The Other Language(46)

Can u give me mina’s phone number?



In mid-September early one morning, her mother rang. More than concerned, she sounded exasperated.

“Do you have friends staying with you? Don’t you feel a little lonely, all by yourself?”

Ironic that her mother would be worried about her being all alone, Lara thought, since she had asked her a few times to come and see her new house, but she refused to leave her air-conditioned apartment in Piazza Mazzini, claiming the trip took too long.

“No. I’m loving it here. I don’t need anything.”

“What’s there to do? Haven’t you done enough holidaying?”

“This is not a holiday, Mamma. It’s my new life. I read, I study, I plant my vegetable gard—”

“You need to get a job, Lara. We are worried about you.”

“Who is we?”

“Your brother and I. You need to come back to Rome, it’s time you think of your future.”

Future? What future? The future was so not what she’d been concentrating on. She was actually trying to focus on thoughts that went exactly in the opposite direction: “no past, no future; live in the moment; one breath at the time.”

“I already told Leo, I’m going to start teaching yoga again, here. I’ll be fine. Don’t you start micromanaging my life, I beg of you.”

“Micro what? What are you talking about, for heaven’s sake?” her mother said.



Lara pulled out her old copy of Shivananda Yoga Teacher’s Manual from the bookshelf. She skipped the introduction because she felt she only needed to refresh her memory on how to build a sequence. She skipped chapter one, then two, then three. She kept skipping. Nothing in the book seemed to hold her attention. The breath, the names of the postures, the mantras, the anatomy, the names of the bones: she felt she knew it all already. She just flipped the pages, glancing over the pictures, and zoned out. Then she went out for ice cream.

A couple of days later she drove to the bookstore and bought a couple of gardening books; then she started with the cooking books. She gazed at all the photos. It seemed enough, for the moment. “I get it, I can do that,” she would say out loud, without actually going through any of the text. The thought of studying any actual technique exhausted her.

Her best friend, Anita, who’d made a fortune breeding rare Chinese dogs, rang. She’d been in Beijing all summer long, dealing with puppies and kennels, and was back in the city.

“What are you doing still there? Are you not coming back?”

“Not immediately. And besides, September is so … so sweet here.”

There was a silence.

“Lara, should I come get you?”

“Why? I can drive back whenever I want.”

“I know, but just in case you didn’t feel like it, I’m happy to come and get you.”

She laughed. “It’s not as if I’m being held hostage here, Anita.”

“I know, I know, you sound just a little … I don’t know. How should I say this?”

“Say it.”

“Depressed?”

After this phone call Lara decided the time had come to test her flexibility after more than a year of neglecting her yoga practice. She sat for a while in cobbler’s pose then settled into Janu Sirsasana, when something snapped in her knee with a loud pop. She waited a few seconds, then cautiously straightened her leg. She felt nothing, everything seemed to be in order, but she knew better. That kind of injury, she knew, was subtle and treacherous, the pain starting only the minute you believed you’d gotten away with it.

Delayed pain was the story of her life: it was exactly for this reason some people had called her an optimist and others a fool.



Sure enough, the knee swelled up and it began to hurt. A couple days later she limped across the street to Mina’s, holding a Gertrude Jekyll rose she had picked up at the nursery outside the village. Mina came to the door, looking splendid. Her hair had been dyed a darker chestnut shade and was nicely done up in a smooth bouffant. She wore a pleated skirt and a starched pink shirt. The house smelled of lavender floor detergent.

“Oh! It’s you! Come in, quickly!” she said, giddy with excitement.

Lara heard hushed voices and the screech of chairs coming from the back of the house.

“Do you want to join us?” Mina asked. “It’s about to start. We’ll have a little something afterward. I’ve made parmigiana di melanzane and lasagne con le polpette.”

Lara peered through the half-open door into the next room. The ladies of the street had congregated in front of the flat screen in two neat rows. They were chatty and restless like children eager for a movie to begin. They greeted Lara cheerfully. One of them stood up, offering her a chair. Lara shook her head, mouthing “no thanks,” and stepped back. She had been told that the local channel aired the evening prayers daily for older people who couldn’t make it to church for the vespro.

“No, thanks, I’ve got a million things to do at home, I’m going back to the city early tomorrow. This is for your garden. It’s an old English rose, it’s called—”

Mina grabbed the Gertrude Jekyll and set it on the windowsill.

“Thank you. When are you coming back?”

“Soon, soon, I just have to take care of a few things. I hurt my knee and I need to see a doctor …” Lara peeked again into the room. Someone had closed the shutters and the women looked like ghosts lit by the bluish light of the TV. The music didn’t sound like church at all. Credits were rolling over the dark screen.