Her mother kept suggesting she sell them on eBay if she needed cash.
“You know how much money you’d make? Enough to do your whole apartment, even the kitchen and the bathroom.”
“Will you stop it? You’re annoying me,” Elsa said to shut her up.
She found the box one day while rummaging on top of an armoire. It was buried under some old sweaters she’d meant to give away. She sat cross-legged on the rug and read all the letters, one after the other, without stopping. They were sweet and melancholic; rereading his words after so long saddened her. They made her aware of all the things she had lost and left behind.
Elsa didn’t own a car on principle. She rode her bike, a red Atala, everywhere across the city. Every morning on her way to work, she pedaled along the Lungotevere, under its thick canopy of plane trees, and then turned right into Via Giulia along the ivy-covered wall of Palazzo Farnese. The street was pretty much in the shade all day, and like similar streets in old Rome, it smelled of moss and mushrooms. The walls of the palazzo exuded damp; a whiff of cool air came from its vents even at the height of summer. It was a chilling sensation, this smell of death and cold stone mixed together. She had never had a good feeling about Via Giulia: too many cruel cardinals and scheming courtesans had lived in the palazzi that lined the street, too many murders and Machiavellian plots had taken place around its dark corners. As soon as she entered the wide-open space of Piazza Farnese, with its twin fountains and the gently concave cobblestoned pavement, a sudden warmth always lifted her heart. At that time of day the tables of the corner café were usually crowded with good-looking people facing the sun in expensive sunglasses, either busy texting, getting a tan or reading the paper. Past the square Elsa crossed the confusion of Campo de’ Fiori, slowed down through the open market, skirted the stands of flower sellers, the mounds of vegetables piled artistically on the stalls for the benefit of the tourists, and parked her bicycle in Via del Pellegrino, another dark and murky street right off the piazza. The studio was on the first floor of a poorly maintained building. She had recently joined a group of graphic designers who built websites mainly related to art. They made catalogs for contemporary art galleries and museums. It was a good job, and she’d just been asked to become a partner.
She was parking the bike on the rack at the corner when she noticed the poster on the opposite side of the street. She’d heard he was coming; she just hadn’t realized it was going to be that soon.
When Drew and Elsa had first met, about twenty years earlier, they’d made fun of their respective names. Elsa was convinced that whenever she introduced herself to strangers, the image of Elsa the lioness—from a sixties film about an orphaned lion cub raised as a pet in Kenya—would pop up in their minds, obscuring her face. She told Drew she’d always felt as though she’d been walking through life with the head of a famous animal stuck to her body. He rebutted that she was the luckier of the two: if she was stuck with a lioness’s head, he had been named after a past tense.
In his early twenties Drew was a skinny guy with a mop of dark hair falling on his face, which he was constantly tucking behind his ear, Mick Jagger lips and skin as white as milk. They had met one night in a club behind Piazza del Fico, where he was playing with a band—a bunch of young Italians who played indie rock. The club was actually just a small, smoky room where people barely paid attention to the live music, busy as they were picking up strangers and exchanging drugs in the bathroom. Elsa’s friends wanted to leave after a only a few minutes—the music was so bad, they said—but she said go, I’ll stay on a bit, because she liked the American singer with the milky skin and the hoarse voice. She waited patiently for the act to finish, determined to talk to him. By then it was past one thirty in the morning and Drew was pretty wasted, so they ended up groping each other in a dark corner without much of a preliminary introduction. They fucked standing against the wall in the club’s storeroom, among stacks of empty bottles that kept rattling as they bounced. She couldn’t go home with him because at the time she was still living at her parents’—it was her last year in high school—but he wrote her number on a packet of cigarettes and said he’d call her. He didn’t, and for a week she obsessed about him, driving herself crazy with angst. When she finally gave up and decided he was just another asshole, the phone rang. It was him. And that’s how it all started.
