The Art of Pantomime

Having always scoffed at mimes and their elaborate communication antics, I find myself now taken aback to be drawing on this art form myself. I would rather not, of course, as I feel quite embarrassed by it, but for the sake of neighborly civility, I manage to drop my ego, sort of, and dive into my own clumsy hybrid version.My Italian vocabulary, as mentioned, is tiny. I guess it is around thirty or forty words. For the moment, let’s not go into why it is so paltry, having essentially lived in Italy now for a total of about ten months—I am the first to know that it is inadequate at best, frustrating and socially compromising at worst. Nevertheless, I manage to communicate when I want to, and sometimes even surprise myself at how well with so little. Older people are easier to “talk” to, they don’t care how much I am struggling, how awkward I might be, how many times I say the same word. They just keep smiling at me and nodding encouragingly, filling in all the blanks until it really seems as if we are having a conversation. I have to use my hands a lot, gesturing things like lying down to rest, walking uphill (there is no other kind of walking here in Menaggio), praying (I enjoy sitting in the churches here, which are around every corner, are cool and dark and peaceful, and even if I don’t really pray, this gesture goes over big with the elder folk who are mostly all very devout). I keep eye contact, and smile. Smiling and the burst of an unselfconscious laugh lifts everything. Friendliness begets friendliness and when you are struggling to connect, the open heart cuts right through effort and brings it all down to closing the separation between us, which doesn’t exist anyway, and opening up everything else which feels real and whole.