The Other Language (2 page)

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.