An Italian Tour

- and being lost in translation

It begins, later, with a tortoise.

Before, during and after the tortoise, I am writing a novel. During this endeavour, I have come to believe there are only a certain number of words a brain can use in a day, largely, I have nothing to say other than what makes its way to paper. In the time I am not working, I have little use for words, or perhaps I am monastic in my use of them, wanting to devote them only to the manuscript and not the frivolity of anything else: not conversation, not thought, not music or television or film, and especially not email. I would like to shut my mouth and my mind to become monastically mute, freed from the need of comprehension and thought.

In devoting myself to the discipline of a novel, I will finally prove my ability to be monogamous.

In the absence of a monastery or a cloister, I need to find other ways of silencing the world. For a time, I have found myself craving white. White rooms, white walls, white curtains, white kitchens with soft closing drawers, the kind of white that makes silence feel possible, the kind of white where there’s nothing to snag your thoughts on, the kind of white against which the tulips, too excitable, would scream, and I would too. Circles, always.

I remember I have been craving this white, when I fly over The Alps, Didion’s The White Album spine bent and face down on my knee, and because I like matching things, I am listening to The Beatles’ White Album, Long Long Long on my headphones as I look down and there they just are. Not a whisper of cloud that day, just these ragged toothed peaks in their bridal white cutting hard against the blue sky. Earlier, the plane crossed the channel, silver then, acres of wind farms off the French coast. I quickly lost interest in the book, Didion’s in-jokes becoming a dated bore, wishing instead I’d taken Edna O’Brien for my cabin bag. I scroll through the downloaded music on my phone, needing something memory blank, something absent but something comforting enough, and there The Beatles were and there the alps are too, and there, just there, Mont Blanc, rising sharply and unmistakably and how is it life has come to this, how does it happen that on this Friday I am on this plane with its white wing, the white peaks below, the White Album playing; so much white, and none of it of the type I have craved.

We do not often get what we want from a life, occasionally, if luck and circumstance conspire in our favour, instead, we get what we need.

Taxi from the airport into town, 160km on the dashboard, windows open, warm air on my face; I check in at the hotel, terzo piano the concierge announces so I know here they will make no concession to my linguistic ineptitude.

In the room, the bed is white and the curtains too. I lie across the bed and it is wider than my full length. I text my editor to tell her I’ve arrived. We make dinner plans. I open the long windows reminding my of my apartment in Paris, so long ago now, how is it it is that long - I step onto the narrow balcony, the apartments opposite forming a square, a resident sits at a battered metal table, the paint peeled and chipped, some laundry hangs from makeshift lines, a rug over one, perhaps someone will beat dust from it; evening gathers its own sounds as swifts and swallows swoop through the changing light. I rummage for a cigarette in my bag, light it with my cheap lighter, down the middle it says LONDON, has pictures of the London Eye, House of Parliament, Buckingham Palace. In case I forget. Make a mental note to buy another.

Inhale. Exhale. Mimic breathing. Hit shuffle on Spotify. Take my chances. Risk rewarded with Beach House. Exhale.

This is how the first night of my Italian tour begins; on a balcony, listening to Beach House, smoking my last cigarette. Every cigarette is always my last.

Months before, in the jaws of a grey winter, my Italian publisher emailed telling me to keep May free. Then the year hit hard, the sort of year you cannot ward off with resolutions, the sort of year where chance comes at you fast and again and again and again, the sort of year where life seems split open, bleeding itself into new colours, and there is no way to articulate it, but especially not when the daily quota of words is devoted to the practice of a novel; that cliff edged fear requiring the type of stomach I am not in possession of. Some things cannot be articulated at the time, they can only be experienced, and the experience will make the subsequent articulation better. Or so it is to be hoped.

This is how it begins after it begins on the balcony; dinner with my team before a long line to an after party; Turin besieged this time of year by every Italian publisher and all of them in this line, we are too late for the list, they’ve closed it and so we are in the street, lined up with everyone else. I am still new enough here to think the night is warm. My editor suggests we leave to take a taxi to meet other people, we run down the street, mistaking many cabs for our own until our own arrives and then, sometime in the morning, we are having drinks in a hotel garden, and there it is, the tortoise.

The tortoise is of note for two reasons. Possibly three, for the fact is, a tortoise is so rare a sight for me to never not be of note. As a child, I turned around to find one in a garden once. Look, a turtle, I shouted, and my mother laughed, correcting me, telling me the vital difference between a tortoise and a turtle, that one can survive on land and in water, while the other can’t. At some point, tortoises were the preferred extravagance of the English aristocracy - or a preferred extravagance, since they rarely limited themselves to one - but because of their extraordinary long life spans in comparison to human ones, they often became an unwieldy inheritance, as was the case with the one I saw, moving slowly through a Scottish garden. I do not recall seeing once since, until I am there on the terrace and there’s the tortoise, and there’s a sign saying there are five tortoises and there also is a cage, looking too small for five but perhaps too spacious for one. There is no sign though, of the other four tortoises. Although it is late and gin has been and is being consumed.

The tortoise is also of note because also on the terrace is an American author who has just released his second novel in Italy, a novel called Little Lazarus, featuring two tortoises - a novel and author much beloved by the Italian public. I am to discover that being loved by Italian readers is a beautiful consuming thing, often bearing no correlation to how loved you are by the public in your home country. Because of the gin and the heat and the rare school trip atmosphere that happens when on tour, the tortoise acts as a pleasing omen. The night unfurls and runs away from us, the tortoise moving occasionally across the terrace as the concierge checks on us occasionally, the talk turns to language as we listen to our editors speaking in Italian, then to the recent translation of Roth’s Portnoy’s Complaint, simply called Portnoy in its Italian iteration. For a time, we listen to our editors speak a language both of us barely understand and with its repeated, rhythmic vowels, it sounds like poetry. To listen like this, feels like a kind of submission.

