Slowly, gingerly, they made their way with the crowd down the steep winding road that led to the small harbor. Whole families marched together, fathers carrying their children on their shoulders, old ladies holding on to the arms of their daughters, kids eating their gelati. They walked briskly, with festive smiles, grown-ups and children equally eager for the music and the fireworks that were to follow. Below, on the small piazza by the water’s edge, there were stalls selling sweets—caramelized almonds, chocolate nougat and Nutella crepes—and Chinese-made toys that lit up, buzzed and shrieked with Star Wars sounds. The local band in their uniforms was tuning the trombones and the tubas under the pagoda-shaped gazebo set up in the piazza. In a few minutes the door of the white church would let out the procession bearing the statue of the Virgin. The oldest and strongest fishermen decked out in their Sunday clothes would bring her down to the pier, haul her onto one of the boats. Mina’s gait wobbled on the steep descent. She grabbed Lara’s arm, making her slow down.
“I am not stupid,” she hissed. “If one’s name is printed in that American magazine—whatever it’s called—one becomes famous all over the world. Why couldn’t he say, ‘Write this down: all my clothes were made by Mina Corvaglia from Andrano’?”
“He totally should have told the magazine,” Lara agreed. Part of her was rejoicing. She was going to recount it all to Leo, word for word.
“Perhaps he thinks he doesn’t need to give my name because I am just a—a peasant, from the sticks,” Mina said, shaking her head. “But we don’t live in mud huts here.”
Mina knew exactly where they needed to position themselves in order to get the best view of the boats and the fireworks. She stopped on top of a stairway that went steeply down all the way to the square, unfolded a large handkerchief and spread it on one of the spotless steps. She sat on it with care, and kept brushing her pleated skirt, making sure it wouldn’t touch the pavement. Lara sat next to her and remained quiet for a few minutes, as the procession slowly approached the harbor. They watched as the statue of the Vergine della Tempesta was carefully placed inside a palanquin on the prow of a larger boat adorned with flowers and candles.
“What about the house he’s buying?” Lara finally asked.
Mina was busy making sure her skirt was in place. She then closed her arm around her knees.
“My cousin, he changed his mind. He’s decided to keep the house for now.”
“Really? How come?”
“Too much confusion. Paparazzi will come to steal photos, more foreigners will come to buy property, prices will go up. We don’t need that kind of pandemonium here.”
The evening light was dimming and turning everything into a watercolor with runny edges of lavender and blue. The boats had grouped around the biggest one, the one that carried the Virgin, and they started to move away from the shore in the twilight. The big boat led the way with its palanquin in a triumph of tiny lights and the fishermen’s boats followed with their flickering lanterns. Somewhere, someone was lighting small hot air balloons made of paper that ascended in a slow, billowing flight, one by one. They were dotting the sky with their orangey glow, illuminated by the boat lights below, forming a dazzling constellation.
Just then the moon emerged from the strand of haze sitting on top of the horizon. A big, apricot moon, pinned against a lilac background. Everything went quiet, the band, the birds, the children’s voices, the Chinese electronic toys. It was as if for a moment everyone felt what it was like to be present, all together, and alive.
Lara held her breath. She had hoped for this feeling for so long. And now, without her aiming for it or practicing toward it, here it was, epiphanic, timeless. She knew the feeling would last only another handful of seconds. But somehow, hadn’t she earned it? From now on she’d at least be able to call it back and it would unfold, replay itself.
She looked at Mina and their eyes met. For whatever seconds were left of that knowing, they were together in it and nothing needed to be said. Then the first of the fireworks sprang up in a cascade of gold that streaked the darkening sky, then fell with a soft crackling noise into the water.
After two hours of fireworks and deafening explosions, their lungs and eyes filled with so much acrid smoke it was as if they’d just escaped a battlefield, Lara suggested it might be time to leave. They’d eaten pork sandwiches and Nutella crepes, bought the nougat and a plastic parrot on a branch that chirped every five minutes, which Mina was planning to hang on her lemon tree. Her digestion upset, but nevertheless satisfied and happily exhausted, Lara steered Mina up the hill, back to where the car was parked.
“Does it get very cold in the winter months here?” she asked, as she drove them back, breaking the sleepy silence in the car.
No answer came, so Lara took her eyes away from the road and turned to Mina, who shook her head, her eyes half closed.
“You know, I was thinking …,” Lara went on. “How much do you think it would cost to rebuild the forno at the house?”
“I don’t know. I can ask my cousin.”
“I had this crazy idea. I was thinking I could turn that room into a small bakery. I’m a pretty good baker, you know? I used to make my own bread.”
“You could make pizza too,” Mina murmured.
“Exactly! I could also bake muffins in the morning. I think it would work, especially in the summer months, for the tourists. Don’t you think?”
“If you made good bread, even the local people will buy it all year round. Nobody makes bread the way we used to anymore. Everyone is using that chemical yeast now.”
“Absolutely. And there are no good bakeries around us for miles.”
Mina yawned.
“I could give you my aunt’s recipe.”
