“This was not a bakery. It was a communal oven. An oven where people could bring their own loaves of bread. Bread and pies, so that my aunt could bake for them. She only charged ten, twenty liras a piece. We all came here as children with our tins, everyone did, every Saturday …”
“Did you? How nice. So, what did …” Lara loved stories like this, it was part of what had drawn her to the village in the first place. But the woman was talking right over her question.
“… And in winter, when it was really cold, this was the warmest room in the whole village, so we sat in that corner, see? My aunt used to have a wooden bench right there.”
The woman gestured to the wall where now sat the dishwasher still sheathed in its cardboard box.
“My aunt would give us sweets while we waited. In the summer we’d wait outside in the garden, and we’d play with the donkey. This is how things were in this village up until only forty, fifty years ago.”
The little woman grabbed a chair and slumped on it, hands entwined on her lap. Her feet barely touched the ground. Lara was beginning to feel it had been a mistake to let this creature in. Obviously this was only the beginning of something far more serious than Lara had envisaged.
The little woman went on. “But of course, what do you care? You people come from the outside and assume everything here is up for sale and you think you have a right to take it down, rip it all up as you please. You even bring your own architect to destroy our history!”
Lara stared at the little woman, shocked. This was truly a disgrace. She’d come to this village with the best intentions, eager to learn and respect the local culture and traditions. And now—barely twenty-four hours after she’d moved in—she was already facing the enormity of her first mistake.
“Senta signora, I’m sorry about the wood oven,” Lara said. “I had no idea how important it was. In fact nobody told me. I’m really sorry, I … I wish I had known before, is all I can say.”
It was true: the local real-estate agent—a young man with overly gelled hair and two cell phones constantly ringing—hadn’t said a word about the oven being part of the village history, had made no mention of the old lady with a donkey who baked for the community; he didn’t mention village women and children taking their tins of pies and bread into what was now her stainless steel kitchen.
“Why did you buy a house here?” the woman asked, a prosecutor for the defendant.
Lara widened her arms, resigned.
“Because I love this village and I wanted to preserve this beautiful house.” She breathed in a bit and continued, “Which by the way would’ve crumbled had I not bought it.”
The woman didn’t balk; she shook her head.
“You people don’t come here to buy property because you love it. You come because it’s cheaper.”
Such was Lara’s welcome to her new life in the house she’d bought right after her divorce.
The truth was the little woman had a point. Tuscany was ridiculously expensive. Umbria was sold out. The Aeolian Islands were for millionaires. Whereas in this exquisite and undiscovered village in the depths of southern Italy, the house plus the cost of its renovation had equaled almost exactly the money Lara had managed to extract from the settlement. She’d thought of the quaint house in the heart of the village not only as a good investment or a summer holiday escape, but more like a second home where she could retreat all year round, and start over. She wanted it to look fresh and simple like those photos in Elle Décor, with handwoven baskets brimming with lavender sprigs or vegetables just picked from the garden, with linen tablecloths thrown over lovely old tables, secluded gardens and mosquito nets shrouding immaculate beds. Lara couldn’t deny she’d seen the opportunity of a little side business as well, maybe involving buying/fixing up/selling properties. It was impossible not to, given the prices of local real estate. In the course of the previous year, Lara had come up to the village several times to oversee the restoration work, often enough to notice how old people seemed to be dying at a worrisome rate—at least according to how often church bells tolled announcing yet another funeral. During the time it took for the workers to finish, she saw more and more old houses go up for sale as younger people kept migrating up north. The new generation refused to work in the fields and the olive groves in favor of more appealing opportunities, like opening a cell phone store in some northern province with ghastly weather. Lara felt she’d stumbled on a pot of gold. All she needed to acquire a piece of property was a modest amount of capital. She didn’t have any access to it at the moment, but she had always tended toward the unrealistic. The future, from underneath her high-vaulted ceiling, had seemed full of hope and potential.
Lara felt she should look into the forno issue right away. That same afternoon she went online and found a posting on medieval communal ovens in France and England. There was no mention of the same in the south of Italy, which suggested she could add her own entry on Wikipedia if she ever decided to. According to the website they were called bakehouses and they were places “where women and children would bring their tins of bread and biscuits for baking. Meeting at the bakehouse was also a way to exchange news and local gossip. Each woman marked her bread loaf with a distinctive cut to make sure she got back her own bread after baking.”
Reading all this made her feel even more at fault. The next day she walked to the city council, an unattractive modern building that sat like a shoe box on a parking lot and asked if she might see the historic plan of the village. She was shown inside the office of a skinny man with clearly dyed hair, semihidden behind piles of papers. He looked through the files and pulled out an old map. He showed her several locations, all marked with an F, which stood for forno. One of those capital F’s stood right over her building. It turned out that yes, she had indeed taken down the village’s last bakehouse, which was “protected” and should have never been touched.
