It is an awful little room. Painted in a garish, too bright and too saturated yellow. The lower half of the walls is scuffed and dirty. The floor is a houndstooth placement of nondescript gray ceramic tiles. Two terrible fluorescent lights adorn the ceiling. Behind the half wall and glass at the far end are two computer stations with a small counter. On the sides are two matching black metal mesh "benches" each with an attached table on the end. The benches seat three apiece, so people also use the end tables as a place to sit. This is the immigration office at the Questura, the province, or county police station.
Today we had our appointment to renew our Permesso di Soggiorno. We obtained the kits by ourselves and I filled them out. All I did was follow along the copies we had from last year, for which we paid an attorney an exhorbitant fee to complete.
My husband, in his deep anxiety, went to work on the "documents." Even though this is a renewal, there were no clear guidelines as to what to provide, so he did what he did the first time: three entire months worth of bank activity, all the letters from Social Security and our pensions proving what we get, copies of our passports, our Permesso, our citizen of Penne cards and our National health cards.
Then we sent it all in to the Questura. At that time, the post office arranges an appointment, which was surprisingly just two weeks away.
Sometimes his anxiety rubs off on me. What if you made a mistake on the forms? Are you sure you got the phone number right? Should we have included this? Or that? Will they take our fingerprints again? It never ended. So, I became concerned that if there were questions perhaps my Italian is not sufficient yet to handle not only the questions but the answers. As a result, I asked our Italian teacher, Marisa, to accompany us. (Yes, of course, we would pay her for her time.)
Right away she offered to drive us, so that was a plus. Getting up at the crack of dawn to catch a crowded bus filled with school kids is not so much fun.
My day started at 5am with a flash of lightning so bright it woke me. A huge thunderstorm was moving in. Then the deluge. I felt sick and nervous. I was thinking about having to drive down the hillside in torrential rain. Maybe she will cancel. Then we will have to scramble for a bus to get there on time. Luckily, the rain eased up and Marisa showed up right on the button. Her son was in the car, bumming a ride to a friend's house along the way.
She dropped us off by the Questura and went to find a parking space. I was surprised not to see people milling around and piled up out in the street outside the Immigration office.
Walking into the ugly, tiny room, one seat was actually available. An officer I recognized made an announcement that today was by appointment only. So when a man came in and was right next to me looking to "take a number" like you do at a deli counter in the supermarket, I said "Oggi, appuntamenti"..Today, appointments. He walked out rather glumly.
The officer I recognized was the same man who had issued our Permesso last year and I recalled that he spoke some English. Lo and behold, when he was done with the person already at his counter, he called our name. Marisa was not there yet and my stomach was in a knot.
He smiled. He said, "You are from New York?" I said "Si." He said, again in English, "I remember you. I looked at your files yesterday." I said, in Italian, that I remembered him from last year. He pulled out our kits and said, "You have many, many, many documents." Errrrrrrrrr. I knew my husband had overdone, overthought and overprinted. I laughed a bit and said, "Mio marito e nervoso," My husband is nervous.
He separated all the bank statements and said, "These are not in Italian." Yeah, well, they are American banks. I thought, but did not say that they are numbers, which are neither English or Italian but I held my tongue. Then he called someone else over to look at the documents. That guy didn't say much, just leafed through. Then he says, where is proof of where you live? Well, we did bring a copy of our deed for the house. "This is in English, too." Aggghhhh!!! I thought he was going to send us away, and besides our address is on every card we have, the Penne card, the health card, the previous Permesso. With that Marisa came in and I told her, "It appears we have a problem." The officer looks up and says, "No, there is not a problem." I'm confused.
After a bit he gathers up the majority of our documents and hands them back to us. He does, however, take our "official" cards...and then he starts to check our fingerprints. As he is doing this, he tells me he was in New York twenty years ago. Did I live in...something unintelligible? "Excuse me?" He says it again and I am still baffled. Marisa says, "Manhattan." Ahhhhhh....Yes! I did live there for a while and I worked in Manhattan for years.
He checks my husband's fingerprints first. They have a little electronic doodad that holds one fingertip at a time. He checked only his index fingers. Then it was my turn. Without a word he asks me to do it again. (In the States I could not pass the ink fingerprint 7 points of identity. Only electronic ones work on me. Haha, I have no fingerprints!) Well, I don't know if he was finally able to match it, but then he had me also do my middle fingers. All the while, he was, in effect, giving ME the finger....showing me by demonstrating when to put it down on the doodad and when to lift it up. I began to stifle a laugh. Is he playing with us?
Finally, he is satisfied that I am me, and says, "You will get a text when they are ready." Really? That's it? We don't have to go inside the police station? You don't need anything else? No, buonagiornata! Wow!
Afterwards, I said to Marisa, what were the odds we would get the officer who has a bit of English and remembers us? We stopped for cappuccino. My husband was in shock. I was relieved. THAT was easy. Marisa noticed the "finger" too and we both decided the officer was having a little fun with us. In a slightly intimidating but good humored way.
It appears they are going to let us stay another year. Now can we go home?
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