The Other Language

by Francesca Marciano

  There was a short silence. They both turned their eyes to the children, who were intent on digging a tunnel in the sand.

  “I am so grateful that our kids are growing up in the twenty-first century in America,” Ruth said.

  “Yes,” said Mrs. D’Costa, “it’s a great advantage, isn’t it?”

  She often wondered about her own children. She and Victor had done everything they could to give them all they needed. And yet, she knew that their lives must have been more complicated than what she was ready to admit at the time. Maybe she had tried too hard to follow her husband’s rule, to stick to the bright side of things.

  There were questions she hardly ever dared ask herself. Why had all of her children left Kenya and gone to live elsewhere? Perhaps they had had to bury their hurts and resentments, when they were small. Had she made a mistake by never encouraging them to talk about it?

  Maybe some of what she’d then called optimism would today be called denial.

  The Khans’ store was busy: right outside, a few African men in overalls were loading bags of cement in the back of a lorry. One young man was weighing a thick coil of rope on a scale next to where Mrs. D’Costa was standing.

  She handed the note with the measurements to Kublai and his father. The three of them remained silent for a few seconds, their eyes fixed on the scrap of paper.

  “It has to be zinc,” she said. “Sealed. That’s the procedure required to carry the body on a plane,” she said.

  “No problem, Mrs. D’Costa. We’ll get it ready by tomorrow,” Kublai said, and scribbled something on a piece of paper.

  She had offered to take care of this. It seemed a practical thing, something that she could handle easily, and she was happy to spare Mark and Tim the ride to the junction for such a gruesome task.

  Mr. Khan leaned in over the counter and removed his reading glasses from the tip of his nose.

  “Why not the Hindu crematorium in town? We could have helped them, we know the people who work there. Ashes would have been so much easier to carry. Once in England they could have whatever ceremony they wish.”

  “I couldn’t agree with you more. But the family wants to bring the body back. To their home, and put it underground, in British soil. It’s their way.”

  Later, as she was getting ready to reverse the car and head home, she saw Mr. Khan with his wobbly gait exiting the store.

  “Mrs. D’Costa! Wait!”

  She left the keys in the ignition and stepped out, her car idling under the midmorning sun.

  “Yes, Mr. Khan?”

  He held out his hand to show her the cluster of white flowers he was clutching between his fingers.

  “In Gujarat we call them Barsoli flowers. My mother planted them in our garden when she got married to my father. She had the seeds sent here from India. Nobody else has a tree like this in all of Kenya. Smell.”

  The scent was deliciously sweet.

  “My mother would wear one of these every night behind her ear. The flowers lasted only a few hours.”

  “What a beautiful habit,” Mrs. D’Costa said.

  “She planted the seeds in our garden so she’d have her personal supply in this country for the rest of her life.” He held the flower up to his nose. “And to remind herself that all things are impermanent.”

  He pulled a tiny envelope out of his breast pocket.

  “I have collected some seeds for you. I know how much you like gardening.”

  “Thank you, Mr. Khan. What a kind thought.”

  Then, unexpectedly, he lifted a strand of her hair and slid the flower behind her ear.

  There was a pause, then he bowed his head slightly. Mrs. D’Costa brushed the flower with the tip of her finger.

  As she drove back home she kept glancing in the rearview mirror to see the white blossom in her hair.

  She took the turn into the plantation at the back of her and the Dobsons’ plot of land. Yes, some of the coconut trees were dying, it was true. She had been noticing more and more naked stumps dotting the horizon. Tim’s comment about the place being jinxed had disturbed her. Trees die too when they age, and these coconuts were planted a very long time ago, she should’ve told him. It was natural. Would that have silenced him?

  Tim was right, Margie didn’t belong here. None of them did, Anne thought. It was a much better idea to take her back to England after all, even though she didn’t know anybody there.

