The Passion of the Crises (and the edge of understanding)

“So when the World Cup is on, do you go for Italy or Argentina?” I frowned at the road in front of me, sweaty palms gripping the steering wheel. I craned my neck about me impossibly, making a show of checking every angle before turning. “Well… Argentina. You have to - because of Messi,” I replied disjointedly, this time focusing on oncoming traffic. This is how the conversation went while I was undergoing my driving test. I tried not to let how ruffled I was by the idle chat seep into my voice. The build-up to the test had been stressful, the waiting room unbearable. But now that I was in the car, I was trying my best to focus on remembering everything, despite the testing officer’s disarmingly chummy tone.

His question was simple enough to answer - in fact, I didn’t even need to think about it before I responded. In my family, we are all Argentina supporters through and through. Even though my mother is Italian, the albiceleste - the blue and white stripes - holds a special place for us, dictating the moods in our house throughout the football season. But the question of what it means to be in between two worlds - what the testing officer was really asking me - wasn’t so easily captured.

Being mixed race in Australia is a paradox. Half of my DNA is Italian, the other half is Argentinian, but my attitude, my accent and my experiences are 100 percent Australian. Born in Sydney, my father calls me “true blue” which wouldn’t be the way white Australians would describe me, at least on first sight. The crux of my cultural identity is much more abstract.

I grew up in the Western Sydney suburb of Fairfield, hearing a smattering of foreign languages more often than I heard English. I went to a school where students would revert to the language of their heritage the moment they had been sent off to work at their desks. Arabic was spoken brashly, the lilting syllables of Vietnamese floated amongst friends, and the debating team which was composed of a group of witty Assyrian girls would revert back to their native language as soon as they sat down to craft a rebuttal. A student in our class who spoke Chinese helped us each write our names in delicate, cross-hatching script to celebrate the year of the Ox. Our teacher prepared us ‘Otai, a traditional Tongan fruit drink, the classroom zesty with watermelon and pineapple as we ladled chunky coconut into cups. There wasn’t just diversity, but a lack of question around it. We never spoke about being many things all at once, about the Australiana associated with a plate of Vegemite sandwiches next to a tray of crackers with dulce de leche, or the smell of sarma mingling with kibbeh. In our home amongst the gum trees, the spices usually associated with Istanbul were equally reminiscent of an Aussie upbringing as a Hills Hoist out the back.

At school, we were all simultaneously insiders, sharing our cultures with one another. None of us were the same, but we made a strong case for strength in differences. What was a bubble, albeit a diverse one, lost its insularity as the years went on. Suddenly, as an adult, I found myself slightly on the outside all the time. This has always been the case to a degree. I was always the odd one out in a family with seamless edges. An Italian mother, an Argentinian father. Everyone spoke Spanish and Italian, and where siblings married people from other countries, everyone absorbed the languages and customs of the new branch of the family tree. I was the youngest of three, the only one who couldn’t speak Spanish, the only one who had never been to Argentina to meet the extended family. I grasped snatches of comprehension during Serious Family Discourses, frustrated at myself for being perpetually on the edge of understanding, plagued by a sense that time was running out for me to find a way in, to find out what this was all about before it was too late.

In the same vein, it was becoming more pressing that I put into words what it means to be biracial. People were starting to ask me. The more frequently I travelled out of my hometown people would wonder at my heritage. It was around this time that I decided to double down on what I did know, taking Italian classes to fortify my halting concept of the language.

In a musty classroom in a forgotten corner of the university, I sat slouched low in my chair on a rainy day, hoping to fly under the radar if I kept very still. Each time I was called upon to answer a question in Italian I would stutter out a direct translation of what I was thinking while the tutor nodded enthusiastically, despite my failure to conjugate the verb forms properly. I felt my face redden as the student next to me answered in fluent, flowing parlance. Rain pelted dully against the mullioned windows, lending sound to the fetid air rising from the damp, maroon carpet. A bundle of nerves, desperation and frustration, I realised in that moment that in spite of the evidence to suggest the contrary, I was enjoying myself.

