“The Blue Water,” Prairie Fire, October 2020 (excerpt).
Perugia: the third day
Virus. The word has a cold, alien sound and ends with a hiss of danger. Italian is onomatopoeic; its letters make sounds that confer meaning. Take the verb formicare, “the feeling that ants are crawling on your skin.” The double rolling “r”s and image offered by the root word formica (ant) combine to create that unpleasant sensation.
Always a lover of language, even now in my old age when I live alone and find few occasions to communicate either in written or spoken form, I keep my Garzanti dictionary close to hand. When I long for the outside world, the Garzanti is a treasure-trove, full of arcane and wonderful words. I won my first copy from our local priest, after submitting an essay that linked the calls of birds in our valley to the lives of saints. I coupled Santa Clara, who followed St. Francis, with the European turtledove, a gentle bird with a mournful call. Clara and her Poor Clares went barefoot and slept on the dirt, worse off than me. I knew this rot would appeal to our priest, a simple man often seen striding through the countryside, alert for deadly sins, the tails of his frock coat swishing like buzzard wings.
I felt so proud when the priest called me to the front of the chapel and placed the hefty book in my hands. At first, only the pictures appealed to me. I ran my finger over line drawings of protozoa, anthropoids and crustaceans, arachnids, mollusks and amphibians, before turning to reptiles and fish. Some of these were familiar to me, including the zecca (tick), scorpione (scorpion), zanzara (mosquito), and lumacca (snail). The "life forms" section featured twenty pages of illustrations of birds, marsupials, ungulates, carnivores, and primates, to end on the very last plate with an illustration of “uomo,” a seated naked man seen from behind, which made me snicker.
Most of all, I loved discovering strange new words, and before long, the whole family joined in. Each night as my mother ladled stew onto our plates, I would announce my latest find: attaccabottoni (a bore, literally, one who attaches himself to your buttons); gibigianna (the play of light on a mirror or on water; also, a woman who attempts to dazzle with her beauty). I would shout a word and someone would use it in a sentence, which often made no sense and made us all laugh. My father proved something of a linguaphile with ciondolone (someone who hangs around without doing much, and whatever he undertakes, he does poorly). Even my mother contributed pidocchioso (stingy, from the root pidocchio, head lice). You can imagine the words Elio chose: scoreggio (a loud fart) was a favorite, as was loffa (an airy fart).
When my chores were done, I’d sit at our kitchen table, searching for words for the next night’s game. One night, I noticed that the words for things that frightened me seemed to begin with letters from the end of the alphabet. Terremoto (earthquake), squalo (shark), vipera (viper), veleno (poison). And naturally, virus. I remember the entry:
Virus (n. VEE’-rooss)
Late 14c. "poisonous substance," from Latin virus "poison, sap of plants, slimy liquid..." from Proto-Italic *weis-o-(s-) ...perhaps originally meaning "to melt away, to flow," used of foul or malodorous fluids...The meaning "agent that causes infectious disease" is recorded by 1728 (in reference to venereal disease). (Etymonline.com)
They tell me a virus is making its way around the world. Perhaps it’s true. As I cannot leave my bed, I get my news from Graziella, who lives in the villa with me. This morning, Graziella set down my breakfast tray of cappuccino and blackberries and said,
“Buon giorno, Contessa. Have you heard that the virus has arrived in our village?”
“No, I have not,” I answered, popping a berry in my mouth. “I’ve never been sick a day in my life.”
“They say it started in China. People there eat bats.”