The Other Language

by Francesca Marciano

  ALSO BY FRANCESCA MARCIANO

  The End of Manners

  Casa Rossa

  Rules of the Wild

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright © 2014 by Audenspice Ltd.

  All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Pantheon Books, a division of Random House LLC, New York, and in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto, Penguin Random House companies.

  Pantheon Books and colophon are registered trademarks of Random House LLC.

  “Chanel” first appeared in The Common (April 2014).

  Grateful acknowledgment is made to Alfred Music for permission to reprint an excerpt from “Carey,” words and music by Joni Mitchell. Copyright © 1971 (Renewed) Crazy Crow Music. All rights administered by SONY/ATV Music Publishing. Exclusive print rights administered by Alfred Music. All rights reserved. Reprinted by permission of Alfred Music.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Marciano, Francesca.

  [Short stories. Selections]

  The other language : stories / Francesca Marciano.

  pages cm

  ISBN 978-0-307-90836-0

  eBook ISBN: 978-0-307-90837-7

  I. Title.

  PR9120.9.M36A6 2014 823′.914—dc23 2013030931

  www.pantheonbooks.com

  Jacket design and illustration

  by Ben Wiseman

  v3.1

  To change your language

  you must change your life.

  —Derek Walcott

  · CONTENTS ·

  Cover

  Other Books by This Author

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Epigraph

  The Other Language

  Chanel

  Big Island, Small Island

  The Presence of Men

  An Indian Soirée

  The Club

  The Italian System

  Quantum Theory

  Roman Romance

  Acknowledgments

  A Note About the Author

  Reading Group Guide

  The Other Language

  In those days getting from Rome to Greece took forever. The highway ended abruptly in Naples and to get to Brindisi on a local road full of potholes was an exhausting ordeal. The journey took two full days but the children were too excited to complain, as this was their first time abroad. That was the idea: to go on a real adventure in order to take the children’s minds off what had just happened.

  For the occasion the father had bought a new car. Looking back now it was just another tiny red Fiat, though at the time it felt like a grand, modern vehicle. It impressed the children and seemed to cheer them up as if this time of their greatest loss would coincide with the promise of a richer and more exciting life. As if, by losing their mother, they had been promoted to a higher level of lifestyle.

  Emma was twelve, Luca was a year older, and Monica only nine. Their feelings were muddled; they were not sure what they were expected to feel. It was the early seventies, before cell phones, before the Web, when children were still children and didn’t know about designer labels and makeup, there were no reality shows, and no easy access to information about sex.

  Their upbringing had been disciplined and they had turned out to be good kids; today one would say they were low maintenance. Even as very small children, their requests to Santa Claus had been modest: a puppet, a red car, a box of watercolors were all they had wished for. But after the accident, they were inundated by an unusual attention. Schoolteachers, neighbors, parents of their school friends—all kinds of grown-ups—had offered to have them spend the night, insisted on taking them to the cinema or puppet shows, fed them chocolate cake and ice cream, presented them with toys and new books to read. This overwhelming sympathy had soon become a nuisance, but because they were so well mannered they didn’t recognize what the uncomfortable feeling they felt really was, so that suddenly the prospect of a foreign land in which to be alone with their father, in which they would not have to say the whole time thank you, yes, please, sorry, to strangers, seemed a liberation.

  Emma doesn’t remember exactly when, during the trip, Monica began to cry in the middle of the night (was it in the little hotel on the way to Brindisi or was it in their cabin, on the boat crossing over to Greece?). “I want Mamma,” she kept saying, almost choking between sobs so that Emma and Luca had to wake up their father, who was sleeping next door. He seemed helpless and scared. He had never been alone with his children, at least not like this, in the midst of a drama, on the way to another country. Maybe he had been too confident, maybe it had been a mistake to drive them so soon this far away from the familiar. He managed to have someone brew a chamomile tea sweetened with honey, and after a few sips of it, Monica fell asleep again. Emma worried that if Monica cried once more they would have to turn back and go home. More than her brother and little sister, Emma wanted to get away as far as possible from what had happened so she could pretend it never had. No accident, no funeral, and no mother.

