part one of who knows how many

I fly out for Sicily tomorrow morning. There was so much to write about this weekend, and so much to do this week when I was home, that I haven’t had time to write it all down. Here’s part one, and when I can finish, I will.

*Names, of both people and corporations, have been changed

Am both traumatized and amused, an absolute failure and a huge success. My life choices up to this point have been vindicated, and have come back to slap me in the face. I reckon the nutshell here is that I have made my bed, and now I am lying in it; Or, in an effort to keep things interesting, bouncing on it.

To clear this up right now, all that the woman who had asked me to come to this (we’ll call her Catarina) had said, in regard to the entire weekend, was this:
“Oh, it’ll be fuuuuuuun! We’ll have a nice dinner, and we’ll stay at a hotel. You just come and help with the Americans; they’ll be so happy to meet you, and you can help with our conversations!”

Seemed like an easy gig. I left around 1:30pm Friday afternoon. A quick lunch, and FL took me to the train station and kissed me goodbye. I hung out the window of the train long enough to see FL reemerge on the other side of the tracks and disappear into the station, long enough to see the town of Cormons lose itself to the trees and surrounding hills, long enough to watch even Mt.Quarin get swallowed up by larger, darker mountains. It was the strangest sensation: even after weeks of walking around chomping at the bit to get out, I would have given anything to stay in Cormons that day. The sky was crisp, and the air so clear that we could actually see the Dolomites, silver and sharp as glass, peak up over the molehill that is Mt. Quarin. There were vineyards to be walked and townspeople to be watched and the oddly inexhaustible excitement of a Friday night at Porchis ahead. Plus, who knew what sort of dangers this weird weekend held, at whatever the hell this thing was I was about to attend. My snowglobe, my precious Cormons, was so much safer.

Catarina had given me extremely vague instructions, which I had mistaken as “simple” instead of just plain “lacking”. She had said to show up at 5pm, to the Palazzo del Turismo in Jesolo, which is a small beach island outside of Venice. I did just that, hopping off the bus at what was, instead of a conference center with a hotel attached, a convention center: cinder-blocked, large auditorium, fluorescent lighting. No hotel. When I entered, I saw a girl who works for Catarina standing at the front desk, speaking into a walkie-talkie. She saw me, looked at my suitcase, and shook her head.

“You’ll have to get changed in the bathroom”, she barked. “There’s not much time”.
Managed to wiggle myself into my tights and dress, wedge my feet into my heels, and shove my heavy-beyond-all-sense suitcase into a closet, just as close to 100 people flooded into the front hallway, chattering and waving their LiquiLife catalogues through the air. I had read through this catalogue on the train- this was pretty much the extent of the fill-in that Catarina had supplied me as to the nature of this company and the event which it was hosting.

Basically, the company is a pyramid scheme, though a very successful, legitimate one. They sell vitamins and minerals in a gel form. Gels for your hair and nails, gels for weight loss, gels for Omega3 fatty-acids, gels for endurance and performance. Each gel is sold in a nifty little packet, colorful and artfully designed, with a tear-away flap, allowing the blessed consumer to hold it to their lips and suck the gel directly into their mouths. The catalogue not only had information on each of the 20 different products on the line (each, obviously, doctor/scientist/athlete/supermodel approved and endorsed), but was filled with at least 15 pages allocated for nothing other than “introducing” the higher-ups of the company. There were photos, bios, and a personal letter written by all the big-shots, both those in America and in Italy. This is how, before even ever laying eyes on them in person, I knew the names, backgrounds, and tacky tastes of the people who I would meet on this weekend away from home. One photo showed an Italian family of 4, the mother and father both “Ruby members” of the company, in a creepily sexual pose, the daughters put on display for no fathomable reason in lycra skirts, holding tiny puppies against their blossoming breasts. Another photo showed the director of international communications lying on a polar bear-skin rug with her husband, who looked like Sigfreid, while she clutched an inexplicable Gucci purse and laughed up into his face, her spiky, teased blond hair gelled to resemble an overgrown briar patch. The Americans all seemed bland and normal enough, and as the weekend progressed I was even ashamed to remember that I had described them as “nerds” based on the impression of their bios.

