you, and fled. The letter, written by her aunt, translated into English by her Aunt's neighbor and without a trace of the Real Federica will fool no one, but at least she did her homework for the first day. I'm hoping for another "Ottimo."