The Other Language

by Francesca Marciano

  Every now and again Lara spotted a small portion of Leo hovering in the corner of a shot, behind a photographer’s camera or obscured by someone else’s arm or head. It would be either a fraction of his profile or the back of his head, at times just one eye and some lips. Only a percentage of him showed—10 percent or 20 percent of his body at the most—the same percentage, she thought wryly, as an agent’s commission. It was disturbing to see him only in fragments, though she couldn’t really tell exactly why.

  He hadn’t called her since they’d left her house for Pantelleria. He had only sent a brief text message.

  Thank you for the grand hospitality, dear sister!

  Can u give me mina’s phone number?

  In mid-September early one morning, her mother rang. More than concerned, she sounded exasperated.

  “Do you have friends staying with you? Don’t you feel a little lonely, all by yourself?”

  Ironic that her mother would be worried about her being all alone, Lara thought, since she had asked her a few times to come and see her new house, but she refused to leave her air-conditioned apartment in Piazza Mazzini, claiming the trip took too long.

  “No. I’m loving it here. I don’t need anything.”

  “What’s there to do? Haven’t you done enough holidaying?”

  “This is not a holiday, Mamma. It’s my new life. I read, I study, I plant my vegetable gard—”

  “You need to get a job, Lara. We are worried about you.”

  “Who is we?”

  “Your brother and I. You need to come back to Rome, it’s time you think of your future.”

  Future? What future? The future was so not what she’d been concentrating on. She was actually trying to focus on thoughts that went exactly in the opposite direction: “no past, no future; live in the moment; one breath at the time.”

  “I already told Leo, I’m going to start teaching yoga again, here. I’ll be fine. Don’t you start micromanaging my life, I beg of you.”

  “Micro what? What are you talking about, for heaven’s sake?” her mother said.

  Lara pulled out her old copy of Shivananda Yoga Teacher’s Manual from the bookshelf. She skipped the introduction because she felt she only needed to refresh her memory on how to build a sequence. She skipped chapter one, then two, then three. She kept skipping. Nothing in the book seemed to hold her attention. The breath, the names of the postures, the mantras, the anatomy, the names of the bones: she felt she knew it all already. She just flipped the pages, glancing over the pictures, and zoned out. Then she went out for ice cream.

  A couple of days later she drove to the bookstore and bought a couple of gardening books; then she started with the cooking books. She gazed at all the photos. It seemed enough, for the moment. “I get it, I can do that,” she would say out loud, without actually going through any of the text. The thought of studying any actual technique exhausted her.

  Her best friend, Anita, who’d made a fortune breeding rare Chinese dogs, rang. She’d been in Beijing all summer long, dealing with puppies and kennels, and was back in the city.

  “What are you doing still there? Are you not coming back?”

  “Not immediately. And besides, September is so … so sweet here.”

  There was a silence.

  “Lara, should I come get you?”

  “Why? I can drive back whenever I want.”

  “I know, but just in case you didn’t feel like it, I’m happy to come and get you.”

  She laughed. “It’s not as if I’m being held hostage here, Anita.”

  “I know, I know, you sound just a little … I don’t know. How should I say this?”

  “Say it.”

  “Depressed?”

  After this phone call Lara decided the time had come to test her flexibility after more than a year of neglecting her yoga practice. She sat for a while in cobbler’s pose then settled into Janu Sirsasana, when something snapped in her knee with a loud pop. She waited a few seconds, then cautiously straightened her leg. She felt nothing, everything seemed to be in order, but she knew better. That kind of injury, she knew, was subtle and treacherous, the pain starting only the minute you believed you’d gotten away with it.

  Delayed pain was the story of her life: it was exactly for this reason some people had called her an optimist and others a fool.

  Sure enough, the knee swelled up and it began to hurt. A couple days later she limped across the street to Mina’s, holding a Gertrude Jekyll rose she had picked up at the nursery outside the village. Mina came to the door, looking splendid. Her hair had been dyed a darker chestnut shade and was nicely done up in a smooth bouffant. She wore a pleated skirt and a starched pink shirt. The house smelled of lavender floor detergent.

