The Other Language (46 page)

Her mother was the one who kept bringing up the subject. She always phoned Elsa the moment she read anything about Barker.

Did you hear, he divorced the wife. He moved to London, he bought a three-story house in Notting Hill. He’s given two hundred thousand dollars to a charity in Bangladesh. You should
get in touch with him, Elsa, I’m sure he’d be happy to hear from you …

There was no way to get her off the subject once she started.

But Elsa didn’t want to hear: she was wary of the past. She’d always had the good sense not to yearn for anything irretrievably lost. She and Barker had forked paths eons before—they had had such different lives now, there was no point in trying to draw a parallel between them. Especially now that she’d gained weight in all the wrong places, had allowed a streak of gray to grow out at the temples and was too lazy to color it.

Drew had ended their love affair brusquely one morning. Elsa had told her parents she was going to Florence with a girlfriend for two days. She had to lie to them, as they would never allow her to spend the night with a man while she was still living at home.

“I don’t think I am in love with you anymore,” he announced literally minutes after she’d opened her eyes, or at least that’s the way Elsa remembered it. “I think you should go.”

She looked at him, aghast. So he repeated what he’d said, this time more urgently.

“I think you should go. Like,
now
.”

Elsa made a leap stark naked from the bed to the bathroom so that he wouldn’t see her cry. She sank onto the toilet and began to sob, staring at her bare feet on the pink tiles while he begged her to open the door. They went on like that for a while—her sobbing, him knocking and begging. When she finally let him in, he didn’t console her or say he was sorry. He only seemed eager for her to leave. He was probably waiting for someone else to call or show up; he seemed in such a hurry to get rid of her. Elsa picked up her clothes from the floor, put them on in a rush and ran down the stairs, still howling. She kept on howling while she ran across the river under a drizzling rain. Passersby stared at her with a pained expression. There’s something terribly sad about a very
young girl sobbing on the street without restraint. You just know she must have a broken heart.

She was crossing Piazza Farnese on her bicycle when the unmistakable curly head of Sandro Donati, the handsome photographer, slid into her peripheral vision. He was sitting by himself at the beautiful people’s corner café wrapped up in a voluminous blue scarf and a tweed jacket with leather patches on the elbows, intent on reading what seemed to be
Corriere dello Sport
. Elsa had designed his new website only a few weeks earlier—the two of them had had a couple of meetings and exchanged quite a few e-mails discussing the layout and concept of the site, and by now she felt a connection of some sort because of the amount of time she had spent in the company of his exquisite black-and-white shots—portraits, still lifes—arranging the short poetic text that accompanied the images on the site, setting it in different fonts and so on. She felt a rush of shyness overtake her but, as she was about to turn the corner, she caught him waving in her direction. For a fraction of a second she thought she could actually stop and join him, but her reserve won out and she kept moving. In the fugitive space of indecision between accelerating and stopping, she caught his reflection in the café window, his head still turned toward her, his hand stuck in midair, so she made a quick decision and backtracked.

“Hey,” Sandro said half jokingly. “I thought you were blatantly ignoring me.”

“Oh no, I wasn’t quite sure it was you. I am afraid I need glasses,” she said, trying to laugh.

“Would you like to sit down and have a cup of coffee? It’s so nice to see you, Elsa, actually I was thinking about you just the other day.”

He waved to a waiter and pulled up a chair for her. It was so nice to hear him say her name.

