A Semester Abroad

by Papa, Ariella

  With Olivia, it was all good, though. Fun, funny and distracting. She was more my speed. And she had a way of making me cheerful. She was full of plans and happy to be in Italy. I began to enjoy the way Olivia’s voice got raspy when she had too much to drink. We smoked and ordered more alcohol to help communicate with those bold boys who talked to us. It was easier than class. The bartenders always understood what I wanted, unlike the rest of the shopkeepers.

  I would have felt like a third wheel with them if it wasn’t for the developing relationship between Suzie and Kurt. One night Olivia and I followed Suzie around the town hoping to run into Kurt “accidentally”.

  “I’ve had enough of American boys,” Olivia whispered to me as Suzie turned purposefully into the piazza. “We’re in Italy now.”

  As if to confirm it, I stopped in front of the tower. I grabbed Olivia’s arm and pointed up. Around us, everything was spinning, but the tower above loomed large and stable, behind it twinkling stars. We looked at a picture of this tower back at school when we discussed programs, when we didn’t know each other. But it became our reality. I looked to see that Olivia felt it, too. I wouldn’t want to experience that moment alone.

  “We’re here. We’re really here.”

  “We’re in Italy,” Olivia said, getting even happier. She was jumping up and down; she was drunk. She was hugging me. Suzie was on the other side of the campo, but we didn’t mind. “We’re really here.”

  During the days, in spite of the harsh temperatures, I spent a lot of time just walking on my own, following the curves of the steep narrow streets until I could find my way back home from almost any point. I found a café on the other side of the campo. The proprietor at this café was a bleached-blonde woman who stood behind the bar with tight jeans stretched over her stomach. The proprietors said dimmi when people came to their establishments, but this woman made it sound sexy and confident.

  This became my place where I could sit at a table and write in my journal. I wrote letters to my friends back home and to Kaitlin, who hadn’t yet left for Paris. I sent them the address at the school, Università per Stranieri di Siena, because none of us could figure out how to get mail at our apartment.

  Of course, I never wrote to Jonas. Well, I wrote to him, sometimes, but I never sent the letters.

  To my friends, I tried to sound happy. I said optimistic things, things I didn’t necessarily feel about learning the language. I wrote about the colors of the buildings, the way I felt like I had stepped back in time. I invited them to come visit me, made plans to meet up with some of them in foreign capitals. I wanted everyone who watched me slip into a depression to know I had been cured of him. I wanted them to believe that I was over my addiction, rehabilitated.

  One night Olivia and I went to the cinema. Suzie was at last having her night out with Kurt. The movie was my suggestion. I saw the theater on one of my walks. I liked the idea of sitting alone in the dark surrounded by people. We chose some British flick neither of us had seen.

  Almost as soon as the film started, I realized that it was a mistake. They don’t subtitle in Italy; they dub. There was no respite from Italian, no translation. Maybe if we went to see a blockbuster with more action than dialogue we would have been okay, but of course the movie was really talky and all the talking was in a language I didn’t really understand.

  Other people did though; everyone got it but me. They were laughing all together at the same moments, sharing. I looked at Olivia. She had a thin smile on her face. Maybe she understood some of it; maybe she didn’t. This was the worst idea. I was crawling out of my skin.

  Then there was a pausa, just like class, we got a break. I turned to Olivia. I hesitated, our friendship was still too new to do anything bold, but I thought that if I stayed and watched the rest of this movie I didn’t understand, I might just lose my mind. “I think I have to go.”

  “You do?”

  “Yeah,” I said. “I’m sorry, but I mean, do you understand this?”

  She shrugged. “Not really, not much.”

  I nodded. I wanted to go but couldn’t move. I liked her enough to want approval.

  “Okay.” She said at last.

  We were out of there.

  Back on the street we walked in the direction of her hotel. What a ridiculous night. Though I felt free, I thought, What now? Will I just go back to my dark frozen apartment? Would I stare at the walls, wishing again for a television? No, I would spend the night remembering every little thing I could about Jonas, the good and the bad.

