It took me twenty something years, id est my whole life back then, to fully understand the absolute, undeniable and unquestionable importance of the proper use of punctuation marks.
Many years before, Miss Quagliotti, my elementary school teacher, had already tried to teach me the basis of punctuation, but with poor results. You shouldn't blame her, poor old woman. I was a very inattentive pupil, always distracted by strange things that happened exclusively inside my head. Very peculiar things, like strange macarena dance competitions between spooky singing mushrooms and lovely vampire-bunnies. Mrs Quagliotti used to say my head was always in the clouds, and somehow I knew she was true, even if I was pretty sure that those dance competitions, and other similar events, mostly happened in the woods near the end of the rainbow, and not in the clouds.
I remember she once explained to us that balloons which slip away from the little hands of children eventually pop, once they reach the clouds. Well, believe me or not, that day I was paying attention to the teacher - it happened, I think, by accident, I maybe had been somehow distracted from my being inattentive - and her words were such a shock for me. What if also my head, having been in the clouds so frequently, a day or another popped? My brain and my thoughts would have dissolved in the sky.
That thought was scary enough to keep me distracted even more, because I was too occupied wondering at least twice a day how being dissolved in the sky would have felt. This is the reason why I didn't get the punctuation thing very well. This and the vampire-bunnies. And obviously the fact that Miss Quagliotti examples, in explaining us the lessons, were not much interesting, whereas some of her traits were way much too interesting, instead. What does that mean? Now I'll explain.
Close your eyes. Now try to picture in your mind a middle-aged woman, short, squat, with huge gold-framed glasses on her chubby nose tip. Now consider her little but excessively feathered hair, shoulder length, wavy and dyed in an awful wannabe-walnut shade of colour, discoloured every here and there - only later, at middle school, I would have learned the word "highlights". Overall on her head there was a combination of colours that could recall a greenish bowel product. Have you visualized it? The teacher's hair, not the shit. Well, now, try not to think about how insane her hairdresser was, try to imagine her voice instead. A squeaky, nasal voice with a whining accent.
Deep wrinkles carved her forehead, as the ones on a pug's muzzle. Huge costume jewelry dangling almost everywhere from her body, shimmering like those disco balls I used to see in the old French movies that my grandma's favourite TV channel displayed quite often - those eighties' French movies filled of French teenagers who were always engaged in long parties with a lot of slow dancing and fondling. Well, Grandma didn't approve that kind of movie for me, but she always fell asleep long before those French kids on screen were even French kissing.
But now, stop thinking of my Grandma, come back to Miss Quagliotti, please.
With a teacher like that, wouldn't you have continuously kept asking yourself, all along the lessons, questions like: "Why is my teacher green-haired? May she be a mutant? Is she an alien, trying to conquer the Earth? Is she in league with the vampire-bunnies? Are her sparkling jewels a perfect disguise for deadly laser weapons? Would I become blind if a laser beam from her disco ba... er, from her necklace hit me in the eyes? Were those wrinkles protruding from her forehead because her brain was growing even outside her skull?" I challenge you to focus on the lessons, while you are deeply worried about such grave matters. It's half a miracle that I got to learn the alphabet decently, let alone the punctuation! Who could pay any attention to semicolons and question marks while feeling in constant danger?
Nonetheless, at twenty-two, punctuation became my obsession for a while. And I spent so much time thinking and reasoning on it, that in the end it had no more secrets for me.
Back then I lived in a flat that I had rented in the city, where I was studying. Yes, in spite of my disastrous experience at elementary school, I had continued studying until University. I didn't have any permanent roommate; I thought that paying for the whole rent and sublet the single free rooms day by day to tourists, transforming in fact the flat in a bed and breakfast, would have been cheaper. It was, indeed. It was a bit more complicated and challenging, but it was also funnier. One week my flatmate was a Japanese girl, very quiet and shy, with a thing for Italian fashion and art, the following week I lived under the same roof with a six-foot Swedish semi-alcoholic, with a thing for Italian men and art, the week after the viking girl was gone and I was sharing the flat with an American chatterbox with a thing for Italian food and art. Weirdly all of my flatmates had a thing for art. But maybe it is not so strange, when you live in Florence and run a bed and breakfast. But to have a thing for art doesn't always mean knowing anything about it. It was asked to me, not only once, which were the best walking directions to the Leaning Tower. The Leaning Tower? In Florence? Were all of them kidding me?
But at some point things changed. A guest arrived and did not leave the B&B anymore, because she decided to live in Italy. She knew nine, maybe ten words in Italian, and she could barely speak a broken English made of about thirty something hardly intelligible sentences, she was Slovak and her name was Jana. She was a restorer. An unemployed restorer, but still a restorer.
I should have said her to leave, at some point, because I usually rented out the room for two weeks at most, and she was already staying there for three months; I should have said her lo leave also because she hadn't been paying for the last forty days: but I felt too bad at the thought of kicking her out, because in the meantime some sort of a sudden bump in the road happened to me, and it could more or less be described as me having fallen in love with Jana. Not willingly, but ineluctably and above all hopelessly. And that was quite a good third reason why I should have told her to leave.
