The Other Language

by Francesca Marciano

  Jeffrey Stone lives in a slightly nicer concrete box than Andrea’s, although no building on this odd, seemingly seaviewless island meets any of the requirements that might elevate it to something even remotely romantic. Stone has made an effort to make the place look cozy, though. He has a few colorful throws scattered across his sofa and armchairs, a Moroccan rug on the floor and a few coffee table books with old photographs of hunting expeditions or East African interiors. We sit outside on the veranda on plantation chairs and an older man with a severe expression in kanzu and kofia brings out a tray with iced gin and tonics and freshly roasted cashew nuts. Apparently Tescari has brought the booze all the way from mainland Tanzania and, judging from what’s left in the bottle, they’ve had quite a lot of it already.

  Tescari has an appointment tomorrow morning with the Ministry of Land and he’s pretty optimistic that he’ll get his permits without a problem.

  “Despite,” he adds, turning to me, “what your friend claims.”

  I ignore his remark and say yes to a refill of my glass.

  “He has married a local, right?” Jeffrey Stone inquires as he pours.

  “Was that her?” Tescari asks.

  I nod and feel both men’s eyes on me. I know they expect me to make a remark or to crack half a joke as a sign of solidarity to the white man’s cause when stranded on such unfriendly land, but I keep my straight face and ignore the question, asking Jeffrey what his job involves and whether he’s planning to stay here much longer. He isn’t, he’s applied for a post in Uganda. Come the end of the year and he’ll get the hell out of this hole.

  This short parenthesis in the colonial world on the island has had the power to rejuvenate me, probably because of the alcohol intake, but I walk home strengthened, and full of ideas.

  Andrea’s on the porch, crossed-legged on the baraza. Pretending to be looking into some miraculous cloud formation in the sky. I know he’s been waiting for me, but when I walk in he just says hi, as though he’s not interested in where I’ve been. I move to sit next to him and he scoots over to make room. We sit quietly for a moment, though I am not quiet inside. I am energized and determined to pierce through the armor with which he has been shielding himself. We enjoy a moment of silence, then I begin.

  “How come one never sees the ocean on this island?”

  “On this side of the island it’s more difficult to see it.”

  “Then take me somewhere where I can. Otherwise I’ll never believe this is an island.”

  He stares into nothingness.

  “Come on. Let’s go. Just you and me this time.” I make my voice sound as conspiratory and commanding as I can.

  But he looks up at me, as if weary.

  “Why?”

  “Because I’ve come all this way to see you, and you, Andrea, haven’t spent a minute with me. You’ve either handed me over to your wife, or talked to me like a stranger.”

  He doesn’t reply and looks away. I can feel him retreating, curling up. I raise my voice.

  “Come back!”

  He looks at me, startled, almost frightened. “What do you mean, come back?”

  “Just come back, for God’s sake!” I shout. “Come back into yourself! Come back! I feel you have turned into an alien.”

  “Have you been drinking?”

  “It doesn’t matter and who cares? It’s exactly what I think. This person you are pretending to be—is not you.”

  “Oh really? And who am I then?”

  “I’ve known you a long time. Longer than anybody else here. I know this is not you.”

  He stares at me and doesn’t say anything. I hold my breath. Does he hate me?

  “No you don’t,” he says coldly. “You think you know me, but you don’t.”

  He glances toward the door of the house. “And please lower your voice.”

  Fifteen years of never eating fresh vegetables, but only rice, chapatis and fried fish in coconut oil have modified his shape, the texture of his skin, the molecules of his inner organs. Fifteen years of not having access to decent books, but just airport paperbacks snatched from the few foreign visitors, must have starved his mind, shrunk his intellect. Fifteen years of not speaking his mother language, forgetting its poetry, its songs, its sonorities and rhythms. And how about going to prayer five times a day, kneeling on a mat, his forehead touching the ground? In which way might that strict discipline transform an agnostic, a free spirit, a biker with long curls?

  “Why are you still here?” my voice breaks. I had no idea I’d be so crushed.