  We were coming to the street of Olivia’s hotel. I didn’t want my night to go the way I thought it was going to. I thought Olivia could probably find other better plans. I worried again that she wanted to keep watching the movie, just not alone. It was now or never.

  “Do you want to grab a drink?”

  “Yeah,” she said it so quickly that we both laughed. I felt a little better.

  Janine told me about this bar. It was where she met the second guy she hooked up with. By now, she had lost count. It could have been a gay bar for all the good-looking, well-dressed men who were inside. There were few women, and I suspected they were tourists and foreign students like us.

  “We’re outnumbered as usual,” said Olivia through gritted teeth.

  “And underdressed yet again,” I said. “Let’s get a drink.”

  We ordered cocktails from the unfriendly waitress who banged the menus in front of us and swept them quickly away when we placed out orders. Olivia got a plate of fries. They were served with mustard and mayo. We started to scarf them up, but they were burning hot. We swallowed the last of our drinks to cool our mouths. We ordered more drinks and asked for ice, but in Italy ice didn’t really exist. What we got back was puny slivers of barely hard water in our glasses. We drank it up. The roof of my mouth was burned. We experimented with fries and mayo.

  “I like mayo, but this is pretty gross,” I said.

  “It’s kind of cooling my mouth out, though,” Olivia said, blowing out her breath.

  “Will you be okay if I go to the bathroom?” I asked, looking around at the men who were circling us.

  “Sure,” Olivia said. “Hopefully, I’ll be here when you get back. Good luck.”

  “Thanks. I’ll need it.” I never knew what to expect from the bathrooms. Sometimes they were just a hole in the floor. This one wasn’t so bad. There was a toilet, but no seat cover. I drank a little water from the sink, knowing it would be a while before the waitress came back.

  Outside the bathroom, there was a man leaning against the jukebox. His eyes widened when he saw me. I thought he mistook me for someone else, but when he waved, I said hi. He looked confused and asked if I was English.

  “No, I am American,” I answered in Italian. He was staring at me so intently that I couldn’t tell if I was making any sense, but I continued. “I am studying here.”

  “Yes,” he said in English. This man was dust. His skin and his hair were almost the same light-brown color. Only his eyes burned like the end of the long ash on his cigarette. They were light gray with specks of hazel close to the pupil. I shrugged and walked past him back to the table where Olivia was finishing off the fries. I grabbed one of the last ones.

  “Sorry,” she said. “I was starving. Was it okay?”

  “Yeah, it was fine. Don’t go yet, though. If you have to go.”

  “Why? Did you make a friend?” I rolled my eyes. She looked up over me. “Is he wearing a yellow sports coat?”

  “Shit,” I said and he was at our table with three of his friends.

  “I am Gaetano. This is Dino, Giovanni and Paolo.” More names. I held my hand out to each of them, unsure if I wanted the customary kiss. Olivia got the kisses from Dino and Paolo and both of us were confused about protocol. “May we sit?”

  They didn’t wait for us to say prego. They just sat. Olivia said, “Oh, okay,” but smiled when Dino winked at her. They were all students, not milatario. Dino could speak English
better than most of the men we met. He ordered more drinks for us. When I looked at Gaetano, he was staring at me. I smiled politely.

  “You are very beautiful,” he said in Italian. I laughed. “Why do you laugh?”

  “You are funny. That’s very funny.” These were words I was able to say.

  He was almost thirty. He told me in Italian that he was going to be a doctor. He wasn’t from Siena. He was from the south of Italy. He said that like he was talking about a different country. He told me a lot, and I wasn’t sure I understood everything. I knew that he was trying to talk slower so that I could understand. I was listening to the tone of his voice more than trying to understand the words he said. His voice was a part of the larger sound of language in the bar. I began to feel a part of that sound. I became a piece in this Italian puzzle.

