TONGUE TIED

FOR WEEKS before I arrived in Venice, I'd been learning words, words and more words. When I arrived, my vocabulary was 600 and climbing daily.  I annoyed everyone by showing off the words for everything from plate to loudly and because I'd done 5 years school Latin,  I thought I'd be fluent by the first weekend.

Well, ha bloody ha.  Ten days in, I can certainly understand A LOT.  Sentences, phrases, clauses and isolated words that last week would have just been a mangled agglomeration of syllables totally beyond my comprehension are now beginning to separate into vaguely recognisable language. I can read!  I can understand signs, menus:  I even set up my new phone in Italian!  Apart from a big mistake, a huge mistake when I received a generic sms offering me 2 months of something free if I just followed the link.  I thought it was free toothpaste, but soon discovered that calcio is football.  I can understand directions, and I can even hear the words in the Italian songs well enough to make me cry on cue.

All my life my most troubled times have been represented in dreams by a mouth stuffed with bubble gum that no matter how much I pull out, how big the gobstopper, how many teeth come with it, my mouth is still stuffed with bubble gum.  I feel like this with Italian.  It's like knowing you are genetically a fabulous singer but your throat hasn't been told this, and when you open your mouth for an aria, a croak bleats out.  Inside my head, I've formed beautiful sentences.  Try to spit them out and I sound as if I'm being throttled by my own hand.  The skook on my shoulder looks on incredulously, saying Mamma Mia, Cosa? C'e?  You didn't practice this all the way to school and back?

I can get those words out like Pavarotti when I'm reading.  But on my own!  Every word is stuck to a piece of that enormous gobstopper of gum, every word stacked on top of another and what comes out astonishes even me.  I have become mute.  I am so petrified of spitting out a word that nobody will recognise that I have become the queen of silly grins, but this time because my bocca is stuck to my labbia, which is stuck to my lingua, which is stuck to my epiglottissimo.  I am now deep in lingua longer,  fruitlessly trying to remove the plug that will sblocco my flow of language.  In my dreams.

Like the morning we had to talk about our parents in School.  I composed what I thought was a short, succinct version of my strange childhood, mentioning the word Parents, whenever I could. This word I'd practiced a lot.  But I couldn't understand why my teacher, so patient and understanding, spent my few minutes suffocating a laugh behind her manicured hands.  Genitalia!  Genitalia!  The word for parents is genitori.  I had called them genitalia.  

Or that I had been bitten by a gypsy, and wanted to talk to some mosquitoes who were camping near their caravan.  It took me a day to get my tongue around the word for earring - occiale, and more for teaspoon - cucciaio, and next thing I knew I was eating with an earring and wearing a teaspoon.

Figures.

Instead: some photographs of water.  That flows as easily as I would like my l'addotiva lingua to do.  The light here is a beautiful cliche.  In the absence of words, let my trigger finger do the talking.