  He doesn’t say anything.

  I think about my boyfriend of five years, Gregorio, whom I’m not sure I’m still in love with but who has become my family, our sunny two-bedroom apartment in Monteverde Vecchio, my old dog, Olga. My daily morning run in the park, my small, cluttered office at the faculty, a couple of my brightest students. The list of my life’s highlights is not that long and maybe not that interesting.

  Who am I to judge? Maybe Andrea didn’t come here seeking adventure. Maybe he has chosen this place to venture inward rather than expand, since everything here—the people, the buildings, even the geography—lacks beauty and brilliance. Maybe he was relieved when he found a place where he could shrink and settle into a smaller life, away from the eyes of others. From all our expectations.

  “I am here because this is my home now,” he says, looking up again, to somewhere far away, above the mango trees across from the house.

  “Don’t you ever miss Rome?”

  “Rome?” he asks, as baffled as if I’d said Mars. “No. Never. I never think of Rome.”

  “And us? Don’t you ever think of us?”

  He shakes his head slowly.

  “No I haven’t. In a long, long time.”

  That’s fair, I think. I hadn’t been thinking much about him either. I hadn’t truly missed him till now.

  “Take me to see the ocean, Andrea. Just the two of us.”

  He stares at me and something shifts in his eyes—is it tenderness? Or maybe just a spark of it.

  We drive for almost an hour in his battered Toyota with the NGO’s logo painted on the side, heading north through a thick forest and then turning west, toward the setting sun. We walk on a sandy path through the bushes and suddenly it’s as though a curtain has been lifted. Miles and miles of open view, of deep blue sea and sand lined with the vibrant green of the forest. The sand is as fine as talcum powder and snowy white, just as Tescari’s brochure described it. I fill my lungs with the salty air, exhilarated by the open space. We sit, and watch the sun go down. It’s low tide and the water has just started to retreat, its rivulets are sculpting wavy furrows in the sand, the crabs running obliquely on its translucent surface.

  “This is beautiful,” I say.

  The sun looks like an egg yolk ready to plop into the sea. I stand up and quickly strip off my shirt and unbutton my trousers.

  He stands up, too, alarmed.

  “What are you doing?”

  “I’m going for a swim.”

  “No. You can’t go in like that.”

  He quickly picks up my clothes and hands them back to me.

  “Yes, I can. There’s nobody around for miles and miles. And you’ve seen me naked before.”

  “Stella!”

  I drop my panties on the sand and I slide off into the velvety, lukewarm water. I dive in and swim until I’m almost out of breath. When I reemerge I see him standing on the edge of the water with my clothes crumpled in his hand.

  I swim out and out, where the sea gets bluer and darker, and after the last strokes I can muster, I wonder if I should worry about sharks. Suddenly, I make out a shadow, as a dark, elongated shape darts past me. I shoot up screaming, and he emerges from the froth, like a shiny dolphin, stark naked.

  We drive back in silence. It’s a good kind of silence, as if the swim has exhausted us but also washed something away. The opaque film that has shrouded my days here has dissolved and now everything looks b
righter.

  By the time we reach the village it’s night; there has been a power cut, and the house is wrapped in darkness, but for the faint glow of the kerosene lamp flickering through the windows. I can tell that Farida has been looking after our supper, there’s a smell of curry wafting onto the porch. Before entering the house Andrea stops for a moment and rests a hand on top of my shoulder.

  “You are the first person from my old life who has come to visit. It was a shock to see you. It was a shock to be speaking Italian again. I am sorry if I’ve seemed distant. It just felt like—well, like a lot to contend with.”

  “Of course. I understand. Don’t worry.”

  “The day you arrived I was up all night, I just couldn’t go to sleep. I was reminiscing, you know—all this stuff that I thought I had forgotten started coming back.”

  “I’m sorry I barged into your life just like that, I didn’t—”

  “No. No, it’s great. It’s really good to see you, Stella. Yes.”

