Sometimes it is hard to recognize irony in a foreign language

Let me tell you about le zanzare. Le zanzare are the mosquitoes. There are lots of them. Also, Italian windows don’t have screens—so when you open the window (and the windows are these magnificently tall, heavy, wood-and-glass affairs that swing open), it’s OPEN. This can be useful: after dinner is cleared off the table, we simply bundle up the tablecloth, stick it out the window, and shake it clean (there is a sort of cement streambed about 10 feet down on that side of the house, so we don’t even need to worry about dumping dinner crumbs on some poor pedstrian); you can also stick your head out and admire the stunning vistas of mountains in the distance (or the neighbors’ vegetable garden!). However, it also means that there are as many mosquitoes INSIDE the house as there are outside; in fact, there are probably MORE inside, because that’s where all the lights and people are. It’s worse in the evening, especially at dinner time, and everyone in our house, including Emilia, detests le zanzare. This leads us to develop ever more elaborate and creative ways of getting rid of them. First, there’s the good old hand smack—NEVER against the wall, mind you, because then you’ll have a squashed mosquito on the whitewash (che schifo!)—always between two hands. The one-handing mid-air grab is more difficult to pull off, but much admired. Dinner is full of sudden SMACKs, and no one blinks an eye, except to ask “Preso?” (“Taken?”, ie, “did you get it?”). Then there’s the coil of some sort of mosquito-poison-incense that apparently smells horrible (I, thankfully, had a cold that night and couldn’t smell a thing). There are various contraptions that plug into the wall and give off a vapor or force field or something.
And then Emilia came home with the newest contraption the other day—a sort of electrified tennis racket. You turn it on, sweep it through the air, and the mosquitoes make a very satisfying sizzle. Demonstrate this to someone who has been futilely slapping at mosquitoes all week and her (no guys in our house) eyes light up; she then stalks around the table hunting mosquitoes, cackling and saying “HA!”. I think the best moment was at dinner several nights ago, when Emilia wound up perched on one foot on the bench at the table, trying to sneak up on a mosquito that kept landing juuuust out of reach on the wall. Tonight we decided that what we really need is a bat (as in the animal. Emilia had seen a TV program about how about a bat eats upwards of a thousand mosquitoes a night).

But it’s more or less a lost cause. There are always more of them. Or even if there’s only one, it buzzes right over your ear in the middle of the night. I’ve actually gotten rather good at pointedly ignoring my bug bites and not scratching them. But the fact remains that at night you have to choose between fresh air and the chance that leaving the windows shut might cut down on the mosquito population in your room.

All this so that you will understand why, when Emilia said something the other night at dinner about how if she opened her windows at night, i penguini would come into her room, I immediately assumed she was talking literally about some sort of small, annoying insect or animal. I knew the word for mosquito, and also squirrel, so I knew un penguino was neither of those (at this point, all of you have most likely thought of the obvious translation for the word penguino. So had I, but I discarded it as unlikely). I asked what un penguino was, and everyone else (faster on the uptake than I) tried to explain at once. You know, they said, those black and white birds (seagulls? I thought, trying to picture an invasion of seagulls through Emilia’s open window, in Florence? Surely not…) that can’t fly (but then how, I wondered, do they get in the window?). At this point I couldn’t think of any other bird that fit the description (short of ostrich, which was even more unlikely) besides the obvious, so I said, indignantly (in Italian) “But… penguins live at…” Yes, Emily, at the North Pole (or is it the South pole?), Emilia said, laughing, and Caitlin and Sophie (also giggling) chimed in to explain that this was a METAPHOR. Emilia meant that her room gets very cold (like the north pole) when she leaves the windows open at night.

I will now pause a moment to collect my poor, battered dignity.

. . .


But we all had a good laugh at my expense. And in my defense, it IS difficult to pick up on things like dry humor when you’ve has been concentrating all day on understanding even the literal meaning of all the words and phrases that aren’t yet in your (still limited) vocabulary.

And to all of you who are going to point out that I have been known to take things too literally on occasion even in English: Yes, yes, I know. But I mostly do that on purpose. Mostly.