Apparently Mina had first gained her stature because of her closeness with the local barons, Donna Clara, Don Filippo, their children and later on to their children’s husbands and wives. She had measured waists, bellies and breasts of three generations of barons and baronesses, brushed their bodies with her nimble fingers, draped cloth around their hips and buttocks. She knew how the women of the family tended to grow heavy around the thighs and thin in the torso, how the men would stay thin but put on love handles after forty. She suggested—discreetly—which cut or length would best suit them. The family had worn her perfectly tailored clothes at first communions, weddings, baptisms and garden parties, season after season. Whenever she would run into them on her way to the grocery shop, or at one of the many processions or funerals that ran along the main street, she would check out their dresses, jackets, trousers and whisper to a neighbor walking alongside her, “See how nicely it falls in the back? Look at the way I did the pleats, the pockets, the lapels. How becoming the cut on the shoulders, the collar, the way it’s pinched at the waist.”
By the time Lara bought the house on Mina’s street, Donna Clara and Don Filippo had been dead for ten years at least and their children and grandchildren were scattered between Rome, Milan, Paris and Madrid. The second generation of barons worked as doctors, lawyers and financial consultants; one had become a successful shoe designer and was in a happy gay marriage in Spain. Things had changed a lot since the time of their parents; they no longer cared to use their titles and hardly ever came back to their eighteenth-century palazzo in the village square. It was too expensive to keep and none of them wanted to live there anyway, so they rented it out for weddings in order to pay for its maintenance. From April to October, young brides from the nearby villages wrapped in the cloud of tulle they’d always dreamed of would get photographed leaning from the balcony of the palazzo against a wall of ivy, or under a cascade of wisteria. By then even the people in the village had begun to shop at the OVS, the ubiquitous cheap department store where one could buy clothes for thirty-five euros. The epoch of tailored clothes was officially over.
Leo, the house is finished (I officially moved in three weeks ago!) as you can see from the attached photos. It’s actually a lot larger and more spacious than it looks in the pictures. The ceilings are spectacularly high, I just can’t get them all in the shot because I don’t have the right lens. I walk to the beach every day (twenty minutes, walking briskly), I swim, I read a lot, I pick my rucola and fresh zucchini from the garden (did you know they grow overnight? They turn into monsters if you forget to pick them) and soon the figs will be ready on the tree. My neighbors are all supernice old ladies (not a man in sight, they must have all died or run off) and I’ve done all I could in my power to make them feel comfortable having me here. The other night I had a party for all of them. I baked spelt banana bread (which they had never had), made buckwheat cherry muffins (which they had never heard of) and made tea (which they never drink, this is espresso nation). However I made them try everything and after a few awkward moments and many laughs I have a feeling we bonded. Mina is my favorite one; she’s an amazing seamstress, she’s made me two beautiful shirts and a dress that cost me next to nothing. It’s incredible: you just bring her a Prada shirt and she makes its identical twin for 25 euros! This is part of what is so lovely about living here: everything is simple, easy and cheap. When are you going to come? You did promise, remember? Can’t wait to spend a bit of time with you!
It had taken almost an hour to compose an e-mail to her brother. It was important that she sounded funny and light, and that she gave the most alluring description of her new domain. He e-mailed her back ten days later. Late and economical, as always.
Hi, thanks for the pix, very martha stewart. I’m coming to visit in august for a few days, I’ll be with a client I’m representing, ben jackson (have u seen “the man at the door”?), the guardian published a big spread last week on yr area, it looked really cool, then we go visit friends in pantelleria, talk to u soon. Does skype work from there?
Six years earlier Leo had moved to London, where he’d begun his career as an assistant to a film agent. Recently he had followed his boss to Los Angeles and become a partner. All of a sudden younger stars were flocking to him. He was perfect for the job; taking care of others had been his number-one specialty since he was a child. He seemed to possess a bottomless reserve of charm that he was able to shower on anyone he encountered. He was a natural. People came away from their first encounter with him certain to have made an indelible impression and a dent in his heart, a certainty that Leo was careful to keep feeding. His charm was his secret weapon, ensuring he’d be loved back, even if falsely or temporarily.
Thus it was odd how one of the very few people left out of this tight circle of love was his sister. He seemed to have lost interest in Lara, as if time spent in her company was not as rewarding as with everyone else. Yes, his life had taken a sharp turn and was now very different from hers—he attended exclusive parties, flew business class to film festivals, had his expensive meals and hotels paid for with a corporate card and was followed by an endless string of girlfriends without names. He was capable of sending a gift via iTunes to a particularly nice salesgirl with whom he’d had a casual conversation about a band while trying on clothes, or sending flowers with a thank-you note to an older lady he’d met on a plane (“For the wonderful conversation that made our flight last only minutes!”). But he hardly ever remembered to call his sister. Whenever Lara rang him he always happened to be in a meeting; if they succeeded in having a conversation he endured prolonged pauses during which she could hear him tapping on computer keys, and her own metallic voice reverberating in the room on speaker phone. Lara had begun to fear that he might be thinking of her as a loser. The Martha Stewart remark only confirmed this worry.
You can’t come with Ben Jackson, this house isn’t grand enough for him!! Let me book him a place where he’ll be much more comfortable. There is a fabulous palazzo converted into B&B only six km from me. Jodie Foster stayed there. Please don’t let him come and stay! No Skype from here, sorry. Signal is too weak.
