One highlight of the film festival is Claudia. She is, bar none, the best MC I have ever seen. Every year, she hosts the Locarno Film Festival. I have no idea who she is, but I know why she has the job. She might be a news anchorperson (although I have never seen her) or some sort of celebrity. But she may also be a professional MC.
She is poised, she always says the right things, and she is not hard to look at – which is critical during interminable award ceremonies – and someone gets some award each night at the Piazza Grande, along with their cast, crew, and everyone they ever met in their life. Unlike the Oscars, at Locarno they don’t just thank the people, they bring them up on stage. And Claudia marshals this whole clusterfuck with ease and grace, cutting off people politely and ensuring things move on as expeditiously as decorum (which is thick in Ticino) allows.
But Claudia’s main skill is her ridiculous facility with languages. We’re pretty sure Italian is her mother tongue, but she’s so good it’s hard to tell. Her French seems equally perfect. She definitely has an accent in German and English, but she speaks them both fluently. Essentially, she is the perfect hostess who manages to interpret flawlessly in front of a crowd of 8000.
The irony is that she doesn’t really need to translate. She speaks so clearly I swear I could understand her fine if she broke into Polish. My Italian and French comprehension skills aren’t that great, but I understand every word she says. By the time she gets to English or German, I’m glad she’s abridged the speech because I got it the first two times. I wouldn’t be surprised if she could speak with plants and animals.
My life began shifting a bit this week. Unfortunately, at the festival, the third time they show films, they project them in a small auditorium. Thus my strategy was backfiring. By the time I heard a film was worthy, so had many others and the small Rialto auditoria were crowded, often to the point that I couldn’t enter; Pardo pass or not. Also, as I spent more time working on La Perla, the more my questions led to more questions.
I had three main projects: property taxes, getting Luciano inspected, and figuring out how the property next door was deeded. I have learned in my Swiss adventure that understanding these processes involve the most frustrating elements of bureaucracy and cultural difference. Invariably, what starts as a simple question gets quite complicated before it makes sense again. But then again, sometimes people can just be turkeys.
Let’s take the woman at the comune for example. In the past two weeks, I had called her five times to learn more about the property next door. She claimed that I needed to speak to a “tecnico” and this guy was only around for about two hours each day. At first, she didn’t even tell me that. She’d simply say that the tecnico was out. I’d ask when I might try him and she’d give me two hours the next day. Those two hours may or may not coincide with when I could get home to place a phone call. Eventually I got this guy’s schedule for the whole week and arranged my days accordingly. However, I called him many times during these hours and he was still out. On the sixth call, the woman, and it was always the same woman, asked me what I needed again. I told her. She said she could mail me a copy of the local ordinance that specified how the property could be developed along with a map of the plot. So I had rearranged by schedule four days to make these phone calls to hunt down this information she had at her fingertips the whole time. Swiss efficiency.
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