Intermezzo

By Lauren Mouat

The stories in this collection center on moments of change, of crossing the threshold, of going through the gate. Some characters experience the fragmentation of making a home in a foreign land, speaking new languages, of falling into or out of love, or of growing up.  The parallel text itself is a reminder that there’s always another way to see the world and to tell a story.

I racconti presenti in questa raccolta sono incentrati su momenti di cambiamento, del valicare una soglia, passare oltre un cancello. Alcuni personaggi sperimentano la frammentazione che creare una casa in terra straniera comporta. Alcuni si innamorano o si disamorano. Altri crescono. Il testo a fronte ci ricorda che c’è sempre un altro modo per vedere il mondo e di raccontare una storia.
 

• Language: English
• Publisher: Ali Ribelli Edizioni
• Release date: May 28, 2022
• ISBN: 9788833469959

Book preview

intermezzo_fronte.jpg

Intermezzo

di Lauren Mouat

Direttore di Redazione: Jason R. Forbus

Foto di copertina di: Luca Misuri

Progetto grafico e impaginazione di Sara Calmosi

ISBN 978-88-3346-995-9

Pubblicato da Ali Ribelli Edizioni, Gaeta 2022©

Narrativa – Intrecci

www.aliribelli.com – [e-mail]

È severamente vietato riprodurre, in parte o nella sua interezza, il testo riportato in questo libro senza l’espressa autorizzazione dell’Editore.

Intermezzo

Lauren Mouat

AliRibelli

Contents / Indice

Introduction

Prefazione

Parliamo

Parliamo

The Boy in the Diving Mask

La Scomparsa

I, Me, You, She

Io, me, te, lei

No Heroes in These Hills

Niente eroi su queste colline

I’ve Lost My Left Foot

Ho perso il mio piede sinistro

Ghost Story

Storia di fantasmi

The Strangers

Le straniere

Acknowledgements

Ringraziamenti

To Henry

A Henry

Arriving at each new city, the traveler finds again a past of his that he did not know he had: the foreignness of what you no longer are or no longer possess lies in wait for you in foreign, unpossessed places.

Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities

Arrivando a ogni nuova città il viaggiatore ritrova un suo passato che non sapeva più d’avere: l’estraneità di ciò che non sei più o non possiedi più t’aspetta al varco nei luoghi estranei e non posseduti.

Italo Calvino, Le città invisibili

Introduction

The stories in this collection center on moments of change, of crossing the threshold, of going through the gate. Every character finds themselves in a liquid, liminal space, where what they once were has dissolved, but what they will become remains unformed.

Some characters experience the fragmentation of making a home in a foreign land. Some fall into or out of love. Some grow up. Others experience the changes to self and identity that are attached to speaking more than one language or of trying to understand not simply the definitions of foreign words, but that more elusive part of communication—the meaning of what’s behind them. Having the collection in parallel text allows a reader to skip from one language to the next (even if just for one word at a time) and therefore out of one reality into another. There’s always another way to tell a story.

When learning a new language, one must beware of false friends, those words that look familiar but turn out to have an entirely different meaning than the expected. The Italian straniera seems like one of those words; for while it looks like the English stranger, it actually means foreigner. But the English word strange comes from the same root word of the Latin extraneus meaning that which is on the outside. Not that far off from the meaning of foreigner, one that is not from here, someone from outside the confines of the familiar walls, the village, the territory. Those borders between what is close to home and familiar and that which is other and strange can also be borders within ourselves—we all construct our stories, our narratives. What happens when we open ourselves to looking beyond those familiar edges, to redrawing the lines?

I wrote the stories in this collection in the space of ten years, between when I moved to Rome and when the events of 2020 were dismantling and reshaping my reality like that of so many others. I moved to Italy many years ago and, like the false friends between English and Italian, it took many years before I began to understand just how different our cultures are—on the outside they appear similar, but the differences lap up on the shore one ripple at a time, barely leaving a mark in the moment, but over time eroding and reshaping the shore of my identity into a new landscape, one that leaves me neither local nor foreign, neither here nor there, but always in between.

