The Other Language (47 page)

“I see you often coming and going on your bicycle. I live right around the corner, in Via Monserrato,” he said.

The fact that he was a neighbor as well as a client seemed to allow a significant shift in their relationship. Elsa found him easy to talk to—they compared notes about the new restaurant that had just opened in Via dei Giubbonari, discussed which one was their favorite vegetable seller at the market in Campo de’ Fiori. Elsa was flattered when he asked her for her phone number.

“If you like, one of these days we could go to a movie or get a bite at that new place,” he said, and rose to kiss her lightly on the cheek when she left.

Elsa rode her bike to the studio in a state of euphoria. Lately there had been little excitement in Elsa’s love life. An affair with a married man had gone awry a couple of years earlier and she’d been sleeping on and off with an old boyfriend she was no longer attracted to just to keep her body engaged in some sort of sexual activity. Even that had come to an end for lack of purpose.

In the following days she caught herself checking messages and missed calls. When she finally saw Sandro’s name on the display and he told her he’d been given two tickets for Barker’s concert, she couldn’t say no.

It wasn’t long before Elsa had lost interest in Drew’s correspondence. He’d told her that he’d started to play music again but his life in Kenosha, apart from a couple of gigs in small venues with his band and idle talk of a contract with an obscure music producer, seemed to have shrunk into a dull repetition—early morning jog, nine to six in the hardware shop, evening practice with the band in the garage. He did mention attending weekly Narcotics Anonymous meetings—so Elsa’s friend was spot-on there—and she suspected that getting off his addictions had probably made him a better person. But it had dulled the edge, killed the magic. All his romantic notions about art and literature, about living his life to its fullest, all that drug-induced passion that had possessed him and sometimes embarrassed her when she knew him
in Rome, seemed to have faded and dispersed like fog, revealing his true substance. Reformed Drew was actually no longer worth yearning for, she told herself. And that’s how Elsa was healed of her broken heart and eventually stopped thinking about him altogether.

The posters were everywhere now. A black-and-white one was covering the scaffolding on the façade of the Andrea della Valle church, which was undergoing yet another restoration. As Elsa kneeled down to lock her bicycle to a lamppost across the street, she felt Barker’s now universally recognized shape hovering above her. The shot caught him jumping midair in skinny jeans and cowboy boots, his sculpted biceps protruding from his T-shirt like some kind of superhero in flight. For a moment she wondered whether it was a good idea, to see him in the flesh again after so many years, even if only at a distance, while in the company of a man she barely knew and had a bit of a crush on.

Sandro had made a reservation at the restaurant around the corner so they could get a quick bite before the concert. Elsa found him sitting at a table, wearing a kind of English countryman’s cap and a fluorescent orange shirt peeking out beneath a bright blue jacket. Did he look glamorous? she asked herself. Fashionable, perhaps, but also on the verge of ridiculous. They both seemed less at ease than they’d been at the outdoor café only a few days earlier, and struggled to find a subject about which they might both be knowledgeable enough to sustain a conversation. This was exactly what was so nerve-racking about going on a first date these days: one had to proceed on this slippery, egg-shelled ground that could crack at any second. They began their slow trek picking through the main headline of the day—the primary election for the new Democratic Party candidate—but their opinions turned out to be antithetical, so they quickly backed up and ventured onto a different theme, as they didn’t want to—didn’t care,
actually—have a debate. Their point was to agree, not to differ, to find common ground rather than contradict each other. Elsa ordered a hamburger and he made a comment in passing about being a vegetarian, so they explored that issue temporarily—Was he a vegan? No, actually a pescatarian. Was it because of some Buddhist credo? No, he simply didn’t eat anything that had a face. Ah yes, she could totally see his point, maybe she too should stop eating animals with faces. When that subject had been unraveled to its fullest, Elsa turned the conversation to summer holidaying. She said she enjoyed hiking the Dolomites in August, Sandro said he liked Ibiza in September, when the rave crowd had left. He said he always rented the same villa on the far side of the island—a very simple, very isolated farmhouse. It is so quiet, you’d never know you were in Ibiza. That’s what everyone always said about Ibiza, Elsa thought, they all made sure to stay in the remotest part of the island, so remote that you would never know it
was
Ibiza. She wondered why people bothered going to a place where they had to make such an effort to stay away from everything the place was famous for.

