The Second Fingerprints

The day after our first fingerprinting, we were required to go to a different Questura (police station) office to be fingerprinted again. Daniela took the kids on the bus to their day camp and I came to the Questura first. Thankfully this one was within 15 minute walking distance of our home. And I was pleased to recognize the address was in a piazza I had visited 2 weeks before as I was searching for the Permesso di Soggiorno kit.

I arrived at the medieval Questura building, which is a large complex that sits on both sides of a small street that functions as a piazza of sorts. It wasn’t clear which entrance to try first, but instinct guided me past a small doorway with a woman enveloped in a cloud of smoke out front. She looked in her late fifties, but could have been one or two decades younger. She had blue gloves on, so I thought she might be the janitor. But she also had white diamond studded boots, which seemed more appropriate for a dance club. I tried to enter the doorway, but she wielded her cigarette like a weapon to block the entrance. She wasn’t going to move. She mumbled something I didn’t understand.

In the early days of living in a new country, you must relinquish all fantasies of maintaining personal dignity. You know nothing, and everything you do and say makes you look foolish. So you try to smile a lot and hope that softens the edges of your stupidity, but then you just look like you aren’t too bright. So you forget about how you appear, and just focus on small goals for the day. You trust your instinct, which picks up subtle body language and clues in the words that your subconscious understands. You trust in the goodness of people, and the inevitability of a well travelled system to jostle you to a destination. Somehow this works.

So I showed her my paper that directed me to this address for fingerprints. Maybe she could help. She took the paper and walked into the small office. I followed and saw that there was a fingerprinting machine inside. She was the fingerprinting tech, thus the blue gloves. In two minutes she had expertly taken a complete set of fingerprints and palm prints. Quick and efficient, a relief after the hassle of the day before. As I recall the experience now, I’m wondering where she put her cigarette during this exchange.