In these middle spaces between one form of being and another, one language and another, reality is something moldable, changeful, bordering on magical in the sense of the word that is beautiful or delightful in a way that seems removed from everyday life. These are the moments of intermezzo—the bridge, the act between two greater acts, when anything is possible. Letting go of the known can be surreal, even terrifying, but in this territory lies the possibility of new life, new understanding. It’s the realm of metamorphosis, the realm of transformation.

Prefazione

I racconti presenti in questa raccolta sono incentrati su momenti di cambiamento, del valicare una soglia, passare oltre un cancello. Ciascun personaggio si ritrova in uno spazio liquido, liminale, dove ciò che erano una volta si è dissolto ma ciò che diverranno resta informe.

Alcuni personaggi sperimentano la frammentazione che creare una casa in terra straniera comporta. Alcuni si innamorano o si disamorano. Altri crescono. Altri ancora sperimentano i cambiamenti di sé e dell’identità legati al parlare più di una lingua o al tentativo di comprendere di più che le semplici definizioni di parole straniere per cogliere la parte più sfuggente della comunicazione: il loro significato nascosto. Il testo a fronte consente al lettore di saltare da una lingua all’altra (anche solo una parola per volta) e quindi da una realtà all’altra. C’è sempre un altro modo per raccontare una storia…

Quando si impara una nuova lingua bisogna stare attenti ai «falsi amici», quelle parole che sembrano familiari ma che rivelano avere un significato completamente diverso da quello immaginato. «Straniera» è tra queste parole in quanto un parlante inglese le attribuisce il significato di persona non conosciuta quando realmente, in italiano, sta a intendere «forestiera», ossia una persona proveniente da un altro Paese. Del resto la parola inglese strange deriva dalla stessa radice del latino extraneus che significa «ciò che è fuori». Non distante, quindi, dal significato di straniero, di qualcuno che non è di qui ma proveniente da fuori i confini noti del proprio territorio. Il confine tra ciò che è vicino casa e familiare e ciò che è altro e strano può trovarsi all’interno di noi stessi: ciascuno costruisce le proprie storie. Che cosa succede quando ci apriamo a guardare oltre quegli orizzonti a noi familiari, ridisegnandone le linee?

Ho scritto questi racconti nell’arco di dieci anni a partire dal mio trasferimento a Roma e continuando fino al 2020, quando gli eventi pandemici hanno smantellato e rimodellato la mia realtà come quella di tante altre persone. Mi sono trasferita in Italia molti anni fa e, come i «falsi amici» tra lingue diverse, sono occorsi molti anni prima che iniziassi a capire quanto le nostre culture differissero: all’apparenza sembrano simili ma le diversità lambiscono la riva un’onda dopo l’altra; in principio lasciavano a malapena il segno ma col tempo hanno eroso e rimodellato la mia identità in un nuovo paesaggio: né del posto né straniera, né qui né là, ma sempre nel mezzo.

In questi spazi intermedi tra un modo di essere e un altro, una lingua e un’altra, la realtà è qualcosa di modellabile, mutevole, al limite del magico nell’accezione di qualcosa «capace di trasformare gli aspetti e le dimensioni del reale, secondo modi fantastici e nell’ambito di una atmosfera incantata». Questi sono i momenti di intermezzo: il ponte, l’atto tra due atti maggiori, quando tutto è possibile. Lasciare andare il conosciuto può essere surreale, persino terrificante, ma in questo territorio risiede la possibilità di una nuova vita, di una nuova comprensione. È il regno della metamorfosi, il regno della trasformazione.

Parliamo

It was always a question of language, Daniel believed, that caused his parents to stop speaking. His father, who spoke to him only in Italian, spoke less and less to his mother in English and she, an American, refused to speak Italian more and more. Gradually, they both reached a state not of not wanting to talk to each other (they claimed) but of simply being unable to.