  “Oh! It’s you! Come in, quickly!” she said, giddy with excitement.

  Lara heard hushed voices and the screech of chairs coming from the back of the house.

  “Do you want to join us?” Mina asked. “It’s about to start. We’ll have a little something afterward. I’ve made parmigiana di melanzane and lasagne con le polpette.”

  Lara peered through the half-open door into the next room. The ladies of the street had congregated in front of the flat screen in two neat rows. They were chatty and restless like children eager for a movie to begin. They greeted Lara cheerfully. One of them stood up, offering her a chair. Lara shook her head, mouthing “no thanks,” and stepped back. She had been told that the local channel aired the evening prayers daily for older people who couldn’t make it to church for the vespro.

  “No, thanks, I’ve got a million things to do at home, I’m going back to the city early tomorrow. This is for your garden. It’s an old English rose, it’s called—”

  Mina grabbed the Gertrude Jekyll and set it on the windowsill.

  “Thank you. When are you coming back?”

  “Soon, soon, I just have to take care of a few things. I hurt my knee and I need to see a doctor …” Lara peeked again into the room. Someone had closed the shutters and the women looked like ghosts lit by the bluish light of the TV. The music didn’t sound like church at all. Credits were rolling over the dark screen.

  “What are you watching?”

  Mina looked surprised, as though Lara had asked a silly question.

  “One of Ben’s films is showing on Channel Two!”

  “I see. And … you are having a party afterward?”

  Mina lowered her voice, pointing her chin toward the other room. “They want to watch it with me. You know, these people are very provincial, they keep asking me all kinds of questions about Ben, they want to know this and that, what does he really look like, is he a nice person or not … they won’t leave me alone. What can I do? They are my neighbors, I cannot simply shut them out the door, can I?”

  “No, of course not. Well … have fun. I’ll see you in a few weeks, I think. I’ll come back soon, I don’t really want to go back to Rome but I have to. I’m going to miss this place a lot—”

  Mina didn’t pay attention to this last comment. She was busy rummaging through the clutter on the table, lifting fabrics and packages till she fished out a gossip magazine and opened it. She hit a page with the back of her hand and showed Lara a spread of blurry photos. Reclined on a chaise longue on the edge of an infinity pool was a topless blonde with oversize dark glasses and earphones. Sitting on the edge of the same chaise, almost hovering over the girl’s taut, tanned body, was Ben—the same faded sarong that he had worn at Lara’s wrapped around his belly. There were palm trees and a stone and glass building in the background. Someone’s legs entered the side of the shot. They clearly belonged to Leo, Lara knew instantly; she recognized a portion of his swimming trunks. Yet another fragment of her little brother.

  “These people have no shame,” Mina was saying. “To intrude like this on Ben’s privacy. I told him: when you buy the house here, you’ll see, nobody is going to bother you. You’ll be able to go as you please, live as you want, in broad daylight. Ther
e are no paparazzi where we live.”

  “I’m afraid they’d follow him no matter where he—”

  But Mina wasn’t listening. She clasped Lara’s wrist and again lowered her voice to a whisper, checking behind her shoulder that none of the neighbors was in earshot.

  “He wants a divorce. He’s very unhappy with his wife.”

  “Really?” Lara glimpsed at the photo spread again. The girl had perfectly erect, Champagne cup–shaped breasts. She must be twenty-five at the most.

  Mina nodded vigorously. “Oh yes. Apparently she’s very cold, very selfish. He pays for everything: house, clothes, servants. Everything. He says his wife has a heart of stone …”

  “Did he actually talk to you about that?”

  “… and now they publish these photos. This woman here, she’s just a friend, she has nothing to do with him but …”

  “That’s his lover.”

  “… with these pictures the wife will take him to the cleaners. It’s going to be a big problem with the divorce case. She can take all of his money, you know?”