The front hall filled up, and I stood at the front desk, a plastic grin on my face, awaiting some sort of instruction. Finally, Catarina breezed in, followed by a pack of men who were clearly American. Their suits were pressed and navy as night, their cheeks healthy and apple-like, giant leather briefcases and grim expressions that I imagine accompany business trips and financial success. I was introduced briefly to each of them, and then Catarina clapped her hands and announced that we were all a bit late, and the conference was about to begin. I followed them into a room filled with chairs and a tiny stage, and just as I was slinking toward the back wall, Catarina caught my eye and mouthed, “here!”, meaning, I was horrified to discover, in a chair smack in the middle of all the Americans. She sat me down, handed me a microphone, and said, in her tiny, impotent English, “translate.”

There was no time to protest. Some man that I recognized from the catalogue as being one of the top Italian salesmen took the stage and started off on a spiel regarding the format for this weekend’s “Team System Meeting”. Simple enough stuff, but as I attempted to translate into the microphone, I found that A) It was turned on very loudly, so that not only the surrounding 10 Americans, but the entire room, could hear me, and that B) translating is extremely difficult, if not, at least at my level, absolutely impossible.

Let me insert right now my impressions of the life-and-time-consuming endeavor which is Learning a Foreign Language. As far as I am concerned, languages are like mathematics: there are people who just get it, and there are people who have to struggle, rethink and attempt to conceptualize every tiny aspect of the task. From the start I found myself comparing learning and speaking Italian to working with math formulas, even before I could even explain why I felt this way. Each word has it’s tense, it’s definition, and it’s direct correlation to whom and what and when you are trying to speak of. It is not merely enough to know that “fare” is the Italian verb “to do/make”; you must know, immediately and definitively, that “fai” means “he does/makes”, that “facevamo” means “we did do/make”, that “faresti” means “you would do/make” and that “potresti fare” means “you could do/make”. Basically, each word is not just one, but multiple, as one single verb can then be conjugated 30 to 40 different ways to mean 30 or 40 different things, and if you have to stop and think of the root verb and then conjugate from there you are out of time, lost, over. One must hear the conjugated verb and understand it completely and totally for what it says. This is why I used to say that speaking Italian was like doing math. Constructing a sentence took an unbelievable amount of effort for me. I would have to start from the base verb/adjective/noun, and then add and subtract, divide and multiply, weave and snip and embellish, so that one, perfect phrase would emerge from the over-simplified wreckage that is basic Italian101. In order to do this I had to train my brain to STOP TRANSLATING. I could not, for example, hear a sentence or a command, and then try and figure out what it meant to me in English; doing this would lose me time and the flow of the conversation and I would be left with a perfectly translated sentence standing alone, without the rest of the idea or paragraph to put it into context. I had to train my brain to only hear the Italian, and to understand what they were saying in Italian, not my native language. Another thing: because of this, and because I have learned a lot of my Italian without the aid of a direct English translation, a lot of Italian words, phrases, and concepts to me do not translate at all. The word proprio, for example. I can explain to you that it means, kind of, directly, exactly, really…all of these things and more. This word strikes me specifically, because I know how to use it in Italian, and because it makes so much sense in Italian and I like this word so much, and we don’t have a direct translation that makes as much sense in English, and because of this, I find myself using this word even when I am speaking in English.

