glanced around. There was no one else there except the pit bull security guard, now standing in the corner and eyeing us suspiciously.
“Shall I ask her then?” Lesley questioned.
“I guess so.”
She went over and spoke Italian to the pit bull. Instantly, the guard erupted, her hands gesturing madly. Lesley translated the barrage for me. “It’s impossible,” she was saying. “You must obtain permission from the front desk in writing. It takes six months to be approved.”
Then the woman looked at us, and her attitude melted a bit. We had been unfailingly polite to her as only the British and Canadians can be, so she recanted. Glancing both ways as if to make sure the coast was clear, she put a finger to her lips and swore us to silence. Then she motioned us to follow her down a hallway off to the side. I think now that it was Lesley’s Italian that tipped the scales. Perhaps the pit bull felt badly about verbally mauling us twice. So we followed her along the narrow passageway, and in the shadows she stopped and reached down to a latch on the floor. It was a trap door. She opened it and pointed. “Vai la giu,” she said. “Go down there.” A ladder poked up out of the opening, and Lesley and I exchanged looks.
We climbed into something like a cellar, a whitewashed space maybe the size of a small bedroom. The woman didn’t accompany us down the ladder, and as our eyes gradually adjusted, I saw marks all over the walls. I peered more closely. Here there was a delicately rendered hand slightly turned, there a half-finished profile — a bearded god-like figure. They were drawings that were unmistakably the work of a master. The master. Here were the sketches of Michelangelo. He had stood in this little room and had left his mark on these walls.
It’s something we all tend to do, though few of us can do it like Michelangelo. Still, we all like to mark where we’ve been. We all want to say simply, “I was here.”
Afterward, I tried to find prints of these drawings, photos in books, postcards, anything, but I’ve never seen them reproduced anywhere. They were, it seems, done while Michelangelo was in hiding. He sheltered here during a siege of the city in 1530. The troops of Charles V, the Holy Roman emperor, had surrounded Florence and were shelling it with cannons. Michelangelo stayed in this cellar for a month, doodling on the walls with charcoal. They were among the last drawings he ever did. Not long after the siege he fled to Rome and lived out the last years of his life there, never again to return to his beloved Firenze.
The drawings were only discovered again in 1975. The little cellar is still closed to the public and all but a handful of restoration scientists and historians. But somehow we were allowed in. The doors were unlocked for us, and we were allowed a glimpse of the sublime sketches of a frail and frightened genius.
We all make our marks in various ways. Humans are experts at creating and manipulating marks or symbols. Language is just one of these systems of symbols. We also use mathematics and spatial orientation. Humans can think in music or even with kinesthetic intelligence, a sort of muscle memory that might be used to choreograph a ballet or map a strategy for winning a football game. All of these are called semiotic systems, semiotics being the study of how humans represent things, how we assign symbols as stand-ins for much more complex ideas.
Humans are very good at symbols, much better than gorillas, for example. The most famous gorilla to use symbols was named Koko, who was taught to recognize and employ more than a thousand, even becoming proficient enough to name a kitten she had acquired for a pet. Koko named it All Ball, perhaps referring to the fact that the cat was an excellent playmate. But even if you buy the supposition that Koko truly understood what she was doing, with a thousand symbols she was working at about the level of a three-year-old human child.
The point is that humans tend to think in a variety of semiotic systems, representing things with symbols — topographical lines on a map, a percentage sign, holding up our middle finger at the guy who cuts us off in traffic — but the most powerful, most efficient, most versatile of these semiotic systems is undoubtedly language.
For one thing languages constantly change. They always evolve to meet our needs. Anyone can see the difference between Shakespearean English and our modern version. We’ve lost thou and thee, but that’s four hundred years of change and easy to see.
The fact is that no matter what the various protectors of grammar say, languages relentlessly mutate. They borrow words and ideas from other languages. They change their pronunciation, and over time they even lose bits and pieces of their grammar. I suspect, for instance, that the adverb suffix ly will disappear from English in another fifty years. As shocking as it might appear to English teachers, sentences like “I tried to get there quick” will become perfectly grammatical.
Yes, languages are as organic as we are. And so Latin got old and eventually fossilized. It remains with us in a jumble of scientific phylums, though it rarely escapes the bonds of the written page any longer. The spoken variations, however, continue to grow and move and spring up into new dialects. Latin has already spawned not only Spanish, Portuguese, French, and Italian, but also Catalan, Provençal, and even far-off Romanian.
Language can get very complicated. The mythical lines between actual tongues and their dialects become blurry and confused. In Italy, for example, so many dialects came out of Latin that it wasn’t until 1979 that what we commonly refer to as Italian, the Tuscan dialect, became the one spoken at home by more than 50 percent of all Italians. And, like many other countries, there are still pockets of other dialects spoken across Italy, including Sicilian, Umbrian, and Corsican.
That’s how the Tower of Babel works. New dialects continually emerge from a mother tongue, usually the language of an empire. They blossom into dozens of other tongues, often leaving the host language a mere museum piece. They form families with all manner of odd uncles and drunken cousins.
Perhaps this is strange to us in North America where you can travel for hundreds and even thousands of kilometres without hearing any major differences in speech patterns. But we are the anomaly. That situation exists nowhere else in the world.
I was attacked in northern Spain by a pack of wild dogs. Well, okay, it was only two dogs, but one of them was a German shepherd and the other was a Rottweiler. They were big dogs, and the German shepherd had three legs. It was a real mean son of a bitch, so in my mind I was definitely assaulted by a pack of dogs. They ripped and tore at me, but why? Because I was on their turf.
I was staying in San Sebastian, a small city on the northern coast of Spain. It’s set in a beautiful bay on the Atlantic Ocean. The entrance to the bay is guarded by two small mountains, and on one of them a statue of Jesus Christ glowers over the city.
I had come to San Sebastian quite by chance during yet another major festival — Semana Grande, “The Big Week.” It’s really an enormous drunk. Deep into the night I wound through the ancient streets sloppily cavorting from tapas bar to tapas bar. It was a lot of fun.
After a few sweet nights of this, my liver was beginning to shut down, and I needed to get away from the mayhem. So I moved to a quiet hostel high in the mountains behind the city. The views over the bay were spectacular, and all around there was a deep and tranquil forest.
One evening my responsibility was to get the wine for dinner, which meant a trip to the village at the foot of the mountain. I set off, half walking, half jogging along a narrow path that wound through the trees. And that was when it happened. About halfway down, the dogs came out of the trees ahead
