But only a few days later Emma and Monica came back from a swim just before lunch and saw that their father had joined the Milanese’s table and was drinking iced retsina in an amiable mood. He called the girls over and introduced them to the group. They had to shake everyone’s hand, giving their names as they had been taught to do. The grown-ups sized them up with circumspection, squeezing the children’s hands longer than necessary. Emma knew right away what that expression of pity meant and felt doubly betrayed.
She felt ashamed, as if the loss of her mother had made her a lesser person in the eyes of the world.
It was way past noon, and Emma was dozing off on a rock in the bay of Kastraki. The cove was on the north side of the village, a perfect half-moon shape. She and Monica had discovered it one day during one of their explorations and decided that they preferred to swim there, away from the loud Greek families always yelling and shouting at their children. She felt a shadow come between her and the glare of the sun behind her closed eyes. It was the younger English boy. He said something to her in his clipped, authoritative language. His voice was surprisingly hoarse and Emma sat up, her heart pounding. His eyes were of a warm brown, speckled with gold flakes. His lips, a dark pink, were cracked and crusty. She noticed how his sinewy arms were rounded by snaky tendons and muscles, and the way his chestnut hair—a mass of salty curls bleached by the sun—fell over his eyes. Emma felt an unfamiliar sensation: the first perception, of something as yet unknown to her and still unnamed. She shook her head and raised her palms up. The boy repeated his question. He waved a hand, as if to prompt an answer, encouraging. Emma remained mute, so he gave up, turned back and left.
That same day, as she was heading back toward the blue taverna, she noticed her father in the distance walking on the beach side by side with one of the Milanese women. They were engrossed in conversation and it struck Emma how at ease with each other they seemed, as if they had known each other a long time. An image of this woman—or any woman—replacing her mother insinuated itself. In the days that followed Emma kept an eye on her father and the woman. There was nothing out of the ordinary happening between them: her father kept joining the Milanese’s table after dinner for a card game, there were laughter and jokes, chilled bottles of retsina and cigarettes, but she never caught him alone with the woman again.
By the end of August days were getting shorter and the light was changing. Soon her father started talking about getting ready to go back home. Emma realized that returning meant facing changes they’d all been postponing. Their tans would fade quickly; so too the brilliance of the endless summer and the whir in her chest at the thought of the younger, dark-haired English boy. She was afraid to ask her father whether he intended to bring them back again to the village the following year. She had been taught that children should never ask for things, but were supposed to wait and be offered.
She felt a terrible regret for not having been able to speak to the English boy when he had materialized that afternoon at the beach, looming above her against the sun. Emma was certain that his friendship would have produced a drastic transformation in her. His nature—so opposite to hers, so attractive—seemed to exude a power and a strength that she needed for herself. She wanted to learn how to swim to the island and back, wanted to speak in that same voice, wear bleached cutoffs and faded T-shirts and never have to wear the same clothes as the Milanese women or see her father ever wrap a sweater around his shoulders, tied at the sleeves. Everything she had experienced during that short holiday had been a discovery: from the sound of his language, to the endless possibilities of her hopes and aspirations. That was the summer when Emma understood that one of the many ways to survive the pain buried inside her was to become an entirely different person.
The children went back to the city to what they assumed was home only to realize how unfamiliar it had become. Everything was the same but nothing was the same anymore. Their mother’s bathrobe was still hanging behind the bathroom door (probably left behind by mistake by the aunts who had cleared the apartment like policemen removing evidence). Her hairbrush, which Emma found in a drawer, still had a few strands of her blond hair caught in it. These objects, innocuous, ordinary, had acquired an ominous nature. And so had the apartment: the dent on the sofa where she had sprawled when reading, her favorite coffee cup that had a crack but never broke, now frightened them.
A couple of weeks later Emma, making sure nobody saw her, threw away the cup and the brush; soon thereafter someone took care of the bathrobe.
In January Rome was hit by a freakish snowstorm. Luca, Emma and Monica woke up to a stunning white landscape—a wonder they had never seen before. The whole city had come to a halt and a childish euphoria had descended upon everyone as if a miracle had taken place. The children were allowed to stay home from school, and all the offices shut down, so that it felt as if the whole world was on holiday with a splendid playground at their disposal. The father took the kids for a walk along the Via dei Fori Imperiali, all of them bundled up in scarves, wool hats and thick gloves. He took several pictures of the Forum and the Colosseum shrouded in white with his new Olympus. He kept saying what an amazing spectacle this was, a once in a lifetime occurrence—Rome covered in snow was something he had hardly ever seen himself. When Monica and Luca started a snowball fight under the Arch of Costantino, he clicked away and turned to Emma, gesturing for her to join in. But she shook her head. She didn’t have it in her to play. For the first time in months she felt a burst of longing, like a sharp ache piercing her lungs. Shouldn’t her mother be in the photograph with them, throwing snowballs and screaming with laughter? Where else could she belong? The injustice of her loss manifested itself in all its cruelty. Emma burst out crying, as if a hidden button had been pushed, and the tears she had withheld for almost a year found their way out at last. She turned her back on the snowball fight and walked a few steps away so that her father wouldn’t notice. She was too small to understand how such a pain could gush up to the surface without warning, but, as she felt the tears stream down her cold cheeks and she quickly wiped them away with her gloves, she somehow knew she shouldn’t be afraid of them.
