The Other Language(2)
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?”
The children had been spared the details of the accident: where it had happened, how badly crushed the car was, how long before she died, whether on the spot or at the hospital. The adults had decided they were too small to be told such dreadful particulars, as if their mother’s death was just another protocol they had to observe, like never ask for a soft drink unless they were offered one and never fish inside a lady’s handbag. But Emma, Luca and Monica misunderstood. They assumed death must be an impolite subject to bring up in conversation, a disgrace to be hidden, to be put behind.
Luca was the first to befriend Nadia. She didn’t speak any Italian and he didn’t speak any Greek. And though it was unclear how they managed to communicate at first, soon he’d deserted his sisters in favor of Nadia and her entourage. He was given permission to hang out on the beach after dinner, sitting around a fire with Nadia and her large group of cousins and friends, who played long, repetitive Greek songs on the guitar. They were called either Stavros, Costa or Taki, as if their parents had made no imaginative efforts as far as names went. Emma found their hairy calves and armpits daunting and their manners coarse. She didn’t like the way they dressed and not even the songs they sang.
The ruins of King Agamemnon’s palace in Mycenae were only a couple of hours away, perched on a steep hill overlooking the Argolic plain. The father and the children drove there on an unusually gray afternoon, and on the way, on a steep rocky road, he recounted the story of the king and his daughter Iphigenia. How, because of lack of wind, the king couldn’t sail to Troy and join the war. An oracle had told him the hunting goddess Artemis was punishing him for his arrogance and to calm her rage he’d have to offer a sacrifice to the deity.
“So he had to sacrifice the dearest thing he had,” he said.
“What?” Monica asked, peeking in from the backseat.
“Iphigenia, his beautiful daughter. He summoned her and she was put on the altar, to be slaughtered.”
But luckily, he said, just as the king was about to cut her throat, the goddess saved the girl by transforming her into a beautiful deer that slipped away.
When they arrived at the site, it had begun to drizzle, and a cold wind had begun to blow. The ruins—the imposing lion’s gate, the tomb of the king, built like a dome with gigantic lintels—were deserted. Emma kept asking where the altar on which Iphigenia had stood was, but her father told her the guidebook wouldn’t mention it because the story was only a myth.
She wandered around in silence, touching the surface of the ancient stones with her fingers. After a while she sat on a step and said she felt cold and tired. The father found an old sweater in the back of the car and wrapped her up, but the atmosphere of the place was having a strange effect on all of them. It was dark and sinister, compared to the bright colors of their village. They didn’t stay long and on the way back in the car Emma kept asking her father how it was possible that Agamemnon would agree to kill his own daughter.
“He was a warrior. He had to join the war at all costs,” the father said.
But Emma wouldn’t relent. How could he? And what about the queen? Why didn’t she do anything to stop him?
“Basta,” Luca interrupted her, annoyed. “Papà told you already. She doesn’t die in the end, she becomes a deer.”
“Yes,” Emma said, “but what about the mother?”
She was sucking the last drop of her lemonade through a straw, watching Luca play a game of cards with Nadia in her yellow bikini, when she saw the two boys for the first time. They were standing on the jetty, one tall, blond, thin as a reed. The other one smaller, darker, younger. Nadia lifted her eyes from her cards and made a face, as if the sight of them annoyed her. She said something to Luca in Greek.