This Crumbling Pageant Read online

  “But what do you want me to talk about?”

  She shut her eyes and held her fingers to her temples. “I haven’t a clear picture yet. I envision you giving a kind of… special presentation. But we can go over it in more detail later. In the meantime, while you are working up to all this, I want your primary focus to be on your first course. I also think it would be helpful if you sat in on as many classes as possible, just to observe. Since you won’t have many hours to begin with, I can offer you an advance if you are having difficulties with money. I know how hard it can be. Well then, I would like to get you started right away. Are you free now?”

  The waiter returned balancing a tray and placed on the table a long shot of espresso with a shaving of lemon peel on the saucer.

  “Now?” Scott asked.

  “Baptism by fire.” She tore open a sugar packet. “Your class meets in twenty minutes. I can introduce you to the teacher you’ll be replacing. Rachel. She’s a dear girl. One of our most prized instructors. We are going to miss her enormously. She’s an American like you. The only problem she has, I’ve noticed, is she has a slight tendency to chew her words when she speaks.” She pretended to chew. “Like most Americans. She, in turn, will hand you over to the students. Meanwhile, I will get started on the paperwork. The immigration office is open for a few hours on Saturday. The tricky part is trying to guess exactly which hours those are. But don’t worry.” She gave a smile that exuded confidence. “I will battle it out with those evil civil servants. They know me by now over there. I don’t want anything to intrude upon this time which you should be devoting entirely to classroom preparation. I will only bother you when it is absolutely necessary for you to come sign this or that document.” She gulped down the espresso, then let out a sigh that raised the smell of espresso. “Allora. Is that okay? Everything clear? Benissima. We should hurry off, now. We haven’t much time. Ah, but go ahead, dear—finish your sandwich first.”

  &

  The school was on the ground floor of a building on Hell St. (Via dell’Inferno) in that maze of alleyways called the Jewish Ghetto. The ponderous, bolt-studded door had nothing to advertise itself. It was as anonymous as the others on the street and, like the others, had an early version of a peephole—an eerie testament to the Jews who used to live there.

  Inside the main office, Scott was receiving some very frazzled last-minute instructions from Rachel, who was in a rush to catch her train to Rome and then her flight to Newark.

  “All the materials I’m taking are mine, just so you know,” she informed him while dumping a limp pile of books and worksheets into a tote bag.

  With its posters on the walls, long table, and copy and soda machines, the office reeked of an American teachers’ lounge. Scott was wondering if he and Rachel were alone, when a door behind her opened a crack and closed again. He watched as the door moved softly back and forth in the jamb, the handle turning in fits and starts. When it finally came to a stop, he said, “That was mysterious,” but Rachel declined to comment. She had opened the drawer to a filing cabinet and was emptying its contents into her bag.

  “For this class,” she said, “I’ve been using the total immersion method from the beginning. I recommend you do the same. No matter how tempting it can be, you should never speak to them in anything but L2.”

  “L2?”

  “The target language.”

  “The target language?”

  “English.”

  “Oh,” Scott laughed, nodding his head and comprehending at last. He knew English. “Right. Gotcha. No italiano.”

  A box of colored pencils slipped out of her hands and he picked it up off the floor for her.

  “Thanks,” she said. “Usually at the beginning of each class I’ll review their homework with them. Then I’ll introduce new material, break them up into small groups, and have them complete some exercises. Then we’ll correct them together. After that, I’ll give them their assignment for the following week. Finally, if there’s still time and if they’ve behaved themselves, we’ll play a game at the end, which should incorporate the day’s lessons.”

  “If they’ve behaved themselves?”

  Again his eyes went to the door behind her. There were shadows underneath it, romping around.

  Rachel took out her phone to answer a text message. “It’s my roommate,” she said, typing a reply. “She’s coming back home with me. We’re both entering the same Master’s program this spring in TESOL and Bilingual Ed.” Tapping at the phone, she kneed the drawer shut, slung the tote bag over her shoulder, and moved swiftly across the room. Scott followed at her heels.

  She dropped the phone into her purse. “Ugh! I’m so late. Okay. Let me calm down. Now…” She scanned a desktop, stacked with trays. “Where does Carolina keep the timesheets? Ah, here they are. Do you have a pen? Never mind, I have one. Oh, God, let me think how many hours I put in this week…” She calculated in her head, the pen poised and antsy in her hand.

  Behind the door came sounds now. Screams, sing-alongs. Scott had a sinking feeling what it all meant. He cursed Luca San Michele in his head.

  “So…” Rachel began, distracted as she scratched numbers into the timesheet. “Okay, so Elvira wanted me to fill you in on where we’ve left off. We’ve covered seven chapters in their textbook. You should pick up from there, with the subjunctive, and you might want to review with them the rules for prepositional phrases. Elvira said she wants you to switch to more content-based learning if you see the students are having problems with the curriculum. I personally find it’s an effective approach for when we seem to have stopped making progress. I’m also supposed to tell you not to rely on drilling alone when teaching them grammar, though in my experience deductive instruction works best with ELLs, and especially when the class is TYLE, like yours is. Finally, Elvira wanted me to review with you some of the methods the SLA highlights for dealing with this challenge. I really don’t have time to do that with you, but anyway you shouldn’t have much of a problem given that the concepts you’ll be introducing are all non-contrastive and ‘WEP friendly.’”