  The village was nothing much. At first Emma felt it didn’t make a lot of sense to have come such a long way to find a village cut in half by a single road. A village with no particular charm, with just one bakery, one café, and two tavernas on the beach, the only places offering any kind of accommodation. The tavernas were identical, except for the colors of the chairs and tables. The first one, called Iorgo’s, had them painted blue, the second one, Vassili’s, were painted a yellow mustard. Just a few hundred meters across the beach was a tiny islet, made of two hills connected by a low strip of land. Its terrain was bare and rocky, save from a few thorny bushes, shaped like two humps on a camel’s back. It looked deserted except for a few goats that one could spot from the beach with the naked eye. The children were excited to find that it was so close. After all, this was—despite its size and closeness to the mainland—the first deserted island they had ever come across other than in adventure books.

  The father had rented two rooms on the first floor of Iorgo’s taverna, after the children had expressed their preference for his blue over the yellow of Vassili’s. Emma and Monica slept together in one, the father and Luca shared the other. The rooms were simple but had flair: the floors were creaky wide planks of wood and the beds of old cast iron, painted in white, with thick, coarse cotton sheets. On the windowsills were pots of basil to keep the mosquitoes away. The children fell asleep to the sound of the waves.

  They woke up early in the morning when the light was still soft, the water glassy and clear and one could make out every pebble on the bottom. They ran downstairs in their swimsuits, sat at the blue table on the beach and ordered breakfast. The only sounds were donkeys and roosters waking up and the low chatter of the fishermen intent on disentangling their nets. They devoured yogurt and honey, crisp sesame bread still warm from the bakery, shuffling their bare feet in the cool sand, under the frazzled sunlight streaming from the bamboo roof. Each one of them secretly believed this might be the end of the tears, and they marked that beach as the place where pain had ended and a new life could begin. Their father was quiet but watchful, eager to notice any progress his children made. He never asked them whether they had washed their faces, brushed their teeth; he never demanded they put their sandals back on. To see them chatting again, enjoying the different food, the light, was more than enough for him.

  At lunchtime one was supposed to go straight into Iorgo’s steamy kitchen, check what was cooking on the stove and order whatever looked good. This was the children�
��s favorite moment of the day. To be able to lift the lids off the huge aluminum pots and peek inside had been unthinkable at home (never ever rummage inside a lady’s handbag, their mother had warned them, as if ladies could be hiding a hand grenade in there).

  Moussaka, chips, keftedes: the pots always held the same food. But the children loved ordering it, picking it, rummaging as they pleased.

  The women of the village were mainly dressed in black and neither swam nor sunbathed; most had the faint shadow of a mustache darkening their upper lip. But Nadia was different. She was Greek but she came from Athens: a city girl. Her extended family—a large group of aunts, cousins and big men with gold chains and bracelets—came to the village every year in the summer and always lodged at Vassili’s. She must have been fourteen at the most but she looked more like a woman in her bikini, showing off her full breasts and round hips. She always wore mascara and pouted her lips whenever she swam in her uncertain breast-strokes, always careful to keep her head above the water like an old lady who doesn’t want to get her hair wet. In their one-piece striped swimming costumes, flat-chested and skinny like shrimps, Emma and Monica x-rayed her every day with a mix of awe and contempt while Luca watched her with hormonal greed.

  At meal times they couldn’t avoid hearing Nadia and her parents, cousins and aunts hissing their s’s and rolling their r’s, always at the top of their lungs as they ate large portions of moussaka and chips.

  “Why are they always screaming? Are they having an argument?” Emma asked her father.

  “It’s just the way Greek sounds. Be grateful that there is one place where people are louder than Italians.”

  He gestured toward Nadia.

