Surnames stick to you. Like skin, you can’t actually change them. You get tanned or bitten by insects, but cells are always there to remind you that this is your shape for ever and ever.
Surnames just stay with you, even if you legally change them. Is it a burden? A sin? A blessing? I always keep in mind how huge the fights were in the past around surnames and caste. How huge a matter it was for a patriarch to ensure that his lineage was maintained as long as he could live and breathe. I understand that, both in the case that you are special and unique or that you are the most common one. I respect it.
So, I have always been a double “E” and a double “T”.
I’ve always been somebody that since the very beginning of her talkative life, should have articulately repeated her last name letter by letter. It is actually not that big of a matter in Italian, you don’t really need spelling in Italian. You only need to pronounce it clearly because every letter has its own sounds, so there are no mistakes. But when you’re just a little girl who is a few years old trying to introduce herself to adults, and they consistently ask you to repeat your surname, well… then you just wish to delete it. Forget it. Just call me by my simple-four- letters-name, I’m fine.
Daddy felt embarrassed as well. By then, he was a chubby short boy, he was struggling with Italian. He would have preferred to speak his dialect since he came from a modest countryside family. Well, his problem was even worse, since his first name was as troublesome as our surname. He was a shy overweighted impossible-to-be-pronounced-name boy. What a nightmare.
Very often he would remind me how hard his youth was because of this double “E” and double “T”. How messy papers were if his voice was too low to make it clear to the receiver. How heavy those letters were, at the beginning.
Once he told me that he had desperately wished more than once to have just one simple silly name. “Bu”, (which in English would be pronounced Boo). Something like, “Hi, chubby puffy little cutie lovely boy, what’s your name?”. And he would just say, “Bu”. Two letters; just one “B” one “U”, no mistakes. I know how stupid this seems. But trust me, I totally sympathised with him by then; we felt the same shameful vibration every time we heard that question, the one which every social life begins with.
How did he grow up with this? Well I think that at some point, you just do it.
To me it was like being the only one. Yes, I was special not only because of that awkward sound, but because unlike every other friends of mine, I had my grandma’s surname.
You didn’t really have much of a choice if you got knocked up by singer, a fascinating traveller who would have entertained different girls after you, especially from the countryside. You couldn’t really have a choice. Keeping your family name and staying with your family was the only way to keep yourself alive in the misogynistic society that was the provincial North Eastern Italian countryside at the time.
So my super-duper granny who had guts raised a child by herself and against the whole world; a child who carried her and her brothers and sisters’ own family name. And that was her pride; to not share her child’s identity with anyone else.
I kept this in mind every time somebody needed to confirm that my surname was actually written with double “E” and double “T”.
Then, at some point of my life, but still too early, there was this very famous Formula 1 driver, who unbelievably, carried MY unique surname. Or better, people thought we had the same surname. And of course, when you are thought to carry the same family name, the first question you are asked is:, “Are the two of you relatives?”. But no no no.
This American, he maybe came from an Italian family, but, gosh, he only got a miserable lonely puny “E”. Just one. And you cannot compare my outstanding impossible to pronounce double “E” with a single one.
That was my turning point; when I started to understand that my fear of this word, because at the end of the story it is still a word, was about to swallow my identity. And my identity, remember, my skin, well everything was in there, in that family name. Our whole story, the strength of my grandma, the fight of my father, everything was in there, in that awkward dissonant and unique double “E”. So, I had first to cope with that, accept it and then make it mine.
Alright, I actually needed to find a way to get it properly under control and proudly mine. If correctly pronouncing an Italian word wasn’t enough to stop people from staring at me with that dopey look, I found my own strategy. The “surname-with-double-’E’-and-double-’T’”. It goes together now, as if was a single word without space nor pause. You have to say it in one single breath. As if it was a prayer. Because if you show yourself reluctant in any of this passage, you will receive “the look” back. I can’t stand it anymore, come on.
Eventually, I found the point when I’ve outgrown this too. There was once somebody that told me something very precious. When I told him my full name, he was so enthusiastic, and I mean genuinely enthusiastic, and exclaimed, “Wow, this is so director-style”. It sounded good.
I don’t really care about being famous, but I’d like to see my double “E” and “T” respected because they belong to me. I am not a single letter. I am an unusual combination of two vowels and two consonants that got together hand in hand, and walk straight and hard as armour.
Take that, Formula 1 single “E” pilot.
