A Poetic Anecdote
The Poet once pouted that he was, ad fundum, only really five, still. Inside, where the Wild Things had prevented him from growing up. He was still stuck in the stop-motion frame of his little self hiding away, from his yelling mother, under the kitchen table. His father had, I think, long left them by then. Or not. Or however these things go: for relations with the aged man seemed passable again, by the time I knew the Poet and learned his father was living in Israel, giving cause for him to go and visit the country regularly; also to stock up on mace and knuckle dusters and nunchucks†, so that he would feel safer on the commons walking home late after meeting up with her or a poetry class at the community centre. He was a charitable man.
I don't know what cause he had to be this jumpy and have his tweed pockets and satchel suited and booted as a military man (and criminal for it, by the laws of the country he was now living in) but when I once wondered out loud (really fed up, by then with how I was being used - in the nicest possible way-) whether he fancied the guy behind the counter in the bookstore, he got more indignant than he ought to have got. I wonder now if had been much accosted on those commons, and none too delicately, perhaps.
I should have said,
but I was only very young and very green, that I don’t think five is very young - at heart. I think you grow younger with age, the farther you are removed from who you really are. Hadn’t he noticed how all his three sons had come out looking as old as the hills? Babies do, you know, and then they stare at you in their first hour with all the wisdom of all the generations bundled into their little package of life force before it disperses into their being, where is slowly decomposes into flesh and fat and flab and rot. They come to remind us that we are born as human beings, who are millions of years old; but then we are made to forget this and have to be sensible and sorry about everything.
I think I must have pitied him back then.
I shouldn't have.
I wouldn’t, and I don’t, now. Then again, it’s what he wanted and such false beliefs make good lesson materials, and I am nothing if not a good teacher, as was he; better at nothing, unless he was a better pedant. Funny how we say: healer, heal yourself but apparently teachers can’t teach themselves. I judge it is safe to report that he won't have learned anything, since. Teacher's call.
We were walking along,
in a part of the city he trusted he couldn't bump into anybody he knew (students did not live around here, teachers neither, and his friends or wife lived in a satellite town) - he must have grown tired of me already by then, for we could have used this precious hour and a half to go to my pied à terre I had very cleverly acquired (lucky as I was in everything but love) free of charge (house-sitting it during someone’s sabbatical) - when a Portobello Road kind of shop caught my eye.
It was not it’s retro vibe or its vintage wares that allured me, but its name sprawled over the window in violet blue.
What a fantastic name, I finally decided, after I had considered the writing on the nice clean pane. “Stirare ad alta temperatura”.
He didn’t understand.
He was miles away. Maybe regurgatating more Tennyson‡, maybe fantasising about her.
That shop, I pointed, across the road, to the shiny shop front with its half-circle transom over a single large windowpane, crammed inbetween a shabby kebab caf and an even dingier poundshop. There was a rack of clothes outside, but he ignored them as a clue, still refusing to be intrigued by my enthusiasm. It really is very clever.
He had no Latin, but prided himself on his French. Granted, coc au vin French but it did him fine in the Provence every other year. France-Israel. France-New-Jersey. France-Greece. France-broke at home (he had issues, and money was his comforter. Money is a substitute for emotion, his psychiatrist was working on it with him).
Surely English would have already given him 25 % to go on. True, we'd have to forgo the "stirare". “Repasser” did not come near enough. Besides even "repasser" would have been a long shot: who irons on holiday? So that would not have likely been on the Barron's cassette course. But “alta” might possilby have connoted "high altar", to a philologos, and the temperatura could have trimmed it to mean something logical, surely? That would have given an instant 75 % and that must raise one’s curiosity about the missing 25%, no?
”Iron at high temperature", I translated for him.
What is it supposed to be selling? he was acting diffident now. He rememberd to cross me, too, It’s not a good name at all. I can’t figure it out. Irons?
I rolled my eyes.
Ironing boards? he took another faint stab to humour me, before underscoring his made up mind, It is not a good name for anything. Who around here speaks Italian? Ha! So he knew that much.
I sighed. It really is a very clever name, indeed. I would explain.
For people like you it doesn’t matter that you don't get it, you are not going to buy a dress, anyway. (Here I paused, to let it pinch, not that it could. I knew he had for her, and she had laughed at him, not in an endearing way, either, calling him daft for picking romantic things out of books all the time. "No, no, not at all," I had soothed. "I would love a dress. It is such a difficult thing to buy for a man. The effort alone is charming." I had no feminist issues with men buying me anything back then. Maybe, because I was always the kind of girl they went Dutch with, never guessing I loved romantic things out of books.
I continued
with the patience of a prize-winning teacher. Floozies who are into synthetic, flimsy, Taiwan-made fashion, will also not be attracted by the name; and they would only have been disappointed if they had been. But people who like cotton and linnen and the natural look, will think about the name and feel particularly invited in. It will have appealed to their intelligence, and their familiarity with the care this clothing needs, I now heard I was sounding pretentious, too.
You over-complicate things,
he chided on repeat. You have to see it’s a pretentious name that won’t attract a single customer, he spoke like a teacher who didn’t want to be disappointed by his star-pupil (the one who hangs on his words most reverently). The only customers they’ll get are the ones walking on that side of the street and something off that rack happens to catch their eye, he was analysing now, methodically, like the shop was a poem; or you are an Italian who consulted the yellow pages and come here in the hope to find an iron. You won’t find this store still here, next time you walk by, I promise you. It is too complicated, he became ostinato, It is fangled: hard to pronounce, harder to recall and its translation rings like a hardware store. Oh what a poet, and doesn’t he know it.
I don’t know if the shop is still there, or if the clothes were of the quality I hoped the name suggested. I never did walk in that part of town again. Some places you just don’t revisit.
I still think it is a great name, that translates well into any language. Try it!
† For a manual on manly small weapons to carry upon your person for defence read more here. The items he managed to smuggle back from Israel are not listed. Please be advised that in many European countries it is a criminal offence to carry any of these weapons upon you (incl. pepper spray or animal-repellent spray) for which you will be prosecuted when searched, and subsequently fined heavily.
‡ Not his real specialisation. He’d have a fit to be associated with Tennyson. Good, here you are then.