  Once all the Dobsons had left and she’d be able to go back to her routine, she would ask Mr. Khan to her Sunday curry lunch. Maybe she’d inquire if he liked cards or mah-jongg and they could sometimes play a game or two. It was such a comfort to know someone like him and his son. He and Kublai were always so kind and thoughtful. She turned into her driveway and immediately heard Pickle’s and Chutney’s cheerful barking. Hamisi was waiting by the gate, ready to open it for her.

  Such a nice, good family, the Khans, she thought. Just like the family she once had.

  The Italian System

  Spring landed on her like an avalanche. Walking through Central Park she heard birds chirping in the trees, as though they’d just returned from a long voyage and now were busy-busy, getting their nests ready for the new season.

  The buds on the cherry trees were ready to burst, the tiny leaves sprouting from the branches, so fine they were almost transparent, like a baby’s fingers on an ultrasound. Everything around her was primed for rebirth.

  She thought she too might be ready for a change of scene.

  She had come to New York seven years earlier with a rather ambitious plan. While still in Rome, she’d applied online for a summer workshop in creative writing at the New School. It was an expensive course, but she’d saved some money just for that. She’d always had a notion that one day she’d write a novel but she knew she’d never start unless she developed a technique and got some encouragement. She’d always admired the pragmatic approach Americans took, even on those subjects—like art, literature, acting, music—that Europeans regarded as too elusive, or impossible to define, and therefore to teach. Americans believed there was a method for everything, and they were right; hadn’t they succeeded in all those fields in which the Europeans, with their snobbish talk of talent and inspiration, were now beginning to fade?

  As soon as she set foot in Manhattan she decided that she didn’t want to leave it, ever. It was a coup de foudre. She felt light, full of promise. In New York she realized she had no witnesses, no memories, just a brilliant, spectacular stretch of future in front of her.

  The summer course at the New School eventually came to an end and she had no more money to invest in her education as a writer. She found a part-time job in a language school. It started as a way to pay the rent on the place in Brooklyn she shared with another girl. With time, teaching became her real job and she forgot about other aspirations; to her what mattered most was that she had found a way to stay in New York.

  But lately she’d begun to feel an undercurrent nagging at her throughout the day, an insidious feeling of frustration that hovered above while she was asleep, and which confronted her first thing each morning when she opened her eyes.

  Ever since she’d arrived in the city she’d tried very hard to become an American, but it had proved hard to blend in. It wasn’t just the accent or the mispronunciation of difficult words that singled her out, it was a question of attitude. Of posture, even.

  New York was a city of foreigners, everyone came from some other place just as in Rome, where she had been born and raised. People had come to Imperial Rome to seek fortune and fame from its farthest colonies under Augustus, and exotic people had done the same in New York before the age of Abraham Lincoln. The flow had never stopped.

  Yet a foreigner always remains a foreigner, no matter how long he’s been away from his native place. Like the Chinese students at Columbia, the Korean grocers and the Latino hairdressers, like the Ukrainian waitresses and the Greek cooks, the Afghan and the Sikh taxi drivers, she still tho
ught of her grandmother’s food as superior to anyone else’s, and like all of them, despite their perfect grasp of English, she dreamed in a different language. She knew that these people, even the ones who had been born on American soil, were prey to a nostalgia for faraway places, some they’d never even been to and may never even see. Such is the strength of the seed implanted in us at birth, she thought, as she exited the Q train at Lexington Avenue and waded through the late afternoon rush hour crowd on the way to teach the first class of the day.

  Whenever she walked along the streets of Manhattan, she looked at all the different faces coming toward her and, despite their different features and colors, she regarded them all as Americans. None of them seemed a stranger to the city. How at ease they looked on the train, underneath their books, Kindles, iPods and iPads, at the wheel of the taxi, behind the counter of the coffee shop, at the gym or inside the beauty parlor! On the other hand, she, even after all these years, still felt self-conscious, afraid of making a faux pas. She came to feel that this was the inherent condition of anybody unmoored from the familiar, and living in a place that is home to others.