It had started to get dark much earlier now. Lara could smell the woody scent of fall coming through the half-open window.
“Maybe you and I could go into this together,” she offered.
There was no answer.
“You know what? I think we’d make good money,” Lara said almost to herself and threw a glance at Mina. She was snoring lightly, her head abandoned to the headrest, the plastic parrot clutched to her chest.
Lara drove on in the pitch-dark, the brights shining on the twisted olive trunks shaped like gnomes. But it was easy; by now she knew the way home like the back of her hand.
An Indian Soirée
The crow woke her up with a start, ripping her away from the dream. Every morning at seven sharp, the stupid bird tapped its beak on the window demanding to enter, each day unaware that he was knocking on a pane of glass. Its relentless cawing was the most disagreeable sound to wake up to.
Her heart was still beating fast from what had just happened in her sleep. She glanced at the pillow next to hers. Her husband gave a moan directed at the crow, then turned over and continued to sleep. Better that way. She needed some time alone.
She lay still, in an attempt to extricate herself from the shreds of her dream. She had just been passionately kissed and made love to and the lovemaking had stirred such a strong longing, she was still overwhelmed and aroused. Apparently she and her ex-lover had met again at a party somewhere. There were people standing around with drinks in hand. He had pressed her gently against the wall, his forehead on hers, and that’s how they’d looked into each other’s eyes, like two stags locking antlers. She had felt they were being observed and for a moment had thought, This is impossible, we can’t, not in front of everybody. Instead all she said in the dream was “I have missed you so much,” and it felt as though such an uncomplicated phrase had instantly commanded a truth that had been buried for years. The words had taken on, as often happens in dreams, a special power, as if they’d meant so much more than just that. As she pronounced them she had felt a surge of relief. From that moment on, she knew it would be impossible to hide this simple truth again: it was true, she had missed him all these years, despite having refused to admit it, so that the dream had come as a revelation, an awakening of sorts. Just then he had leaned in to kiss her, pressing his mouth to hers with an incredible will, in the same way he had with his forehead. And then, still in the dream, of course, she no longer cared if others were watching and word would get out. Yes, it would be public. Her husband would have to know. It was inevitable. They had found each other again and discovered that their passion was intact. In fact, it had never faded. How astonishing was that?
She got up slowly, entered the bathroom and looked at herself in the mirror. She hadn’t seen him in almost fifteen years. She didn’t even know where he was anymore, whether he was married or had children. Then why, she wondered, why would he come in her dream so forcefully, so completely out of the blue? She splashed her face with cold water. Her eyes looked puffy again, she noticed with dismay. It felt almost as if he’d ambushed her, leaping out from the depths of some repressed memory. And what was the dream meant to be? A secret message? A prophecy? How about telepathy? Could he have been dreaming of her too, on the very same night? Was this some kind of message she was meant to pick up and do something about? After the kiss, when he’d made love to her, the feeling was so visceral, she couldn’t accept it had been just something she’d fabricated. She must have had an orgasm or something, it just wasn’t possible to feel this way otherwise. She looked at her face, more closely this time, till her breath fogged the mirror. Puffy eyes, crinkly at the corners.
This was insane. Yes, insane. But she wanted him back now—how did that happen?—after years of not even thinking of him. She would have to track his number, his Facebook page or search his username on Skype. Nobody could disappear entirely anymore. She unscrewed the cap of jasmine bath gel, one of the luxurious ayurvedic products offered in the hotel, and turned on the shower.
He knew exactly what was going to happen to her hair. As it thinned out—and it would, eventually, with age—it would go limp and disclose the unseemly shape of the back of her head, which was flat. He knew it would happen, because of her mother. That’s exactly what had happened to her head and he found the detail deeply depressing, as though this plane at the back of her mother’s head, its lack of roundness, signaled a weakness. It made the older woman look even more helpless, especially since she was unaware of this particular flaw, being at the back where she couldn’t see it. He had never liked his mother-in-law. She was a petulant, self-centered and uninteresting woman who relentlessly talked rubbish. Often he’d had to stop himself from shouting at her to shut the fuck up. That was another problem with marriage, you were stuck for life with people you didn’t care for.
Why these days did he always wake up to unpleasant thoughts such as this one? They’d come just like that, surprisingly clear and specific. His wife’s hair issue wasn’t a particularly bad one compared to others. Most days the first thought he’d have would concern his own death. It was like a message flashing an alarm just as he was floating back to the surface of consciousness. A little voice would warn him, getting louder and louder till he had to open his eyes: “Good morning, you are going to die! It will occur soon, every day it’ll be a day sooner!”
He’d started having these deathly reminders since he’d turned thirty-five. It was the age when he’d became physically aware that half of his life had gone past him. Once he’d heard a well-known writer at a dinner party, much older than him, say that since he’d turned fifty he’d had the distinct sensation that he had more past than future, as on a scale that tilts the other way. The concept had terrified him. These unpleasant thoughts, such as his wife’s hair eventually flattening with age (which he put in the same death department as this idea, too, had to do with the passing of time and the loss of youth), would greet him as soon as he opened his eyes with a frightening punctuality, like that damned crow cawing so loudly outside the window, that horrible sound that always woke him with a fright. There was nothing to do. Crows, he had told his wife since the day they arrived, were the sound track of India. And so was death. According to the clichés.
