I was wearing heels. And
make up. And even a jacket with subtle, sparkly gold threads woven through the
green-beige-brown tweed and absurd, fluffy, eight-inch re-cycled vintage
raccoon fur cuffs. I was doing my best impersonation of una donna italiana and hoping my translations would be accepted.
You see, I wasn’t completely
clear on what made a translation “official”. Last time, Signora R. told me to
go to the tribunale where they
had a list of official translators. Two weeks ago, that’s what I did. Only they
told me to go to the giudice del pace. At the justice of the peace, they guy looked over my translations, used his rubber stamp all over them
and told me to get a couple of tax stamps worth about $35, had me sign a
declaration that they were true to the best of my ability and sent me on my
way. I wasn’t sure if that was official enough.
Despite my attempts to look
the part, I was no match for Signora R. . Her fuchsia dress, fuchsia fur stole,
dark pinkish-red 3D manicure, armful of rhinestone bangles and be-jeweled
eyeglasses topped with a cascading explosion of blond hair, she was truly an
Italian woman and quite possibly the personification of one of my favorite
Italian expressions, an albero di natale or “Christmas tree”.
It was my third time meeting
with her, but it may as well have been the first. Armed once again with the
wonderful distraction that is A., another chatty, done-up Italian woman, as
well as my armload of documents, stamped and taxed and apostilled, we went
through it all from the beginning, as if we’d never done it before.
“Is your husband Italian?”
Duh. Of course he is. If
he wasn’t, why would I be applying for citizenship through marriage? I shook the thoughts from my head, hoping the smile
accompanying my “Sì” was
convincingly pleasant.
She turned to him. “Do you
have carta d’identita?”
“No lo so,” he replied, looking at me.
“You don’t know if you have?
Maybe an Italian passport?”
“Sì, sì. Ce l’ho.” I pulled
out his carta d’identita and his Italian passport.
Oh, how the Italian ladies
chuckled. He doesn’t know if he has these things! No, I wanted to say. He knows that he has them, that they’ve been issued to him. He just
doesn’t know if they are here with us now because I always have them. But I didn’t. Mostly because I didn’t know how, but
a little bit because she’s the one who takes my application, the one who has
the power, and I didn’t want to seem rude so I didn’t even try. I just tried to smile pleasantly. Again.
She picked up my application
form. “There is a new modello.”
Of course there is.
And then she proceeded to
fill in the blanks I had left, things like what type of degree I have (she
couldn’t find a good translation for BA in English/Secondary Education, either,
choosing just “college degree”) and what I do now (we decided on “housewife”
and everyone chuckled again).
Next, she fondled the sheaf
of papers from the Comune. Things
like the marriage “extract” (a copy of the page in the book of the town hall in
which the marriage was registered), the piece of paper confirming V.’s
citizenship, and the one that proves I’m resident in the town.
“Oh. You need to be resident
two years.”
“Yes. I am,” I said, still
trying to smile, fearing that maybe the new modello came with another change to the law that I hadn’t
yet heard of. “Yes. Married 2009. Living here since January 2011.”
“Not from marriage.
Resident.”
“Yes. Is now January 2013.”
Giggling and chirpy Italian
abounded. So silly. Yes, is now 2013. She looked down again.
“Oh. Trentuno gennaio. You must wait.”
Of course I must wait. It’s
only quattro gennaio. They didn’t
put me in the book until the thirty-first, even though our lease was dated the
first, the vigili came to confirm
we lived in our apartment on the tenth and really, what else were the people
who work at the comune doing that
they couldn’t get me in the damned books sooner?
I tried not to roll my eyes.
V. said, “Oh, OK. We come back primo febbraio.”
“No, no, before that.”
Um. What? My residence is
dated January 31st, but we don’t need to wait until February 1st.
But we can’t submit everything today. When exactly is a good time? Oh, never
mind. Va bene.
On to the translations.
“Who did these?”
A. did not say, “I told
you two days ago on the phone. She did them. And the guy at the Justice of the
Peace read them, said they were fine and stamped them.” She wisely left out the first part, embellished
slightly on the second part adding something about a teacher helping me (yes,
my teacher, whom I call Google) and
Sig.a R. nodded appreciatively at the stamps and signatures.
Then she said something very
quickly about the Embassy in Rome and dragged a sparkly, depth-enhanced claw
under the part of the instructions on the application that say things need to
be legalized by the “competent authority” where the documents are from or at
that country’s consulate in Italy.
I looked at A., confused. “Ci
sono apostilli,” I ventured. Right
there. The first page is one, with that big blue seal of Secretary of State of
New York, followed two pages later by one from the Secretary of State of the
USA.
A. read my thoughts and
kindly, politely pointed them out.
Va bene.
A flurry of grazie and handshakes and kisses on all of our cheeks and
we were sent on our way to fill out the new form and return in three weeks.
Before buying a tax stamp worth €14.62 and paying the application fee to the stato
via the post office of €200. You
see, Rosalba wants to look at everything before I do that.