  And yet here was a riddle she couldn’t figure out: Why did that look of disorientation and vulnerability she knew was stamped on her face seem invisible on everyone else’s?

  That day in the park, sitting on a bench under the trees bursting with their promise of bloom, she felt a breeze of optimism caress her face.

  All right, she thought, like those birds building a nest, I’m going to start something new.

  Maybe, in the early hours of the morning, before going to work, she could try to jot down the introduction to the book she’d been thinking about for months. Her plan was still nebulous but at least she had a good title. It said it all, and though she had forgotten a lot of the rules she had learned at the creative writing course, what if she just followed her instinct and started from that?

  Italians are always described as warm, stylish, fun, passionate, charming, life-loving people. What is their secret?

  How do they manage to look always so groomed and elegant even when they can’t afford to buy expensive clothes? How is it possible that the most desolate trattoria on the back road of a nondescript town will serve you the best dish you’ve had in years? And how can Italians appear so confident and full of life despite the fact they live in one of the most malfunctioning countries, run by the Mafia and corrupt, shifty politicians, a country basically going bankrupt? So why, despite these failings, do Italians come across as positive, gregarious, always ready to laugh? This book is going to teach you how to make your life more enjoyable, how to gain confidence, taste and charm—without trying too hard. Nonchalance is the key factor: the less you try, the easier it will be to feel as stylish and charismatic as the Italians are, deep down in their skin. The secret is very simple. It’s called the Italian System.

  She set the alarm for seven and wrote every morning till lunchtime, as she had planned. She usually reached the school by five. Let’s Speak Italian was located in a small town house on the Upper East Side; it was sparsely furnished with folding metal chairs, Formica desks and cheaply framed photographs of famous Italian monuments and movie stars. Her classes started at five thirty—she taught evening classes to people who mostly had full-time jobs—but she liked to get there early, take time to look at the students’ papers and have a cup of coffee with some of her colleagues. To be teaching Italian in a school, surrounded by other Italians who had the same poorly paid part-time jobs—some of them had come to New York because of a marriage, others had had higher literary ambitions that failed—only enhanced her feeling of being trapped inside a circle of outsiders. All her students spoke with terrible accents and hated the congiuntivo and the condizionale; they were either coming to the school because of their line of work—fashion, wine, travel—or were affluent retirees who liked the idea of being able to engage with the locals on their next Italian holiday. And it was for their sake that she felt she was supposed to retain all of her Italianness while at work. Her students loved her accent, the way she moved her hands and certain grammatical mistakes she still made when speaking in English. The act of writing the book not only partly relieved her of the frustration she’d begun to feel, but also let her put that feeling of otherness to use, make something positive, anchoring, out of it.

  For the very first time she was able to isolate small details that shone like jewels among the ruins, the corruption, the vulgarity of her country of origin. So many immigrants are embarrassed by the place they come from, she thought, it’s probably inevitable. After all, it has to be a love-hate relationship. Without the hate there would be no voyage.

  Memories from her childhood started to come up like gnocchi in boiling water, at the most unexpected moments. Food always came up first, for her.

  Stop being afraid of calories, they are not your real enemies. The problem is not the pasta, pizza, or your cornetto and cappuccino. It’s not the carbs that will make you fat, but the complications that are the essence of the American meal. Just think of the endless layers that form a hamburger: bread, mustard, cheese, bacon, meat, onion, pickle, ketchup. Why so many ingredients in one dish? What’s the point of such a crazy medley?

  The first time I checked the list of flavors inside an ice cream parlor in America my head spun. All I wanted was chocolate. But I was forced to choose between chocolate–chocolate chip, caramel-chocolate-pecan, double chocolate chip–walnut cookie, triple choc-fudge-pecan-walnut and choco-choco-superdark-almond-caramel-crunch. In Italy we grew up with chocolate, hazelnut, coffee, cream and vanilla. In the fruit department we had only lemon and strawberry. In the early days, that was it and we were quite content. These simple, straightforward flavors were superbly executed and delicious. They were like clothes in solid colors as opposed to some mad flowery psychedelic pattern.