  But after we got the next round, I was tired of trying to speak his language. It happened that quickly. I grew frustrated with trying to make sense. Moments earlier, I was happy to be a part of it, and suddenly I would give anything to be talking to some frat boy in English, to not have to think.

  I looked at Olivia. She looked like she was having the same problem despite Dino’s command of English. She suggested we play a drinking game. Great idea but what? Asshole would be too hard to explain and besides we didn’t have cards. Quarters could be turned into lira, but did we want to start throwing money around a bar? Then I thought of it.

  “The sign game,” I said.

  Olivia nodded. “Thumper, right?”

  So we demonstrated the sign game. In the game, everyone makes a sign with their hand: thumbs, bunny ears, hang loose, whatever. That is your sign, and when someone makes your sign, you have to make it again and then pick someone else’s sign and do it right away until someone messes up or can’t think of a sign and has to drink. We exaggerated gestures when we couldn’t think of the words to explain the rules. It was tough to demonstrate with only the two of us. Dino tried to translate, but the other men were yelling that he wasn’t quick enough. They were yelling what they thought were the rules. They were all just kind of yelling.

  We played a lightening round of the game with each other and then decided the Italians were ready.

  We played this game for a couple of hours. Giovanni kept fucking up, and the others yelled at him, trying to explain, pleased that they had the knowledge of the new fun foreign game. They kept yelling the word subito at him. As I watched them explain it to him, I understood the word subito meant right away, right now, immediately, without having learned it in class or looked it up in the dictionary. The Italians wanted everything subito. It was better than any lesson Signora Laza could give me.

  The game served its purpose. It got us drunk. It broke the ice. Olivia’s smile got wider and wilder; her laugh grew less nervous and more confident. She made up a lie about a boyfriend, so that she could relax. I did the same thing. I didn’t give my fake boyfriend a name, but I looked Gaetano directly in the eye so he would understand that I was not interested. I had a ragazzo and didn’t want him.

  The group broke off into little conversations. Olivia and I were not able to talk to each other. Occasionally the Italians said something to each other in a harsh language that was a southern dialect. I was flattered that they thought we would understand standard Italian. The dialect sounded sort of similar to the language I could barely understand, but the accent was harder like German and the ends of words were cut off.

  I talked to Giovanni, who I liked because he seemed to be the most confused, the least sure of himself. There was something endearing about that. Then Gaetano said something to him in dialect. Although all the dialect was rough, this was an outright command. Giovanni stopped talking to me immediately, and I realized that Gaetano had somehow claimed me. His friends respected that.

  Eventually, Giovanni excused himself and I tried to get into the conversation Dino and Paolo were having with Olivia. But Gaetano took the opportunity to talk to me. He asked where my parents were from, and I told him where my grandparents were from. It was a simple enough conversation to understand. What he was really asking was what part of Italy I was descended from.

  “So you are from the south, too?”

  “Well, I’m an Italian–American.”

  “The north and south are different you know. The south is better.” Dino, who was from the north, said something to Gaetano that I didn’t understand. Gaetano ignored him and continued. “People here don’t like the people from the south, and we don’t like them.”

  “You like Dino.”

  “Dino is different. He is good.”

  “I see.”

  “For me you are Italian.”

  “I am. Italian-American.”

  “Your mouth is like the south. And your dark hair and eyes. Like the women of south Italy.” I didn’t know what to say to him. Dino winked at me and switched to English.

  “The men of the south are all criminals.”

  “Are you a criminal?” I asked Gaetano.

  “No,” Gaetano said with a wry a smile. “Sometimes, the men of the south who move north have to do things that are a little illegal.”

  “Like…criminals,” Olivia said. I laughed feeling nervous, and Gaetano said something else to Dino that I didn’t understand.

  “You know Gaetano is priest?” Dino asked. The Italians at the table cracked up. Gaetano wanted to speak English now. They all did; they all wanted to show off the little bits they knew.

  “Are you a priest?” I asked. This was starting to get weird. I wasn’t sure what was worse, having a criminal or a clergyman looking at me the way he was.

