coming on all greta garbo

I’ve found myself in a little world where the guiding impulse is to cosset, to bundle up and blanket and enfold. Even the hard-faced matriarchs go about dressed in eiderdowns—pneumatic puffy coats or masses of fur. Watch them wrapping babies into scarves and mittens, each burbling to the other in this low-slung, vowelly language. This polysyllabic tendency to elaborate, interspersing everything with lilting qualifiers—secondo me… purtroppo… magari… This mad profusion of soft furnishings—anything that stands still long enough will be draped in two layers of damask and hung with a tassel.

Out of the babble of brocade and lace and elaborate phrases arises a sharp unifying theme: the banishment of the meagre; the final repudiation of all lack. There is a history-hardened core to it. It’s not something you want to cross. Don’t be fooled—the north of Italy isn’t all dolce vita. This region was squeezed by Mussolini’s fascism on one side and Hitler’s on the other. It’s people were fodder for canons and camps, livelihoods were destroyed in the economic chaos, and they haven’t forgotten. You will eat the panetone you are given, and you will offer your gifts of expensive chocolate, exquisitely wrapped, because these little gestures are all perpetuations of this endless, mesmeric dialogue: we affirm luxury and comfort; we deny their opposites. It’s the secular version of crossing yourself when you pass someone unfortunate in the street.

For a foreigner from a less troubled place, who once found the collectivist spirit of Italy quaint, it can leave you feeling, well, a bit bilious. Two visitors from the Outside World came to open a window and drag the stuffy covers off my head—my sweet, skeptical sister who’s seen it all and doesn’t mind it too much; and Macgregor the expert expat, who knows a culture clash when he sees one. “My god—it’s Japan: the sequel!” We swapped Japan faux pas stories—the “trinket box” (actually a funerary urn) that I brought out to show at the dinner table, announcing brightly that it was “for a friend of mine”; the staffroom showdown between a Macgregor and a senior teacher which, a century earlier, would have seen one or the other of them dead from shame.

He’s right—this place is more like Numazu, Shizuoka than it is like Sydney. The Japanese have no word for privacy—they’ve borrowed ours—and the Reggiani are equally confused by my desire for solitude. It’s a small town built on small business, and friendship is a network of interdependence and reciprocal favours. In the event that I am not involved in some promotional venture for the school on a Saturday night, I will at least be expected to render an account of who I was with, what we ate and whether we had a nice time (we did, of course—this is integral to the Saturday-night-report genre). These people are not bullies. For the most part they are funny, generous and stoical—they are just discomfited by what they don’t understand: chiefly, me. I got taken for a shop lifter the other day, presumably because talking like a five-year-old and constantly consulting a dictionary is shifty behaviour. On another day, three times in an hour, I was addressed in French. They don’t know what I am, but I’m not them.

Happily, I get on very well with all my students, and most people in the town are very friendly—friendlier than Sydney people, that’s for sure. I just get defensive sometimes because I feel like this mania for collective experience is rubbing out my solitude, and that’s the place I write from. It’s also the place I empathise from—I need time to reflect or I become oblivious to everything. When I shut the door behind myself or decline a dinner invitation, it’s because I need time to remember who I am, so I can be sane enough to give a damn who anybody else is.