A new boy has arrived at the Italian course for foreigners. Mohammed is talkative and sports an ambitious haircut. He had to immediately answer the first question that men who make their debut in class are always asked, the only real fundamental question that my Indian student undertakes to verify as an admission criterion: “Are you married?”.
He’s stronger than her.
Before they have pronounced the name, even before understanding their country of origin: «Are you married?». She would also ask Ulysses if, by mistake, he landed on the banks of the Bacchiglione.
Indeed the network of my Asian female students is like the incipit of Pride and Prejudice: it is a universally recognized truth that if you land in Italy crossing the continents on foot it means that you are a resistant and determined man. And therefore it is immediately necessary to find a wife.
“I’m not married,” Mohammed admits, figuring he’s ended up in the files of the Muslim mothers in this neighborhood. Starting from a Pakistani city, he walked for three years. «He IS walked?», tries to correct the Bengali Khazi. “No. Walking wants the verb to have for the past tense». “Oh,” Khazi nods.
This matter of the auxiliaries to be and to have is the great grammar leap of the A2 Italian course. It is the gateway to life in two dimensions, the present and the past. Finally the chance to tell your own story. Mohammed’s begins thirteen days before crossing the border. Thirteen days in the Slovenian woods, in the rain, eating little and sleeping outdoors. «My feet hurt so much that the first thing I did when I crossed the border into Italy – in Trieste, you know? – it was taking a train, getting off in Bologna, knocking on my cousin’s apartment, taking off my shoes and staying in bed for a week». The first really nice thing: watching television while a family member brings you lunch to your room.
Princess instead says that as soon as she arrived in Italy she ended up on a farm in the Taranto countryside. One morning she woke up early, too early, because of the mooing of the cows. She thought: “But I made this whole journey along the desert, bottled up in Agadez for months and then in Benghazi, I took a boat that was leaking from all sides to find myself in a place that sounds like Nigeria?”.
So she stuffed her clothes into a bag, looked at the olive trees under the yellow sun and then said goodbye to her companions. Hello girls, I’m going to the city. I leave you the cows, heel lifters and agriculture. The train to Padua, she says, was the first happy sensation in years and now she sleeps until unthinkable hours.
Rosalìa made a comfortable journey by plane from Chile; yet, she too was terribly afraid. To fall into the ocean, to die of asphyxiation in the cabin. At one point she opened her eyes and saw Venice from above. “I didn’t think it was like that. I can’t find the word.” A few hours later she embraced her husband whom she hadn’t seen for a long time: «Me and him inside the tram that was taking us home. I looked at the trees, the buildings. The most romantic thing that ever happened to me.’
“It happened.”
“Right. She happened.”
“Feminine?” Khazi asks again.
“Feminine. Because there is the verb to be».
“I understand”.
“How do you spell it, I understand?”
«With the acca».
«Bene».
So thanks to Mohammed the anecdotes flock.
Mina surprises us. Her first experience in Italy is not beautiful, it is memorable. You shook the hand of Pope Francis. «The Pope, the one dressed in white» Sumaya whispers to Khalid that she didn’t understand well. Mina landed in Lampedusa with her two children and was welcomed in Molfetta. “I slept inside a church. One day Don Angelo said: tomorrow the pope is coming. He gave me and my children a crucifix.” The Lithuanian student premises that his first beautiful and Italian thing is not poetic like the others. Simply the first day he ate pizza for lunch and also for dinner. And the second day he did the same thing. The third, the fourth. For a week, a lot of pizza. Shaila smiles because she too had the same reaction when her husband sent her home a tub of pistachio ice cream the day she arrived from India.
Khalid remained silent. He too, like Mohammed, walked for an incredibly long time before being able to find a safe place. He is very young, Khalid, he is twenty years old. Scrolling through his Instagram profile, you can see the selfies he took with his travel companions while walking along a path in Macedonia or Bosnia. They smile, it looks like a picnic with friends. In those images Khalid does not yet know that his first experience in Italy will be a rather big health problem. “They visited me at the reception center and told me that something is not right.” They operated on him in a hospital where the doctors and equipment made him feel like he was in a TV series. When he was better he bought some Harry Potter glasses and enrolled in this course. The Indian girl asked him too: «Are you married?». But then he was struck off the bachelor list. Sumaya says he’s too young, skinny and not yet ready to make his debut in the world. Inscrutable and infallible is the wisdom of the weavers of marriage.