  “He say this because I live with monkey,” Gaetano practically screamed for emphasis.

  “You live with monkeys?” Olivia laughed. “In a zoo?”

  “Are you a zookeeper?” I asked.

  Dino corrected Gaetano in Italian.

  “He live with monk, not monkey,” Dino explained. I shrugged, not sure if this was a joke. “How you say where live monk?”

  “Monastery?”

  “Yes, yes. I live monster with monk, no monkey,” Gaetano said. The Italians laughed again. Paolo began making monkey noises. Olivia and I looked at each other waiting for the punch line.

  “No, is really,” said Gaetano, nodding. “I live ’ere. In monster.”

  “Okay, sure.” I guessed it was like a dorm.

  “So we mus’ go your casa,” Gaetano said, winking a gray eye at me. The Italians thought this too was funny. Gaetano translated for Giovanni. Giovanni turned a little red.

  “We are not going to go to my apartment ever,” I said. Then I switched to Italian, for the benefit of anyone who needed clarification. “Mai.”

  The waitress brought another round. It was the last round for us. It was after two. The boys conferred in dialect. They were trying to plot ways of making us stay. We wouldn’t stay. We needed to go back to our beds and sleep. We used sleep as an excuse.

  “Andiamo via,” I said. “Siamo stanche.”

  Confused, they followed us out. They said they wanted to walk us home. They asked us to go dancing. They asked us to go to a hot spring. To each request we shook our heads. We continued to tell them that we had to leave. We were tired. They didn’t believe it.

  “Why?” Gaetano asked. Everyone seemed to be waiting on me.

  “We’re not going to get in a car with strangers.” I said, using a word I learned in class that day, sconoscuiti. I could tell immediately I hadn’t used it right. Gaetano was genuinely offended that I said that. He claimed not to be sconoscuito, whatever the damn word meant. He insisted that we go with them to the hot springs.

  “He says it’s nice for tourists,” I told Olivia, not sure why I was translating.

  “We’re not supposed to be tourists,” she said.

  “They probably want us to go skinny-dipping,” I said.

  “Let’s just go home,” Olivia said, starting to walk toward the campo. She waved back to the guys. “Ciao!”
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  “Wait,” said Gaetano, walking over to us. He looked at me. “You call me.”

  “I can’t.” I said. “I don’t have a phone.”

  “She ’ave none in ’er albergho?” He pointed at Olivia.

  “You can give it to her,” I said. He wrote down his number and handed it to me. I took it and gave it to Olivia. I had no intention of calling him.

  “To the monster,” he said, pointing at the paper. “You call me.”

  “The monster, yeah. Scary,” I said as Olivia laughed. I grabbed onto her sleeve. The rest of the boys kissed us on both cheeks, and Gaetano got too close to my mouth. I moved away quickly and tugged Olivia down the street. We shouted ciao at them, letting the end ring out like the Italians did.

  We walked down Via di Citta, arms linked as if we were Italian women and Siena was our city.

  4.

  I set rules for myself, so it would be easier. One was not mention his name. It was an old rule, started by my friends when his girlfriend, Mono Girl, came back. They stopped bringing him up. They thought they would protect me. But they didn’t realize that conversations for me became yet another waiting game. No matter who I was talking to or what I was doing, I was waiting for a clue about him.

  But in Siena, no one knew me or him or anything. If I didn’t mention Jonas, if I didn’t speak his name, I told myself things would be fine. In Italian, the letter that started his name didn’t exist. I told myself, He will not exist for me here. But whenever I looked at the poster of the Italian alphabet in my classroom, the first thing I thought was that something was missing. I had to stop it. If I could manage to get through a day without relating everything back to him or us, this would all be worth it.

  But, it was so hard to walk those narrow streets. The couples stopped everywhere to kiss each other, to heat each other up. The men looked at the women in a way that broke my heart. Their love was on display. These couldn’t be the same men who wanted to fuck blonde americane in my apartment.