The Other Language(35)

She was emerging from the shower in her plum-colored, Moroccan-style bathroom when she heard a vigorous knock at the front door. Still dripping wet, she ran down in her robe, crossed the courtyard and opened the old wooden door, which had been painstakingly sandpapered and waxed. A small woman of indefinite age, with an old-fashioned perm, her body shaped like a box, was staring at her.

“You are the person who bought this house?” she asked, her voice loud as a trumpet. She was a local, as Lara could tell from her accent. She nodded.

“Ha ha! At last you are here in person!” the little woman said with a cruel smile and slid herself inside the courtyard like an eel.

“For months all I’ve been seeing are your builders. Very rude people. Where do they come from?”

“Martano, I think. Why?” Lara wondered if the small woman had come to give her some kind of fine, although she wore no uniform.

“I knew it. Martano people are all thieves.”

“I’m so sorry, signora. Was there a problem?”

The woman ignored her and proceeded to take a long, critical look at the potted plants that filled the courtyard, at the indigo blue table and matching chairs that Lara had spotted in a magazine and bought online. She closely examined the pale dusty mauve of the walls, a hue that had cost days of trial and error.

“I see you have changed everything in here.”

Lara wasn’t sure where this might be leading.

“Well, I have restored the place. It was a ruin.”

The woman ignored her and peered some more. “My great-aunt lived in this house,” she said.

She brushed the smooth surface of the wall, then moved swiftly toward the glass door of what used to be the barn and glanced inside.

“She used to keep her donkey in there,” she said, pointing at the space.

“Oh yes? Well, that’s the living room now.”

“She never married, she worked very hard all her life. She was a very clever woman.”

Lara tried a friendlier expression. All this might be pretty sweet, after all. “So you knew this place from the time she lived here? How nice. Would you like to see what it looks like now?”

Lara opened the glass door, which gave into the ex-barn-now-living-room, but the woman was already snooping inside the kitchen on the opposite side of the courtyard.

“I knew this place like the back of my hand. We used to play in here all the time when we were children.”

She stepped into the kitchen and Lara followed her. There were still unopened boxes on the floor; the stainless steel surfaces of the brand-new appliances glinted in the shady room. The woman gave a yelp.

“See! I had heard from people you had done this, but I wanted to see for myself.”

“Had done what?” Lara asked.

The woman was glaring at the opposite wall.

“This thing you have done in here, is a mortal sin.”

By now, had she been in Rome, Lara would have normally lost her patience and asked her to leave, but it was her first contact with any of her neighbors in the village and she sensed she’d reached a delicate intersection that required some caution.

“A mortal sin!” the little woman repeated in a thundering voice.

“Please have a seat. Can I offer you a cup of coffee?”

“No.”

“Okay. Then please, what is it that I did?”

“The forno. You tore it down.”

Lara crossed her arms.

“Yes I did, the architect … my friend,” she said, but immediately regretted bringing an architect into the conversation. “It was as big as a room. It took up too much space, it took half the courtyard.”

But the woman was right; when, a year earlier, Lara had bought the house in the heart of the village, she’d taken Silvana, her architect friend, to see it. She was a towering woman in her forties with flaming hennaed hair who on principle never came off her high heels, especially when marching through building sites (“height gains you respect, it’s Pavlovian”). Silvana had paced inside the old building not uttering a sound, with an air of concern. Maybe it was just her way, or maybe she didn’t approve of the house. Lara had begun to worry. Silvana had taken one look at the opening of the gigantic wood oven in the kitchen and before Lara could say anything she’d climbed inside it with the speed of a crab, holding her flashlight.

“It’s gigantic. And totally useless,” her voice had boomed from the dark interior, like Jonah’s from inside the whale.

She’d reappeared, her clothes coated in blackish dust, then effortlessly slid out of the oven mouth. She had a big grin on her face.

“Good. We can gain some space. I feel a lot better now.”

So the forno went down, and what was once a dark chamber was now a third of her courtyard.

The little woman waved her index finger at Lara like a mad evangelist.

“You tore down the last oven of this village to gain a little space for your plants. That forno was a public monument. It was part of our history!”

The woman shook her head with disdain.

“Yes, I was told this room was the village bakery. But as I told you the wood oven took half the space of the courtyard. I mean, it went from here all the way to …” Lara made a sweeping arc with her hand across the expanse of the courtyard.

“This was not a bakery. It was a communal oven. An oven where people could bring their own loaves of bread. Bread and pies, so that my aunt could bake for them. She only charged ten, twenty liras a piece. We all came here as children with our tins, everyone did, every Saturday …”