What’s in a name?
Someone asked that once, someone in pain and on the theatre stage. It could have once been asked when accusations were brandished like guillotines and the man of the woods stalked the virgin forests of Salem, but that will always be historically obscured.
It served Arthur Miller’s purpose, and we all know what somebody else said – if it’s good enough for him…
For me it’s always been a case of my name containing within its fragile walls everything that is not. Everything that is different.
My name is Marco.
It is not an Anglo-Saxon name. It is not an Australian name. It is the name of the “other”, along with all the other names that floated onto our shores, all the other names that find that they, like people, arrive somewhere without being able to speak the native language.
I rarely hear my own name here. When I do it always refers to me.
Some people have to complete a cursory inventory of the room their in, to check the names, to make sure that it’s their body that belongs to the name being called.
I’m sure it happens to people called Dave or Mike or Bob whenever they’re in largish gatherings of people.
It never happens to me. I can be sure that when my name is called, when it’s breathed, said, whispered or shouted that it’s intended for me.
“Marrrrrrrr-co” my mother used to call out from the backdoor. My Aussie friends would always turn to me and say “Jeeeez you have a funny name”.
They had heard it a million times before. The sing-song voice that smelled like dinner and afternoon television always made my name seem more exotic. They always found it funny when all around us there was a din of Tim, Neil, Ben and Steve. Mothers at backdoors calling out short silly words for endlessly recurrent reasons.
My name found itself alone in this country. Even with the relatively large migration of Italians my name still found itself the only instance of its kind in almost every situation, in almost every room. No one else in my family shares my name.
When I was younger my name and I grew lonely together, wary of other names and the bodies they dragged around with them.
I used to be jealous of my brothers name – Dennis. A good Irish name. His Irish, mine Italian and us, a family of Brazilian and Portuguese decent. I am sure that if my mother continued to have children she would have continued to name us indiscriminately. Like modern cuisine, we would have equalled Babylon in its plurality and internationalism.
Then I went to Europe.
More specifically I went to Italy.
My name was everywhere.
Buildings and Piazzas and famous Churches share my name. I heard it shouted across canals and balconies. I came across street signs on ancient rock with my name providing the signifier. Swaggering men not afraid of their names possessed mine. Women said it in a way that did not imply something forbidden.
It took me a long while to not jump every time I heard that once rare sound. I had to inhibit a response that had become ingrained. I had to cut the umbilical chord that had never been cut between the thing that is me and that noun that refers to it.
In Australia it was almost a case of the word and the person being one and the same. A singularity that could not be disentangled. When it was not being uttered by someone acquainted with me, my name would never be uttered. It was too intertwined with my ego. I could not say my own name for a long time. To ask me to say my name would be like me asking you to say your personality. Just make sure you say it in only a single word.
My name had become a compound. The very substance of my being. My difference. My mark (incidentally the Anglo version of my name).
All of a sudden it was part of a greater language. Part of a history greater than my own and part of a character that was more than singular, it had become part of a nation and an empire.
I thought that this would please me. And it did.
Sometimes it just hurt giving and having taken what had always been mine.
My name.
Marco