In Other Words (8 page)

In Italian I write without style, in a primitive way. I'm always uncertain. My sole intention, along with a blind but sincere faith, is to be understood, and to understand myself.

T
he diary provides me with the discipline, the habit of writing in Italian. But writing only a diary is the equivalent of shutting myself in the house, talking to myself. What I express there remains a private, interior narration. At a certain point, in spite of the risk, I want to go out.

I start with very short pieces, usually no more than a handwritten page. I try to focus on something specific: a person, a moment, a place. I do what I ask my students to do when I teach creative writing. I explain to them that such fragments are the first steps to take before constructing a story. I think that a writer should observe the real world before imagining a nonexistent one.

My short Italian pieces are mere trifles. And yet I work hard to try to perfect them. I give the first piece to my new Italian teacher in Rome. When he gives it back to me, I'm mortified. I see only mistakes, only problems. I see a catastrophe. Almost every sentence has to be changed. I correct the first version in red pen. At the end of the lesson the page contains as much red ink as black.

I've never tried to do anything this demanding as a
writer. I find that my project is so arduous that it seems sadistic. I have to start again from the beginning, as if I had never written anything in my life. But, to be precise, I am not at the starting point: rather, I'm in another dimension, where I have no references, no armor. Where I've never felt so stupid.

Even though I now speak the language fairly well, the spoken language doesn't help me. A conversation involves a sort of collaboration and, often, an act of forgiveness. When I speak I can make mistakes, but I'm somehow able to make myself understood. On the page I am alone. The spoken language is a kind of antechamber with respect to the written, which has a stricter, more elusive logic.

In spite of the humiliation I continue. For the next lesson, I prepare something different. Because buried under all the mistakes, all the rough spots, is something precious. A new voice, crude but alive, to improve, to elaborate.

One day I find myself in a library where I never feel very comfortable, and where I usually can't work well. There, at an anonymous desk, an entire story in Italian comes into my mind. It comes in a flash. I hear the sentences in my brain. I don't know where they originate, I don't know how I'm able to hear them. I write rapidly in the notebook; I'm afraid it will all disappear before I can get it down. Everything unfolds calmly. I don't use the dictionary. It takes me about two hours to write the first half of the story. The next day I return to the same library for another couple of hours, to finish it.

I am aware of a break, along with a birth. I'm stunned by it.

I've never written a story in this fashion. In English I
can consider what I write, I can stop after every sentence to look for the right words, to reorder them, change my mind a thousand times. My knowledge of English is both an advantage and a hindrance. I rewrite everything like a lunatic until it satisfies me, while in Italian, like a soldier in the desert, I have to simply keep going.

After finishing the story, I type it on the computer. For the first time I'm working on the screen in Italian. My fingers are tense. They don't know how to move on the keyboard.

I know there will be many things to correct, to rewrite.

I know that my life as a writer will no longer be the same.

The story is entitled “The Exchange.”

What is it about? The protagonist is a translator who is restless, and moves to an unspecified city in search of a change. She arrives by herself, with almost nothing, except a black sweater.

I don't know how to read the story, I don't know what to think about it. I don't know if it works. I don't have the critical skills to judge it. Although it came from me, it doesn't seem completely mine. I'm sure of only one thing: I would never have written it in English.