“I never meant to have done that!” Lara blurted out. She believed in karma and felt as though, by following her architect’s advice, she had demolished an Egyptian tomb, with all the consequences that the sacrilege might entail. The skinny man behind the desk reassured her. Yes, she had actually broken the law, but it could all be fixed by paying a little something. It was going to be a small fine. Nothing much. Not to worry.
“I’ll pay, of course. That’s not the problem, it’s just that … it’s that I feel really bad that we …” Her voice broke a little. “That I did this. It was totally unintentional.”
The skinny man seemed surprised by her concern. Obviously the oven didn’t mean as much to him as to the little woman with the bad perm.
Lara rang her architect and told her about the communal oven.
Silvana cut her off. “We gained twenty square meters of walking space. It’s an added value to the property.”
“I know, I know. But—”
“You are just being sentimental, Lara. Just forget about it.”
“I feel like we committed a crime. Which by the way we did. Apparently we actually broke the law.”
But Silvana just laughed. “Well, Lara, it seems to me that everyone else did too, since you say it was the last remaining oven in the village.”
“Yes, but it was a protected monument.”
“What were you going to do with it anyway, bake loaves for the masses?” Silvana laughed. “This isn’t the eighteenth century, everyone has an oven now. Anyway, let’s talk about this later, I’m with a client now.”
Lara realized how, until that moment, the politics of her street had completely escaped her, wrapped up as she’d been with only the builders and her architect. Up until now the neighbors had been to her only extras in the background, blank faces she hadn’t paid any attention to and couldn’t remember. Owning a house in a village was clearly very different from moving into a new apartment in a city, where anonymity was not only okay but an asset. She had moved into a community that had lived so closely together for years and years, where everyone knew every little
thing about one another. Now this foreigner had shown up from out of the blue; for months she had been coming and going, ignoring their existence, interested only in her building work, and not once bothering to say hello or goodbye. Another mistake that needed immediate correction.
She decided the right person to ask would be the young man with plucked eyebrows—a distinctive trait she’d observed in the local male youth—who served her cappuccino every morning at the café in the piazza. The little woman’s name was Mina, he told her. Everyone knew her: she was a dressmaker, the best in the area. She’d had a good elementary and high school education, a bit of money she’d saved, and although she’d never married she was self-sufficient and, according to the village standards, successful. Figuratively speaking, she was the mayor of Lara’s street.
The following morning Lara knocked at Mina’s door, presenting a box of chocolates. She saw the sewing machine, a stack of fabrics, a cat curled up on the table where Mina had been cutting a cloth, licking his paws.
Mina grabbed the box.
“Thank you,” she said without smiling.
There were wisps of thread floating like dragonflies in the breeze blowing from the open windows. Lara smelled the heat rising from fabric that was being ironed.
“I was just wondering, Signora Mina …,” she said. “If I brought you a shirt, could you copy it for me?”
Apparently Mina had first gained her stature because of her closeness with the local barons, Donna Clara, Don Filippo, their children and later on to their children’s husbands and wives. She had measured waists, bellies and breasts of three generations of barons and baronesses, brushed their bodies with her nimble fingers, draped cloth around their hips and buttocks. She knew how the women of the family tended to grow heavy around the thighs and thin in the torso, how the men would stay thin but put on love handles after forty. She suggested—discreetly—which cut or length would best suit them. The family had worn her perfectly tailored clothes at first communions, weddings, baptisms and garden parties, season after season. Whenever she would run into them on her way to the grocery shop, or at one of the many processions or funerals that ran along the main street, she would check out their dresses, jackets, trousers and whisper to a neighbor walking alongside her, “See how nicely it falls in the back? Look at the way I did the pleats, the pockets, the lapels. How becoming the cut on the shoulders, the collar, the way it’s pinched at the waist.”
By the time Lara bought the house on Mina’s street, Donna Clara and Don Filippo had been dead for ten years at least and their children and grandchildren were scattered between Rome, Milan, Paris and Madrid. The second generation of barons worked as doctors, lawyers and financial consultants; one had become a successful shoe designer and was in a happy gay marriage in Spain. Things had changed a lot since the time of their parents; they no longer cared to use their titles and hardly ever came back to their eighteenth-century palazzo in the village square. It was too expensive to keep and none of them wanted to live there anyway, so they rented it out for weddings in order to pay for its maintenance. From April to October, young brides from the nearby villages wrapped in the cloud of tulle they’d always dreamed of would get photographed leaning from the balcony of the palazzo against a wall of ivy, or under a cascade of wisteria. By then even the people in the village had begun to shop at the OVS, the ubiquitous cheap department store where one could buy clothes for thirty-five euros. The epoch of tailored clothes was officially over.
