The Other Language by Francesca Marciano
In those days getting from Rome to Greece took forever. The highway ended abruptly in Naples and to get to Brindisi on a local road full of potholes was an exhausting ordeal. The journey took two full days but the children were too excited to complain, as this was their first time abroad. That was the idea: to go on a real adventure in order to take the children’s minds off what had just happened.
For the occasion the father had bought a new car. Looking back now it was just another tiny red Fiat, though at the time it felt like a grand, modern vehicle. It impressed the children and seemed to cheer them up as if this time of their greatest loss would coincide with the promise of a richer and more exciting life. As if, by losing their mother, they had been promoted to a higher level of lifestyle.
Emma was twelve, Luca was a year older, and Monica only nine. Their feelings were muddled; they were not sure what they were expected to feel. It was the early seventies, before cell phones, before the Web, when children were still children and didn’t know about designer labels and makeup, there were no reality shows, and no easy access to information about sex.
Their upbringing had been disciplined and they had turned out to be good kids; today one would say they were low maintenance. Even as very small children, their requests to Santa Claus had been modest: a puppet, a red car, a box of watercolors were all they had wished for. But after the accident, they were inundated by an unusual attention. Schoolteachers, neighbors, parents of their school friends—all kinds of grown-ups—had offered to have them spend the night, insisted on taking them to the cinema or puppet shows, fed them chocolate cake and ice cream, presented them with toys and new books to read. This overwhelming sympathy had soon become a nuisance, but because they were so well mannered they didn’t recognize what the uncomfortable feeling they felt really was, so that suddenly the prospect of a foreign land in which to be alone with their father, in which they would not have to say the whole time thank you, yes, please, sorry, to strangers, seemed a liberation.
Emma doesn’t remember exactly when, during the trip, Monica began to cry in the middle of the night (was it in the little hotel on the way to Brindisi or was it in their cabin, on the boat crossing over to Greece?). “I want Mamma,” she kept saying, almost choking between sobs so that Emma and Luca had to wake up their father, who was sleeping next door. He seemed helpless and scared. He had never been alone with his children, at least not like this, in the midst of a drama, on the way to another country. Maybe he had been too confident, maybe it had been a mistake to drive them so soon this far away from the familiar. He managed to have someone brew a chamomile tea sweetened with honey, and after a few sips of it, Monica fell asleep again. Emma worried that if Monica cried once more they would have to turn back and go home. More than her brother and little sister, Emma wanted to get away as far as possible from what had happened so she could pretend it never had. No accident, no funeral, and no mother.
The village was nothing much. At first Emma felt it didn’t make a lot of sense to have come such a long way to find a village cut in half by a single road. A village with no particular charm, with just one bakery, one café, and two tavernas on the beach, the only places offering any kind of accommodation. The tavernas were identical, except for the colors of the chairs and tables. The first one, called Iorgo’s, had them painted blue, the second one, Vassili’s, were painted a yellow mustard. Just a few hundred meters across the beach was a tiny islet, made of two hills connected by a low strip of land. Its terrain was bare and rocky, save from a few thorny bushes, shaped like two humps on a camel’s back. It looked deserted except for a few goats that one could spot from the beach with the naked eye. The children were excited to find that it was so close. After all, this was—despite its size and closeness to the mainland—the first deserted island they had ever come across other than in adventure books.
The father had rented two rooms on the first floor of Iorgo’s taverna, after the children had expressed their preference for his blue over the yellow of Vassili’s. Emma and Monica slept together in one, the father and Luca shared the other. The rooms were simple but had flair: the floors were creaky wide planks of wood and the beds of old cast iron, painted in white, with thick, coarse cotton sheets. On the windowsills were pots of basil to keep the mosquitoes away. The children fell asleep to the sound of the waves.
They woke up early in the morning when the light was still soft, the water glassy and clear and one could make out every pebble on the bottom. They ran downstairs in their swimsuits, sat at the blue table on the beach and ordered breakfast. The only sounds were donkeys and roosters waking up and the low chatter of the fishermen intent on disentangling their nets. They devoured yogurt and honey, crisp sesame bread still warm from the bakery, shuffling their bare feet in the cool sand, under the frazzled sunlight streaming from the bamboo roof. Each one of them secretly believed this might be the end of the tears, and they marked that beach as the place where pain had ended and a new life could begin. Their father was quiet but watchful, eager to notice any progress his children made. He never asked them whether they had washed their faces, brushed their teeth; he never demanded they put their sandals back on. To see them chatting again, enjoying the different food, the light, was more than enough for him.
At lunchtime one was supposed to go straight into Iorgo’s steamy kitchen, check what was cooking on the stove and order whatever looked good. This was the children’s favorite moment of the day. To be able to lift the lids off the huge aluminum pots and peek inside had been unthinkable at home (never ever rummage inside a lady’s handbag, their mother had warned them, as if ladies could be hiding a hand grenade in there).
Moussaka, chips, keftedes: the pots always held the same food. But the children loved ordering it, picking it, rummaging as they pleased.
The women of the village were mainly dressed in black and neither swam nor sunbathed; most had the faint shadow of a mustache darkening their upper lip. But Nadia was different. She was Greek but she came from Athens: a city girl. Her extended family—a large group of aunts, cousins and big men with gold chains and bracelets—came to the village every year in the summer and always lodged at Vassili’s. She must have been fourteen at the most but she looked more like a woman in her bikini, showing off her full breasts and round hips. She always wore mascara and pouted her lips whenever she swam in her uncertain breast-strokes, always careful to keep her head above the water like an old lady who doesn’t want to get her hair wet. In their one-piece striped swimming costumes, flat-chested and skinny like shrimps, Emma and Monica x-rayed her every day with a mix of awe and contempt while Luca watched her with hormonal greed.
At meal times they couldn’t avoid hearing Nadia and her parents, cousins and aunts hissing their s’s and rolling their r’s, always at the top of their lungs as they ate large portions of moussaka and chips.
“Why are they always screaming? Are they having an argument?” Emma asked her father.
“It’s just the way Greek sounds. Be grateful that there is one place where people are louder than Italians.”
He gestured toward Nadia.
“You should go and try to talk to that girl, Emma. She’s about your age.”
Emma shook her head.
“She’s not. She’s much older.”
Emma didn’t want to make friends with anybody new. She didn’t want to have to answer when they’d ask, “Where is your mother?”