Slow learner

Danny and I have been taking Italian lessons—more properly, engaging in Italian conversation—with our endlessly patient teacher, Franca, for a few days now, and it is dawning on me that I should probably just spend my time memorizing a few stock phrases (“I'm very pleased to meet you,” “This is a lovely town,” “Where is the bathroom, please?”) and give up on the idea that I will actually be able to speak this language any time soon, at least not with any degree of fluency.

Franca is in many ways the perfect teacher. She manages never to betray any irritation about spending 90 minutes talking to a functional moron, and then spending the next 90 minutes talking with another one. She has a sense of humor and a knack for explicating the workings of the Italian language in a way that I can more or less understand, if not remember. She speaks enough English to explain things that baffle me, but not so much that she is tempted to slide into speaking to me in my mother tongue. She is good about forcing me “parlare italiano,” even when the effort of trying to explain what I mean seems insuperably difficult to me and, no doubt, rather tedious to her.

Of course I keep launching into conversations that veer far from the present-tense verbs and simple vocabulary with which I actually have some small facility. What possesses me to want to discuss the passato-imperfetto details of how I caught the cold that I fear I've been spreading all over town, or the future of self-driving trucks and their likely effect on the Italian economy?

I also realize that by putting so much energy into learning this language, I am committing myself to coming back here on more than an occasional basis, even though I remain very ambivalent about that idea up here in my conscious mind.

At least my cold seems to be winding down. Soon I will be able to stop exclaiming, “Ho un raffreddore!” to avoid shaking hands. Doesn't that sound vaguely like I'm both raffish and adored? Italian makes even having a cold seem glamorous.