  I reach for his hand, which is still resting on my shoulder, and I wrap my palm around it.

  “Do you see me as a failure?” he asks. “Like some kind of beached hippie?”

  “No, I don’t,” I say, and I squeeze his hand in mine, hard. “I really don’t.”

  We enter the house and in the semidarkness I discern Farida sitting still on the floor, slightly slumped, her head hanging low. Only now I realize how worried she must be, seeing that Andrea and I have disappeared together. After all I am an impenetrable mystery to her—an older mzungu woman—an enigma she cannot even converse with or maybe even begin to grasp, like all of Andrea’s life before her.

  But as she hears us coming in, she leaps up and comes forward, and her face lights up. Maybe I’m wrong again here, I keep misreading the signs. From the way they look at each other, the way they gently exchange a few words, I see their bond is even stronger than what I’d glimpsed earlier. I look at Farida again. No, she isn’t concerned after all. I’m not a threat to her. She knows her husband intimately.

  And far better than I.

  The next morning they drive me to the airport in the NGO’s car. I’m flying back to Dar and from there on to Rome. Gregorio is coming to pick me up at the airport with Olga. Strange, how home has never felt so blurred.

  For the occasion Andrea and Farida have put on their nice clothes—immaculate white kanzu and embroidered buibui because there will be people they know leaving or arriving on the small plane from the Big Island and there will doubtless be polite conversations and exchanges of news. Andrea moves around the tiny airport with ease, he weighs my bag on the scale, has a chat with the man in overalls who checks my ticket and passport, greets the people he knows. Farida has once again been holding my wrist tightly all along and now that Andrea has gone to get me a bottle of water she keeps repeating something to me in a hushed voice, something urgent, which he’s not meant to hear. She repeats it two, three times and I turn my palms up. I don’t understand. She reiterates the same words, more forcefully this time, but I widen my eyes.

  “Nini? What?” I ask.

  She laughs. And then Andrea comes back and tells me it’s time I go, they are about to board the plane, so I am going to have to leave without knowing what Farida so urgently wanted me to know. Though I’m aware this is not the right thing to do here, I hug her and kiss her on the cheek. And yet I don’t shake hands with Andrea because I’ve been told that’s another taboo, one I don’t wish to violate as my parting gesture.

  “Wait! Just a second!” I call out, before they get back to the car. I have pulled out my phone. Farida immediately strikes an awkward pose, as I take the picture of the two of them. This is the only picture I’ve taken during the whole trip. I peer at the tiny screen. It’s a good one.

  I know they will have beautiful children.

  “Same flight again, eh?” I hear a voice behind my back.

  “Yeah, same flight,” I say to Tescari. Today he wears another freshly ironed blue shirt and orange trousers, hair still wet from a shower.

  I see Jeffrey Stone in the lot, too, standing next to his brand-new SUV into which he’ll soon climb and drive off.

  “I bet you’re happy to be heading back. At least I know I am,” Tescari says under his breath. “This place would drive anyone nuts. Mosquitoes, crazy people, no booze, mangroves. It’s hopeless.”

  I know that Carlo Tescari will sit next to me and talk nonstop for the entire length of the flight. He’ll feel even more entitled to do so now, given our newly born comradeship, which we’d sealed earlier with gin.

  After all, haven’t we come from the same place, and aren’t we headed in the same direction?

  The Presence of Men

  The bells woke Lara up at seven. When she opened her eyes under the tall vaulted ceiling, for a split second she felt as though she were inside a church. It had been her first night in the new house in the village and she’d slept beautifully.

  She was emerging from the shower in her plum-colored, Moroccan-style bathroom when she heard a vigorous knock at the front door. Still dripping wet, she ran down in her robe, crossed the courtyard and opened the old wooden door, which had been painstakingly sandpapered and waxed. A small woman of indefinite age, with an old-fashioned perm, her body shaped like a box, was staring at her.

  “You are the person who bought this house?” she asked, her voice loud as a trumpet. She was a local, as Lara could tell from her accent. She nodded.

