Vaguely Listening to Something in Italian Played through an Intercom

46 Vaguely Listening to Something in Italian Played through an Intercom Tony Hoagland One more Saturday night and you’re by yourself again, standing in a restaurant on College Avenue holding a slice of pizza in your hand, and reading the giant menu on the flyspecked wall, when halfway through the song, the words start creeping into your head because if you are not mistaken it seems the singer is addressing Solitude and not only that & he’s thanking her for holding him so close last night, for touching him in places that only she could reach— You decide that loneliness must be a more developed art form in Italy than in southeastern Texas, and from the little you know of opera, that seems quite possible what with all those fat men getting up on stage to yodel out their mamma mias, their antipastos, and solo mios. You have never been to Italy, but you can comprendo that redollent mixture of beauty and suffering. You too have ridden the ferris wheel alone, and hung on tight in that difficult moment of watching the waiter remove the second set of silverware. 47 Tony Hoagland And now you remember the slice of pizza in your hand, and notice the shape your teeth have cut out of it, how anonymous that bitemark is, how poignant and forlorn. Already you can tell how empty you are going to feel when the song is really over and you are back in this ordinary pizza parlour with the plastic Parmesan dispensers and its vulgar North American flies. You thought for a moment you had understood something about suffering, how it exists for a reason; but the insight was just like your life, which slips out of your grasp each time you think you have a grip on it, which hovers like a mist in front of you, then drifts away— always a little beyond your comprehension, always a little hidden— which, as any real Italian could tell you, will always be the case with something in translation. ...