THE DREAM OF A COMMON LANGUAGE

My husband turned to my nine-year-old son at dinner. “This summer,” he proclaimed, “we are going to learn Italian.” Why would he decide to take on such a feat? It couldn’t have been the food. We were sitting at an overpriced strip-mall Italian restaurant, disconcertingly named after the Native American name of our town on Long Island and some neologism combining the word pasta with the word cafeteria.

I doubted that it was the ambiance. There was a strange trompe l’oiel mural covering one wall depicting an open air piazza in Rome or one of the hill towns of Italy. The remainder of the dining room contained fake brick, wood laminates and artificial plants. It was a study in illusion.

I once listened to a patient ramble on in Italian about his latest hospital adventure. I had greeted him with the few phrases of Italian that I knew from our honeymoon in Italy or had learned from the housekeeping staff at the Brooklyn hospital where I used to work. He mistakenly assumed I was fluent in Italian, and began his discourse.

He told me of a recent hospital admission during which he felt he was treated rather gruffly by some of the associates in a large gastroenterology group. First they mistook him for his roommate, then they continued to call him by the wrong first name, then they said they didn’t know why he was bleeding. He felt alienated and dismissed. I shook my head, and let him continue, giving up on my attempts to steer him toward an English version of his story, just enjoying the lilting cadence of his emotional words. Then I answered him, and he smiled, realizing that my answer was in English, but that I had understood everything he had blurted out in his own native tongue. I examined him, reassured him, and he thanked me as he walked out to the receptionist to make a follow-up appointment.

I brought his chart back to my desk and for a moment let myself dream of a common language.