Angel of Language

“Ball” was our son’s first word— at least, the first that clearly referred to something. He’d been exclaiming “da-da-da” for a long time, but even though we liked to think he was celebrating his dad wherever he went, he was probably just trying out sounds to see how they resonated in the wide world. Then one day, as I was putting him in his car seat, he pointed to a tennis ball on the floor and said, “Ball.” Perhaps it was more like, “Ba,” but we both knew what he meant, and we looked at each other and laughed. From then on his world was adorned with circles and balls. As we looked at books together, he pointed to the moon—“ball”—and monster eyes—“ball”—and doorknobs and pumpkins and snowmen. Pictures on billboards, car wheels, fruit, and CD’s all caught his attention. We’d be driving down the street and he’d say “ball” so often I thought he was simply repeating the word as a kind of mantra or reveling in his recent discovery. But time and time again he surprised me. If I looked creatively, there was always some sort of ball, even if it were only the balloon on a Re/Max “For Sale” sign.

When Cosmo was eighteen months old, we took him to Venice for two weeks. His spoken vocabulary had expanded, but “ball” was still his favorite—both the word and the toy. Just before we left, a friend lent us her dog’s little soccer ball, which we tucked into our on-board bag and carried everywhere from then on. The ball became his source of pleasure and exercise as well as a kind of social passport. While we waited in the Rome airport for our connecting flight, he entertained the other passengers, children and adults alike, by kicking the ball to them. They cheerfully kicked it back. Once we got to Venice, he kicked it around the campos and the Piazza San Marco, and if it rolled away from him passersby would stop to kick it in return, sometimes staying to continue the diversion or just to watch him. Whether people were responding to a particularly European urge to kick a soccer ball or simply admiring this blond-haired boy’s focused play, Cosmo inspired them to indulge a whim, if only briefly.

In the early evenings we would wander from our rented apartment on over to San Stefano, a neighborhood square full of activity. On their way home from work and relaxing before dinner, residents would pause to have an aperitivo or gelato, buy a newspaper, or greet a friend. Usually one or two small groups of boys gathered to play soccer and practice shooting goals by slamming the ball against the brick wall of the Gothic church. Cosmo spied them immediately and was transfixed. Drawn like a cat to a catnip toy, he was ready to pounce. I’d pull him away but he’d wriggle determinedly out of my arms and trot back to the playing field. I’d scoop him up again and retreat again. One boy was nice enough to let Cosmo kick the big soccer ball, although he seemed a bit anxious to get it back. Maybe the boy, recognizing that rabid desire, was both empathetic and wary. Sometimes Cosmo would be content to watch, but even then he was still actively engaged. He would crouch low, point a finger and jabber loudly, something like “Beejabuya meenameena Ball!” Although excited, he was not smiling: this was serious, intense business. Creating his own language, he sounded like a fussy blue jay or chattering squirrel.

We were as fascinated by him as he was by the ball. His speech was in that fluid transitional stage between babbling and verbalization, between pure potentiality and recognizable language. He seemed to be still “trailing clouds of glory,” tapping into a universal awareness that we adults have long ago lost. Sometimes he would “read” books to himself out loud, with elaborate sentences and gestures, the meanings of which were known only to him. The exotic intonations might well have been Chinese or Indonesian, so melodic and strange they were to our ears. We were somewhat in awe of him, for at one-and-a-half-years old he had the capacity, as all babies do, to speak any language, given enough exposure and repetition. It’s so much harder for his parents, who come to a second language later in life and have to twist our American mouths and tongues in unfamiliar positions just to say, “Two tickets, please” (Due biglietti per piacere). We may know phrases but can’t mimic the accent; or we know the vocabulary but not the correct sentence construction. As adults we are all too aware of the complexity of language, its tenses, gender, agreements, and colloquialisms. We want to follow the rules, both linguistically and socially. But Cosmo felt no such compunction. Whereas his parents stammered and addressed the grocery store clerk impolitely in the familiar tu form of “you,” he unabashedly pointed and stared at people until, invariably, they’d smile and wave at him. We knew enough Italian to order in a restaurant and were just glad to receive the dish we wanted, but he elicited a much more genuine response by running into the gelato store proclaiming, “Your!”—his word for “yogurt.” Twice he was given a free dish of that decadent version of ice cream. We often carried him in a backpack on the vaporetti, the water taxis, and if he started wiggling and complaining that he wanted “Down!” people around us—even the men who helped dock the boat—were quick to help distract him by catching his eye, making a face, or saying a few kind words.

Bumbling though we were, our small knowledge of Italian proved a modest advantage. It wasn’t hard to know that people were complimenting our son, but I was glad to be able to understand some of what they were saying. For example, the cashier at one church said, “Che begli occhialini!”; that is, what beautiful eyes. In the foyer of our apartment building, Cosmo insisted on pushing around a doll’s stroller that had been left there, and since it was sometimes hard to entertain him in our little apartment, I allowed him to do so. Still, I kept an eye out for the owner while practicing what I might say in Italian to beg her pardon. Sure enough, here she came, a young girl with her father. “He was playing with this,” I said rather obviously. The girl was not impressed, but her father was gracious. I learned their names (Augosto and Elena), her age (three years old), and that she had a 20-month-old brother. They asked where I was from. Such rudimentary information, and yet I came away feeling gratified that I could chat with them, however briefly. It was still way beyond me to join the locals who made an evening ritual of ordering aperitifs and snacks at the little bar downstairs and chatting with friends by the canal wall, but at least I could tell Elena how nice she was to let Cosmo play with her toy. She made a point of taking her stroller back upstairs with her.