Per ragione linguistica, tendered his father; linguistic reasons, explained his mother.

They never fought. They never shouted or cried. Theirs was a cold war and language its weapon, both its use and its absence.

Com’é andata a scuola oggi? his father asked.

Bene, Daniel answered.

And how was school today, Daniel? his mother asked.

Fine, Daniel answered.

It often seemed easier to say nothing at all and so Daniel resided in soft yellow afternoons, in mornings of clinking silverware, in evenings and nights of descending silence. Sometimes his ears rang with it and sometimes he felt that if he didn’t say something, he might forget how to speak entirely.

Don’t you think Daniel’s too big for that sweater? his mother remarked to the space above the empty dinner plates one evening. Daniel’s clothes had always been mailed in special packages from his grandmother in Italy who had laid up a collection of centuries’ worth of tight undergarments and wool sweaters, passed down for generations.

It’s really too hot for grandma’s wool clothes, she said.

His father’s eyes scanned the paper (he had La Repubblica delivered) without so much as an upward flicker.

We’ll have to buy some new clothes so he looks a bit more . . . would she say it?

His father leaned back in his chair. Took a sip of water.

American. Her voice shot across the room like a slap. She’d said it.

His father was re-buttoning his sweater.

Daniel broke in. I like new clothes, he said to his mother. E anche quelli vecchi, he said to his father. It was the empty words, Daniel felt, that always smoothed a wrinkly situation. His father continued reading the paper and his mother sipped a glass of wine and everything was ok again, he thought.

He prided himself on these moments when the tremors of impending conflict began to strain and warp the foundations of the room and nobody else knew how to stop the cups from rattling. Only he could look into the heart of the problem, the molten center, and say the right thing, in the right language, that would settle everything back into place.

They had met on a cruise ship, his parents. Pompeii, the Colosseum, Michelangelo’s David, and the canals of Venice in 36 hours . . . or at least it felt like it, she’d joke. Blonde-haired and red-lipped, she’d been swept off her feet by the charming tour guide standing on the pier in Naples. That wasn’t Daniel’s father. Daniel’s father was the one she met at the bar onboard after she’d been teased beyond belief by the guide who waited all day, until the bus ride back to the cruise terminal in fact, to reveal that he was, so sorry to say, married. She’d ordered a spritz and rested her hands on either side of her drink, looking at all the pretty rings on her fingers that meant little to her and the slivers of marble in between them. At least everything in Italy is beautiful, she said, without a smile.

It’s not real marble, said the barman. This would be Daniel’s father. It’s made of marble dust, compacted with glue. And when this news appeared to be close to breaking the young woman’s heart even further, he added, Our next stop is Rome. In Rome, go to the Cathedral of St. Peter in Chains and touch the columns. They are ancient. From Greece. They are both beautiful, he smiled, and real.

In Rome, his mother skipped the Colosseum to go to the Cathedral of St. Peter in Chains. She had touched the columns and thought of the barman’s honesty and his beautiful blue eyes. She was not a silly person. She was someone who believed in dreams and romance and magic. She’d been searching for these things her whole life. That’s why she’d come on this expensive trip. At the end of the cruise, she stayed. She lived with the Italian cruise ship barman with literary ambitions in a flat overlooking the rooftops of Monti. She learned Italian and they made love on the terrace and he wrote poems and stories and they danced in gardens. When she got pregnant, they got married and moved back to the US. A child couldn’t be raised on fields of sunflowers and cold marble and blue grottoes and music in bars and poetry. These things were for lovers, not for children.

After the conversation about the clothes, his mother took him to Target where every T-shirt was emblazoned with either a sports car or a meaningless word. Since he didn’t care so much for cars, Daniel chose one that said Bob Marley and one that said All-American Trucking and