The winter was hard on the father. He felt lonely and at times even desperate. To find himself suddenly responsible for the three children turned out to be more than he could handle. He had no time to grieve, busy as he was taking the kids to school before the office, picking them up, making sure they ate proper meals and got new shoes whenever their feet went up one size. In the spring he consulted with friends and family and he recalled for them how the Greek holiday seemed to have had such a beneficial effect on the children—so much so that it seemed worth repeating. The younger aunt, their mother’s sister, told him the kids had talked all winter about the friends they’d made in the village. Apparently Luca had exchanged a few letters with Nadia, whereas Emma kept talking about the two English boys. The father asked, puzzled, Which English boys? He had hardly noticed them.
They took off again the following July. The children couldn’t wait to arrive; their excitement mounted to a frenzy when they got off the ferry and started hearing Greek being spoken again. All winter long they’d fantasized about this moment: the memory of the village—of their immaculate rooms, of the deserted island across the beach—had haunted them, and they couldn’t believe the place still existed as they’d left it.
It was a relief to find that not much had changed during their absence. Iorgo and Maria’s taverna looked identical, except for a new coat of slightly darker blue paint. Nadia and her large family had just arrived from Athens a few days earlier, and she was already positioned on her towel working on her tan. The two humps of the island were there, so were the goats; in the kitchen, under the lids, pots and pans disclosed the same moussaka, keftedes, and chicken with chips. Nothing had changed. If anything, it was the children who had.
Luca’s voice had turned into a mix of hoarse and strident trumpeting, his legs were now just as hairy as the Greek boys�
��. Monica’s face had rearranged itself in a different order, the tip of her nose had settled into a slightly more rounded shape, she didn’t look like any of the pictures from the previous year. Emma’s figure, too, had reassembled itself. She had just gotten her period and with it a new softness around her hips, so now she had a waist, small breasts and a bottom. She looked at Nadia with overt suspicion: the roundness of her curves and bosom were an anticipation of what was yet to come. Luca was besotted more than ever by Nadia but soon realized the new guy from Athens who smoked Marlboros and played backgammon with her every afternoon must be the new boyfriend. This was at first a disappointment but Luca quickly devised a new strategy: he had no hope against such a masculine antagonist and so pursued the role of harmless admirer, in order to maintain his privileged position with the queen. Nadia organized her usual after-dinner singing around the bonfire, which allowed furtive kisses among her teenage friends to be exchanged thanks to the dark. She also encouraged her court to join sirtaki dancing with the locals under the string of lights hanging across the taverna’s roof. She led the dance with the old fishermen—her jet-black hair loose on her shoulders, allowing glimpses of her soft cleavage to show—and insisted on teaching Luca the steps. When the dance reached a climax, the fishermen would each grab a plate from one of the tables and smash them on the floor, which sent the audience into a frenzy of applause and cheers. Emma found this form of entertainment irritating and refused to join in, declaring Greek music repetitive and too loud for her.
The previous winter at school Emma had been taking a weekly English class, but the teacher, an elderly woman from Palermo, spoke it with a thick Sicilian accent and the sentences she gave the class to translate didn’t go beyond “the pen is on the desk” or “Mary is a very good student.” Emma had higher ambitions: she needed to pry open the secret of the language she longed to master in view of her forthcoming—she hoped—encounter with the dark-haired English boy. She had been playing the Beatles’ White Album and Joni Mitchell’s Blue incessantly in her room, making a point of learning the lyrics by heart and singing along. She had looked up every single word in the dictionary and had painstakingly attempted to paste the pieces together in a way that would produce an intelligible sentence. She found out from a magazine that one of Joni Mitchell’s songs, “Carey,” was about a hippie girl living on Crete.
The wind is in from Africa
Last night I couldn’t sleep
Oh, you know it sure is hard to leave here Carey
But it’s really not my home
There was so much joy and excitement in Joni’s voice. Emma sang the lyrics over and over in an endless loop. There was something so seductive in the image of a free-spirited young woman on a Greek island, a wind coming all the way from Africa. One day soon, might that person be her?
Once back in the village Emma had checked right away for signs of the English boy’s presence but the villa’s blue blinds were always shut, no car with an English plate was parked in front of it, and she began to sulk.