But I didn't. Time passed, bills piled up: but I was so crushed on her that I only wanted her to stay forever. So I did the only thing I could do: I tightened my belt, raised the rent of the other room and started to spend every second of my spare time daydreaming about our future romance. It feeled a bit like I was eight again, my head still filled with little vampire-Jana-bunnies dancing macarena, and kissing me. My head was in the clouds as never before. But this time I was not worried about it eventually popping, I felt like it had already popped and, God, being melted in the sky felt so damn good.
I liked everything about Jana: her golden locks, her slightly crooked front teeth, the freckles tide that flooded her nose and cheeks, her voice and above all her accent. I loved listening to her calls home, those intense Slovak gabbling with her parents and siblings. It seemed to me that half of the words she said were "something-inka". It resembled a continuous tongue-twister. Listening to those chants felt like melting in the sky, I stood there, absent-minded, listening to those mysterious sounds while pretending to do something else, and eventually forgetting the pretending thing. I found myself staring at her and even sometimes thinking about a different kind of tongue-twisters, the kind that consists in entwining my tongue and hers together.
But I don't know when and why I started to feel like that. She always smiled, when she talked. Maybe that was the sparkle for this magic. But I can't say that for sure, because magic is always so mysterious.
The problem, the tragic side of this fairytale, was this: I couldn't decide whether those smiles were caused by her natural kindness with friends or because she felt something more than friendship and kindness for me. Was I only a friend to her? Or maybe a potential lover? I analyzed the thing, investigated deeply trying to find clues to solve the puzzle, I tried to decipher her words, that complicated Slovak-Italian-English mixture. It was so hard trying to decode that jigsaw language, that I often failed and so I ended up trying to analyze her daily actions too. Was she washing her hair? Ok, but was she washing it because it was dirty, or because she wanted to seduce me with the sublime scent of her hair conditioner?
One day I found a little white cardstock box on the kitchen table.
I'm curious by nature, and, well, the box was on the kitchen table. Anything you leave on the kitchen table becomes everyone's property, that was my credo. Valuable guest of "Fior di Firenze", in your room you can be as reserved as you want, and keep your secret things safe from the world's eyes. But if you put something on the kitchen table, it won't be a secret any more: it becomes public domain. And so you allow me, your valuable host, to be as nosy as I want. This is a rule of the house. An unwritten rule that I doubt someone other than me knows but, honestly, who cares? I know it and that's all, it makes me feel fully authorized to snoop as much as I want.
So I opened the box: it was filled with some sort of multicolored plastic crap. There were four or five, the smallest of them rolled out, it was a tiny blue disc. I didn't understand what the heck it could be, I inserted a finger in the box and I pulled out a... red plastic piece with the shape of a... question mark? "What the fuck!" I said to myself, and I began to shake the box, spilling out the content on the waxed tablecloth. A green comma, and a yellow exclamation mark also came out. So I guessed the blue disc must have been a... period? But... it just didn't make any sense.
"Jana!" I called out, starting to wander throughout the house. There were no other guests in the B&B, at the moment, so that mysterious plastic punctuation must have been hers. Not that I was shocked, she had a thing for oddities.
"Jana, is this thingy yours?", I asked, when I arrived in her room. She was drawing at her desk. She was very good at drawing. I always was spellbound when I was watching her sketch something.
"Darček. Magnety", she replied, smiling
"Magnety", she said again, when I persisted in not being able to understand the Slovak language. After three or four times, she took from my hands the question mark and put it close to the metal headboard. I heard a "cling" sound and then the plastic piece clung to the headboard.
There! That was a magnetic punctuation set. I should have guessed from the word "magnety", indeed, it was not so distant from the Italian, in hindsight. But... why did she need it? Or rather, why should anyone on the green ever need magnetic punctuation?
"Why did you buy them?'
"No understand", rispose.
"Why do you have them?"
"You repeati?"
"Why, Jana? Perché?"
"Darček!" she kept replying, with a smiling face.
Unfortunately I didn't understand and maybe it didn't exist a way to mime that "darček" word. Maybe it had some kind of abstract meaning. She took her smartphone and started typing in some apps.
"Darček! Regalo!" she said in the end, pronouncing the Italian word in a funny way.
A present! A present for me! From Jana!
I was happy. It was a shitty present, by my standards, but it made me very happy anyway, because it came from Jana.
But happiness was soon replaced by a multitude of questions. Who knew what Jana wanted to say to me by giving me a present? And with that strange stationery in particular? What did that mean? It was so difficult to understand her, as she was surrounded by very high linguistic barriers. Maybe she was aware of that and had tried to go beyond the barricade by giving me those punctuation marks: they were symbols, and symbols always have a symbolic meaning. But what the hell were they symbolizing?
I should have stopped my thoughts in time, preventing me from starting overthinking about the gift. But it was already late for that. Too late. My mind had already started to get lost in the clouds, searching for every possible meaning of the punctuation gift. And, I already know it since elementary school: one day or another it will burst and I will dissolve in the sky.
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