  “You should go and try to talk to that girl, Emma. She’s about your age.”

  Emma shook her head.

  “She’s not. She’s much older.”

  Emma didn’t want to make friends with anybody new. She didn’t want to have to answer when they’d ask, “Where is your mother?”

  The children had been spared the details of the accident: where it had happened, how badly crushed the car was, how long before she died, whether on the spot or at the hospital. The adults had decided they were too small to be told such dreadful particulars, as if their mother’s death was just another protocol they had to observe, like never ask for a soft drink unless they were offered one and never fish inside a lady’s handbag. But Emma, Luca and Monica misunderstood. They assumed death must be an impolite subject to bring up in conversation, a disgrace to be hidden, to be put behind.

  Luca was the first to befriend Nadia. She didn’t speak any Italian and he didn’t speak any Greek. And though it was unclear how they managed to communicate at first, soon he’d deserted his sisters in favor of Nadia and her entourage. He was given permission to hang out on the beach after dinner, sitting around a fire with Nadia and her large group of cousins and friends, who played long, repetitive Greek songs on the guitar. They were called either Stavros, Costa or Taki, as if their parents had made no imaginative efforts as far as names went. Emma found their hairy calves and armpits daunting and their manners coarse. She didn’t like the way they dressed and not even the songs they sang.

  The ruins of King Agamemnon’s palace in Mycenae were only a couple of hours away, perched on a steep hill overlooking the Argolic plain. The father and the children drove there on an unusually gray afternoon, and on the way, on a steep rocky road, he recounted the story of the king and his daughter Iphigenia. How, because of lack of wind, the king couldn’t sail to Troy and join the war. An oracle had told him the hunting goddess Artemis was punishing him for his arrogance and to calm her rage he’d have to offer a sacrifice to the deity.

  “So he had to sacrifice the dearest thing he had,” he said.

  “What?” Monica asked, peeking in from the backseat.

  “Iphigenia, his beautiful daughter. He summoned her and she was put on the altar, to be slaughtered.”

  But luckily, he said, just as the king was about to cut her throat, the goddess saved the girl by transforming her into a beautiful deer that slipped away.

  When they arrived at the site, it had begun to drizzle, and a cold wind had begun to blow. The ruins—the imposing lion’s gate, the tomb of the king, built like a dome with gigantic lintels—were deserted. Emma kept asking where the altar on which Iphigenia had stood was, but her father told her the guidebook wouldn’t mention it because the story was only a myth.

  She wandered around in silence, touching the surface of the ancient stones with her fingers. After a while she sat on a step and said she felt cold and tired. The father found an old sweater in the back of the car and wrapped her up, but the atmosphere of the place was having a strange effect on all of them. It was dark and sinister, compared to the bright colors of their village. They didn’t stay long and on the way back in the car Emma kept asking her father how it was possible that Agamemnon would agree to kill his own daughter.

  “He was a warrior. He had to join the war at all costs,” the father said.

  But Emma wouldn’t relent. How could he? And what about the queen? Why didn’t she do anything to stop him?

  “Basta,” Luca interrupted her, annoyed. “Papà told you already. She doesn’t die in the end, she becomes a deer.”

  “Yes,” Emma said, “but what about the mother?”

  She was sucking the last drop of her lemonade through a straw, watching Luca play a game of cards with Nadia in her yellow bikini, when she saw the two boys for the first time. They were standing on the jetty, one tall, blond, thin as a reed. The other one smaller, darker, younger. Nadia lifted her eyes from her cards and made a face, as if the sight of them annoyed her. She said something to Luca in Greek.

  “What was that?” Emma asked Luca. She hardly ever paid attention to Nadia, but this time she wanted the information.

  “They are English. Two brothers,” said Luca, uninterested.

  “How do you know that’s what she said?”

  “I just know. I’ve learned the words. So what?”

  Emma didn’t say anything. Luca looked at her with hostility.

  “Stop sucking that straw. You are driving me crazy.”

