The Other Language(13)
“Yes, it’s much better out here.” Emma smiled at Luca, grateful that he was her brother, that he was there, close again.
It was early morning; only the birds broke the stillness, swooping underneath the bamboo roof in their search for leftover bread crumbs. Emma was sitting on top of her duffel bag outside the taverna’s door while inside the father was settling the bill with Iorgo. The chorus of the same sirtaki song that had played all summer echoed from a speaker inside the large empty room despite the early hour. From where she was sitting she could see a portion of the two men leaning over a table where Iorgo scribbled numbers in his hesitant handwriting. She knew this was the last time she was going to see the beach and the island and wasn’t quite sure what was required of her for an appropriate farewell. She felt languid and sentimental about leaving and wondered about performing some kind of ritual of goodbye.
“Oh, you’re here.”
In his travel clothes, dark shades, faded blue Lacoste shirt and long trousers, the father looked particularly efficient. He patted his pocket for his cigarettes.
“I’m going to load the car and we’ll be ready to go in twenty minutes. Give me your bag, I’ll put it in the trunk.”
He seemed cheerful, now that his plan was being put into action. Emma stood up and let him take her duffel. She walked over to the water’s edge with her flip-flops on, letting her feet sink a few inches in the soft sand. The water curled at her ankles.
“Hallo Emma …”
David had come up behind her in his slack swimsuit, holding his flippers. He stared at her dress, puzzled.
“Where are you going?” He shielded his eyes from the brilliance of the early-morning sun.
“Home. We are leaving now.”
“Oh,” he said, and looked away toward the island. Emma fixed her gaze on his bare chest. It was unreal, what had happened between them. She absolutely refused to understand what could have moved her. To allow him. To do that. It was unthinkable now.
“I thought you were staying till the end of August,” he said, feigning indifference.
“My father wants to go home.”
She knew he had come for her, eager and full of hope. She saw his long stork legs, his bony shoulders, how they were beginning to droop just a little. It should have been Jack, not him.
“Will you write to me?”
Emma looked the other way.
“I don’t know. I don’t have your address.”
“Just wait a minute, please,” he said.
David dropped his flippers and ran inside the taverna. He came back a few seconds later. He’d scribbled his address on a piece of the paper tablecloth and had put only his name on it: David Gallagher, 49 South Hill Gardens, London. So was that it? Because of what happened he now was the one who’d been able to claim her? She had obviously miscalculated the consequences and she had lost Jack without her knowing.
Luca appeared, with a heavy bag strapped across his shoulder, sweaty and agitated.
“Em, what are you doing still here? We are ready to go, get moving!”
Emma was relieved she had an excuse to leave David there. His hungry look repulsed her. Crumpling the note in her hand, she moved away and followed Luca to the car.
They never went back. Only Luca did, many years later while traveling with a girlfriend he intended to marry. He had made a point to detour to show her the village of his childhood. He sent Emma a postcard in flashy colors painted over a black-and-white photo. He had drawn an arrow pointing at an ugly five-story building: “This is where Iorgo’s used to be. Nothing looks the same. Don’t bother!!” Emma showed the postcard to her father. He put on his reading glasses and scanned the picture for a good thirty seconds, as if he were trying to single out someone he knew among the tiny figures crowding the beach in neat rows of umbrellas and sun chairs. The father had aged, put on weight, remarried. He handed the postcard back to Emma and made a face.
“He’s so right. Never go back. It’s always a disappointment.”
In all those years the father had never found the right moment to discuss the accident with his children. At first because they were too young to be burdened with such an unforgiving truth, and once they were old enough he gathered that none of them wished to discuss it anymore. He assumed that by then they’d had enough time to process and digest their own version of the story and there was no need to dig any deeper. It wasn’t true of course, but the children felt protective of him now; they’d become the ones who wanted to shield him from that memory, so they refrained from asking. In the course of time they worked secretly, collecting evidence that they exchanged and pieced together. Reconstructing the picture, finding the missing pieces, became part of the bond that held Emma and her siblings together. Each one of them brought something back to the puzzle—fragments, traces that they managed in time to extract from their aunts, their mother’s closest friends, from letters and photos they found. Yes, Eleonora suffered from depression; yes, she was seeing a psychiatrist; yes, she was taking medication. No, it hadn’t been anybody’s fault. And no, it had not been an accident.
Although the information they’d collected was more than they needed to know, it didn’t solve or settle anything, or help to soothe them.
In her early twenties, Emma fell in love with a young American biologist she’d met on a train to Florence. They had corresponded for a few months and then she had followed him to Boston. He lived in a dusty north-facing apartment in what she mistook for a nice neighborhood. She had momentarily dropped out of university in order to follow him—she was studying architecture, but without passion—and she got a job in a vegetarian restaurant to make some cash and get out of the house while he was at work. She thought she’d eventually get her working papers once the biologist married her and she’d be able to get a proper job. It was just a matter of time and patience. In the meantime she made delicious vegetable casseroles for dinner, which they ate while sprawled on the carpet in front of the fire. She admired the ease Americans had with their bodies, how they used objects and moved around the furniture with a freedom Europeans never had. How they took their work to bed, ate take-out food in the car, how they put their bare feet on the table, walked inside a bank in their shorts, used their cars as a cluttered closet where they could toss in just about anything. In Europe people had meals only if sitting at a table, only worked at their desks, hardly ever sat on the floor, never walked around the house in their bathrobes and socks. She wrote enthusiastic letters to her family and friends, describing her new life. She felt she had finally become the person she had always wanted to be. Someone who thought, dreamed and made love in a different language, who had acquired different habits and conformed to different rules of behavior.