Lost in Translation

During pizza-making class we had a scare re: Dustin Hoffman, because the Italian news was showing clips from his films with dreamy music and someone heard the word "morto."

V: Is Dustin Hoffman dead? Dustin Hoffman! He's Dead!
Group: No!
V: Giorgio, is Dustin Hoffman dead?
Giorgio: (while tossing pizza dough): Eh?
V: Is Dustin Hoffman dead??? Look at the television. Dustin Hoffman.
Giorgio: Ah. (glances at TV, smiles brightly) Si, il morto. (shrug, smile, toss pizza, perfectly)
Group: Oh god! Too soon! (etc)

It might have been the only moment of perfect agreement we had on the whole tour. Death of a pop culture icon makes for ex-pat solidarity. Why does it seem worse to learn mildly important pop culture news in Italian? Meanwhile, 112 slices of pizza had to be eaten, and so we tried. It was an uphill climb. Pizza-tossing: fun. Pizza-eating: tricky. With a class of eight, plus a chef-teacher making model pizzas, at eight slices per pie, that's a lot of freaking pizza, and so trivial in the light of Dustin Hoffman's passing. There would be no more Dustin Hoffmans but the pizza was endless. Then, miracle, around slice 59, our tour guide popped out with his blackberry and a funny smile. "Update," he said, in his Canadian-Italian way, and proceeded to clarify that Dustin Hoffman was not in fact dead, but opposite, had rescued a man in London from a heart attack and sat with him till the ambulance came. So thank god. Did this news even make the states at all? It was all over Italian television. But really, why, Giorgio? Giorgio, young pizza-maker from Napoli with the big Hollywood eyes, why?? Translation incidents like these are how big cultural misunderstandings get started. It was just like an EM Forster novel.

* * *

Then, truffles. Which I have been obsessed with, but not tasted, since I read Diane Ackerman's Natural History of the Senses.

For centuries truffles were hunted with sows. Ackerman explains the science of it in detail, but the brief version is: there's a hormone in the truffle that's very similar to a hormone released by a male pig, which is also very similar to the human male hormone. So that's what the sows smell when they're hunting, and probably also why we humans consider the truffle such a delicacy. Everything is biology. Here are Ackerman's further musing on the subject:

"For the truffle farmer and his sow, walking above a subterranean orchard of truffles, it must be hysterically funny and sad. Here this beautiful, healthy sow smells the sexiest boar she's ever encountered in her life, only for some reason he seems to be underground. This drives her wild and she digs frantically, only to turn up a strange, lumpy, splotched mushroom."

She goes on to empathize further with the inconsolable sow. It's a great moment in a great book. I've always thought would make a lovely scene in a play. Not my Shelley musical, but maybe a tourism play. We'll see. Commission?

So people generally hunt with dogs now. Not out of sympathy for those Carrie Bradshaw type sows, but because the sows have a habit of devouring the truffles on the spot, which is not cost-effective, and dogs are more restrained.

Our truffle hunter was a factory man at his dayjob. He does the truffle stuff on the side, but when he scores, the payoff can be pretty good. Like playwriting, that's unreliable, so he has a job in a factory. His family has been hunting this territory for generations. There are codes among truffle hunters here. Though no one owns this land, you don't hunt someone else's spot. And each hunter keeps his prime spots shrouded in secrecy. He brought us through a buttercup field and tall wild grass, then a track of abandoned houses. Easy walking, but on his own he'll pick through much more difficult terrain.

The dogs were called Lady and Ruby. One trains the other. These two were pretty distracted, and I got scolded for petting one. You don't mess with a truffle man's dogs. Lesson learned. It was all very rambo, and not nearly as touristy as I thought it would be. I had pictured each of us on a putt-putt type enclosure with each our own dog on a leash, but this was the real thing, this was "don't touch, be quiet, watch em work." The dogs raced all over the land while the man said "cheh, cheh, Lady, Ruby, cheh, cheh, Lady." Don't know what "cheh" was or how to spell it, but it seemed to work like sonar, and kept the dogs on task, while he stood there with his truffle-digging staff, a combination spade/pick deal, useful for both digging truffles and clubbing predators. He reminded me of the deer hunters back home. No gun, same attitude. A man of few words.

This forty-minute hunt yielded three clods of earth that turned out to be truffles. They had no smell while we were in the field. "Just dirt," someone on the tour said. By the time we got back to the b&b, they were warm with that signature truffle odor, brown, musky, a very old smell that goes right to the bottom of your lungs. Maybe it's the place. We had them in a risotto. From the earth to the plate, two hours.