About three or four years after that, when Drew was back in the States and on his way to becoming famous, he decided to use his last name only and morphed into Barker. Like Beyoncé and Sting, like Madonna, Bono and Adele, it seemed that rock stars didn’t need a first and last name like regular people. Understandably so in his case, since Drew wasn’t a name particularly fit for a famous person.
Since then Drew had become universally known as Barker and his face had been scanned, photographed, blown up on posters, banners and magazines all over the world so that everybody had access to every pore of his skin. He was forty-something now and he still looked great in every photograph Elsa saw, his waist small, his ass pretty tight. His handsome face had lost that boyish, fake innocence. The nose was stronger, the cheekbones more prominent, the hair short and still thick. Of course, being a millionaire must have helped as far as preservation goes. Stars like Barker could count on personal trainers, personal chefs, expensive spa treatments, yoga gurus and miraculous ayurvedic, Swedish or Chinese treatments.
She didn’t feel possessive of him in any way: she had too much good sense to claim him as personal property just because she’d slept with him way before he became famous. It was actually kind of weird how Elsa—who felt pretty bland and unglamorous at thirty-nine—couldn’t see in Barker what everyone else saw, but just saw Drew Barker, the kid from Kenosha, Wisconsin, who’d come to live in Rome to escape his provincial destiny and play guitar in a lousy band. During the time they were together Elsa was moved and at the same time embarrassed by the naive image he attempted to project—the Bohemian-artist-living-in-Rome, with the yellowing copies of A Moveable Feast and Allen Ginsberg poetry rolled up in his jeans back pocket. Drew Barker, who swore he’d never set foot in Wisconsin again because there was nothing beautiful or remotely cultural to look at there.
He was sweet and catlike in the way he made love to her, but he could also be mean, in ways so subtle that she often misread him. He would call her up late at night, from his rehearsals with the band, or from a noisy bar, saying, “I’ll be home at midnight. Go over now and wait for me. The key is under the mat.”
“Why don’t I come and pick you up and we’ll go together?” Elsa would ask—she longed to be the girlfriend who showed up at the end of rehearsals and was seen going home with him.
“No,” he’d say. “I want you to go now, just go over to my apartment and warm up my bed.”
She was only nineteen, she didn’t know enough about men and their ways, and took his orders as flattery.
Her new colleagues at the studio shared cool music files, bought tickets for contemporary dance and went to gallery openings all the time. They were busy people, working hard at keeping up with the buzz. Elsa didn’t go out much after work, she listened mostly to classical music these days and didn’t care about contemporary art. She was actually content to spend the evenings after work cuddling her cat while watching movies on her computer. Despite her aloofness people at work respected her—she was a brilliant designer, with a great sense of proportion and composition—though nobody seemed interested in becoming her friend.
It was a mystery how the rumor crept up on her. Elsa had no idea who started it or how it spread. But slowly and surely, spread it did, and she knew it had reached her the minute people gravitated toward her with a particular kind of curiosity.
The first one to show the signs at the office was Marta, the receptionist.
“Can I ask you a personal question?” she asked Elsa one morning with a knowing smile. It was a couple of months after she’d started working at Creative TechDesign.
Elsa blew on her pin
k polka dot tea mug, in which she had her special tulsi tea, and made a sound with her nose that could mean various things.
“What?”
“I don’t know if this is true,” Marta began. “But I was told that in that Barker song …”
Elsa glanced at the porcelain cleavage emerging from the low cut of the girl’s black T-shirt, at the elaborate Japanese tattoo sneaking up her arm like a sleeve. At her full, plump lips, possibly injected, or simply inherited, it was hard to say. Pretty girl, twenty-something. Then Elsa blew on her tea again and started scrolling through her e-mail. The girl paused, taken aback by her indifference.
Elsa lifted her gaze. “You were, what, five, ten, when he wrote that song? How come you even know it?”
Marta grinned.
“Are you kidding me? We grew up with it. It’s a—a hymn to love. I know all his songs by heart.”