In the meantime she’d been practicing her swimming technique; she wanted to be ready. Emma went every day to Kastraki by herself and now she could easily swim halfway to the island and back. It was her secret, which she had kept even from her siblings. She didn’t want her father to know she was training for the crossing; he would not allow it because he still didn’t trust her as a swimmer. It was true, she wasn’t very experienced, but she saw that each day she managed to reach a bit farther; her strokes were getting more powerful and her breathing more controlled. All she needed was time, and in a week or two she might be able to reach all the way.
After the swim she sat on a rock, listening to her accelerated heartbeat, to the blood pulsing in her temples and to her shortened breath, until it all slowed down and the drying salt tightened her skin. These were the moments that would stick in her memory for years to come, those instants of perfect bliss that nothing else would ever match again.
One afternoon she was walking in the blistering sun, heading back from her swim. As she approached Iorgo’s taverna she could make out her father sitting under the bamboo roof in his shorts and open shirt, covered with zebra stripes of light and shade. She liked those hours of quiet, when it was too hot to speak and everything stood still, a suspension in the glare of the day. As she got closer she saw he wasn’t alone. The Milanese woman from the previous summer was sitting across from him, looking urban and pasty, her white linen dress stuck to her damp skin. He waved.
“Emma, come say hallo to Mirella.”
He looked uneasy. He urged her to go and chase up Luca and Monica wherever they were and join them for lunch. Mirella didn’t look as attractive as she had the year before. Now she seemed to Emma somehow powerless, tense.
“Where are the others?” Emma asked her.
“Which others, dear?” Mirella strained to smile.
“Your friends from last summer.”
Mirella put a hand in her hair absentmindedly, not quite meeting Emma’s eyes.
“Friends? Oh. I don’t know. I came alone, this time.” Another awkward silence followed, as though Emma had asked the wrong question.
Monica was the first to broach an exploration of the potential consequences of Mirella’s arrival.
“Why does she have to sit with us all the time? Can’t she eat at her own table?” she blurted out, completely out of context, while she and Emma were looking for green glass pebbles on the beach. Since Mirella had arrived, if Emma had become sulky, Monica had turned morose. The woman’s presence had made their mother rise from the dead, and they felt frightened in ways that they couldn’t decipher, let alone discuss. Meanwhile, this summer Luca had abandoned them for good, in favor of his new group of teenage friends from Athens; he was to be counted upon neither for solidarity nor for help.
Emma shrugged, pretending not to know the answer to her sister’s complaint, but Monica wouldn’t let her off the hook.
“She is in love with Papà. Otherwise why is she here again, all by herself?”
Emma handed Monica a dark blue pebble. Blue was a rare color. Monica put it in the jar without looking. She persisted.
“Why do you think she came back?”
“I don’t know. I doubt Papà is interested in her.”
“How do you know? He lets her eat with us every day. They play cards at night. They are always together.”
“I think he’s embarrassed that she came back but is just trying to be kind to her.”
“Why should he be kind?”
Emma didn’t answer, which made Monica more anxious and angry.
“Why does he have to be kind? Because of what? Huh?”
“Stop it.”
“Stop what?”
“You are screaming.”
Monica lowered her voice.
“Why does he have to be kind to her? She’s nothing to us. She’s just a stranger.”
“Because he’s feeling sorry for her, okay?” Emma said calmly, although she felt this wasn’t the best answer. She looked at Monica. She was as dark as the fishermen, and her curly brown hair hadn’t been brushed in weeks. Her little body had grown sturdy and strong, a bomb ready to explode.
Then one early morning Emma looked up from her yogurt and honey and there they were, the English boys, back on the jetty in their canvas shorts sitting low on the hips, slipping on flippers, ready to dive in. They too had grown up since the previous summer, in that shocking Alice in Wonderland way that happens between the age of twelve and fifteen: they were much taller, sturdier, and their hair had reached their shoulders. She followed the trajectory of their arms and fins breaking the stillness of the water like two dolphins behind a boat till they reached the shore of the island and turned into two tiny vertical figurines, jumping from rock to rock just like the goats.
“What are you looking at?” the father asked.
“Nothing,” she said, smiling at him.
He was such a handsome man, her father, still so young and
lanky, his sandy hair falling across his face. He wore a white shirt with a threadbare collar over what he called his Bermuda shorts, the sleeves rolled up to his elbow. No wonder women fell in love with him. He was so quiet, and—by then she could tell from his enduring silences—lonely.
Emma doesn’t remember now how the magic happened. Who said what first, which words were exchanged. All she knows is that the memories of that summer turned into English because that’s what she found herself speaking. It was like an infant going from blabber to complete sentences in just a few weeks, letting the brain do the job in its mysterious way. It came like a flow, an instantaneous metamorphosis she was completely unaware of. All she remembers is that one summer the younger boy was speaking incomprehensible phonemes, and the next—thanks to the Beatles, to Joni Mitchell’s lyrics, to the promise of love?—the same clipped syllables turned into verbs that described actions, adjectives that specified attributes and nouns she now grasped as if in her hands and succeeded in using them all, ordering them in the right sequence to make herself understood.
The Other Language Page 2