Leo, the house is finished (I officially moved in three weeks ago!) as you can see from the attached photos. It’s actually a lot larger and more spacious than it looks in the pictures. The ceilings are spectacularly high, I just can’t get them all in the shot because I don’t have the right lens. I walk to the beach every day (twenty minutes, walking briskly), I swim, I read a lot, I pick my rucola and fresh zucchini from the garden (did you know they grow overnight? They turn into monsters if you forget to pick them) and soon the figs will be ready on the tree. My neighbors are all supernice old ladies (not a man in sight, they must have all died or run off) and I’ve done all I could in my power to make them feel comfortable having me here. The other night I had a party for all of them. I baked spelt banana bread (which they had never had), made buckwheat cherry muffins (which they had never heard of) and made tea (which they never drink, this is espresso nation). However I made them try everything and after a few awkward moments and many laughs I have a feeling we bonded. Mina is my favorite one; she’s an amazing seamstress, she’s made me two beautiful shirts and a dress that cost me next to nothing. It’s incredible: you just bring her a Prada shirt and she makes its identical twin for 25 euros! This is part of what is so lovely about living here: everything is simple, easy and cheap. When are you going to come? You did promise, remember? Can’t wait to spend a bit of time with you!
It had taken almost an hour to compose an e-mail to her brother. It was important that she sounded funny and light, and that she gave the most alluring description of her new domain. He e-mailed her back ten days later. Late and economical, as always.
Hi, thanks for the pix, very martha stewart. I’m coming to visit in august for a few days, I’ll be with a client I’m representing, ben jackson (have u seen “the man at the door”?), the guardian published a big spread last week on yr area, it looked really cool, then we go visit friends in pantelleria, talk to u soon. Does skype work from there?
Six years earlier Leo had moved to London, where he’d begun his career as an assistant to a film agent. Recently he had followed his boss to Los Angeles and become a partner. All of a sudden younger stars were flocking to him. He was perfect for the job; taking care of others had been his number-one specialty since he was a child. He seemed to possess a bottomless reserve of charm that he was able to shower on anyone he encountered. He was a natural. People came away from their first encounter with him certain to have made an indelible impression and a dent in his heart, a certainty that Leo was careful to keep feeding. His charm was his secret weapon, ensuring he’d be loved back, even if falsely or temporarily.
Thus it was odd how one of the very few people left out of this tight circle of love was his sister. He seemed to have lost interest in Lara, as if time spent in her company was not as rewarding as with everyone else. Yes, his life had taken a sharp turn and was now very different from hers—he attended exclusive parties, flew business class to film festivals, had his expensive meals and hotels paid for with a corporate card and was followed by an endless string of girlfriends without names. He was capable of sending a gift via iTunes to a particularly nice salesgirl with whom he’d had a casual conversation about a band while trying on clothes, or sending flowers with a thank-you note to an older lady he’d met on a plane (“For the wonderful conversation that made our flight last only minutes!”). But he hardly ever remembered to call his sister. Whenever Lara rang him he always happened to be in a meeting; if they succeeded in having a conversation he endured prolonged pauses during which she could hear him tapping on computer keys, and her own metallic voice reverberating in the room on speaker phone. Lara had begun to fear that he might be thinking of her as a loser. The Martha Stewart remark only confirmed this worry.
You can’t come with Ben Jackson, this house isn’t grand enough for him!! Let me book him a place where he’ll be much more comfortable. There is a fabulous palazzo converted into B&B only six km from me. Jodie Foster stayed there. Please don’t let him come and stay! No Skype from here, sorry. Signal is too weak.
Leo’s response came, surprisingly, just two hours later.
Ben is cool. The house looks fine. Stop fretting.
The shirts and dresses always came neatly folded inside a plastic envelope, crisp and skillfully pressed, then wrapped in a sheet of newspaper sealed with tape. The package felt solid and as full of promise as a gift box from an exclusive boutique. Mina’s work had a Victorian quality. It was flawless in every detail; the collar, pleats and buttonholes were stitched as if by an
invisible hand and the buttons were either mother of pearl or covered in the same material as the dress. Lara’s full name was always embroidered inside the collar in lovely childish lettering. Each time Lara had to insist that Mina quote her a price, but she would turn her head, reluctantly, the other way.
“I don’t know. You give me what you think is right.”
“Please, Mina. Otherwise I cannot ask you to make me anything else. Please.”
This would go on for a while, till Mina would finally relent.
“Ten, fifteen, you decide. Whatever you think is right.”
Lara would put a twenty on the table and Mina would snatch it without a sound the minute Lara took her eyes away. Clearly it was part of village etiquette, this pretense that money wasn’t the issue. Outside of what she paid for the house itself, this felt like the best-spent money of her entire life. Lara, in her new clothes, looked in the mirror and saw herself slender and pretty again.
“Mina, you are a genius.”
Mina cocked her head, beaming. Since the day Lara had become such an enthusiastic client, the issue of the forno seemed to have been forgotten, or at least put temporarily behind them.
For two years now Lara had seen her own body progressively lose its contours and definition. It wasn’t age, it was the divorce that had caused the implosion and slackened her from within. Her whole being had lost muscle and core, as though what she’d assumed was her legendary physical strength, her lean muscular body trained by years of running, and then practicing and teaching yoga, had turned out to be only a secondary effect of the safety of her marriage, a reflection of her domestic stability. The minute her husband was gone, so too fled her body. Since then, clothes had had the purpose only of covering up what she feared about herself.
The Other Language Page 12