A hymn to love? Please, Elsa felt like saying.
She got up from her desk to signal that the exchange was about to be over.
“I think I know what it is you want to ask me,” she said. “I get asked that all the time. And the answer is no.”
“Oh. Oh. Sorry. It’s just that … well, it’s just that someone told me you were—”
“They were wrong,” Elsa said, and that was the end of that.
Apart from his very first CD, Elsa hadn’t bought any of Barker’s music. She pretended there wasn’t a particular reason. Perhaps because of their shared past, she didn’t feel she should have to pay money to listen to him; and in any case there was no way to escape his music, since it had been playing everywhere for so many years on every radio station, in commercials and supermarkets and at shopping malls. Elsa tended to stay away from it as much as possible, as though the amplified sound of his voice might blast the delicate mechanism over which she’d managed for many years to keep control.
Her mother was the one who kept bringing up the subject. She always phoned Elsa the moment she read anything about Barker.
Did you hear, he divorced the wife. He moved to London, he bought a three-story house in Notting Hill. He’s given two hundred thousand dollars to a charity in Bangladesh. You should get in touch with him, Elsa, I’m sure he’d be happy to hear from you …
There was no way to get her off the subject once she started.
But Elsa didn’t want to hear: she was wary of the past. She’d always had the good sense not to yearn for anything irretrievably lost. She and Barker had forked paths eons before—they had had such different lives now, there was no point in trying to draw a parallel between them. Especially now that she’d gained weight in all the wrong places, had allowed a streak of gray to grow out at the temples and was too lazy to color it.
Drew had ended their love affair brusquely one morning. Elsa had told her parents she was going to Florence with a girlfriend for two days. She had to lie to them, as they would never allow her to spend the night with a man while she was still living at home.
“I don’t think I am in love with you anymore,” he announced literally minutes after she’d opened her eyes, or at least that’s the way Elsa remembered it. “I think you should go.”
She looked at him, aghast. So he repeated what he’d said, this time more urgently.
“I think you should go. Like, now.”
Elsa made a leap stark naked from the bed to the bathroom so that he wouldn’t see her cry. She sank onto the toilet and began to sob, staring at her bare feet on the pink tiles while he begged her to open the door. They went on like that for a while—her sobbing, him knocking and begging. When she finally let him in, he didn’t console her or say he was sorry. He only seemed eager for her to leave. He was probably waiting for someone else to call or show up; he seemed in such a hurry to get rid of her. Elsa picked up her clothes from the floor, put them on in a rush and ran down the stairs, still howling. She kept on howling while she ran across the river under a drizzling rain. Passersby stared at her with a pained expression. There’s something terribly sad about a very young girl sobbing on the street without restraint. You just know she must have a broken heart.
She was crossing Piazza Farnese on her bicycle when the unmistakable curly head of Sandro Donati, the handsome photographer, slid into her peripheral vision. He was sitting by himself at the beautiful people’s corner café wrapped up in a voluminous blue scarf and a tweed jacket with leather patches on the elbows, intent on reading what seemed to be Corriere dello Sport. Elsa had designed his new website only a few weeks earlier—the two of them had had a couple of meetings and exchanged quite a few e-mails discussing the layout and concept of the site, and by now she felt a connection of some sort because of the amount of time she had spent in the company of his exquisite black-and-white shots—portraits, still lifes—arranging the short poetic text that accompanied the images on the site, setting it in different fonts and so on. She felt a rush of shyness overtake her but, as she was about to turn the corner, she caught him waving in her direction. For a fraction of a second she thought she could actually stop and join him, but her reserve won out and she kept moving. In the fugitive space of indecision between accelerating and stopping, she caught his reflection in the café window, his head still turned toward her, his hand stuck in midair, so she made a quick decision and backtracked.
“Hey,” Sandro said half jokingly. “I thought you were blatantly ignoring me.”
“Oh no, I wasn’t quite sure it was you. I am afraid I need glasses,” she said, trying to laugh.