Cosmo seemed thrilled with his expanding vocabulary, too. A few months before, at his last swim class, he suddenly learned to kick his legs. At the same time, he said “Gick!” with such obvious glee it was as though he needed the action before he could master the word. In Venice, his growing vocabulary often reflected his new experiences: pasta, sit, peach, map, chicken. “Aa-cot” was a favorite, as we gave him dried apricots to distract him in museums. “Push” was useful, as he was learning to eat with a fork. And although “bath” was certainly not a new experience, it was at least unusual, since we bathed him in a big dish tub on the floor of the shower. “Up-down” was his neologism for climbing the steps of a bridge, a newfound skill.

He was learning that words not only describe things, but that they also express emotion and requests. When we were in the apartment, which was narrow and confining, he often banged on the door and exclaimed, “Owda!”; that is, outside, where the world opened up and he could run. When we licked up the last bit of our gelato one night, he said “all gone” for the first time. He said it in such a plaintive, almost anxious voice, and with such a melancholy wave that it seemed a lesson learned. Good things do not last, neither pear juice nor vacations nor babyhood. Lunch must be cleared away, boats drift out of view, and people you admire—or who stop to admire you—go away, and you might never see them again.

Once I took Cosmo out to a nearby square, Campo San Trovaso, while his dad made dinner in the one-person kitchen. Unlike most squares, this one was not entirely made of stone or concrete but offered a meager patch of grass, and on this evening we saw two rabbits nibbling their greens. Their owner noticed Cosmo’s interest and kindly picked up a rabbit to let him pet it.

“Piano,” she said. Pet it softly.

Encouraged by my other small success, I wanted to take this opportunity to talk, but I could think of nothing to say until I was reminded, perhaps inappropriately, of the baby food jar of puréed rabbit I’d seen at the store.

“Come si dice?” I asked. “Coniglio?”

“Sì, coniglio,” she said, and from then on spoke a comfortable English with me.

For things Cosmo had no word for, he made use of “Mmm? Mmm?” and pointing to let us know, for instance, that he wanted to play in the broom closet or grab a jar of tomato sauce off the grocery shelf—much in the same way that I told the grocer, “Vorrei queste, per piacere”: I would like these, with a finger pointing to cherries, a word I could not seem to remember (ciliegie). When we visited churches, Cosmo experimented with the acoustics by shouting, “Ba! Ba! Ba!” At the church of the Frari he was so excited by statues of horses on a tomb that he loudly and repeatedly called them “Moo!” One very charming idiom he created on his own was that, instead of saying “boat,” he sang a little song that went “doo-doo-doo”—something like the first three notes of “This Old Man.” As there were many boats in that city of canals, we heard this ditty many times.

I had no similar kind of music to speak; on the contrary, the Italian words I uttered seemed clumsy, flat, and limited. One day the caretaker of the apartment stopped us and asked if things were going all right. “Sì, va bene,” we responded—that was easy enough. Then she launched into an involved discussion about sheets and towels. I vaguely remembered the words from a class, but in any case the elaborate pantomime she performed was clear. I gradually understood that we were to give her the dirty laundry. What I wanted to know was when and where we should deliver it—and yet I could not make her understand that.

She grew more exasperated. “Gli asciugamani,” she kept repeating. “Gli asciugamani sporchi.”

“Sì, capisco,” I responded. What I wanted to say was, All right already! Dirty towels! But what are we supposed to do with the damn things? Hoping that the matter would be resolved before bedtime, we collected the linen in a pile. Later that day, no doubt realizing that she would have to take the matter into her own hands, she came by and picked it all up. She asked if she should clean the apartment mid-way through our stay—at least, we both guessed that was what she asked—but fearing more frustrating conversations, we assured her we would take care of it.

We felt as though we had shown our true nature: since we didn't have enough vocabulary to discuss household activities, we were merely tourists after all. Oh, well. We could still enjoy those things that did not depend on a particular language to be appreciated: the mosaic floors and golden domes of San Marco, for example; the expanse of the Grand Canal and the intimacy of the back streets; the Tiepolo paintings in the Scuola Grande di San Rocco. At the Peggy Guggenheim Collection, we took in the impressive collection of modern art, a refreshing change from the centuries-old paintings and sculpture we had been immersed in. Since they did not allow the child backpack, we had to check it and carry Cosmo in our arms. As we looked at works by Picasso, Duchamp, Brancusi, Balla, and others, he started to get antsy. I tried to point out balls and circles in the paintings so I might pause a little longer in front of them, but he was not to be bothered. Now that he had more experience in kicking and throwing, pictures of balls were apparently no longer as interesting as the thing itself. If I set him down, he careened about, getting in people’s way. As I picked him up take him outside, he squirmed and his foot hit the frame of a Pollock.

Once outside, however, he was happy. He kicked the gravel in the courtyard (“Gick!”) and pointed at other children, whom he identified collectively as “girl.” We also wandered to the front of the building to a terrace fronting the Grand Canal, where there is a large bronze sculpture by Marino Marini called “The Angel of the City.” It is a minimalist form of a naked man sitting on a horse, with his face upturned and arms spread wide in an encompassing, almost ecstatic gesture.
He’s like our child, I thought: full of grace, greeting the world unself-consciously and openly, without pretensions or fear, accepting whatever wonderful things it has to give. I looked out at the canal bustling with gondole, yachts, and barges, at the blue water splashing against the ochre and sienna walls of the old buildings, and I momentarily understood that angel’s rapture. When I turned to find Cosmo, my son and my joy, he was investigating the spotlights fixed in the ground.
When he did look up, he pointed at the angel’s horse and said matter-of-factly, “Moo.”