They entered Mina’s breezy room with the cat and the flying wisps of thread. She was sitting on a tiny chair with her reading glasses perched on her nose, intent on stitching something. She stood up immediately the minute she saw Ben and Leo.
“Come in! Welcome! Please, sit down!” she said, grabbing a chair and a stool. “And who are these nice giovanotti? Are they both your brothers?”
Lara had never seen her so excited before. Oh, the presence of men, she thought. The difference it always makes.
Leo shook her hand, yes he was Lara’s younger brother, and Ben introduced himself as Beniamino, un amico. He handed Mina a couple of shirts and patted his stomach.
“I’m afraid I’m bigger now,” he said in his broken Italian.
“He means he’s put on a little bit of weight, since he bought those,” Leo intervened.
Mina took a professional look at the shirts and at Ben’s waistline. She grabbed a measuring tape.
“Lift your arms, please,” she ordered.
Mina looked like a dwarf hugging a giant as she slid the tape around him. She scribbled measurements with her childish handwriting on a scrap of a used paper napkin.
“Now your shoulders. Turn around.”
Clearly she had no idea who Ben was—his films were a bit too highbrow for the local cinemas—and this seemed to relax him.
“I guess I’ll leave you two in Mina’s hands,” Lara said, relieved. “I’ll be home if you need anything.”
The introduction had been a success. She ran back to the house and turned up the volume of the radio, just in time to catch the tail end of her favorite show.
In the days that followed Mina must have been working nonstop because the packages kept coming. She knocked at the door twice a day to summon Ben or Leo for yet another fitting. She had needles already threaded pinned to her shirt, scissors in her pocket, strands of fabric stuck to her skirt and she always looked frantic, as if high on something. Ben and Leo kept ordering more clothes and buying more fabric. Mina knew of old shops in the nearby villages that still had great leftover cloth from the seventies, or stalls that sold bolts of material at wholesale prices at the farmers’ markets. They got in their car and drove incessantly following the directions she drew on her paper napkins. They always came home with rolls of soft percale cotton, pure linen, light cashmere wool under their arms, exultant and rewarded as if they’d been on a great outdoor adventure.
A few days later Lara came home from her midmorning swim and found the house empty. She set up the table for lunch, mixed a couscous salad with eggplant, fresh mint and fennel. Two hours later Leo and Ben came back, Ben waving enthusiastically and mouthing a hello, phone glued to his ear, as he went up the stairs leading to the roof in search of the fourth bar. Leo placed a woven basket filled with muddy potatoes and zucchini on the kitchen counter.
“This is from Mina. She has an amazing vegetable garden in the back of the house. Have you seen it?”
“Nope.”
“Ben had a go at digging out the potatoes. It was hilarious.”
He went straight to the fridge and poured himself some water. He glanced at the table.
“Don’t bother with food, we just had something to eat at Mina’s.”
“Did you? Did she make you lunch?”
“Yes. Supplì di riso with saffron.”
Lara cleared away the plates, napkins and her tastefully constructed salad.
“… and carciofi fritti.”
“Wow, pretty fierce, cholesterol wise. And what did you talk about?”
“Lots of stuff. That woman is so much fun. The stories she tells. She told us about an old house right outside the village, past the railroad crossing. Nine rooms, vaulted ceilings, a huge lemon orchard.”
“Really?”
“Some relatives of hers want to sell it. She said she could get it for us for something like two hundred.”
“Us?” Lara stopped putting the plates away and turned toward her brother. “I had no idea you were interested in real estate, Leo.”
“Well, Ben is.”
“But why?”
Leo looked at his sister, surprised, then his tone shifted as if he were trying to handle someone irrefutably obstinate.
“What’s so strange? He likes it here.”
“He hasn’t seen anything. All he’s done is run back and forth from here to Mina’s or up on the roof to talk on the phone.”
“Ben has traveled all over the world. He can tell pretty quickly how he feels about a place. And nobody knows who he is here. That’s a big plus for him.”
Lara sat across from her brother at the kitchen table, discouraged. This little vacation wasn’t going at all the way she’d hoped.
“It could be a good investment as well. Ben is pretty shrewd when it comes to business.”
“Is he?” she asked, trying to sound neutral.
“Of course. His father was a mega investment banker. Ben has learned a thing or two from him.”
“How convenient.”
Leo ignored her sarcasm.
“We’re going with Mina to look at the house later this afternoon,” he said, without inviting her.
Lara felt gloom wrap itself around her like a fog. When she had mentioned her plan about buying property only a couple of days earlier, he hadn’t shown a flicker of interest. Why couldn’t they ever connect on anything? She had missed her brother and now that she was on her own, she needed him more than she had in the past.
They both remained silent for a moment across the table from each other, suddenly uneasy at finding themselves alone with each other in such a small space. Ben’s intense phone flirting came down through the open door in bursts. It had become the musical score of their days together.
“Is this his lover?” Lara asked.
“I don’t know.”
“Of course it is.”
Leo didn’t say anything. He stood up and made a move as if to leave the kitchen, then turned back to her.
“Don’t you open your mouth.”
“As if I could give a shit. Honestly.”
“He’s in love, okay?”
“Good for him.”
Then Leo moved closer, lowering his voice.
“He’s madly in love, Lara. I’ve never seen him like this before.”
Leo seemed sincerely moved, as if Ben’s new happiness had changed things for the better for him as well. Actually, it was generous of her brother, Lara thought, to give some dignity to all those extramarital phone calls.
Lara was beginning to see what her problem was: she wasn’t ready to accommodate other people’s joy yet, she didn’t have enough room in her. Next summer, maybe. It had been a mistake, this desire to share her space so soon. She heard herself saying, “It’s a phase. It doesn’t last. It never does.”
Leo frowned. “Jesus. Why do you have to be so negative?”
“Actually only the other day you called me an optimist. Anyway, it’s lust, Leonardo. It’s a drug. You know that perfectly well, we’ve all been through it.”
“Maybe we all need a little help for the initial boost,” Leo said.
She thought about this for a moment. Yes. Love was a drug, a rave. People got high on it and within half an hour were capable of doing anything in its name. No place was too far to reach, no phone number too expensive to call, no decision faster to make. Lara envisioned a gigantic diptych in the vein of Michelangelo. It would be called The Last Misjudgment. Two frescoes on opposite walls: on one, a crowd of people would be engaged in all sorts of crazy activities—jumping off cliffs on Olympic trampolines; getting ready to sail the Atlantic solo or kneeling all the way to Santiago de Compostela, all in the name of love. On the other, the same crowd would be trapped in the debris of their marriages: slumped on couches, snoring in front of TV screens, overweight, dressed like slobs, eating in murderous silence at a pizza parlor.
Was Leo right? Had she really become negative? Hostile? Jealous? God, did she feel awful.
Ben barged in from the roof staircase grinning and made his announcement.
“Green light. We can go tomorrow!”
“Excellent!” Leo stood up, beaming.
They gave each other a high five. Then Ben turned to Lara and said, “We’re going to visit a friend in Pantelleria. Do you know how to get there from here?”
“I have no idea. But I’m sure your phone will tell you,” Lara said, her voice blurred, as though she’d just woken up from a feverish sleep.
Neither Leo nor Ben seemed to notice her grumpiness, and Ben was already tapping away on his beloved touch screen.
“I’ll get Allison to take care of this. She’s a whiz when it comes to travel,” he said to Lara, smiling his fat boy smile.