After that shocking breakup, Elsa had heard that Drew was seeing an American art student from Texas. A leggy blonde with a mane of long wavy hair who’d come to Rome to finish her Ph.D. on the Italian Renaissance painter Artemisia Gentileschi. Just the sort of thing Drew from Kenosha would suck up to, Elsa thought. She had been trying her best to reestablish some kind of superiority in order to overcome the humiliation, and after receiving this bit of information she rode a train all the way to Naples just to look at Artemisia’s most famous painting—
Judith Slaying Holofernes
, in the Capodimonte museum, a magnificent palazzo built for King Carlo di Borbone in the mid-eighteenth century to house his vast art collection. Never, she felt, had a painting been so brutally graphic: Judith and her woman servant are holding the struggling Assyrian warrior down on the bed with a forceful gesture as though slaughtering a pig for the kitchen. Elsa knew the painting well, from her art history classes—it was an iconic work, embraced by several feminist critics—but up until that day she had only seen it reproduced in books. Art historians agreed that this work was Artemisia’s most powerful because in choosing this subject she had channeled her hatred for Agostino Tassi—a much less talented painter who worked in her father’s studio—a man who’d raped her, dishonored her. Elsa stared at the painting for a long time, fixing her gaze on every detail, taking in the way the blood spurts from Holofernes’s throat onto the mattress, noticing the way Judith (whom historians had established was Artemisia’s self-portrait) has rolled up her sleeves to the elbows and keeps her body slightly askew from the bed, so as not to soil her beautiful blue dress. Elsa was in awe of the artist’s cruelty, her determination. This was revenge at its best. Elsa moved away from the painting having filled herself with a righteous fury. Walking through the rooms of what she felt was
her
gallery, giving friendly nods to
her
museum guards sitting idly in the corners of the empty rooms,
gave her a renewed sense of authority, as if she had succeeded in reestablishing her ownership not only of Artemisia Gentileschi, but of the entire Italian Baroque and Renaissance period. Elsa rode the two-hour train back to Rome with her face against the window feeling that, despite the fact that it had been her first visit to the Capodimonte museum, her brief time there had allowed her to regain stature in the face of those foreigners who came from nowhere, assuming they could simply absorb by osmosis her culture and history, and transform themselves into someone else by grabbing, using and then spitting out whatever came their way.

The letters started coming about a year after Drew left, completely out of the blue. Elsa was twenty years old; she’d left home by then and was sharing a flat with two friends from university. The first letter, mailed to her parents’ address—an event, since nobody bothered to write with a pen on paper, buy stamps and find a mailbox anymore—didn’t sound like Drew at all, it had absolutely no trace of his dark humor. Its tone was formal, old-fashioned, just like his neat handwriting: it was very specific and seemed concerned only as to whether she could forgive him for what he had done to her. Apparently Drew had gone back to Wisconsin after all; the letter claimed he’d now realized how “confused and unhappy” he’d been in Rome at the time of their breakup. What he’d inflicted on her was “unforgivable” and only now could he see what he had lost by breaking off their relationship so abruptly as if, he wrote, “you had been my enemy rather than a person I loved.”

Elsa was puzzled by the saintly tone, and showed the letter to one of her roommates, a girl whose skills at deciphering emotional nuances she trusted. The girl declared he must be in one of those American 12-step programs either for booze or drugs or both. This letter, she said, was simply what step 8 required: making amends to all the people you’ve harmed under the influence;
Elsa surely happened to be just one in a long list of people to whom he owed apologies.

“I bet quite a few of these aerograms must be flying across the globe as we speak,” the girl said with a smirk.

This obvious truth came as a mild disappointment and Elsa regretted showing her the letter.

But then, a couple of days later, she decided to jump at the opportunity and secretly constructed a short but effervescent reply, chiseling her words, cutting and shaping it more and more so that her letter would sound casual, affectionate and humorous enough in case he might be interested in continuing their correspondence. Drew wrote back a week later with the same humorless tone of the first message, confessing he’d just recovered from a very dark period and was now helping out his father in the hardware shop back in Kenosha. He was thinking of taking up playing music again with a bunch of guys from the neighborhood. He thanked her for putting the letter in the post rather than e-mailing him back. He said that seeing her familiar handwriting again made their contact “so much more valuable.” It struck Elsa as odd, unlikely, the way these details seemed to be precious to him. As if he’d shed a protective layer and what was left underneath was too tender, too vulnerable to be attractive.

Sandro Donati ordered two cappuccinos and forced Elsa to try an almond croissant despite her protests. Nonsense, he said, you are not fat at all. Elsa couldn’t make herself look into his piercing blue eyes, he was so much more attractive than she remembered when they were discussing ideas for his website. He then complimented her for the work she’d done and on the vintage leather jacket she was wearing. He asked her whether she also lived in the neighborhood.