The little black dress
was invented to make fancy hotel dinners bearable, even when the table is too
wide to attempt to talk across it. Parties like these are called ‘functions,’
and diners usually butter up their nearest neighbors rather than buttering
their own bread. If you’re a pro, you act blasé and speak of art installations
made from the spokes of recycled 10-speeds. Ground-breaking projects dangle
from everyone’s fork like restless spaghetti, and names drop like rain
pattering above canopied tables, mild but insistent.
I love
black dresses, lo ammetto. But sculptures made with flat tires and banana bike seats
are a mystery to me, ammetto
pure quello. It would take a
zillion lines to explain exactly how I got to attend a big-wig party like last
week, but the point is short and sweet: getting there was a cinch compared to
actually being there. Next to the other guests, I was a pee-wee golfer in the
pro leagues. I had not founded a life-saving charity organization or
entertained Russian dignitaries that morning at breakfast. Most days, managing
to make the bed sometime before mid-day is triumph enough. Not that shyness was
the problem-language teachers who spend half their lives making small talk with
students are not intimidated by strangers at parties-the issue was more one of
authentic inferiorita.
Our
host recognized it right away. Signor Ferruccio, who I’d met only once before,
had married a Spanish duchess of sorts, but he was un gentiluomo in
his own right-in spirit, if not by birth. Seventy years old and unashamed to
look it, he has nothing of the politician about him-only diplomacy, pure and
simple. Thus, as I approached the table, he promptly invited me to sit beside
him. No one but a true gentleman would ask the lowliest guest to take the seat
of honor.
As
we exchanged initial pleasantries, I hid my worry behind the pillow-case-sized
napkin spread over my lap. ‘Senta,
signora,’ he said once I was settled, ‘Do you see
that man over there-il
dottor Pietro Casagrande?’
‘Over
there’ meant directly opposite his place setting, but our crystal and cutlery
made it feel frontiers away. ‘Yes,’ I nodded. Mr. Casagrande was an elegant
banker type with thick-framed glasses and a suit that was worth a whole month’s
rent on the posh side of the river.
‘In inglese,
his name would be ‘Peter Big House,’ is that right?’
I
smiled and felt a surge of something like love. It’s the diplomat rule: to make
people comfortable, talk about what you’re sure they know. A single question
and he’d already won me over, tapping into language fun, life’s most
inexhaustible fuel source. Not even the wealthy can resist the simple pleasure
of inglese maccheronico. And even more happily, Mr. Big House’s surname was the
first of the very long guest list that kept us entertained until our
post-entrée salad. Mr. Ferruccio’s wife, Maria del Mar Torres, smiled at ‘Mary
of the Sea Towers.’ a lovely mermaid-sounding name that probably made her want
to stay married. I too, was lucky. ‘Clean Hawk’-his loose translation of
‘Linda’ and ‘Falcone’-pleased me quite well. There’s nothing like an
Indian-scout name to mark the beginning of a beautiful friendship.
Forging
new relationships in Italy is an out-and-out linguistic concern, as sentiment
and formality trip over each other trying to determine which ‘you’ form feels
best. ‘Dare del Lei,’ which literally translates as ‘Giving of the she,’ refers
to the Italian habit of treating strangers or respectable individuals with a
studied sense of distance. An odd sort of trick that English speakers are
generally slow to embrace, it entails talking to someone as if he were not in
the room at all.
‘Mi puo dare del tu, se vuole,’ I
told my host, midway through the second course. The suggestion was spontaneous
and a mistake. As the older, more prestigious person, he was supposed to initiate
any informal ‘you’ use.
He
smiled and looked at me kindly. ‘Preferisco
sempre dare del Lei. Some say it’s a
dying habit and those who do, are happy about it. Not me.’ The common custom of
using the informal ‘del tu’ with foreigners irked him, he explained. ‘Everyone deserves a bit of ceremony.’
Then he paused and thought a moment, ‘Lei ha mai tolto il tu a qualcuno?
Have you ever taken the ‘informal you’ away from someone?’
‘You
mean, demoting them back to stranger status?’
‘Yes.’
‘I didn’t know you could.’
‘Of
course you can,’ he said solidly. Then, he leaned inward, confidential, ‘Se lo ricorda,
Clean Hawk. The day you do, you’ll know what true power is.’
I
gave a small smile. It was a good night. Authoritative advice and an
Indian-scout name, used with del
Lei.
Perhaps
this function could even be called a party.
