The Tower of Babble

I went to Italy in 1970 to direct a movie, met Carla, got married, and stayed for a decade. We spoke English together at first. Gradually, as I learned the language, we shifted to Italian, and now speak it together virtually exclusively. In the beginning I struggled to learn by memorizing the vocabularly from a how-to book, one chapter a day. After a couple of weeks I had learned words for furniture, rooms of the house, table settings, and so on, and verbs like "to clean," "to sweep," "to rinse," and "to dust." I realized I was becoming qualified to be domestic help. Carla struggled with language a bit too. In one intimate moment early in our relationship she wanted to tell me I was her one and only, in Italian "tu sei il mio unico." She cooed what she thought was the correct translation: "Oh, you are my eunuch."