  “Ha ha! At last you are here in person!” the little woman said with a cruel smile and slid herself inside the courtyard like an eel.

  “For months all I’ve been seeing are your builders. Very rude people. Where do they come from?”

  “Martano, I think. Why?” Lara wondered if the small woman had come to give her some kind of fine, although she wore no uniform.

  “I knew it. Martano people are all thieves.”

  “I’m so sorry, signora. Was there a problem?”

  The woman ignored her and proceeded to take a long, critical look at the potted plants that filled the courtyard, at the indigo blue table and matching chairs that Lara had spotted in a magazine and bought online. She closely examined the pale dusty mauve of the walls, a hue that had cost days of trial and error.

  “I see you have changed everything in here.”

  Lara wasn’t sure where this might be leading.

  “Well, I have restored the place. It was a ruin.”

  The woman ignored her and peered some more. “My great-aunt lived in this house,” she said.

  She brushed the smooth surface of the wall, then moved swiftly toward the glass door of what used to be the barn and glanced inside.

  “She used to keep her donkey in there,” she said, pointing at the space.

  “Oh yes? Well, that’s the living room now.”

  “She never married, she worked very hard all her life. She was a very clever woman.”

  Lara tried a friendlier expression. All this might be pretty sweet, after all. “So you knew this place from the time she lived here? How nice. Would you like to see what it looks like now?”

  Lara opened the glass door, which gave into the ex-barn-now-living-room, but the woman was already snooping inside the kitchen on the opposite side of the courtyard.

  “I knew this place like the back of my hand. We used to play in here all the time when we were children.”

  She stepped into the kitchen and Lara followed her. There were still unopened boxes on the floor; the stainless steel surfaces of the brand-new appliances glinted in the shady room. The woman gave a yelp.

  “See! I had heard from people you had done this, but I wanted to see for myself.”

  “Had done what?” Lara asked.

  The woman was glaring at the opposite wall.

  “This thing you have done in here, is a mortal sin.”

  By now, had she been in Rome, Lara would have normally lost her patience and asked her to leave, but it was her first contact with any of he
r neighbors in the village and she sensed she’d reached a delicate intersection that required some caution.

  “A mortal sin!” the little woman repeated in a thundering voice.

  “Please have a seat. Can I offer you a cup of coffee?”

  “No.”

  “Okay. Then please, what is it that I did?”

  “The forno. You tore it down.”

  Lara crossed her arms.

  “Yes I did, the architect … my friend,” she said, but immediately regretted bringing an architect into the conversation. “It was as big as a room. It took up too much space, it took half the courtyard.”

  But the woman was right; when, a year earlier, Lara had bought the house in the heart of the village, she’d taken Silvana, her architect friend, to see it. She was a towering woman in her forties with flaming hennaed hair who on principle never came off her high heels, especially when marching through building sites (“height gains you respect, it’s Pavlovian”). Silvana had paced inside the old building not uttering a sound, with an air of concern. Maybe it was just her way, or maybe she didn’t approve of the house. Lara had begun to worry. Silvana had taken one look at the opening of the gigantic wood oven in the kitchen and before Lara could say anything she’d climbed inside it with the speed of a crab, holding her flashlight.

  “It’s gigantic. And totally useless,” her voice had boomed from the dark interior, like Jonah’s from inside the whale.

  She’d reappeared, her clothes coated in blackish dust, then effortlessly slid out of the oven mouth. She had a big grin on her face.

  “Good. We can gain some space. I feel a lot better now.”

  So the forno went down, and what was once a dark chamber was now a third of her courtyard.

  The little woman waved her index finger at Lara like a mad evangelist.

  “You tore down the last oven of this village to gain a little space for your plants. That forno was a public monument. It was part of our history!”

  The woman shook her head with disdain.

  “Yes, I was told this room was the village bakery. But as I told you the wood oven took half the space of the courtyard. I mean, it went from here all the way to …” Lara made a sweeping arc with her hand across the expanse of the courtyard.