An Italian Education by Tim Parks

Author:Tim Parks
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Grove/Atlantic, Inc.

NON ESSERE FISCALE

Can a child or person really have two nationalities, express the traits, that is, of two national characters? Or doesn't one inevitably exclude the other? Or worse still, they simply destroy each other, so that rather than being English and Italian, my children with their mix of languages and habits, are neither one nor the other. These are imponderables. But there are moments when even imponderables are wonderfully incarnated. This tiny chapter remembers two of them.

It's eight in the evening. I've just come into the room to send the kids to bed. Stefi is sitting on the floor playing with her dolls and singing a song: “Mary Had a Little Lamb.” She sings it in the well-to-do, upper-middle-class accent of the little children who made the English tape she has. Instead of her normal raucous tones, her voice is wavering and twee, as befits songs about little girls and their woolly little animal friends. Stefi loves to sing as she plays:

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