The Other Language(37)
“I never meant to have done that!” Lara blurted out. She believed in karma and felt as though, by following her architect’s advice, she had demolished an Egyptian tomb, with all the consequences that the sacrilege might entail. The skinny man behind the desk reassured her. Yes, she had actually broken the law, but it could all be fixed by paying a little something. It was going to be a small fine. Nothing much. Not to worry.
“I’ll pay, of course. That’s not the problem, it’s just that … it’s that I feel really bad that we …” Her voice broke a little. “That I did this. It was totally unintentional.”
The skinny man seemed surprised by her concern. Obviously the oven didn’t mean as much to him as to the little woman with the bad perm.
Lara rang her architect and told her about the communal oven.
Silvana cut her off. “We gained twenty square meters of walking space. It’s an added value to the property.”
“I know, I know. But—”
“You are just being sentimental, Lara. Just forget about it.”
“I feel like we committed a crime. Which by the way we did. Apparently we actually broke the law.”
But Silvana just laughed. “Well, Lara, it seems to me that everyone else did too, since you say it was the last remaining oven in the village.”
“Yes, but it was a protected monument.”
“What were you going to do with it anyway, bake loaves for the masses?” Silvana laughed. “This isn’t the eighteenth century, everyone has an oven now. Anyway, let’s talk about this later, I’m with a client now.”
Lara realized how, until that moment, the politics of her street had completely escaped her, wrapped up as she’d been with only the builders and her architect. Up until now the neighbors had been to her only extras in the background, blank faces she hadn’t paid any attention to and couldn’t remember. Owning a house in a village was clearly very different from moving into a new apartment in a city, where anonymity was not only okay but an asset. She had moved into a community that had lived so closely together for years and years, where everyone knew every little thing about one another. Now this foreigner had shown up from out of the blue; for months she had been coming and going, ignoring their existence, interested only in her building work, and not once bothering to say hello or goodbye. Another mistake that needed immediate correction.
She decided the right person to ask would be the young man with plucked eyebrows—a distinctive trait she’d observed in the local male youth—who served her cappuccino every morning at the café in the piazza. The little woman’s name was Mina, he told her. Everyone knew her: she was a dressmaker, the best in the area. She’d had a good elementary and high school education, a bit of money she’d saved, and although she’d never married she was self-sufficient and, according to the village standards, successful. Figuratively speaking, she was the mayor of Lara’s street.
The following morning Lara knocked at Mina’s door, presenting a box of chocolates. She saw the sewing machine, a stack of fabrics, a cat curled up on the table where Mina had been cutting a cloth, licking his paws.
Mina grabbed the box.
“Thank you,” she said without smiling.
There were wisps of thread floating like dragonflies in the breeze blowing from the open windows. Lara smelled the heat rising from fabric that was being ironed.
“I was just wondering, Signora Mina …,” she said. “If I brought you a shirt, could you copy it for me?”
Apparently Mina had first gained her stature because of her closeness with the local barons, Donna Clara, Don Filippo, their children and later on to their children’s husbands and wives. She had measured waists, bellies and breasts of three generations of barons and baronesses, brushed their bodies with her nimble fingers, draped cloth around their hips and buttocks. She knew how the women of the family tended to grow heavy around the thighs and thin in the torso, how the men would stay thin but put on love handles after forty. She suggested—discreetly—which cut or length would best suit them. The family had worn her perfectly tailored clothes at first communions, weddings, baptisms and garden parties, season after season. Whenever she would run into them on her way to the grocery shop, or at one of the many processions or funerals that ran along the main street, she would check out their dresses, jackets, trousers and whisper to a neighbor walking alongside her, “See how nicely it falls in the back? Look at the way I did the pleats, the pockets, the lapels. How becoming the cut on the shoulders, the collar, the way it’s pinched at the waist.”
By the time Lara bought the house on Mina’s street, Donna Clara and Don Filippo had been dead for ten years at least and their children and grandchildren were scattered between Rome, Milan, Paris and Madrid. The second generation of barons worked as doctors, lawyers and financial consultants; one had become a successful shoe designer and was in a happy gay marriage in Spain. Things had changed a lot since the time of their parents; they no longer cared to use their titles and hardly ever came back to their eighteenth-century palazzo in the village square. It was too expensive to keep and none of them wanted to live there anyway, so they rented it out for weddings in order to pay for its maintenance. From April to October, young brides from the nearby villages wrapped in the cloud of tulle they’d always dreamed of would get photographed leaning from the balcony of the palazzo against a wall of ivy, or under a cascade of wisteria. By then even the people in the village had begun to shop at the OVS, the ubiquitous cheap department store where one could buy clothes for thirty-five euros. The epoch of tailored clothes was officially over.