This Italian vocabulary was more familiar to me than French had been when I studied it years prior, diametrically made the work more difficult. I knew these words. They were present in my everyday life. Yet here they were, seemingly further beyond reach than ever. Whenever I felt I was reigning in a semblance of mastery over a grammatical tense, it would retreat again into the murky depths of the gerund, or the imperfect. How could I begin to grasp the meaning of “magari” which has about a hundred different uses? As this became my daily grapple, I found I was relating increasingly to the difficulty of the subject, to the slipperiness of the verb forms, than to the language itself. The lyrical trysts of the words, the drawl of the dialects, the inherent poetry, and the long-winded tendencies it inspired galvanised my certainty that if I have been any more familiar with the language, I wouldn’t have been so beguiled by it. It was the thrill of the chase. There was so much beauty in those Italian words, and so much frustration that the struggle came to represent not just the lament of the language learner, but the spirit of being biracial - of being between two worlds.

Walking down the cobbled streets of Rome, everything old is new again. Locals congregate in interloping laneways, conducting the invisible orchestra with their hands. They are deep in conversation, speaking in layers of gesture and intonation. The lemons stacked precariously at the market stalls are stunning in their size, their yellow flesh saturated by the soft, peachy light refracted through the city. The trickling sound of water fountains follows you everywhere. In Rome, even the traffic lights are beautiful.

All of this is foreign to me. It’s a lifestyle of which I have lived an adapted version - growing tomato plants in the backyard, hunting down zucchini flowers at the fruit shop, never turning up at a friend’s house without an offering of struffoli, saladitos, or a bunch of parsley. To walk through the viale and to see Italy as a native Italian would be to erase my heritage, and in part, to erase my biraciality.

It was the absence of duality which I came to abhor. Suddenly, I found myself able to put a finger on my frustration; It wasn’t with myself at all, but with others. Things that seemed obvious no longer interested me. Things that were straightforward became boring in their one-dimensionality. In Italy, I’ll never truly be an insider, but I’ll never be a tourist either. There is too much there that I take in my stride; the aperitivo, the evening stroll, hearing a turn of phrase in dialect that I’ve heard my mum use - to make me laugh, to make fun of me or to reproach me. The presence of cappuccinos in the morning and their veritable absence any time after that. The diabolical passion for football. More importantly, if I was any more Italian than I am, I probably wouldn’t feel that giddy excitement upon hearing the language spoken in passing on the street. The duality lies in both the beauty of the language and my initial recoil upon hearing it - forever associating its shrill tones with being told off by my parents or being forced to interact with a house guest over dinner.

There is definitely an excitement associated with being an outsider. So many of us spend our lives going out of our way to fit in, to make the transition from ourselves to the person behind us in the supermarket queue as seamless as possible. The eye shouldn’t linger or hitch as it passes over you. This effort can become so oppressive that to break from it is to break from shackles, and to seek out “otherness” is to be reborn. Nothing has so motivated me to embrace the liminal space I exist in as the thought of seeing Italy through an Italian’s eyes, and immediately losing the profundity of my immersion in it. Like a deconstructed joke that ceases to be funny once it’s explained. It has been said that Rome wasn’t built in a day and nor can it be understood in one. In the land of contradictions; languid lives and chaotic traffic, fascism and liberalism, rampant racism and wanton warmth, being able to decipher Italy and its many moods would remove my experience of its mystery.

In Italian the word “emozionante” translates directly to “excitement” but it sounds similar to emotion - emozione. That’s because Italians don’t experience excitement without also experiencing a profound feeling - a sort of common human experience which underlies elation. Their propensity to be moved by even mundane encounters means that they are constantly transforming, moment to moment, in the same way that language does. Each utterance brings a newness, especially when learning a language. And so, it’s incredibly emozionante for me to sit in on an Italian conversation that is so rapid that I can only guess at the lost idioms and innuendo.

It’s when these experiences begin to compound with one another that you realise that nothing in life is ever so straightforward as you would think. Predictability is a logical fallacy, whereas struggle and diversity are the norm. These spaces in between, where we feel like we have become lost or overlooked are not limbo, they are the place to be, the place where all the interesting stuff is happening. When you realise that your fringe existence is woven into the fabric of the universe, you realise that the saying “variety is the spice of life” is about you.

By the way, I did pass my driving test on my first try, with flying colours.