The Other Language (27 page)

“It looks so neat in here.”

“I’m on holiday,” Mina said drily.

“That’s good. You deserve a bit of rest. You did so much work this summer.”

Mina didn’t answer. She was sitting on a chair and fiddling inside her tiny handbag. She pulled out a handkerchief.

“Too much work.” She gave Lara a crooked look and blew her nose.

“You mean … the work you did for Ben?”

Mina scowled. “Do you have any idea how much material I had to use for that big a man?”

“Of course. More fabric, more sewing. More everything.”

“Not more money, though!” Mina cried with unexpected force, which allowed Lara to dig deeper.

“You don’t feel Ben paid you fairly?”

“Ha!” Mina turned her face to the side with spite. “Those people, they have big mansions in England with swimming pools and servants but when it comes to—”

“Actually he lives in America, he doesn’t have a—”

“—squeezing money where they can, then … you should see them! Do they know the difference between something expensive and something truly beautiful? No, they don’t!”

Lara replayed the last sentence in her mind and double-checked its meaning. That was a sharp observation.

“Did he not pay you what you asked?”

Mina shrugged again, and turned her face away, as if the question didn’t even deserve an answer. Lara pressed her.

“Didn’t you tell him upfront what you were going to charge him?”

But, clutching her handbag and rising from the chair, Mina ignored this. For the occasion she had chosen to wear her pleated skirt and a funny blue jacket with golden buttons. She eyed her tiny wristwatch.

“We’d better go,” she said. “The procession starts at six and we need to find a good parking spot, one by the harbor.”

In the car—the small Subaru she had bought secondhand from a local dealer when she had first moved down south—Lara hoped Mina would release more information about what had happened with Ben, but she was wrapped in silence. Lara had to poke at her again.

“Have you heard from him lately?”

Mina shook her head.

“I thought he used to call you on the phone like every other day.”

Mina looked out the window, pretending to be absorbed by the landscape.

“Oh yes, he called, what, three weeks ago? ‘Mina, I’m flying down to see you for two days,’ he says, ‘I need you to do some more work for me.’ I say, ‘Of course, come, you are always welcome, and we must speak about the deal on the house.’ You know, the house of my cousin. So he arrives in a black car with black windows and a driver in a black suit. It looks like a funeral car, everyone got so frightened. People thought I was dead.”

Lara laughed, but Mina didn’t.

“With this blond woman. The one in the photograph.”

Lara stopped at a red light and turned toward Mina.

“The one by the swimming pool?”

“That one. He walks into the house, hugs me, kisses me like I am his mother,” Mina said with disdain. “Then he introduces this woman who doesn’t speak a word of Italian. She’s almost naked, in a little camisole that shows everything underneath. He says,
‘Mina, this is my fiancée and she loves your work, look, she has brought some clothes for you to copy.’ And this woman opens a suitcase filled with her flimsy dresses, and then she throws them on my table.”

Like she was his mother, Lara thought. Could that be what had hurt her the most? But how could Mina have been that deluded? But—she reminded herself—it was also true that Mina now knew Ben’s body like a familiar map, its exact measurements; she’d cut and sewn the fabric that would envelop him and keep him warm. She’d touched him on the shoulders, around the waist, along his legs. She had memorized every inch of him. Wasn’t that some other, extraordinary kind of intimacy?

Mina didn’t say anything more. She sat stiffly on the edge of her seat as the small harbor came into view. She indicated a slot between parked cars.

“There. You can fit right in there.”

There was another long pause during the parking maneuver.

“And then?” Lara kept checking her rearview mirror, pretending to be only half interested.

“I told him I was on holiday,” Mina said bitterly. “I gave him the address of Jolanda, in Ortelle. She’s not as good as me, no. But she can make their clothes.”

