The Other Language (3 page)

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.