"The Bella Lingua" (The Stories of John Cheever)
Cheever's Hate Letter to Rome
Princess Orietta Pogson Doria Phamphili descended from an Italian royal family dating back to the 16th century. Mussolini sent her father to a concentration camp. During WWII, she joined the anti-fascist resistance, almost blowing up her family palace when the Nazis occupied it. A devout Catholic, she adopted two children and collected art, boasting one of the world's most impressive collection.
She was also a terrible landlady who couldn't be bothered to unclog the drains or fix the gas leak. John Cheever and family spent a year in Italy staying in an apartment at that palace. He had a miserable time. He drank. He attended parties. He failed to learn the language. Italian landmarks disappointed. In Italy, he only wrote one story, which he hated.
You can definitely imagine John Cheever typing this story while cursing the entire country. Every character in “The Bella Lingua” reflects an aspect of Cheever's miserable year with all of its frustration and comedy.
Uncle George, the Tourist
Uncle George, retired from the fertilizer factory, comes to Italy primarily to carry his niece and her son back to the Midwest. It's his first vacation in 43 years, complete with an itinerary full of American food and the right tour buses. From his first paragraph we know that he's a rube, a schmuck, a tourist. Everything from his disappointing breakfast (You gotta no hamma? You gotta no eggsa?) to his judgment of the tour guide (can speak four languages but looks poor) pegs him as the stereotypical Ugly American.
As a reader, you want to see him suffer. Riding in a fishbowl tour bus, listening to women talking about ringworm isn't enough. Uncle George hates everything he sees from sheep to nursing women to young men in bathing suits. He can't even go to church without being annoyed by loud prayers, but he still gets to see castles.
Finally, he gets mugged. At Nero's villa, a sketchy vagrant promises him a special attraction just for men. He's dumb enough to follow. They take all of his money, leaving him to roar with anger. He “hated Italy with all its thieving population of organ grinders and brick layers.” He hates Rome. Calls it ugly. He hates the naked statues and by the time he gets to his niece's apartment, he's ranting against the whole place.
Despite his bullying, his niece won't go home with him. Her son wants to go home. His niece is distraught. When he sees Italian nobility walking through her apartment, he responds with “Oh Giuseppe the barber he gotta the cash....he gotta the bigga the blacka mustache.” Uncle George actually thinks that this lazy ethnic humor will get laughs.
Kate Dresser, the Expatriate
Kate Dresser is the niece that Uncle George wants to drag home. She's not going. Kate hates her home town. They mocked her nose. They put gum in her hair. Her only refuge was the movie theater made up to look like an Italian palazzo. She moved from the fertilizer factory town to Chicago to New York to Italy. Her husband died. By contrast, Her son grew up hating Rome - hanging out with Americans and dreaming of the day when he could go back to the land of baseball and cheeseburgers.
Like Cheever, Dresser lives in a palace apartment with Italian nobility as her landlords. Unlike Cheever, she gets a deal on her rent because the Italian nobility walk through her place to get to the elevators. These nobles actually suffered under fascism. One is missing a hand. Her uncle reacts to this strange scene with a hacky joke. Her uncle will never understand why she likes Rome because her uncle doesn't understand anything outside of that small town.
Kate has the quintessential expatriate job, teaching English while dubbing Italian movies. If her son didn't invite her asshole uncle to take him back to America, she'd be perfectly happy. As much as Cheever puts his own living experiences into her story, he's imagining someone who could actually live and work and stay in Italy.
Of course, her life isn't ideal. When Uncle George comes to collect her son, she asks Wilson Streeter, her student to help. Even Streeter finds that troubling. Doesn't she have actual friends? Is this businessman in his fifties the most imposing male she could find? Probably.
Wilson Streeter, Perpetual Outsider
Streeter is the first protagonist and at first it seems like it's going to be his story alone. He's the typical Cheever protagonist. He's living in Italy, working as a statistician for a company with initials in the name. He's divorced and his wife has full custody. Cheever distinguishes his status from a tourist because he's stuck in Italy. He's not going to remember every moment for future anecdotes.
The story spends most of its time on his attempts to learn Italian from a series of bad teachers. One reads Pinocchio at him. Another one talks about her problems. There's the cute teacher that might be flirting. At least he thinks that she's flirting. Either way, it's a bad idea to grab your Italian teacher in an attempt to kiss her.
Finally he ends up with Kate Dresser, reading and translating the Italian classics. He feels like he's getting somewhere. He still doesn't understand the public Italian singers. He doesn't get the culture. He certainly doesn't approve of Italians feeding cats live firecrackers or standing around chatting when hit-and-run victims die. He's the one who gets to observe Kate fight with her family and he's the one who proves ineffectual when the uncle shows up.
Wilson closes out the story with an Italian passage from I Promessi Sposi that probably confused most 1950s readers who didn't speak Italian or read the classics. Since The New Yorker published it, most probably pretended to get the joke. Either way, run it through Google translate and it's about the plague, where even the healthy Italians look pale and sickly. He's almost finished, so next up is The Divine Comedy, starting with the Inferno.
Novels from the 19th century with plague passages and Dante are great metaphors for Cheever's time in Italy, probably not the best book for learning to speak Italian in daily life. I don't teach languages, but I'm pretty sure that ESL classes don't start out the students on Shakespeare.
Here’s an academic article on John Cheever.
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For more short stories, check out Michael Hemmingson.