IL FATTO BELLO

Spy Game

by Linda Falcone (issue no. 101/2009 / May 7, 2009)
Il fatto bello della settimana. Moments from everyday Italy

Every Sunday morning, a foursome of ladies in their eighties comes to squawk beneath my windowsill as if they were seagulls looking for bread. Actually, only two are seagulls. The other two flit rather than swoop-and to be fair, their comments sound much more like chirps than shrieks. Nonetheless, they gather there, looking for a crumb of scandal. And they usually find it before I've finished flossing my teeth on the other side of the bathroom window. This week, I had them wondering where, oh where, the name label on my doorbell had gone. Had the rain made it too limp to stick, or had I departed and decided to rip my name away? My shutters, they sighed, were so frequently closed that no one had even a peek at me for weeks.

 

 

And that, my friends, was their Sunday-morning scandal and my Sunday morning success story. It does not take much, after all, to start the day immeasurably satisfied with oneself. I come from a country where ‘spy' is a profession, not a pastime, and they come from a place where ‘private eye' is nothing more than an oxymoron. Because while James Bond is English and Inspector Clouseau is French, in Italy, it's the common man who's prone to suspect that someone out there is not telling the whole story and that someone may just be you.

 

Try, if you will, to get on bus number 14 with one of those free daily newspapers that were made to go straight from the printing press to the rubbish bin. Before you make it halfway home, six peeping-paper Toms will be hovering around your reading space as if you held the only restaurant menu and they were hungry and hell-bent on ordering breakfast.

 

If any of us actually had to pay for one of those papers, we could blame their sneaky peeks on the economic crisis and the need to save two euro on the daily news. Or if there were a scrap of real news in that whole army of words we could even admire their need to be updated before getting off the bus. But the truth is, neither of those excuses apply. In this country, people peek because there's some secret spy game going on: someone's certainly hiding something around here and maybe your paper will prove just how many hot potatoes are boiling in each one of our pots.

 

In the end, I've de-cided, that Italian living is especially fashioned to foster all the skills that make for great investigation. Even plugging in the iron on an ordinary morning can spur a scout-out session reminiscent of a search for where the booty's been stashed. Where is that small-prong German plug you need to activate in your otherwise Italian iron? Trust me. Without super-scope intuition, you risk a three-hour rummage through top-shelf shoe boxes full of five other adapter varieties that somehow plug into nowhere. Thus, while suspicion is certainly a driving force in this country, intuition becomes equally essential.

 

Get yourself lost in the city one day and you'll find proof of that pudding. Finding someone to give you directions on an entirely innocent afternoon is like finding an eye witness who can actually recall who really said what on the day the crime occurred. Unless you can correctly guess the hometown of every casual passerby, you have virtually no hope of being pointed the right way. You see, usually, instead of giving directions, Italians tell lost people all about their hometowns. ‘Oh, I'm sorry,' they'll say quite apologetically, ‘I'm not from here. I was born in Grosseto.' Ask a lady from Livorno how to get to Piazza Santa Croce and her 26 years in Florence won't help you get anywhere past Brunelleschi's dome. Only people born in the city have a real right to give directions. In Siena assisting the disoriented traveler may even be a medieval birthright. Thus, the only fast cure for a bad case of Lost lies in one's ability to intuitively understand just who owns the place.

 

Four days after my recent Sunday revelation, my theory was thoroughly proven. Once a week I suffer though an hour-long English lesson with a smart man who actually pays me so that he won't have to cooperate. In efforts to spark constructive debate, I'd brought him a watered-down ANSA-in-English article about a ship full of illegal immigrants being rescued in international waters.

 

‘I can't tell you my opinion,' Riccardo protested. ‘I don't know the facts.'

 

‘Well, then just tell me what you think based on the facts that are in this article.'

 

‘But, how can I know that it really happened that way?' he frowned.

 

I grinned back and it was worse. ‘You can't. So how about we just fake it for half an hour? It's either international maritime law or the future perfect progressive.'

 

‘Okay. How far were they from the Lampedusa port, did you say?'

 

Riccardo is a smart man. Too smart, in fact. But I suppose you have to be to survive in this land of saints and sailors. A bit of healthy suspicion, loads of intuition and an eye for subtle detail is just the ticket. And yes, the threat of English grammar, works quite well, too. After all, James Bond didn't come from nowhere.

 

 

Teacher by profession and writer by necessity, Linda Falcone is celebrating her fifteenth year of Italian living. Author of Italians Dance and I'm a Wallflower and If They Are Roses, she delights in experimenting with both poetry and prose. Only the grocery list should never be written.

find out pick-up points

Features

 

Articles

 

Special Issues