The Other Language(36)
“Did you? How nice. So, what did …” Lara loved stories like this, it was part of what had drawn her to the village in the first place. But the woman was talking right over her question.
“… And in winter, when it was really cold, this was the warmest room in the whole village, so we sat in that corner, see? My aunt used to have a wooden bench right there.”
The woman gestured to the wall where now sat the dishwasher still sheathed in its cardboard box.
“My aunt would give us sweets while we waited. In the summer we’d wait outside in the garden, and we’d play with the donkey. This is how things were in this village up until only forty, fifty years ago.”
The little woman grabbed a chair and slumped on it, hands entwined on her lap. Her feet barely touched the ground. Lara was beginning to feel it had been a mistake to let this creature in. Obviously this was only the beginning of something far more serious than Lara had envisaged.
The little woman went on. “But of course, what do you care? You people come from the outside and assume everything here is up for sale and you think you have a right to take it down, rip it all up as you please. You even bring your own architect to destroy our history!”
Lara stared at the little woman, shocked. This was truly a disgrace. She’d come to this village with the best intentions, eager to learn and respect the local culture and traditions. And now—barely twenty-four hours after she’d moved in—she was already facing the enormity of her first mistake.
“Senta signora, I’m sorry about the wood oven,” Lara said. “I had no idea how important it was. In fact nobody told me. I’m really sorry, I … I wish I had known before, is all I can say.”
It was true: the local real-estate agent—a young man with overly gelled hair and two cell phones constantly ringing—hadn’t said a word about the oven being part of the village history, had made no mention of the old lady with a donkey who baked for the community; he didn’t mention village women and children taking their tins of pies and bread into what was now her stainless steel kitchen.
“Why did you buy a house here?” the woman asked, a prosecutor for the defendant.
Lara widened her arms, resigned.
“Because I love this village and I wanted to preserve this beautiful house.” She breathed in a bit and continued, “Which by the way would’ve crumbled had I not bought it.”
The woman didn’t balk; she shook her head.
“You people don’t come here to buy property because you love it. You come because it’s cheaper.”
Such was Lara’s welcome to her new life in the house she’d bought right after her divorce.
The truth was the little woman had a point. Tuscany was ridiculously expensive. Umbria was sold out. The Aeolian Islands were for millionaires. Whereas in this exquisite and undiscovered village in the depths of southern Italy, the house plus the cost of its renovation had equaled almost exactly the money Lara had managed to extract from the settlement. She’d thought of the quaint house in the heart of the village not only as a good investment or a summer holiday escape, but more like a second home where she could retreat all year round, and start over. She wanted it to look fresh and simple like those photos in Elle Décor, with handwoven baskets brimming with lavender sprigs or vegetables just picked from the garden, with linen tablecloths thrown over lovely old tables, secluded gardens and mosquito nets shrouding immaculate beds. Lara couldn’t deny she’d seen the opportunity of a little side business as well, maybe involving buying/fixing up/selling properties. It was impossible not to, given the prices of local real estate. In the course of the previous year, Lara had come up to the village several times to oversee the restoration work, often enough to notice how old people seemed to be dying at a worrisome rate—at least according to how often church bells tolled announcing yet another funeral. During the time it took for the workers to finish, she saw more and more old houses go up for sale as younger people kept migrating up north. The new generation refused to work in the fields and the olive groves in favor of more appealing opportunities, like opening a cell phone store in some northern province with ghastly weather. Lara felt she’d stumbled on a pot of gold. All she needed to acquire a piece of property was a modest amount of capital. She didn’t have any access to it at the moment, but she had always tended toward the unrealistic. The future, from underneath her high-vaulted ceiling, had seemed full of hope and potential.
Lara felt she should look into the forno issue right away. That same afternoon she went online and found a posting on medieval communal ovens in France and England. There was no mention of the same in the south of Italy, which suggested she could add her own entry on Wikipedia if she ever decided to. According to the website they were called bakehouses and they were places “where women and children would bring their tins of bread and biscuits for baking. Meeting at the bakehouse was also a way to exchange news and local gossip. Each woman marked her bread loaf with a distinctive cut to make sure she got back her own bread after baking.”
Reading all this made her feel even more at fault. The next day she walked to the city council, an unattractive modern building that sat like a shoe box on a parking lot and asked if she might see the historic plan of the village. She was shown inside the office of a skinny man with clearly dyed hair, semihidden behind piles of papers. He looked through the files and pulled out an old map. He showed her several locations, all marked with an F, which stood for forno. One of those capital F’s stood right over her building. It turned out that yes, she had indeed taken down the village’s last bakehouse, which was “protected” and should have never been touched.