  “What does that mean?”

  Scott had thrown her off. She ceased scribbling and looked up at him with something like dread. One of her eyebrows was disheveled. “What does what mean?”

  He shook his head despondently and shrugged. “All of it.”

  For the first time, Rachel smiled at him. Everything about her was so American in a Plain Jane kind of way that he would have liked to cling to her UCONN Huskies sweatshirt for comfort and moral support.

  “Everything will be fine,” she said. “Trust me. You have nothing to be nervous about.”

  “The director seems to have high hopes for me.”

  “You’ll never see her again.”

  “What?”

  “Oh, maybe you’ll see her every once in a while, especially during the accreditation period, but otherwise, no.”

  “But she said she was going to help me with the work visa.” Mentally, Scott had already been putting all his money on the director. He thought she possessed just the right amount of pushiness and high-strung energy to get the job done.

  Rachel nodded. “That would be Carolina, the secretary. She takes care of all that. Don’t worry. She’s quiet, but persuasive. Elvira spends most of the time in Padua with her boyfriend, who’s a neurosurgeon. You’ll see. All her talk is just empty bravado. Every now and then she comes in and makes a grand sweeping appearance, and then goes running off into the arms of her doctor boyfriend. All she cares about is making things look professional. That, and paying her teachers as little as possible. Did she try to give you an advance on your wages? I thought so. Did you accept? Good. Don’t. You’ll owe her your soul in no time.”

  &

  It was sweet to see how much pleasure the children took in saying the word “here.”

  “Maria,” said Scott, sitting behind a large, alienating table at the front of the class. He
frowned over the attendance sheet.

  “Here!” piped a tiny little girl, her hand shooting straight up.

  Scott put a neat checkmark by her name and then moved his finger down to the next. “Bruno.”

  “Here!” enthused a slightly older boy with a cheese-eating grin. He threw a punch into the air.

  Another check.

  “Rosa.”

  “Here!” shouted Rosa, a chubby little girl with a mannish face.

  He continued down the list. There were about a dozen children present in the dim, narrow room, with its high ceiling and ghostly frescoes. He called out the final name.

  “Damon.”

  “Yo.”

  Scott peered up from the sheet with raised eyebrows. “Damon?”

  A skinny black kid seated by the windows raised his hand. “Yeah, that’s me,” he said.

  It was an American accent, the genuine article. It was like music to Scott’s ears. He sat up. “You’re American.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “Where are you from?”

  “I’m from Flint, Michigan.”

  He stared at the boy in amazement. “From Flint, huh? I can’t believe this. What are you doing all the way over here?”

  “My mom moved us here for work.”

  “How long have you been here?”

  Damon thought about it. “We been here… hm, maybe one year?”

  “That’s a long time. What does your mom do for work?”

  He shrugged. “Beats me.”

  “But how come you’re in this class if you already know English?”

  He stroked his chin. “I guess maybe she doesn’t want me to forget how to speak it.”

  Scott sat back. “Well, Damon, I can already tell you’re going to ace this class no problem.”

  Up until then the boy had been trying to act cool. But now a smile spread over his face and he was too pleased to say anything. His classmates smiled, too, and the boy seated next to Damon reached over and gave him a pat on the back. He was their English language secret weapon.

  “Okay, everybody,” Scott declared, getting up from his chair and coming out from behind the table. “This is going to be your first quiz. Ready? Now. How many of you understand a word I am saying? Raise your hands.” He waited, then laughed, “Not you, Damon.” He looked around the room and repeated the question, loud and clear so he couldn’t be accused of chewing his words. “Can you understand me?” But the children only looked among themselves in confusion. Finally the class turned to Damon for enlightenment.

  “Vuole sapere se lo capite,” the boy translated the question to them, and then, naturally, they all raised their hands high into the air.

  “Damon,” said Scott, “what exactly did you guys do all day with your last teacher?”

  Damon gave this some serious thought. Then he said, “She basically made us do a lot of exercises. A lot of grammar.” He rolled his eyes.

  Scott rubbed his forehead. “Alright, everybody. Let’s try to get through this.”

  Rachel had supplied him with some flashcards, and he went through those in a jiffy. Then, working off a ditto sheet, he went around the room and asked the students questions, stuff like “How old are you?”

  They were familiar with this one. Poor Bruno started it off, saying slowly, “I have—”

  “I am!” the class corrected him in chorus.

  Bruno beat himself on the head at his own stupidity.

  “What’s your favorite food?” was another question. But they were all answering “pasta.”

  “We’re never going to learn any English like this,” Scott said.

  He handed out a vocabulary exercise, told Damon to tell them to take their time, then used the break to send Holly a text:

  Nobody could possibly like that girl Arpi.

  That morning they had argued about whether or not anyone could possibly like that girl Arpi. Scott placed the phone on the table, then picked it up again and wrote:

  And I hope you put on some clothes before you answered the door!