Leo’s response came, surprisingly, just two hours later.
Ben is cool. The house looks fine. Stop fretting.
The shirts and dresses always came neatly folded inside a plastic envelope, crisp and skillfully pressed, then wrapped in a sheet of newspaper sealed with tape. The package felt solid and as full of promise as a gift box from an exclusive boutique. Mina’s work had a Victorian quality. It was flawless in every detail; the collar, pleats and buttonholes were stitched as if by an invisible hand and the buttons were either mother of pearl or covered in the same material as the dress. Lara’s full name was always embroidered inside the collar in lovely childish lettering. Each time Lara had to insist that Mina quote her a price, but she would turn her head, reluctantly, the other way.
“I don’t know. You give me what you think is right.”
“Please, Mina. Otherwise I cannot ask you to make me anything else. Please.”
This would go on for a while, till Mina would finally relent.
“Ten, fifteen, you decide. Whatever you think is right.”
Lara would put a twenty on the table and Mina would snatch it without a sound the minute Lara took her eyes away. Clearly it was part of village etiquette, this pretense that money wasn’t the issue. Outside of what she paid for the house itself, this felt like the best-spent money of her entire life. Lara, in her new clothes, looked in the mirror and saw herself slender and pretty again.
“Mina, you are a genius.”
Mina cocked her head, beaming. Since the day Lara had become such an enthusiastic client, the issue of the forno seemed to have been forgotten, or at least put temporarily behind them.
For two years now Lara had seen her own body progressively lose its contours and definition. It wasn’t age, it was the divorce that had caused the implosion and slackened her from within. Her whole being had lost muscle and core, as though what she’d assumed was her legendary physical strength, her lean muscular body trained by years of running, and then practicing and teaching yoga, had turned out to be only a secondary effect of the safety of her marriage, a reflection of her domestic stability. The minute her husband was gone, so too fled her body. Since then, clothes had had the purpose only of covering up what she feared about herself.
At first there had been boredom. It had seeped into their marriage like a fume. Suddenly there was nothing to talk about, it was as simple as that. Nothing in the news worth discussing, nothing worth watching together on TV, no Caravaggio exhibit worth standing in line for, nothing they could share and use as a conversation piece. Just “Would you like another coffee? Are you coming back for lunch? Did you pick up my jacket from the cleaners? I am so tired I think I’ll just go to bed.” Their life had shrunk to a sequence of polite questions and answers that only served to make sure the mechanics of their cohabitation kept on working.
Then came the rage. It hit them like a tornado, it blew away the fume of boredom and shook their household from the foundations. In fifteen operatic minutes on one Sunday night everything came down and shattered. Rage made them feel alive and strong, gave color to their cheeks, lit their eyes. They were, for a fleeting moment, beautiful and sexy again. Of course it was a younger woman—a French one—whom they’d met at a dinner party three months earlier—a fact that gave Lara the chance to replay and revise all the instances when her husband had told her he wasn’t coming home for dinner/was going to see his brother in Genoa/meet in Paris an investor for his green technology firm, etc., etc. Lara stood up from the kitchen table, where they were eating a spinach and beluga lentil salad, and hurled the plate across the room. She saw the crumbled feta scatter in slow motion, then land on his shirt like snowflakes. She detected a flash of terror in his eyes and knew that at last she’d gained some power over him. She immediately furthered the opportunity and slapped him in the face. The gesture felt artful and precise as if, along with the shock, a supernatural force had just lodged inside her and was going to stay for good.
Sadly, rage turned out to be a bad drug; it never tasted as good as the first time and when it dissolved it left her limp on the floor like a used dishrag. She had tried to recapture its magnificence by summoning him again the next day for a further explanation (by then he’d checked into a hotel) but the force was gone, her fury was only a repetition of a stale act that led her nowhere. Now that he had abandoned the house, her husband seemed to have become invulnerable as if, after nine long years of marriage, he had, overnight, learned the trick of how to become a stranger. He was no longer scared of her reactions, but accommodating like a doctor with a difficult patient, ready to file for divorce, willing to take care of the bills and let her have the apartment. He was simply in a hurry to leave her behind.
“Is it because of the sex? I just need to know,” she finally asked, wincing at the predictability of the words she was saying. It was the last time they saw each other alone, before the lawyers became their permanent bodyguards.
“No,” he said.
“Then what is it? Does she make you feel younger?”
“No,” he said, drawing out the syllable into two and moving his gaze toward her with a hint of mercy. “Actually, she makes me laugh.”
Months later, once she had adjusted to the situation, the thing she regretted the most was having asked this last question. She could easily have lived with the version everyone had heard a million times, which required no translation, being the same in Chinese and Icelandic: man leaves wife for a younger, sexy girl who adores him without discernment. But no. He had left her for someone he simply had more fun with. She had visions of her husband and the girl driving through Provence in a convertible, laughing their heads off, as their hair blew in the wind.
Had she lost her sense of humor along the way, or—and this was what she feared the most—had she never had one to begin with?
Her brother texted her three days before arriving:
How many bars?
Just one in the main square.
They don’t serve fancy cocktails, I warn you.
I mean bars as in reception for iPhone.
Ooops. 2. Sometimes 4 if u go up on the roof.