Dear Martha

SARAH CIPULLO

I don’t really like this language of yours, but I have a soft spot for you, and each time we talk, it’s as if once the conversation is over I’m coming back to Italian with my arms covered with notes about beautiful words you say I will never remember. It doesn’t matter if I close my eyes, focus on them, or stay silent in a still room full of darkness.

In my memory, I’m unable to retain the words that naturally bloom in your bones. You are so inside your language that you’re very exact when you use it to move around me or to stay away from me. You are always at the right distance and I really feel like you measure it sharply with the phrases you choose, each time abandoning inches and feet.

On the contrary, I am so clumsy while I try to express myself in a language that gives me no authority and makes me sound like an uneducated person with half Italian and half somewhere-from-the-North-of-Great-Britain accent. When I speak English I feel like a piece of wood shaped with an axe. Tina showed me great things that can be done with a chainsaw (besides, chainsaw carving is so American), but I’m sure there exist tools that allow greater precision and would not deprive me of my identity in such a way. They would not return a blurred image of myself to anyone I speak with. It’s so frustrating.

The moment I cross the line that separates Italian from English and I enter your world, I have the same body, I’m standing on the same legs, my eyes are still greyish blue, my right arm is still damaged and it still slightly changes the location of my shoulder blade. But it’s not me anymore. It’s someone else, coming from afar. And sometimes she’s incomprehensible, most of all when it’s 6 p.m. and I’m so tired after a whole day spent computing syntax in your language. After 6 p.m. the only English I can perform is Drunk English, as you well know.

During my mid-year performance review, Kate told me that I should learn to be short and sweet. At first, I wool-gathered about those words, while I was assimilating what they meant. Then I tried to explain to her that I wasn’t sure it was really me not being short and sweet. I believed it was probably my English that was not short and sweet. Each time I want to tell someone something, the phrases I have run in circles inside my head. I start to run after them while building each sentence and sometimes, while I’m looking for verbs and nouns I cannot find, I pile word on word, taking time. It’s like mining work and mining work is always tiring. Oxygen is scarce, but I dig. I dig well and deep and at times I dig more than I should, other times I still dig too little. Often, words are just not inside me and I get testy.

melitas

Sarah Cipullo was born in Brindisi, Italy. She lived in Milan, Siena and Edinburgh and is currently based in Turin. She has a degree in Cognitive Science and Language, designs cars by sending emails and normally writes in Italian. In her free time she mainly reads, writes and plays chess. She doesn’t believe in borders.

Recently I decided to improve (or at least I’m trying to). I bought a Kindle and this happened for two reasons. First, my parents told me that there’s no more space for my books in their home. I already owned an e-reader while I was a student at university. I was always changing apartments, cities, and countries. I couldn’t afford to buy books and move them with me. But when I got to Turin, though I always had the instinct to leave, I felt the need to learn and stay. So, I decided to abandon the instability of e-books and I started buying physical ones again. They had weight, they were like an anchor. If I was going to move once more there would have been a penalty to be paid. I have always placed my books discreetly on their shelves, but the restlessness that started thickening my veins when I was a student remained and it forced me to stay detached and careful.

Did I really want to stay in Turin? I wasn’t sure, and every time I went to my parents’ place in Puglia, I packed all the books I had read in my suitcase. And so, my fifteen-year-old room became a bookshop, but now it sounds like there’s no space anymore and the issue is, there’s no space in my apartment too. That place is honestly a mess. It looks like an archaeological site of too many civilizations that have been destroyed. Italy was locked down for a long time because of COVID. I didn’t have the chance to move my books for a year, for we could not get on a train and go to another region. Consequently, I now cannot allow myself to buy other volumes. It’s me or them in the little corner I have left.

The other reason that pushed me to buy my Kindle is that I can simply touch a screen while reading to easily consult a dictionary. Simple words I can understand appear on screen explaining to me the meaning of more complex ones.

The limits of my language mean the limits of my world, Wittgenstein wrote.

How small mine is. There is only room for a modest park with the broken arches of collapsed aqueducts. So Italian, uh.

I will never master English, I’m well aware of that. I’m just asking for asylum in your language to find a place where I can be known and seen, which is basically what one desires when in love. To be known. To be seen.

You cannot imagine how stupid I feel right now when I write “in love.” I wouldn’t use these words if I was writing in Italian. There’s too much intensity in them. They speak of a feeling that needs to have the time to settle. The bones, the organs, the tissues, the skin, they all need to know. And flesh needs to meet flesh for it to be real. This has never happened to us, but the language I’m using right now, it’s not mine. It turns me into an ape, so definitive and elementary in her approximate being. It’s without any grace that I’m making myself vulnerable to you and I can read through all these words I’m writing so little that I’m almost anaesthetized to my own feelings.

Dear Martha, I perfectly know I will not achieve anything by writing this letter I will not send. And I also perfectly know that beyond you, English is a powerful tool to use, that me learning and improving it in the past was not about you at all. But today, in this moment, it’s as if you are everything that makes sense in all this wading among alien words; as if you are the only final destination of this journey. I apologise for my groundless feelings. They still are unprepared to see reason and reject the giant body of water between our continents. There’s such a distance in this ocean and too much room in it for desire.

The first thing I thought about you when we started working together was that you had a sexy voice. And that was really it, nothing more. At that time, I was completely absorbed by a girl I met before the second wave of COVID who, at some point down the road, told me that I couldn’t even make it in her rankings. We were not in the same place back then. She lives in the North, I was stuck in the South, and turns of events kept us apart for a long time. She fell in love with someone else. Someone that had a body, a presence, that already was with her in Milan. After she was gone for a while, you and I had a talk. It’s funny because we were talking about language and while we were chatting I suddenly felt a connection and I realized how comforting it was to share thoughts with you. Intimacy between us happened underground, as a hushed agreement, while I was not thinking about it. I didn’t plan it and it didn’t occur in the same way again, but from that moment on, you started living within the walls of my mind. I imagined it was probably just me and I tried to defend myself. I avoided getting in touch with you unless it was really needed and I remember, I managed to do it for three weeks. Clearly, it didn’t work out and at the very end. I’m sitting here, writing in a language of which I am no daughter, feeling like a freak.

I saw you have full lips, indigenous eyes, and your face has features from both the old and the new world. In your blood, there’s the past and the future of everything, Martha. Your face can be stiff at times, but when you smile you’re so beautiful. You’re professional, sometimes formal, always kind. But I cannot smell you, nor observe how you move. I don’t even know what day you were born or if you have legs. I can only see your torso when we have meetings with the camera on. I know nothing about the real you. If you were to leave the company at any moment I would not know how to contact you. And even if I knew, I’m not sure I could, I’m not sure I would have the right to.

So I’m a fool writing these things I’m feeling and they are like cornerstones of a new religion. For they are groundless, blind, and wild. Still, they exist and reverberate like a glow among the ribs of my thorax. They hit them with such energy as if it was generated by an immense turbine.

I keep telling myself this is a COVID thing, but I dread that desire will stay, that I’ll crumble under its weight and I’ll end up tasting you in my mouth, hidden in the groove of a damn English diphthong.