This thought of submitting to something I don’t understand is something that does not come easily to me. This is why I cannot believe in God. For much of this year a friend and I have been talking about submission, partly because neither of us can do it, partly because both of us want to. Sometimes, you have to be forced into a thing.

That first night of the tour, I am forced to submit to the power of this language. For the duration of it, I am too, although submission still eludes me since it is not long until I turn my mind to decoding it but also, for a time, I will live in the absence silence offers.

To not understand a language marks a return to childhood and a certain kind of innocence. I have long thought language acquisition marks the passage from innocence to knowing, and it is this knowing that marks us in ways we cannot after escape. I have thought too that it is this the story of the fall alludes to, a prelapsarian world marred after by language; in the beginning was the word, etc. If not words, what innocence might not knowing offer?

As I am taken from event to event, from interview to photoshoot, from lunches to dinners, I quickly realise that to be both unable to but more essentially, not expected to partake in the language presents a certain kind of freedom. More dangerously, I discover it is this type of freedom from expectation I have craved. It is also to be free from the obligation of replying. And more, in a country where no one can understand you but more vitally, no one knows you, it frees you to say whatever you want. As the tour unfolds, I find myself possessed by a type of boldness I do not have at home, I begin to I say what I really think, and do not worry about my thoughts being trivial or controversial or odd, because I never have to listen to them back or worry about anyone I know listening either. Perhaps it is this white has stood as a metaphor for. All this longing for white rooms, white curtains, white linen; when all I wanted was to think no one was listening.

Whatever it is, I find that I am, for the first time in a very long time, alone with my thoughts. Like most things you have no been alone with for a long time, I was worried to be that alone. Instead, I find being unable to participate fully when I always an active participant, restful. Whereas at a table full of people I would be listening, talking, thinking, or in a train carriage, eavesdropping on the people next to me, or the same in a cafe, always always always the noise of language, there was no need for it now. Instead, I watch, I see, I think, I smell, I taste, I feel; I become verb.

All tour long, I sense more than understanding. In the order of things, it seems the right way round to experience first, understand later.

Here are some of the things I sensed on tour. Hyperbole as it sounds and is not, it really was the experience of a lifetime. If you cannot bring yourself to believe in magic, try at least to put your faith in luck and circumstance, for a time.

I watch the sun disperse as it sets in the Bay of Napoli, and there’s Vesuvius over the water, and later, I swear it turns the city to fever as it rises through the centuries old cobblestones; In Turin, I write agnolotti in my phone notes, in brackets, rabbit; in Milan Centrale I am dwarfed by Mussollini’s ambitions as the hangover hits and I chase it away with a fat coke, ice, lemon, and how it is I want to be having a coke with you; on the train between Bologna and Rome I start to think of second person again, and how it would be to write a book about you, and no one would know the you you are; in Bologna Jasmine hangs heavy in the air as the thunder rolls in some time around 2 am and I cannot sleep, perhaps the second negroni is to blame or perhaps it is this feeling of being so vitally alive I cannot miss a thing, likely, it is the 11pm espresso telling on itself; under the shade of umbrellas octopus arrives, tentacles curling around themselves, we shape bread into la scarpetta, mopping up the last of the sauce from the mussels, and I know by then what it means, and how to order a second bottle of wine, and that the limoncello is about to arrive; the train pulls into the station and despite the fact of signs on the platform warning DO NOT CROSS THE TRACKS, people swell over them, jumping onto the low platform at the other side, I guess we only warn people against doing the thing we know they already will; and 10 am on a Sunday is too early for a photoshoot after learning the correct pronunciation of gintonic 7 hours earlier at a party on the roof of a castle; I have been driven through the streets of Rome and there it is, San Pietro, just there, and there it is, right up ahead the Colosseum; I have spoken in gardens and bookshops around tables and at book festivals, I have marvelled at simultaneous translators; some time just after dawn I watch swifts dart in and out the Colosseum and of course it’s here, in the birth place of Christianity, built by Jews, that my heart, torn in two directions since birth, no longer feels half hearted, but entertains the possibility of becoming whole; I have paid two euros to stand at a bar and drink an espresso at 7 am and I have thought, yes, likely I could live like this; the dust of the Villa Borghese has stuck to my feet long after I try to wash it off; I have cried in Canonica’s studio, the devotion of sculpture; I have marvelled at the sea pines and the orange trees; I cross myself in San Giovanni and now I have started I do not stop; I pray in ways I didn’t know I could in Santa Maria Maggiore - perhaps in the end our beginning always comes back to us; I do not try to listen to conversations next to me as I sit alone at the bar with a negroni and my notebook; I talk to Argentineans on the train between Rome and Naples, cobbling shared sentences together, I tell them to visit Scotland for the peace but not the heat, they tell me to visit Buenos Aires seeing as I don’t find Naples too much; I have sat on friend’s roof terraces and window sills, I have learnt how it is writers have friends all over the world, I have learnt too these iterant tendencies of mine might not be such a bad thing after all; I have been asked on live national radio if I think democracy is possible against a backdrop of climate change, in a Bologna garden I am asked exactly who climate catastrophe constitutes a disaster for; between each city, every event, all the conversations, my next novel solidifies, I start to take it seriously, I begin to entertain once again, the possibility of my ability to write it, because being lost in translation as I have been has given me the confidence to say what it is I need to say next, or at least, to try to say it. It is the trying where the faith lies, I realise, when later I despair to friend about the distance between the idea and its execution - same for God really, he replies, and so it continues, I am writing a novel.