  “It’s his lover. I know that for a fact,” Lara reiterated, louder this time.

  Mina slapped the magazine shut and put it back on the table. She looked insulted. “Oh, no. She’s just a friend. He told me he doesn’t want to get involved with anybody for a while. He wants to think, to be left in peace.”

  “Wait. How do you … Do you speak to him on the phone?” This was crazy.

  Mina issued her shrill laugh.

  “Yes, he calls me almost every day! That man needs to rest. Yes, he has to have his peace. He works so hard, he deserves it.”

  “What language does he speak to you? He speaks to you in Italian?” Lara was bewildered. When did Ben decide to pick Mina as his confidante? Didn’t he have more suitable friends in Hollywood?

  Mina nodded distractedly.

  “These pictures are going to cause a very big problem with the wife …”

  Lara sighed. Why was she engaging in this anyway? It was hopeless.

  “I have to go now.”

  “Yes, yes, go,” Mina said and glanced into the TV room.

  Ben had just made his entrance on the screen—a few years younger, a few pounds lighter, in a police uniform.

  Lara’s apartment in Rome was the same one in Via Plinio where she’d lived with her husband. After nearly three months of absence it looked foreign, abandoned and dreary. For a few days Lara moved around the rooms with circumspection, unsure as to what to do with her body, where to park it. She tried the couch, the green armchair, the desk, but couldn’t find a spot where it felt natural to be. She asked Anita over for dinner and realized she no longer knew how to cook in that kitchen. All the dexterity she’d had all summer long with food, her ability to throw together extravagant recipes in just a few minutes, was gone.

  “They say having two houses is like having two wives. Neither one has the whole of you,” she said gloomily when Anita arrived. She’d shown up in a slinky Sue Wong dress and with a bottle of Prosecco, ready for a bubbly night of gossip and laughs. She pulled a minuscule puppy out of a tote bag and proudly announced, “And this is Carmen. A hairless Chinese crested.”

  The tiny dog was as ugly as it was hairless—except for the long, soft tufts of white hair that flowed from the top of its head. From this very ugliness came its adorableness, Lara supposed.

  But she was in no mood to discuss Chinese puppies with Anita. All she wanted to talk about was her restlessness; how her previous life in the city seemed impossible to resume, how she couldn’t find her center anymore, how hurting her knee had clearly been a sign, and not a good one. Lara barely gave the puppy a glance.

  “It looks like a rat with a wig,” she said, pouring Prosecco in the glasses.

  Anita stared at her, puzzled, then lifted the glass in a toast with one hand while settling Carmen back in the bag with the other.

  The next morning Lara rang her ex-husband. They hadn’t spoken in almost a year. She said she wanted to see him.

  “It’s important to me. I don’t want to think of us as enemies anymore, okay?”

  “We are not enemies. I never felt that way, despite what you think, Lara,” he said, peacefully. A bit too peacefully, in fact.

  “That’s great, then. One more reason to see each other, I’d say,” she insisted.

  She struggled to find a sensible place to meet. A café could be hazardous—too many people, tables too close, what if she ended up crying? Her mind raced.

  “How about the bar at the Excelsior?”

  Her husband hesitated; the venue sounded dangerously romantic. Lara could feel a small panic rising in him.

  “It’s comfortable, it’ll be quiet. And they make great martinis,” she reassured him. As if she went there regularly for expensive cocktails.

  The day of their rendezvous was a premonition of fall, with a heavy sky and a constant drizzle, perfect weather for meeting an ex-husband. She wanted to surprise him by looking more glamorous and mysterious than she had ever been while with him, so he’d assume that a major event—a man, a new vocation?—had turned her into a different person, or, even better, allowed her true nature to emerge. She longed to be anything but the same woman he’d wanted to leave.

  A few minutes after six, she limped into the lobby of the Excelsior a few minutes after six in a light beige raincoat and large dark glasses, her hair pulled back in a chignon with a vintage Hermès silk scarf folded and tied as a headband—in the vague hope of resembling Grace Kelly in one of those movies with Cary Grant.