Slowly, gingerly, they made their way with the crowd down the steep winding road that led to the small harbor. Whole families marched together, fathers carrying their children on their shoulders, old ladies holding on to the arms of their daughters, kids eating their gelati. They walked briskly, with festive smiles, grown-ups and children equally eager for the music and the fireworks that were to follow. Below, on the small piazza by the water’s edge, there were stalls selling sweets—caramelized almonds, chocolate nougat and Nutella crepes—and Chinese-made toys that lit up,
buzzed and shrieked with
Star Wars
sounds. The local band in their uniforms was tuning the trombones and the tubas under the pagoda-shaped gazebo set up in the piazza. In a few minutes the door of the white church would let out the procession bearing the statue of the Virgin. The oldest and strongest fishermen decked out in their Sunday clothes would bring her down to the pier, haul her onto one of the boats. Mina’s gait wobbled on the steep descent. She grabbed Lara’s arm, making her slow down.

“I am not stupid,” she hissed. “If one’s name is printed in that American magazine—whatever it’s called—one becomes famous all over the world. Why couldn’t he say, ‘Write this down: all my clothes were made by Mina Corvaglia from Andrano’?”

“He totally should have told the magazine,” Lara agreed. Part of her was rejoicing. She was going to recount it all to Leo, word for word.

“Perhaps he thinks he doesn’t need to give my name because I am just a—a peasant, from the sticks,” Mina said, shaking her head. “But we don’t live in mud huts here.”

Mina knew exactly where they needed to position themselves in order to get the best view of the boats and the fireworks. She stopped on top of a stairway that went steeply down all the way to the square, unfolded a large handkerchief and spread it on one of the spotless steps. She sat on it with care, and kept brushing her pleated skirt, making sure it wouldn’t touch the pavement. Lara sat next to her and remained quiet for a few minutes, as the procession slowly approached the harbor. They watched as the statue of the
Vergine della Tempesta
was carefully placed inside a palanquin on the prow of a larger boat adorned with flowers and candles.

“What about the house he’s buying?” Lara finally asked.

Mina was busy making sure her skirt was in place. She then closed her arm around her knees.

“My cousin, he changed his mind. He’s decided to keep the house for now.”

“Really? How come?”

“Too much confusion. Paparazzi will come to steal photos, more foreigners will come to buy property, prices will go up. We don’t need that kind of pandemonium here.”

The evening light was dimming and turning everything into a watercolor with runny edges of lavender and blue. The boats had grouped around the biggest one, the one that carried the Virgin, and they started to move away from the shore in the twilight. The big boat led the way with its palanquin in a triumph of tiny lights and the fishermen’s boats followed with their flickering lanterns. Somewhere, someone was lighting small hot air balloons made of paper that ascended in a slow, billowing flight, one by one. They were dotting the sky with their orangey glow, illuminated by the boat lights below, forming a dazzling constellation.

Just then the moon emerged from the strand of haze sitting on top of the horizon. A big, apricot moon, pinned against a lilac background. Everything went quiet, the band, the birds, the children’s voices, the Chinese electronic toys. It was as if for a moment everyone felt what it was like to be present, all together, and alive.

Lara held her breath. She had hoped for this feeling for so long. And now, without her aiming for it or practicing toward it, here it was, epiphanic, timeless. She knew the feeling would last only another handful of seconds. But somehow, hadn’t she earned it? From now on she’d at least be able to call it back and it would unfold, replay itself.

She looked at Mina and their eyes met. For whatever seconds were left of that knowing, they were together in it and nothing needed to be said. Then the first of the fireworks sprang up in a cascade of gold that streaked the darkening sky, then fell with a soft crackling noise into the water.

After two hours of fireworks and deafening explosions, their lungs and eyes filled with so much acrid smoke it was as if they’d just escaped a battlefield, Lara suggested it might be time to leave. They’d eaten pork sandwiches and Nutella crepes, bought the nougat and a plastic parrot on a branch that chirped every five minutes, which Mina was planning to hang on her lemon tree. Her digestion upset, but nevertheless satisfied and happily exhausted, Lara steered Mina up the hill, back to where the car was parked.

“Does it get very cold in the winter months here?” she asked, as she drove them back, breaking the sleepy silence in the car.

No answer came, so Lara took her eyes away from the road and turned to Mina, who shook her head, her eyes half closed.