He stumbled out of bed and went into the shower. There were signs of his wife having just left: a damp towel abandoned on the floor, the bottle of shower gel uncapped, covered in droplets. His wife was an early riser and her morning routine was always a fast one. It was one of the first things he’d observed about her when they’d first started sleeping together. She could be ready in fifteen minutes and look perfect. He thought that it was an attractive trait in a woman; he hated having to wait around and didn’t like women who put on too much makeup. The shower was pleasantly hot, the bath gel’s fragrance was sweet. As usual, sinister thoughts were washed out under the forceful jet. They were not to come back again, at least until the next morning.
He had been to India before, loved it, and had enjoyed playing the India expert for decades. This time however, he wasn’t sure he loved it as much. Maybe he was just in a bad mood, and India could be difficult if taken the wrong way. Things that had never bothered him were now beginning to take a toll. The pollution, the ugly malls sprouting everywhere in the big cities. Even the food was tiresome. When they had gone up north in Rajasthan two weeks earlier, nothing had felt authentic, it had all seemed a circus, a fa?ade for the wealthy tourists. When he had traveled through the same regions back in his twenties, he had felt as though he had continuously stumbled upon fairy tales happening before his eyes. The magnificent haveli in Jaisalmer that cost only two hundred rupees a night where no other guests were staying, seemingly open just for him and his friend; their room with exquisite wall paintings and a balcony carved in sandstone overlooking the desert. The lovely country residence of a local Thakur outside Bikaner who had taken him horseback riding through the plains and led him inside a thatched hut, its mud floor swept clean, walls painted in bright turquoise lime, where they’d been offered opium tea by the Bishnoi, a vanishing tribe over which the Thakur family had ruled for centuries. Now the haveli looking out on the desert had been badly restored and was on Trip Advisor and the Thakur had handed his family home over to a hotel chain, so that now travel agents offered guided tours in the huts of the Bishnoi with “opium tea included in the price.” It all had to do with time, of course. That was then, when he was young and India was poor, this was now, when he could afford a seven-star hotel and India’s economy had grown at a stellar rate.
His wife had never been to India before and she loved everything she saw unconditionally. Before they left she had devoured guidebooks, Indian novels, essays on Hinduism and Jainism, and was determined to get the most out of this trip. She was an enthusiast, a firm believer in the glass-half-full theory. He had married her partly for that reason: he knew that as long as he held on to her, she would save him from the gloom that haunted him at every corner.
During the trip she noticed things he no longer saw or that didn’t interest him enough to notice.
“I love the way everything happens on the floor. How good people here are at doing things we can do only on tables.”
“Like what?”
“Eating. Ironing. Lots of stuff. Have you seen how the tailors squat and hold the material down with their big toe when they cut it?”
Images like that stuck. Now, whenever they happened to see a tailor at work on his haunches, he couldn’t help checking his feet, how deftly he was using them to clasp the fabric.
“Do you realize these women drape six meters of fabric around their bodies with only one pin, if any? They tuck the pleated fabric of the sari into the petticoat. No buttons, no stitches, nothing. And the way they put those flower garlands in their hair? It takes one second for them to do, and yet they stay on for the whole day.”
She had wanted a garland in her hair too, and women in the temple during a pooja had pinned one in her short ponytail. It didn’t look as good as theirs. For some reason it kept dangling wildly in a way that it never did on Indian braids or buns. After twenty minutes, she lost it.
“See? That would never happen to them,” she said, defeated. And immediately added, “I must study the way they clip this thing on.”
She was constantly figuring out how things worked or why they didn’t, compiling her own India instructions booklet. This attitude she had of being always on the outside, looking inside, mildly irritated him; he’d always disliked the idea of being a tourist. He believed in that quote by Paul Bowles—how did it go again?—the one that made the distinction between a tourist and a traveler. Of course he wasn’t a traveler. He was just a tourist who hated to be one.
The first week she had worn her own clothes, light fitted shirts and cotton pants, her nice sandals. It turned out that these had too many straps and were an inconvenience to put on and take off each time they entered a shop or a temple, so she got herself a pair of chappals. That was the beginning of the transformation. Then came the kurtas, the long shirts women wear over their shalwar pants. She found them so comfortable that soon she had to get the pants as well, in matching colors, and then the dupatta, the scarf that women so artfully throw across their chest. The dupatta for him was the last straw. It turned her outfit into a dress-up costume, plus it kept falling off her shoulders so that she was readjusting it every five minutes.
He loved her—that went without saying—but they’d been together for almost sixteen years and it was normal to find her tiresome at times. He had to admit that it was lovely, the way she found so many things interesting and worth being investigated; it was a sign of her vitality, and he cherished that. He only wished she had stuck to wearing her own clothes instead of those Indian outfits that were slowly multiplying inside the suitcase, which she didn’t know how to wear.