Whenever I make that fateful trip to my local Rome hospital to have my ruined eyes examined, my mostly steady Italian collapses like a car forced to screech over asphalt on flats. Call it anxiety or jitters or a sudden bout of verbal lunacy or a weird amalgam of the three in which even my body language plays a part.

My most recent visit was particularly rich in this sudden madness. Asked to lie down on a cot — beds were few — I did so with my feet spread apart, my eyes closed, and my hands folded over my chest. All was well and good until another patient saw me and screamed. My position, I was told by a concerned nurse, was that of a dead man in a coffin. Could I kindly remove my hands from my chest and at least pretend to breathe? Or simply rise from time to time? I did, back from the dead.

My right eye, which is entirely blind, began to hurt so I rubbed it assiduously as an orderly walked by. What was the problem, he asked.

“Nothing really,” I replied, aside from the fact that the eye in question was my occhio morto, literally my “dead eye.” I only made things worse by poking at the eye and saying defunto, or “dead.” The orderly winced and called for a doctor since these are not words normally associated with eye woes, as the doctor told me. Better I stay hushed until (mental) help arrived. Again, I did as I was told.

If only it had ended there.

After a while I needed to use the men’s room and waved to a nurse to assist me.

What was this new problem, she said.

I then fell into the jaws of verbal blockage, since I do know the word toilet. But did I use it? No.

I was having “hydraulic” problems, I offered. Problemi idraulici. This might be apt for a truck with marred gears or an apartment with broken plumbing, but not a human on a cot. She groaned, then again suggested as others had that I keep my exhortations to a minimum as she took me to the toilet, in Italian pronounced, like some pseudo-rental property, twa-let.

After this latest gaffe I did try to keep still, and alive, by wiggling my legs and rolling left and right on the cot, to better seem alive.

All this set the stage for my “piece of resistance,” not exactly what the French say but close enough.

Later, back at my cot, I struck up a conversation with a group of family members waiting for a father or grandfather to emerge from surgery. They had somehow been spared my references to dead eyes and plumbing woes. They invited me to rise from my resting spot, Lazarus-for-a-day, and come to chat with them.

We spoke of overcrowded Rome hospitals and Donald Troumpe, accent on the “e,” their spoken version of another Donald, but in the wake of my mishaps, who cared?

One of the group, a 20ish daughter, told me she had just come back from a vacation in San Francisco and had been startled by the number of homeless people she had seen, which was anathema to her Hollywood vision of America.

Alas, America was now in some respects Amerika, no longer an idyll but a nation with many pockets of jobless despair.

At first my speech was eloquent enough to make me think I had rediscovered my groove.

Until . . .

Until I told the group, which now included two passing but interested nurses, that San Francisco was not the only place where the homeless were present in abundance.

And what did I call the homeless? Senza tette.

All either gasped or laughed aloud.

You mean tetto, “roof.” As in, the roofless.

I had just told a group of half-a-dozen innocents that America was rife with people who lacked breasts, since tette is expressive Italian slang for “teats,” or their more Anglicized counterpart, “tits.”

In effect, the dead-eyed plumber, me, had told his rapt audience that my otherwise over-sexed America possessed a great number of tit-less vagrants.

I had at least made a corridor of sadness into one of brief hilarity, but since I hadn’t been hired as a clown, I went back to my cot to shut up and again play dead.

By the time two doctors came to fetch me for a cortisone shot, my homeless tit fame had apparently spread. As I rose from my couch, one of them said, “Please. Please. No need to say another word.”