Once upon a time, long, long ago, Italians hated the telephone and feared it. A greenish-gray contraption the color of the cold war, il telefono sat in the hallway of everyone’s homes, banished from access to the ‘real’ rooms. Way back then, a blundering state-owned company called SIP strangled citizens with the country’s phone-line monopoly and its acronym was onomatopoeic, evoking both ‘insipid’ and ‘insidious.’ And the townsfolk did all they could to avoid dialing numbers on any day without holiday status. Otherwise, you could count on receiving a bill whose digits stretched from here to wherever you happened to be calling.
Perceived as a threat rather than technological advancement, telecommunications in Italy was founded on a single premise: nessuna nuova, buona nuova. A silent phone meant harmony for the whole of the house. This attitude reigned sovereign through the entirety of the 80s, and to me, it explains why Italians today still answer their phones with Pronto? an urgent one-word query that means ‘ready’ rather than ‘hello.’ The phone has rung. We’re ready: spread the bad news as if it were butter, and we’ll eat emergency as if it were bread. Long story short, for decades, the phone was the only place Italians didn’t want to talk to each other.
Times have changed, ovviamente. SIP operators became a thing of the past as semi-privatized Telecom took over and started paying 13-year-old assistants to do everything except assist you. And progress progressed. At present, mobile phones are stuck to our chins and cheeks with frightening frequency, like a chronic case of technological mumps. Those greasy touch-screen thingamajigs that should be anything but touched are in the hands and on the ears of everyone. And a whole slew of the country’s adolescents-who have very possibly lost all faculty of speech-currently speak a text-language made solely of consonants, employing enough x’s to make their messages little more than a series of cross-outs. If you don’t tutor a 15-year-old every Friday afternoon, then you might not know it yet. Perchè is now xke and ti amo has morphed into yu. It used to be ‘I love you’ until someone took the ‘love’ out because, as my student says, ‘it’s faster.’
Stefano, the boy who studies with me each week, brings homework on nautical engineering and Shakespeare’s Macbeth, two topics that are apparently more important than ordering off an English menu, a skill in which he has never been properly versed. I’m paid to teach him seventeenth-century Elizabethan drama and, as a freebie, he teaches me Italian-teen-text-shortcuts. And at the end of the day, neither of us know what the other is talking about. And Shakespeare? Well, either he’s rolling in his grave or thinking it’s a very fair trade.
Stefano’s story, which I will tell from here on out, did not happen ‘once upon a time.’ It happened just last week, when he threw his book bag onto my couch and produced a rather shocking statement: Sono venuto a confessarmi un pò.
Oh good, I love confessions. Besides, the boy is 15 and spring has sprung. Lady MacBeth is far less relevant than Little Miss Muffet. He had girl troubles, and because I smile hello and goodbye at the start and finish of almost every lesson, he considers me in some way a confidant. It took him almost an hour to explain why he had fought with his girlfriend. Not that I needed the reason. One of the only benefits of adolescence is that squabbles need no justification-at least until le mamme get involved.
Yes. Le mamme. I would say ‘mothers’ but le mamme are a step above mothers when it comes to implementing scary offspring-protection mechanisms. Apparently, the girl’s mamma scolded Stefano via text message for making her daughter cry, and the boy, struck by something you might call conscience, thought he would go over to her house and apologize in person (to la mamma) for having raised his voice.
‘Di persona?’ his own mother argued. ‘No. This is 2010. People don’t apologize in person. They send text messages.’
Because we are in Italy, his mother wrote the apology herself: le mamme can seldom refrain from such things, even in the year 2010.
So, there you have it. Stefano left his lesson as peaceable as a clam, but I’ve been sick about it for six whole days, overcome with a horrid sense of foreboding. The day Italians lose the ability to communicate a tu per tu, face to face, person to person, is the day the race dies. It sounds very dramatic, I know. But if you disagree, then call me up, invite me for coffee and let’s fight about it. An out-and-out chat between the real-life me and the real-life ‘you,’ as in ‘I love you.’ And by all means, let’s leave the ‘love’ in there. Sul serio. Stop alle telefonate e parliamone.
