Chapter 40
BACK IN THE CLASSROOM, Angela covered the metric system.
But that was really just a windup to a larger lecture on shopping for clothes.
There were several women’s boutiques in town—Solinas, Pauline, and Nella were among the best—but she said that under no circumstances were we to traipse into these stores acting like we owned the place.
“These are not American department stores. No touching the clothes. And remember, you will not be permitted to try anything on, so know your measurements—in centimeters.”
Behind me was a bookshelf stacked high with Italian-English dictionaries, and I absent-mindedly pulled one from the shelf and opened it to a random page.
I sounded out the words pranzo, prassi, and prateria in my head.
I remembered playing a game in third grade that my teacher, Mrs. Hallinan, had called Dictionary.
She’d give us ten words, and we’d have to look them up as fast as we could, scribbling down the correct definition beside each one.
I had been good at the game, and I tried it now.
First with gold, then with boring. I didn’t actually write anything down, just tried to get to the Italian word as quickly as possible.
The word for gold was oro. Boring was weird, because the word noioso looked closer to our word for noisy.
Siobhan was asking something about European shoe sizes when it occurred to me that I could use the dictionary to translate the flyer, which was still at the bottom of my purse.
I retrieved the flyer, unfolded it, and stuck it between the pages of my handbook, where no one—except maybe Laura—would be able to see what I was doing.
The dictionary was so much better than my phrase book. It had all the words I needed, even if I had to take a guess at some of the tenses and verb conjugations. I wrote in pencil on the margins of the flyer and kept moving words around until I had some approximation of:
An Italian port given to America
as a present from the
Andreotti-Malagodi administration
THE ISLAND OF LA MADDALENA TRANSFORMED
INTO A SOURCE OF POLLUTION, AN ATOMIC PERIL, AND A MILITARY TARGET.
THIS IS AN ACT AGAINST DIPLOMACY AND PEACE,
A SECRET AGREEMENT TACITLY
STIPULATED OUTSIDE THE PARLIAMENT
AND AGAINST THE WILL OF ITALIAN CITIZENS.
Let Italian ports be ports of peace.
Get atomic bases out of Italy.
I sat back and stared at what I’d written.
By then it wasn’t news to me that the Communist Party wanted us off the island.
But the charges they had leveled against us—that the subs were a source of pollution and even peril—were ones that I hadn’t seen so clearly articulated before. I wanted to know more.
“Any questions?” Angela asked, and it took me a minute to realize it was noon, and we were being dismissed for the day.
Before I could reconsider, I shot my hand up into the air.
“Yes?”
“Are the locals in support of us being here?” I asked.
She narrowed her eyes at me. “Why do you ask?”
“Oh,” I said, trying to keep my tone light, “the protests, mainly.”
Laura was looking at the flyer, so I shut my handbook, trapping it within its pages.
Angela indicated that we should pack up and said that the car was no doubt waiting downstairs for those who were catching the twelve-thirty ferry.
“I would urge all of you to ignore these protests,” she said as everyone stood to go.
“They are a distraction, nothing more. None of the instigators even live on the island.”
This was the second time I had heard that assertion, and I wanted to ask how Angela could be so sure, but she was about as approachable as a snapping turtle, so I closed my mouth and waited for Laura and Siobhan to gather their things, then followed them toward the stairs.
“Mrs. Archer,” Angela said as we were filing past her, “a word?”
“Sure,” I said, then nodded to Laura and Siobhan to go on without me.
Angela waited until they were out of earshot. “Next time you need a piece of PCI propaganda translated,” she said with a curt smile, “all you have to do is ask.”