The Italian Teacher(95)

“It’s good I know you,” he says.





79


The operation is gruesome and not worth dwelling on, he informs Barrows by email. Pinch says he’ll need months to retrain what remains of his tongue, but this proves untrue. Within weeks, he can speak very slowly and with a lisp, which strangers take to be mental impairment. To avoid such exchanges, he avoids talking, except with Jing or medical staff.

For a man who spent his adult life teaching people to communicate, Pinch is unbothered to become mute. With others yammering all around, he eavesdrops and comes to an opinion: Only a fraction of speech transmits word meanings; the bulk is entirely social—to console, ingratiate, jockey. He writes down his own remarks, keeping pads and pens everywhere. This has a condensing effect. Hand gets tired, brain gets to the point.

Pinch discovers something more. He had lazily assumed the Chinese to be a stoical people and had attributed this to the population size—too many souls to indulge in sentiment. But Jing, even with her medical knowledge, sobs when he displays his butchered tongue. This angers him. He must consider her now, alongside everything else. Yet her fragility protects him too—he can only pity himself when alone, and she rarely leaves him.

For distraction Pinch flips through Natalie’s old pottery manuals: technical guides about glazes and strident manifestos by Bernard Leach. He hates never having taken up pottery. Why did I overlook this? I’d probably love it. Mom tried to show me. Well, that’s decided: I’m learning it, the second I improve a little.

After dark, the night terror descends, a cold finger against his breastbone. His eyes spring open on blackness. Such a mess that I’m leaving. And I am leaving. He hears house sounds, a distant police siren—all this will continue, as if I’d never been. He distracts himself by visualizing every room at the cottage. All of Dad’s originals, still in the attic. I must admit what I did. What can anyone do to me now?

He lies still, trying to control his breathing. In through the nose, out through the mouth. Slower. The dread returns, that demon touching his chest.

By morning he assumes his bright manner. “You know what they say?” (With Jing alone, he speaks shamelessly in his slobbery way.) “When it comes to dying, nobody got it wrong yet!”

“You’re not dying.”

“Not if I don’t have to.” He pokes her arm affectionately, joshing more than ever, gaining a warmth for people that he never before experienced—he’s become curious about strangers, and forgiving too. Pinch so wishes that he’d been this way all along.





80


He speaks often of the cottage, although a trip is inconceivable while undergoing treatment. He transports himself there by learning Basque. “The word for ‘sandwich’ is ‘ogitarteko’!” he informs Jing. “Isn’t that fantastic? Listen to this: ‘Hizkuntza bat ez da galtzen ez dakitenek ikasten ez dutelako, dakitenek hitzegiten ez dutelako baizik.’”

His childhood nickname derived from Basque, he tells her. When Bear was traveling around northern Spain in 1947, he discovered a local bar food. When his next newborn arrived, he took to calling him “little pintxo,” which became “Pincho,” which settled into “Pinch”—how Natalie always referred to him.

“I need to be in my cottage.” At least once more. Dad’s paintings just lying there. I can’t leave it like this.

“You want to go talk with Basque people?”

“Don’t know if I’d talk to them. But I could find them at the market and listen.”

“What’s the point learning, Chars, if you never talk?”

“The point? More words!” His medication-dulled eyes glint. “More!”

His trip keeps getting delayed. The oncologist says: “Treatment first, then travel. Maybe next summer. That’s the plan—next summer we get you to that cottage. Sound fair?”





81


When Pinch is readmitted to the hospital, Jing asks for a list of people he’d like to speak with by phone. He has so few to suggest. He’s been in regular touch with Marsden and Birdie since they heard of his condition. But he wouldn’t mind hearing from Julie again. After decades of life, that’s it: Marsden, Birdie, maybe Julie. He leaves out Barrows—he’s ashamed for her to know, as if dying early were a form of failure.

“Not too bad here! Could be worse!” Pinch tells Julie when she phones. He asks after her niece Liz and nephew James, recalling the memorable tour they all took around the National Gallery. “Fun, that was.”

“Gosh, I’d entirely forgot that. Well, Elizabeth lives in London now, works in marketing, though she’s on maternity leave now. James does something in tech—do not ask me what! He’s got four little ones, believe it or not.”

Pinch longs to say: Do those two remember me? I was fond of them.

“I was really just calling to thank you, Charlie.”

“To thank me? I didn’t do anything,” he says, exerting himself to hide the lisp. “You’re back living in your hometown, back with your first husband—seems I had no effect at all!”

“I owe an awful lot to you. I had no confidence before, which you gave me.”

“All I did was encourage you, which somebody should’ve done long before.”