“Would you like to sit down and have a cup of coffee? It’s so nice to see you, Elsa, actually I was thinking about you just the other day.”
He waved to a waiter and pulled up a chair for her. It was so nice to hear him say her name.
After that shocking breakup, Elsa had heard that Drew was seeing an American art student from Texas. A leggy blonde with a mane of long wavy hair who’d come to Rome to finish her Ph.D. on the Italian Renaissance painter Artemisia Gentileschi. Just the sort of thing Drew from Kenosha would suck up to, Elsa thought. She had been trying her best to reestablish some kind of superiority in order to overcome the humiliation, and after receiving this bit of information she rode a train all the way to Naples just to look at Artemisia’s most famous painting—Judith Slaying Holofernes, in the Capodimonte museum, a magnificent palazzo built for King Carlo di Borbone in the mid-eighteenth century to house his vast art collection. Never, she felt, had a painting been so brutally graphic: Judith and her woman servant are holding the struggling Assyrian warrior down on the bed with a forceful gesture as though slaughtering a pig for the kitchen. Elsa knew the painting well, from her art history classes—it was an iconic work, embraced by several feminist critics—but up until that day she had only seen it reproduced in books. Art historians agreed that this work was Artemisia’s most powerful because in choosing this subject she had channeled her hatred for Agostino Tassi—a much less talented painter who worked in her father’s studio—a man who’d raped her, dishonored her. Elsa stared at the painting for a long time, fixing her gaze on every detail, taking in the way the blood spurts from Holofernes’s throat onto the mattress, noticing the way Judith (whom historians had established was Artemisia’s self-portrait) has rolled up her sleeves to the elbows and keeps her body slightly askew from the bed, so as not to soil her beautiful blue dress. Elsa was in awe of the artist’s cruelty, her determination. This was revenge at its best. Elsa moved away from the painting having filled herself with a righteous fury. Walking through the rooms of what she felt was her gallery, giving friendly nods to her museum guards sitting idly in the corners of the empty rooms, gave her a renewed sense of authority, as if she had succeeded in reestablishing her ownership not only of Artemisia Gentileschi, but of the entire Italian Baroque and Renaissance period. Elsa rode the two-hour train back to Rome with her face against the window feeling that, despite the fact that it had been her first visit to the Capodimonte museum, her brief time there had allowed her to regain stature in the face of t
hose foreigners who came from nowhere, assuming they could simply absorb by osmosis her culture and history, and transform themselves into someone else by grabbing, using and then spitting out whatever came their way.
The letters started coming about a year after Drew left, completely out of the blue. Elsa was twenty years old; she’d left home by then and was sharing a flat with two friends from university. The first letter, mailed to her parents’ address—an event, since nobody bothered to write with a pen on paper, buy stamps and find a mailbox anymore—didn’t sound like Drew at all, it had absolutely no trace of his dark humor. Its tone was formal, old-fashioned, just like his neat handwriting: it was very specific and seemed concerned only as to whether she could forgive him for what he had done to her. Apparently Drew had gone back to Wisconsin after all; the letter claimed he’d now realized how “confused and unhappy” he’d been in Rome at the time of their breakup. What he’d inflicted on her was “unforgivable” and only now could he see what he had lost by breaking off their relationship so abruptly as if, he wrote, “you had been my enemy rather than a person I loved.”
Elsa was puzzled by the saintly tone, and showed the letter to one of her roommates, a girl whose skills at deciphering emotional nuances she trusted. The girl declared he must be in one of those American 12-step programs either for booze or drugs or both. This letter, she said, was simply what step 8 required: making amends to all the people you’ve harmed under the influence; Elsa surely happened to be just one in a long list of people to whom he owed apologies.
“I bet quite a few of these aerograms must be flying across the globe as we speak,” the girl said with a smirk.
This obvious truth came as a mild disappointment and Elsa regretted showing her the letter.
The Other Language Page 27