The idle chatter was beginning to tire her. The problem was she wasn’t feeling any vibe coming from him, there was absolutely zero chemistry now, which was maybe part of the reason it was so hard to find common ground. She wondered why on earth he’d bothered asking her for a date.

“Nice shirt,” Elsa said at one point. She must have hit the right spot at last because he suddenly jumped up from his chair and stood, beaming.

“It’s my favorite,” he said, with unexpected fervor. He struggled out of the shiny jacket and turned around, showing the fluorescent white velcro stripes on the back of his shirt.

“Guess what?” He laughed, delighted.

“Tell me.”

“I found it under a pile of junk at the Porta Portese flea market. This is the shirt men wear on road works. Five euros!”

“That’s amazing,” she said. “Amazing. I thought it was a Helmut Lang. Five euros? Pheeew! Who would have guessed.”

Barker’s first album came out in the mid-nineties, only a few years after he’d left Rome, and became a worldwide sensation overnight. He’d surprised Elsa once more: risen from the ashes of his detoxified, mediocre life, he’d bloomed into a star. Elsa just couldn’t believe how fast he’d made the leap from the hardware store in Kenosha to the cover of
Rolling Stone
.

Then she read in a magazine the title of his hit song, the one that had climbed to the top of the charts.

“Roman Romance.” And her heart skipped a beat.

So those letters had not been just a formality, a mandatory step to add her pardon to his list. The song had to be his tribute to her, long overdue. What a relief for Elsa to realize that with time and sobriety Drew—or Barker, whatever she was supposed to call him now—had been reminiscing about their love, that he had genuinely missed her. And to realize that she, well—that she had been in some way his muse.

Elsa ran to the music store in Via del Corso and bought the CD, but as soon as she got home and sat down to listen to the lyrics, she was mortified.

By then it was already too late, there was no way of stopping the rumor. Friends started ringing her up, people she only barely knew stopped her on the street, acting unusually friendly, her mother pestered her. All of them asking the same question. Is it you, the girl in the song? Is it you?

It was pointless to tell people that no, it wasn’t her but a blond Texan art student. People just wouldn’t hear, they loved the story too much. Knowing Elsa made them feel a step closer to Barker. By knowing her, they too could claim a piece of him. So the song kept following her. It became an albatross in C-sharp minor, another reminder of her humiliation.

She hadn’t been to a big rock concert since her twenties and never in such a grand auditorium. Crowds frightened her. People were streaming inside the stadium like ants, joyfully, expectantly. They walked with beatific smiles stamped on their faces, as if to confirm they were all there for the same exact reason, like a clan wearing the same tattoo. The place probably had more than twenty thousand seats and it was full to the brim. Sandro had been given VIP tickets, so they sat in a square section right across from the stage, cordoned off and slightly above the heads of those below. There were comfortable, nicely padded chairs, and complimentary mineral water with snacks. Elsa recognized a few faces in the VIP crowd, a couple of actresses and comedians, a young politician who had been recently involved in a scandal, fashion models with chopstick legs in impossible high heels next to orange-tanned football players. They were passing out Champagne in paper cups to one another, kissing and hugging and making their cordoned-off space their special private party, blatantly ignoring the supporting act. One of them—a beautiful dark-headed woman Elsa had seen in several films—came over and kissed Sandro Donati quickly on the mouth. I love your shirt, she said in a throaty, languorous voice, I am so going to steal it from you.

As the lights went down, a ripple went through the audience and then—there he was, center stage, under one sharp cone of light, in black pants and a crisp white shirt. His face filled the giant screen behind him: the tiny crow’s-feet, the two-day-old beard, the Mick Jagger lips, every intimate detail was so uncannily familiar to Elsa. She had actually touched those cheekbones, she knew the dots floating in those irises and the straight bridge of that nose. When the camera framed his hands picking the strings of the acoustic guitar, she recognized the shape of his fingers, his square nails and
the flat shape of his thumb, which for some reason she had always found such an exquisite, manly feature. Those fingers had actually once explored every millimeter of her body, including cavities and hidden parts.