  Nadia giggled. Apparently, she was beginning to pick up some Italian.

  The English brothers, it turned out, came every summer, because their parents owned a house in the village.

  They came and went to the beach every morning, barefoot and silent. Their cutoffs were bleached by the sun, their T-shirts ripped, their perfectly hairless legs were long and scratched, their longish hair tousled. Emma found the casualness of their wardrobe fascinating. She had never come across a similar style before—the Italians looked too dainty while the Greeks were so unsophisticated. She observed the boys as they put on flippers and masks and watched them as they swam slow and steady all the way to the island.

  Emma gathered the details from one of Nadia’s aunts who spoke a little Italian.

  “The mother and the father buy our cousin’s villa. Rich English people,” the woman said, fanning herself with a newspaper.

  Emma asked her which villa it was; she hadn’t seen any building worthy of that word.

  “In front of the souvlaki place. The big villa, you cannot miss. The biggest in the village.”

  She shook her head with irritation as if the loss of this piece of family property had been a personal affront.

  That same afternoon Emma spotted it. Villa was a big word for what it was: a plain two-story house on the main road, just across from the bakery and the souvlaki stall. The dark blue shutters had been newly repainted and gave it an air of nobility, but that was about it. There was a car with an English license plate parked outside. Emma ate her souvlaki in silence, staring at the house for a long time.

  Nadia was lying on a towel in her bikini, flipping the pages of a comic book, her skin shiny with tanning oil, her hair done up in a twisted bun.

  “Come on, why don’t you go talk to her?” said the father again.


  Emma shrugged; Monica imitated her.

  “I don’t speak any Greek,” she said.

  “We can’t understand her,” Monica echoed.

  Emma turned her gaze to the English boys in the distance as they were putting on their flippers, getting ready for their swim to the island. She loved the hushed, clipped, refined sounds of their language, the way they exchanged quick sentences, hardly moving a muscle in their bodies. Emma wished she could speak the boys’ language instead. It sounded authoritative, distinguished, exact.

  “What’s wrong with you two?” said the father.

  “Nothing is wrong. We’re fine,” said Monica, suddenly defensive.

  “We’re fine playing with each other, Papà,” Emma said.

  She observed Luca and Nadia splashing each other in the shallow water. They no longer needed a common language to get along.

  Come the start of August, there was a new arrival, a group of well-groomed adults. The women were tall and slender, and wore similar sleeveless linen dresses way above the knees and flat Capri sandals. The men showed up for dinner in soft loafers, pastel-colored sweaters wrapped around their shoulders and tied by the sleeves, their wet hair parted on the side.

  “Milanese,” said Luca disapprovingly.

  Emma, her brother and sister had become proprietorial by now, as if they had always owned the place, so used had they become to their particular sunbathing spots, their favorite rocks, their table at breakfast, their access to the kitchen where Iorgo’s wife, Maria, erect, hands on hips, would holler the name of the dish each time they lifted the lid. Nadia and her family also watched the new group with an air of superiority.

  The Italians ignored their stares, and pretty soon were all over the kitchen lifting lids from the pots just like the rest of them. They too were early risers and breakfast was no longer a quiet affair of tiny waves lapping the shore, birds, breeze, hushed voices and Papà quietly flicking pages of his book while they ate bread and honey. The Milanese were loud and jolly and never stopped talking. It felt so unfair to have come out such a long distance, undertaken such a perilous voyage, having had to learn the Greek words for milk, honey, bread, cheese, good morning, thank you, please, to have actually established a silent complicity with the English boys by the mere fact of sharing the same beach, and now, with the intrusion of the Italians, to have this sense of foreignness and adventure be disrupted. Emma resented their calculated stylishness as if it didn’t make any difference to them to be in Milan or in a tiny village of the Peloponnese. She had made sure not to speak Italian in their presence, confident that by lying low, she, Monica and Luca would be able to shroud their identity.