One should
never ask anything after a party. It is enough to keep a front-row corner of
the couch and get full view as your hosts dissect the unfortunate guests who’ve
already gone. Last Saturday when the last of the festa crowd pulled the door closed, the curtain went up on a
conversation populated by a slew of beastly metaphors that made a body wonder
who had invited that dubious bunch in the first place.
I sat and
listened as the comments flowed forth matter-of-fact, gurgling like a stream
and nonchalant as weather talk. According to popular consensus, Francesco, ‘the
man with buckles on his shoes,’ had a cervello come le acciughe, an
anchovy-sized brain that made him draft bad business deals based on nothing but
‘fried air.’ His brother, Vincenzo, a more attractive man whose poor shoes got
no description, was as ‘unpredictable as a buttered eel’: catch his eye for
more than four seconds and you’d steal his soul-or so they thought; no one had
captured his gaze long enough to prove it. And Giovanna’s boyfriend was a bit
of a pidocchio rifatto, didn’t you
think? The poor made-over louse’s newfound snobbery failed to hide his visible
shortcomings.
The evening
left me wondering. Was it cultural, the ease with which insults were dealt out
like face cards in this word game where friends were stripped of everything but
their clothes? Was it a purely Tuscan talent for biting but colorful eloquence?
Or was it simply pure meanness, the kind that human beings sometimes cultivate
no matter what part of the globe rotates under their feet? Either way, I was peeved: why does one bother
being friends with a person whose brain reminds you of an anchovy?
We fought
about it on the way home, Filippo and I. And as usual, Filippo thought my
annoyance could be traced back to the Mayflower pilgrims. I was born in a
country with puritan ideals, he said, and had absorbed them-religion through
osmosis. For Filippo, every dissimilarity between our two cultures can be traced
back to none other than the puritani and the popes. This is his chiodo fisso, a reoccurring theme he
pounds on as if with a stubborn nail defying its placement in the wall. Only
puritans thought it possible to eradicate flaws; the Catholics, deep down, were
far more realistic.
Filippo was
convinced of his argument, ‘Francesco does make bum business deals, going in
like a calf and out like an ox most of the time. To acknowledge this fact is
not mean, just honest. And we might talk about his cervello da acciuga, but we
don’t want to change it. Realism is real love-you can’t say that it’s not.’
‘Really,’ I
answered blandly. ‘So, basically, tonight’s conversation was not mean? It was
high-minded?’
He shrugged.
‘In Italy, people are flawed but forgiven.’
‘On their
death-beds maybe.’
‘No, all the
time. We survive because we look and overlook. Fundamentally, this is what
makes the country Catholic. It’s why we live near our relatives. In fact, this
is why we live near everyone. Imperfection makes a great story.’
‘Not a great
bed-time story.’
He
half-smiled. ‘No, not a fairy-tale. A novel.’
I thought a
moment. ‘I don’t like your idea of religion though osmosis.’
He shrugged.
‘It’s common practice in a country where nobody practices.’
Oh, santo cielo. There’s the rub again. I
ask you, now, is Filippo right about his chiodo
fisso? Do all our attitudes ultimately boil down to what men in high hats
once did and declared? And do values seep into the cells based on where we
filled our lungs with air during childhood? Or should this notion be stacked
with other discarded Italian truisms, smack on top of ‘find wives and oxen from
your home country’? Honestly, some ideas are best hammered straight out of the
floorboards, nail or not.
And ideas
aside, after this article, will I ever again be invited to a dinner party? And
will it really matter? Apparently, it’s the post-festa that counts. Still, if the invitations do stop coming, then
unfailingly, we’ll know precisely where to place the blame: on the pilgrims, of
course, and the popes.
