SOMEWHERE IN NORTHERN ITALY

WRITTEN BY Matt Wisner

It’s a really small town. Only 500 people. When you google “Pozzecco Italy” it tries to correct your search to Prosecco Italy, the place where the wine comes from. Sinta came here when she was 10. She was born in Ethiopia and was sent to an orphanage when her biological mother passed away and was adopted by her Italian parents in 2006.

When she got to Italy she had to be in school with people who were much younger than her because she couldn’t speak Italian. She couldn’t really connect with her family because of the language barrier.

The light is running out and it’s still hot and that’s all anybody can talk about. A short stone wall separates the one-story brick house from the street, and you can see a large garden in the back, with every vegetable this sort of climate supports. There’s a church and a bank and a post office but nothing else. It’s the kind of place some unsuspecting heartthrob doctoral student might come to study archeology or something useless and romantic like that.

Sinta Vissa grew up here. After running the 1500 at the World Championships and deciding to join the On Athletics Club, she’s home for a bit, running the dirt roads of Pozzecco before her next race which is weeks away. “There’s nothing to do here,” she told me. “But it’s good for running though. I’m enjoying it more than usual because it’s just mileage right now.”

Call Me By Your Name is also set somewhere in Northern Italy, and there’s this scene where the main character Elio is asked “What does one do around here?” and without hesitation he says “Wait for summer to end.” When he’s pressed for a more substantial answer he says, “Read books, transcribe music, swim in the river, go out at night,” and of course I asked Sinta the same question because I thought I might get the same answer. She said, “Go out. Hang out with my friends. It’s a very slow lifestyle. There’s no rush. A lot of talking.” Close enough.

She also felt like she stuck out in Italy because she’s Black. “It took me like five or six years to not give a fuck about anything,” she said. I guess that’s just the perks of being a wallflower! Kidding. It really sounds like that shit sucks.

I can’t imagine not being able to talk to the people around me. Some kid in my first-year Spanish class threw a chair across the room in frustration because he messed up the distinction between ser and estar or something basic for the zillionth time and eventually it became too much for him to handle, how disorienting it is when the universe has you in a cuckhold like that, when all you can say is hello and goodnight and you want more. I took six years of Spanish but have never even been to a Spanish speaking place (“hispanohablante” they say, because I had to flex like that) and all I ever used my Very Refined Mastery Of The Language for was to flip through Carmela’s Spanish version of The Handmaid’s Tale, asking her after every sentence if I’d interpreted the meaning correctly. If the stakes were any higher I may have thrown a chair myself or done something even more drastic because being heard might be my primary requirement for existence. Sinta’s stronger than I am.

I asked her a lot of questions about that time in her life. Sinta described herself as a hyper kid. She was reactive. She cut herself out of the family photo albums. She’d tell them, I don’t belong here! You’re not my real parents! She’d run out of the house and hide in the field or at the top of a tree and her frantic parents would get in the car looking for her. “But now we all laugh so I guess they forgive me,” she said. “It even took me a while to be a part of the family. They loved me. They adopted me and they wanted to love me.”

When Sinta told me her parents aren’t runners and don’t really understand running I immediately thought Holy shit maybe they have no idea how good she is and I thought of how Mike Teavee in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory coded some crazy algorithm using the trajectory of the sun and the moon to locate his golden ticket and his parents were looking at him like he was some freakish specimen, as though looking at him from behind a glass wall like he was a zoo animal. Sinta is also kind of a freakish specimen with how fast she can run. “I used to be upset when I’d win a race and my mom would be super happy because I got first and I’d be so pissed, I was like ‘You don’t even know what I’ve done. I’ve run terrible times,’” she said. “My mom would say ‘If Sinta’s happy I’m happy.’” That’s endearing to me though. My parents are tapped in and I can’t hide. I ran 4:01 in the mile last week and they knew exactly what that meant and that I’d be unhappy. I didn’t even need to get the noose myself because they handed it to me. Kiiiiiidddddding. 😸

It’s obviously so hard to move to a new place where you don’t know anybody or the language. But she literally did it again! Lmao. Coming to the U.S. was different though because she had a clearly defined mission. She was coming to be the best runner she could be. She didn’t run much in Italy. Everybody in her club ran the 400 hurdles because that’s what her coach wanted to coach. That’s actually so nuts. But she got to America, a small school called St. Leo’s in Florida, and knew she’d run the distance events. “They were like, ‘You’re from Ethiopia. You should do long distance.’ I think I’ve found my path,” Sinta said. She had to use Google Translate to write the email to the coach to be recruited. The plan was to get used to running higher mileage and improve her GPA and then transfer to a track powerhouse. Everything went according to plan. She transferred to Ole Miss without knowing where Mississippi was on the map. “My friends were asking me about Craig Engels, and I was like ‘Who is that guy?’” she said. “They were talking about Waleed and Mario and I had no idea who they were.” She got there and ran fast right away, ramped up her mileage, ran even faster. She just kept getting better, which is of course what everybody wants. After just a year at Ole Miss she thought she was ready to win her first national title. The mile indoors. She got second. Kept doing her thing and then won the 1500 outdoors a few months later. She told Coach Vanhoy she wanted to run the World Standard of 4:04 in the 1500 when her PR was only 4:16 and he said he could get her there by the end of the year, and that’s what happened. Everything kept going according to plan. Ok what’s next? She decided to give up the rest of her NCAA eligibility and joined the On Athletics Club which I guess is the logical next step for somebody as good as her. To her new coach Dathan Ritzenhein, if you’re reading this, what is Sinta capable of? I want you to write it down and we’ll check in a year or two or three. I feel like she could be nutty good.

– – –

I’ve been reading this book called Motherhood by Sheila Heti and she talks about how it’s conventionally accepted that our way of connection to nature is by having children. We put a piece of ourselves into our kids and by extension into the world and that’s how we feel meaningful, like we’ve done something that matters in a world where we might otherwise feel small and inconsequential. She proposes instead that we can feel significant by looking backward, trying to understand ourselves through our ancestry, as though our personhood is uniquely shaped by conditions so far above our heads, so far in the past, influenced by decisions made by people we’ve never met. That’s sick. Sinta said she was a preteen and feeling lost and purposeless or whatever, and I guess that’s natural when you’re 12, but it’s why she started running. To connect to an Ethiopian culture she never consciously knew. Her parents lived in Bekoji, a running town. Everybody runs. Bekele was born there. Sinta said, “I wanna belong. I wanna get close to my culture. That’s how I started. Just three times a week. It was a joke. But I wanted to be someone or something.” She began running for a club before she could even speak Italian well. Of course I could write that rUnNiNg iS tHe uNiVeRsAl LaNgUaGe, but that also doesn’t directly apply to Sinta’s situation at the time. It wasn’t about making friends necessarily. She views running as her purpose. She kept saying the word purpose and that has a religious connotation to me so I asked her if she believes in God and she said yes. I asked if she was religious and she hesitated. She said she’d never go to a bible study, for example, but in the same breath she said, “My life was meant to be. In God’s hands.” She said it’s about hope and belief. Never losing your hope, she said.

All this talk about purpose and Sinta interjected, “Did I ever tell you what Sinta means?” No, she hadn’t told me what Sinta means. Someone who sees a lot. She doesn’t belong in one place. She said when she thinks about her life and where she’s been and where she’s going, it’s many places. “I don’t care. I just take one bag,” she said. Next is Boulder.