Page 41 - WTP Vol. XI #6

nearly elvish.
“As I intend,” Parsons smiled. “We begin some years ago. My earliest stay in the Abruzzi.”
He had rented a cabin, a primitive baracca, in the village of Intermesole high up in the mountains. The town was like a swallow’s nest clinging to the rock face—all up and down, its streets a steep climb from one cramped piazzetta to another. By a number of kilometers, it sat downslope from the more celebrated town, Pietracamela, which (here Parsons paused to survey his audience) was at serious risk, now, of sliding off the mountain.
“Very fragile,” Roberto murmured. “Two landslides there in just the past several years.”
“Not a place, I dare say, to be investing in property.” Parsons continued. “I’d in fact undertaken a hike between the two towns, a rough uphill climb on one of the national sentieri—a very strange hike, the blazoned trail leading me up over serious obstacles, including several waterfalls! Dry ones, thank heavens, mere trickles in August... and the woods aswarm with dense clouds of insects. Though oddly, none bit me; they gathered around my head as if curious, nothing more.
“Fortunately for me, the good people of Intermesole, apprised of my intentions and without telling me, had sent someone in a car up to Pietracamela to fetch me back down. Had they not done so, I don’t know what I would have done, I was so thoroughly exhausted— hitchhiked, perhaps? Not likely to be able to call a cab up there. Though I could have been wrong.”
Pausing to sip his drink, Parsons polled his audience. The members of the family had all taken seats, and the professor had settled into a wide comfortable chair, a side-table at his elbow. His drink rested on it, recently refreshed.
“ ... The owner,” Parsons continued, “of the baracca I was renting (boulders from the cliff face jutted right into
the room) was Canadian by extraction, a lovely woman, Anna, who had early married her husband and had come out there to live. I never got the backstory, but one of the first things she said to me upon my arrival (I was there for several weeks) was ‘L’Italia! O l’ama o l’odia!’— which, I have to say, rather took me aback. Though, for all that, ‘love it or hate it,’ she seemed content enough, and took great pride in telling me about the region, about the town and its traditions.
“So one day, Anna’s husband caught up with me in town, a tall lean man by the name of Corrado. Rather Slavic, I thought. Abruptly he informed me, ‘You come with me
to dinner tonight.’ No more than just that! In a tone as dictatorial as it was inviting. ‘Be at our place at 8,’ he said.
“’In my car?’ I asked.
“’No,’ he said, ‘I’ll drive. There will be several of us.’
“Now, I was invited to dinner several times during my stay—cordial invitations from families in the town. These had been, linguistically, an interesting adventure, my ‘Tuscan’ Italian, as you’re pleased to call it here—”
Quick smiles from several quarters.
“—Leaving me, I have to say, at something of a loss, as of course I knew nothing of the local dialect. A young man at one of those dinners turned to me and said, ‘Are you following us?’
“’About half,’ I replied. Whereupon everybody switched to ‘proper’ Italian, if there be such a thing. Deferring to me, of course. But it wasn’t even minutes—”
The professor broke in here. “There is indeed, yes!, such a thing as ‘proper’ Italian. Bah! Il dialetto abruzzese... brutta roba, eh!...”
“—And yet,” said Parsons, smiling, “it was your great film director, Vittorio di Sica, who claimed that there was no such thing as ‘Italian.’ That there were only the dialects. Of which I know so little. And in which case I speak no Italian at all.”
“Mah!” the professor muttered, half-lifting himself in his chair to stress his point. “Di Sica! Che cosa, napolitano! What to expect?”
Parsons paused, then continued. “In any event. So! The invitation from Anna’s husband—”
It had launched one of Parsons’ most memorable adventures. Never would dining, would securing a taste
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