Italy... part 2

Up a flight of steps and into a wide doorway. A petite woman greets me with a smile and I’m given a tour of the apartment. Immediately I’m in love with the ambiance of the place. Richly tinted lace scarves, camouflage doorways and are peeled back to reveal massive bedrooms. Large geometrical shapes are painted on the walls in bold shades and poetry quotes are splashed across the walls in massive gold- colored cursive letters.

We sit in the kitchen and peer out of the two wood-framed glass doors leading out to a small balcony, scattered with paint supplies and potted plants. Over a pasta lunch we talk about ourselves. I find out that she is an architect, that she respects and adores art, and that she has a real appreciation for unfiltered expressions of human emotion. That’s all I need to know. I can tell I like her.

It’s confirmed when days later, I sit in bed and cry, seemingly of a broken heart (we’ll get to that later) and she stoops down on the floor in front of me and stares into my face “Cry!!” she says. “Cry…” She tells me that to pretend to be happy would be worse than crying. And she’s right. So I cried….

I remember the day I decided to translate one of my free-writes into Italian. After over an hour and a half of painstakingly wrestling with Google translator, I was SO sure that I finally had my translation right. I proudly handed her the paper to check for mistakes, of which I was SURE there were few. After about 2 minutes of looking it over she told me “This is all wrong”. “Your Italian is like my English” she laughed. That day she spent over an hour correcting my translation. “This is important” she said, as she hunched over a massive English- Italian dictionary. She’d refer to me when she needed clarification. “ ‘Stared’ What is this?”. I explained “ah! Come ‘fissò… fissato’!” We went on like this until the entire text had been translated. And it wasn’t until weeks later that I realized she had helped me write my first, but not last, piece of Italian poetry….