  There were things that suddenly caught her attention. Everywhere she looked now, wandering around the aisles of a supermarket, or on the Q train coming back from work, she noticed things that suggested another observation, another idea. The book was like a magnet that attracted the tiniest particle. Everything, no matter how small, stuck. She took brief notes on a Moleskine she tucked in her pocket. The notes sounded like a secret code, but she knew what they meant and she would decipher them later on, once at home: “gutting fish,” “what’s inside a chicken?,” “lack of frontier.”

  A word about dairy. Our milk goes bad in five days. Mozzarella, ricotta? You have to eat it the same day. Forty-eight more hours and the cheese tastes like yogurt. We don’t mind about the bacteria that the FDA army has ordered killed in every dairy product sold on American soil. That bacteria boosts our immune systems and no American tourist visiting Rome, Venice or Florence has ever contracted salmonella from a cappuccino or a caprese salad. It’s a celebration and a ritual to buy something that will spoil in one day, knowing we are eating it only a few hours after it was made.

  On the same note: every Italian knows how to gut a fish under the faucet and clean it, how to pull the gizzards out of a chicken, how to tell liver from brains or kidneys, tail from tongue in the butcher’s display. Feathers, blood, entrails, everything that is part of an animal is still visible and tangible, and that means we are still in touch with natural elements at least to a certain degree, whereas in America most children can still barely grasp the connection between a steak and the animal it comes from.

  She was slowly gaining confidence. Her writing had become more fluid, more agile. It was like a muscle that stretched and gained speed. Dared she admit, even to herself, that a book like this could have a voice? And that she was actually beginning to find it? Now and again she threw in a funny line, a little humorous spark. She was getting bolder. One day, as she was having coffee with her colleagues before class, she mentioned that she was writing something. It felt good to come out and say it, as it would make her work real and stop her from treating it like a hobby, a secret pastime. There were words of approval along with a few
patronizing smiles. When one of her colleagues asked whether she had a publisher, she laughed. It’s an experiment, I’m just having fun with it, she said breezily. Later, on the train back home, one of the teachers—Clelia, a sad woman from Pisa who had married an Iranian in New Jersey and then had had a tragic divorce—asked her what her book was about. She answered vaguely, afraid that Clelia, with her thick glasses and old-fashioned clothes, might think she was making fun of her, that she might be making caricatures out of all of them—a bunch of Italians who still spoke English with thick accents, small people who lived in small apartments, who didn’t have the glamour of the fashion designers, the visual artists or the famous architects who’d made their country such a salable commodity.

  She went home that night and decided it was time to do something about the huge pile of laundry that had amassed over the kitchen table. Laundry was something she had always tended to postpone, as she found the whole procedure boring and unpleasant. She took the elevator down to the basement, and started loading the washing machine. Under the tremulous fluorescent light in that dark space she realized why doing the laundry in the city could be such a depressing chore.

  The dryer.

  We, as a people, are against it: no Italian possesses one. Dryers are the only bit of American culture that we still firmly and unanimously resist. We dry our sheets, towels, shirts, T-shirts, etc., on a clothesline, letting wind and sun take care of them. We still believe in the power of natural heat and we love the smell of bedsheets dried on a sunny, windy day. In any Italian city, you’ll see our garments hanging on a line outside our windows, balconies, roofs or strung across an alley. We don’t mind, we actually love the sight of our underwear flapping in the wind. Our eyes have gotten used to it, it’s part of the landscape; tourists love to take pictures of it, they think hanging laundry is quintessentially Italian, the way it dots the landscape in bright colors. Sometimes their photos appear on Instagram or on Flickr, or as a lovely postcard, and we think that’s quite sweet—our underwear, socks and panties have become a work of art!