From the Fire Hills

The Subjunctive Mood

12 THE SUBJUNCTIVE MOOD When the Swedish girl, not even twenty, played the part of Chiara asking if I needed more pancetta for my Carbonara, I did not but said I did, that the water was rolling now eight minutes, salty and starched as the tide off Corpus Christi, where a month ago I waded with someone I had no intent to wait long for. What did I know of Carbonara—some Roman affair named for the coal miner’s wife waiting for a husband’s return from the underworld, the dish formed with cheese Boccaccio praised, and yolks from the eggs of turmeric-fed hens, pasta requiring the subjunctive mood: hopeful like the wife summoning her man back to bright street markets wearing the raiment of capitalism and cancer and a hunger for her? And yet I am there at the unearthing, the excavation of that distant fall in language school, descending again to advanced conversation and the Swede hip to grammatical gender, those green-blue eyes and ease with which she conjured cappuccino. I rose from the intermediates—a military brat from Canada who always tanked declensions, the Japanese girl shuffling in her flip-flops— to the Bundesrepublik of third level, overrun with Germans, a Gothic Line of dative case and remote past wizards. 13 How I envied their constant voiceovers, hushed collaborations, conspiratorial, the rush to resuscitate a fellow national gone cold midsentence, while I waded through the murky dialogues with no intermittent oil lamps of linguistic aid, no native speaker tugging the imaginary rope I wanted to be tied to and with, whose name, were I to choose, would have been Courtney—some fine American strain to follow to the surface. Instead, I pined like a coal miner for that Swedish girl and any comprehension of the scenario, for then Chiara and I priced oleanders for the garden, and Salvo at the nursery was a giant prick pushing the camellias instead. This, a situation the Germans mastered, grabbing Salvo by the scruff of his patently southern dialect to conjugate a bargain out of him. All the while, their subtle, simultaneous translation transformed our textbooks into some chic, far-flung district of Berlin in summer, where every flower offered its bloom in the proper tense, and the dogs all barked in Swedish. And it is not because the Germans saved themselves from shame dressed in silence, though that is what I thought then, but rather the opposite: that they could never know the gasp, the suffocating precision of my ignorance in that language class, in Bologna, and the odd love I felt for the Swede and the Chiara inside her, wondering which of the two labored harder, and for Salvo: a stereotype in my book, hopeless lover of the slow Mezzogiorno, who must hate the barbarians in the gutters 14 of their gutturals, their glottal stops and fricatives. Salvo: some character whose name even means he is saved, means he wears as work only loam, spared the mines from which his brothers or cousins, bathed in a second kind of night, returned to wives—call them all Camellia—whose pity reeked of pork fat, who cracked the eggs, grated cheese, and spoke only in the simple present, daunted by the irony of the subjunctive, a difficult mood, botched even by natives, implying hope, yes, but also doubt, fear, and the marigold’s nauseating blush. ...