The Other Language (4 page)

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.