So in this way, with my Italian up to this point being constructed and known with these parameters, I was asked by a woman I can now only describe as irritatingly ignorant to translate. And this guy wasn’t even doing me the courtesy of speaking for a moment, and then pausing for me to translate. Oh, no. He was just plowing on, full steam ahead, leaving me there with my head on the verge of explosion. I found myself understanding fine, but then getting tongue-tied when trying to turn it around to it’s English equivalent. I found myself speaking Italian to the Americans. I couldn’t explain fast enough, I couldn’t even think of the words in English! It was like suddenly English was my foreign language. And every time I stopped to explain, I would miss the next sentence, and then have to struggle to find my footing again. It was a mess. My face was red, I could hardly breath, my heart was pounding, and all around me the Americans were leaning in, whispering, “What?? What did he say?” and Catarina kept watching me and mouthing, “Speak! Speak!”I was just about hysterical. The first 3 people to make speeches were fine; at least, I could convey the general gist of their monologues. But the 4th guy…he was speaking in metaphors! About how business is like a tree or a leg with veins or two trunks and ants or tendons or good Christ, I had no fucking idea where he was going with that.

Found myself saying, “well, you see this company is…there is a large corn field. Wait, no, just a field. And he is standing on one leg. Big leg with circles? Oh, rings like the age of the tree, I bet! Oh, a scarecrow? No. Business pulses on the right and on the left…this is capitalism? I’m sorry, I’m too confused”.

This guy went on for almost 30 minutes, and after the initial kick-off to his stupid metaphors, I was lost. There was nothing I could do. I just sat there, mouth ajar, silent, watching this guy talk and trying, desperately, to put the individual words that I was hearing come out of his mouth into an intelligible sentence. To no avail. I felt like an absolute failure, I felt mortified. I wanted to bolt, but I was in the middle of a giant pack of men in suits and Catarina was staring me down and I couldn’t even feel my legs to get up and move. All I could do was wait.

Finally, it was over. I fled the room and went into the stairwell outside, which was dark and cool and I just sat there for a minute and tried to catch my breath. I had not signed up for this, and I felt utterly humiliated. My phone wasn’t working, so I couldn’t call FL for any encouragement, and to be honest I knew that I couldn’t call him, that if I did I would just burst into tears at the sound of his voice, and my god, I wanted his chest so badly, why wasn’t I there against his chest talking about what to do for dinner instead of here in this cold stairwell???

Ah, dinner. I remembered that there was still that ahead of us, and the only shining light in this scenario was that surely there would be champagne. I put on my composed/professional face and emerged from the stairwell, where I had been no longer than 1 minute, to find the front hall completely empty. Outside there were a few people scattered about, but Catarina was not among them. Neither was anyone I could recognize. I walked all over the place looking, no one. She had left me.

So there I was: 5 euro in my wallet, my high heels already killing me, traumatized and lost, no working phone (and there was no public phone, either), and a huge suitcase. I didn’t have the name of my hotel or the name of the restaurant. Just as I was about to lug myself across the street to the McDonalds, where I imaged I could at least sit until I came up with some idea of how to get in touch with FL to come save me from this stupid situation, a man in a tuxedo came up.

“Are you supposed to be at the dinner with us?” he asked, smiling gently at my stricken face.

Rode with him and another man, both in tuxedos and both very kind, in a fancy BMW SUV to a restaurant about 30 minutes away, where the party was already in full swing. Catarina saw me when I entered and said, “Finally! Could you not find a taxi?” Wanted to strangle her, but instead I just smiled and gracefully swooped a glass of champagne from the tray of a passing waiter.

“We’ll call you if we need you”, she said, and then turned her back to continue talking to the crazy briar-patch-haired lady from the catalogue.

Fine with me. I sipped my champagne and considered the mountains of fried seafood that had been laid out for appetizers, beginning to feel myself calm down, thanks to the presence of calamari and Ribolla Gialla. Back on my own territory, if only slightly. Felt a tap on my shoulder, and turned to find one of the Americans. I had noticed him right away when he walked in, but had been too freaked out to give him much thought. He was much younger than the others, probably in his late 20’s/early 30’s, with punkishly-sculpted hair and a white tux, tie decorated with skull-and-crossbones. He smiled and thanked me for my translations earlier. My immediate reaction was to bluff, give him an “oh, yars, yars, certainly, sir”, but I found myself just smiling tiredly and letting out an amused sigh.