  Her ex-husband was waiting at a table in the far corner of the wood-paneled bar, among soft cushions and elaborate Japanese flower arrangements. He looked more attractive than she remembered and, like her apartment without him, oddly foreign. The memory of their physical intimacy—even its subtle scent—had vanished as though someone else (the woman with a sense of humor?) had erased it for eternity. He asked why she was limping and when she told him about the Janu Sirsasana incident, he couldn’t keep back a condescending smirk.

  “Yoga. You didn’t give that up yet, did you?”

  “It’s not like I’m doing heroin,” she said breezily, yet she regretted having mentioned the word yoga. He’d always found the subject—with its obsessive concerns about hips, knees and shoulder openings, breathing techniques, mantras and especially the smugness that came with an advanced practice—deeply irritating.

  The conversation floated without a purpose for a few minutes, aided by the intervention of a young waiter who took their order. Her ex-husband asked for a pot of green tea but Lara felt she ought to order a martini. She tried to sum up the past year, giving a joyful picture of all that had happened without him. She was happy with her choice of the venue; it had just the right atmosphere: the bar was quiet, almost empty, the muted colors soothing, the decor minimal yet cozy. The drinks came, and there was another awkward silence while he juggled with cup and teapot. He then broke the silence with a studied casual tone.

  “It’s great that you’re happy in your place down south. Where exactly is it again?”

  “It’s just a tiny village south of Lecce. You wouldn’t have heard of it.”

  Because she’d bought it with his money she felt protective of it, as if he could lay claim to what was now only hers.

  He smiled encouragingly. He only wanted to be nice and friendly.

  “It sounds good, your life. I mean, you used to be such a city girl. I never pictured you in a small village growing vegetables.”

  Lara wasn’t sure this was the kind of recognition she’d been looking for, and the eagerness he showed in approving her life without him was beginning to unnerve her.

  Suddenly, in the richly upholstered, orchid-filled bar, her ideas about growing her own vegetables and making fig preserves sounded naïve, even pathetic. She looked at her ex-husband, in his superbly tailored pin-striped suit, who kept smiling at her as one would with a crazy person. Now that she had him in front of her it
wasn’t clear why she’d wanted to see him again. She didn’t love him, didn’t hate him or want him anymore, and certainly she didn’t care to be his friend. Maybe she thought that seeing him again would help her make sense of the nine years spent in his company. She needed evidence that those years had been meaningful for both of them but, the more she looked for that evidence, the less she found it.

  “You look good. I like this look. The raincoat,” he said.

  The martini was beginning to have its effect. She hadn’t had a stiff drink in ages and had a feeling her eyes were beginning to spin all over the place without a focus and her voice had started to slacken.

  “Lara,” he said calmly.

  “Yes? What?” Had she been staring at the wall too long? She quickly regained her posture in the velvet armchair.

  “Nicole and I are getting married next month.”

  There was a long pause. She collected herself again.

  “Nicole? Oh. Is that her name?”

  He nodded, with a hint of impatience. She knew her name, of course.

  “We are going to have a baby in January,” he added as he sipped his tea, so that the cup would conceal the lower half of his face.

  There was another silence. He took a deep breath.

  “I meant to call you. I wanted you to know but you beat me to it. I didn’t want you to learn it from someone else.”

  She kept still, her eyes fixed steadily on him.

  “Lara? Are you okay?”

  “Yes. Totally. Why? Well, that’s very good news. Really good. Congratulations. I mean it.”

  “We’ll be moving to Paris next month. GreenTech has hired me as a consultant.”

  “Paris? Wonderful.”

  She smiled. He smiled back. Sipped more tea.

  “I’m glad I got to see you. I really am. You seem good,” he said and then chuckled. “Except for your knee, of course.”

  “You never made me laugh,” she blurted out.

  “What?”

  “You were never funny. You have no fucking clue as to what humor even is.”