Last Call: Hold That Call
Rocca, Francis X.
LAST CALL by Francis X. Rocca Hold That Call E VERYBODY IN ITALY—AND I MEAN EVERYBODY—has a cell phone now. An unkempt woman in a Padua Laundromat mumbles that she's lost some change. Someone...
...This is a people addicted to talk...
...But she does not mean to be condescending, only helpful...
...Two drivers meeting at an intersection in a town such as Sciacca will agree on who goes first by looking at each other, exchanging signals invisible to the untrained eye...
...THE SPANISH HAVE EMBRACED THE CELL-PHONE almost as ardently as the Italians have, and since they love to gab even more (two Spaniards can spin an hour-long conversation around something as trivial as driving directions), it is only economics that explains the lower density of m6vil units on the streets of Madrid and Seville...
...Yet lately, thanks to the increasing worldwide dominance of English, they are finding it simpler to deal with the millions of tourists...
...There is still one place in Europe where work occasionally comes to a complete halt...
...Someone points to a sign and suggests she call the manager...
...MOVING WEST TO ANOTHER MEDITERRANEAN peninsula, one finds Spain much the same, only less so...
...And for the trios of college-age Japanese women (easily the most common unit of visitor these days), the Anglophonic ascendancy has meant liberation from the bondage of the bus tour...
...The Catalan nationalist party's web site is in Catalan and English but not in Castilian—which is a good way for Barcelona to stick it to Madrid but not an indicator of actual practice...
...OF COURSE, TALK IS MORE THAN SOUNDS...
...Or rather, languages...
...other Italians are not so cryptic...
...The ringing actually sounds more like chirping, which makes these ubiquitous electronic pests seem like a new plague, more insidious than any of the ten God inflicted on the Egyptians...
...Spaniards typically meet the most fumbling attempts at native speech with patience and encouragement...
...And they use more than their hands...
...14 90 May 1998 • The American Spectator...
...This is often a matter of courtesy, but just as often a reflection of ignorance...
...In trains, when one of them goes off dozens of hands dive into purses and coat pockets, and the carriage resounds with a chorus of ciaos...
...ALL those clichés about Italians communicating with their hands—even bringing five fingertips together to emphasize a point—are true...
...To ONE ACCUSTOMED TO AMERICA'S technological superiority, it is startling to find Europe—and southern Europe at that—so far "advanced" in this respect...
...Whereupon she whips out her palm-sized Nokia and gets him on the line...
...But being on the whole less businesslike than the Italians (which is why they are less rich), the people here prize communications technology above all for its social value...
...Increasingly, people don't even bother to get home lines installed, thus circumventing the notorious phone company bureaucracy...
...to the American awaiting an overnight transmission, both frustrating and alluring...
...Five years ago, signs in three or four languages were common in Siena and San Gimignano...
...Yet one suspects that even if these gadgets were more expensive, the Italians would still be using them...
...In the Sicilian dialect, a word can mean very different things depending on the facial expressions that accompany it...
...There is talk of establishing a "non-phoning" section...
...Now the default foreign language is English, called into action at the merest hint of an accent...
...Since one does not ordinarily pay to receive cell calls (as is true in the States), one gives one's number out freely and therefore gets phoned constantly...
...Here an American is still free to practice the local language...
...But as anybody knows who has tried to get by in a tongue he has not mastered, communication often depends on non-verbal elements...
...Now, Sicilian culture is especially secretive...
...And that leaves all the more time for talking...
...Smile quizzically at a waiter, then look around the dining room, and he will automatically direct you to the W.C...
...Many well-educated people here, especially among those over 4o, do not speak the language of Shakespeare and the Spice Girls...
...Unlike Italy, where everything but Tuscan is a mere dialect, Spain officially recognizes Castilian, Catalan, Galician, and Basque, the last of which is not even Indo-European...
...To the Italian this is astonishing...
...The narrow streets of Florence are thronged with pedestrians talking as if to themselves, each voice raised to be heard over all the others, and over the ringing of incoming calls...
...Teenagers on buses chatter with their friends and parents...
...This can be frustrating, especially when you've gone to the trouble of composing a query about train schedules in Italian, and the woman at the ticket booth insists on answering back in an unintelligible version of "your" language...
...A Venetian souvenir vendor might try tempting you with a few words of German or French...
...One reason is that the Old World's cell-phone system is simply more user-friendly than ours: cheaper and easier to access, even when crossing international boundaries...
...ITALIANS HAVE LONG BEEN USED TO FOREIGNERS speaking their language badly, or more often not at all...
...Trying to accomplish something as mundane—and in the age of e-mail, outdated—as receive a fax, a foreigner discovers that offices regularly turn off their fax machines at the end of the day, and even during the mid-day siesta...
Vol. 31 • May 1998 • No. 5