“I gave it my best shot. I hope I at least made it clear that your head of sales is possibly a little batty, talking all that nonsense about scarecrows and roots surging through the soil. Might want to keep an eye on him”.

He laughed and said, in a spirit of relieved camaraderie, “Yeah, I don’t know what I’m doing here either”.

He introduced himself as Scott Goodman, and his picture had not been in the catalogue. He was the guy who had named LiquiLife, and he was the guy who came up with all the snappy titles for the products, and who designed the logos. Usually, he didn’t have to travel with the rest of the corporate crew, but as this was a Team Systems Weekend, he was required to come to show his support as a member of the team. He seemed a little out of place with the rest of them, and I eventually indentified him as a confidant in this bizarre dream I was in.

Just as we were on the topic of the reality of Salt Lake City, Utah, Catarina came up to me and gave me my instructions. I was to sit at the head of the table, smack in between the CEO and the VP. I was to be their translator, I was to make them feel welcome, I was to help them with whatever they needed.

Assuming this was to be an unbelievably boring evening from then on out, I glugged the last of my champagne, and took my seat.

To my right sat the VP of LiquiLife, a hefty, blond man in his 40’s, the type, I imagined, to play golf as a primary form of exercise. I began to rack my brain as to what to say to a VP- were we suppose to talk about…? - but he beat me to it. He introduced himself as Donald Martin, with a firm, swooping hand shake, one I appreciated.

“Do you know how to ask for a diet coke? With ice?” he asked.

From there the conversation was easy: we talked about how ridiculous it is to drink warm cokes without ice, the terrors of European travels during the summer when there is no air conditioning (still!), and how their hotel didn’t have wireless internet (“an obvious oversight”, I supplied, in a cruel, peckish attempt to get back at Catarina, who had been in charge of finding them suitable accommodations). He was so nice! Not a scary corporate VP at all, just some guy, who could have been an uncle of mine. To my left, eventually, came Stephen Hammons, CEO of LiquiLife. From the start he was a bit sterner and reserved, but I came to realize over the course of the dinner that this was probably more of just a personality trait then some sort of put-on airs. He made conversation, too, and we managed to get along just fine. He told me about his family (6 children. Mormon), how his son was playing wide receiver in tonight’s homecoming football game, how his wife was going to certainly send him minute-by-minute texts from the game this evening, messages he would not at all mind being woken up to receive. We talked about Japan, where he had lived for 2 years when he was 20 (already a college graduate), about the food and culture.
So weird. I found myself in a blazer and heels, eating a marvelous 7-course meal (all seafood!) in-between two corporate millionaires, talking about family, football, and the pro’s and con’s of European travel. There was nothing to it.

The dinner wrapped up about midnight, and people began to disperse back to their respective hotels. I found Silvana, with whom I mistakenly assumed I would be traveling. She looked at me like I had three heads.

“I don’t know what hotel you’re at. Ask Martina.”

Jesus. Who in the hell is Martina?

After half an hour of asking around, I finally got the name and a vague address of my hotel, but was then instructed to call a cab. Still had no money or a working phone, and was saved from once again becoming completely abandoned by my friend with the BMW. He still had my suitcase in the back of his car, and a navigation system, and would be happy to take me to my hotel.

Arrived, exhausted, tottering on blistered feet and full to the gills (har har) with bony island fish, at my hotel, which was, thankfully, very nice, by 1am. Found my room, which had a large bed, a bathtub, and a balcony that over looked the sea. No time for a bath, though; I had to be back at the convention center at 8 am. Set my alarm for 7, but there was no need: at 6:30 the shutters over the balcony began to raise themselves, and I blinked my sleepy eyes at the blinding red light, which was, I was thrilled to find, the light from the sun rising over the sea. It was beautiful.