One of the characters I met upon first arriving in Rifugiamo was Baldoria, who I would learn was the Canine Queen of the village. Her principal throne was in Sally and Nick Heartson’s home, a British couple who spoke only English to her, never Italian. When we first met, she was already an older regent with signs of arthritis in her hips. Yet, she loved to go for a “walkie” and quickly became my regular partner on long hikes in and around the village.
Sally told me that whenever English-speaking visitors came to the village, Baldoria somehow heard them speaking from her spot in the Heartson’s courtyard in the lower Carraia section, some distance below the road. She would then walk to the strangers, greet them, and then accompany them on a tour of the village.
But the question remained: how did she hear them speaking from way down in the Carraia? One afternoon, while Baldoria and I were walking in the forest above the town, I considered the possibilities.
It’s a well-known fact that the heavier English language settles under the Italian like water under olive oil. Ponderous consonants weigh down the Anglo tongue, especially combinations like CK, PT, NT and NG. Gravity then takes over from there. Thus, in an Italian hill town, English flows downhill to the lowest point. In Rigugiamo, a line drawn from the Colle section (where our house had been built over a thousand years earlier) down to the Carraia section is a rough lingual approximation of the continental divide. English spoken along the road naturally flows to the Anglo cistern in the Heartson’s courtyard. And consonants, being consonants, cannot just quietly settle there. Instead, they rattle around the walls of the cistern, creating echoes in the courtyard, where The Queen hears them and follows them to their source. How else can one explain that wherever English goes, Baldoria is sure to follow?
There was one other aspect of Baldoria’s Anglophilic personality that did not require a flight of fancy to explain. From the stories I heard among the villagers, I became convinced that The Queen’s preference for the English tongue was part of a grand charade. After all, she was an Italian dog, born in Italy, of Italian stock. She had learned English as her second language from her adopted parents. Her feigned inability to understand Italian reminded me of a game that the goddess Hera might play on mere mortals. It provided cover for her as she roamed about her kingdom. If an animal needed to be reminded who was at the top of the food chain, The Queen was up to it. Dogs feared her. Cats scrambled away as soon as they spied her. And if an Italian scolded her for a transgression, she ignored them, as if unable to understand. Once I understood her language charade, we became good friends. Plus, it helped that I often spoke that magic English W word – “walkie”.
Read more of Queen Baldoria’s escapades in my book, Questions for the Heart.