  On his way out, Scott had run into Luca Gallo climbing the stairs. Holly and the artist had made plans to go to the basilica to look at its hallucinatory fresco of the prophet Mohammed, burning in hell, and Scott was concerned because Holly had only been wearing a towel when he left.

  The phone vibrated clockwise on the table.

  You’re wrong. He’s crazy about her.

  Nothing about how she answered the door. Then came another text:

  How’s the interview going, by the way? Are you done yet?

  But he didn’t feel like talking about it yet.

  The students finished their exercise and Scott went over it with them. What to do next… In twenty minutes he had plowed through all of his material. That left two hours and forty minutes to kill. The good news was the children seemed pretty well-behaved and disciplined. Rachel had obviously known how to keep them in line. However, he could already predict how fast all of her hard work would be undone, by him. It was the same mixed feeling of pleasure and hopelessness he used to get whenever he moved into a new apartment. So neat and clean—how would he ever keep it that way?

  14

  Not long afterward, Scott developed the power to clear rooms. Everyone at the school was a native Italian and, because they were self-conscious about their real-world English abilities, avoided him so well it seemed choreographed. He could walk into the busy office and then stand around watching it steadily empty of people. Taking the director’s advice, he had asked some of the teachers if he could observe them as they taught. But far from welcoming him in the classroom, as Elvira had promised, they reacted with hostility, terror, walk-outs, and songs of protest. It made him feel cosmically alone. Sometimes it seemed his only friend was Janet, and she hated his guts.

  “What am I supposed to do with this?” she asked, opening a belated Christmas gift.

  “Do with it?” he said. “It’s a pin. You pin it on your jacket, I think. What’s the matter? I thought you liked vintage crap.”

  “For my home!” she blared. Then she sat up on the sofa very ladylike and waved her hands over her squat body. She wore a belted sweater dress and black pearl choker. “Not for my clothes and accessories. Didn’t you ever notice?”

  “Notice what?”

  She stooped. “Thanks.” She snapped the jewelry case shut and tossed it aside, then, struggling forward, reached under the sofa for his present. She watched with a smile as he unwrapped it. “You were admiring mine so I thought I would order you one, too.”

  He examined the onyx obelisk in his hands. It was the same as her own, the one she kept on the mantel, in front of the Kensett painting.

  &

  He had written a satisfying e-mail to his mother, wishing her a merry Christmas and telling her she didn’t have to fret anymore about him and Holly coming to stay with them, because they had both found work. Her reply was less satisfying:

  How much will you be making? Will it be enough to live on? I hope you’re not dipping into your savings. You’re going to need it when you get back. And what are you doing for health insurance? I couldn’t sleep last night worrying about it. God forbid something happens, I don’t want to go bankrupt…

  That was the gist. All Scott wrote back was:

  It’s enough to live on over here.

  Which it was. Even being uninsured in this country didn’t give him the same insane gambler’s rush it did back home. For instance, one morning he woke up with pink eye (he knew right away which one of his students was the culprit). Holly took him to the hospital and in five minutes flat, no questions asked, he was lying on his back and having his eyes gouged by the thumbs of a real live doctor. The emergency room visit plus the cost of filling the prescription at the pharmacy totaled less than fifty dollars. In addition, he didn’t have to go to a New Year’s Eve party hosted by one of Holly’s new work friends. Win-win.

  He went to surprise
Holly at work one day. He asked for her at the front desk and was led to the museum’s private library, where she was sitting at a large table, leafing through color plates. Scott took a peek and saw Biblical nudes, standing like phantoms in front of electric blue skies. Holly looked happy to see him and to show off what she was working on. She said she was researching the Florentine painter Francesco Furini for a possible exhibit, and drew Scott’s attention to the artist’s sfumato, or “smoky,” brushwork, which gave his paintings their otherworldly effect. Scott offered to take her out for lunch, but she said she wanted to keep working.

  She saw him out, leading him through the Rococo wing. Every object on display was accompanied by a caption in Italian and, underneath, its English translation. Her translation. Holly looked so happy showing off her projects she was almost emotional, as if she wanted to cry about how very meager and pathetic her needs were, and how cruel life had been to have withheld them from her for so long. Scott could see that, once and for all, she had decided what she wanted to do in life, and it wasn’t Medicine, and it didn’t involve going back home anytime soon. She had a year-long work contract. Were they really going to stay in Italy for a whole year? Obviously yes, though it was something they had yet to acknowledge.

  She would leave for work before he woke up, never came home during the long lunches, and always stayed past quitting time. She would return flushed, only to go out for a walk with the dog and jump in the shower before meeting her co-workers for un aperitivo.

  Weekends, too, she was booked solid with little excursions, or with one of the endless festivals or cultural events happening in and around the city.

  “I don’t get it,” he confessed to her. “You see these people every day. Why would you want to spend your free time with them, too?”

  “They’re my friends!” she said emphatically. She was getting ready to go out to the university, to a panel discussion on semiotics starring the president of Humanities, Umberto Eco. “Remember having friends, Scott?”