The Other Language(6)

After the swim she sat on a rock, listening to her accelerated heartbeat, to the blood pulsing in her temples and to her shortened breath, until it all slowed down and the drying salt tightened her skin. These were the moments that would stick in her memory for years to come, those instants of perfect bliss that nothing else would ever match again.

One afternoon she was walking in the blistering sun, heading back from her swim. As she approached Iorgo’s taverna she could make out her father sitting under the bamboo roof in his shorts and open shirt, covered with zebra stripes of light and shade. She liked those hours of quiet, when it was too hot to speak and everything stood still, a suspension in the glare of the day. As she got closer she saw he wasn’t alone. The Milanese woman from the previous summer was sitting across from him, looking urban and pasty, her white linen dress stuck to her damp skin. He waved.

“Emma, come say hallo to Mirella.”

He looked uneasy. He urged her to go and chase up Luca and Monica wherever they were and join them for lunch. Mirella didn’t look as attractive as she had the year before. Now she seemed to Emma somehow powerless, tense.

“Where are the others?” Emma asked her.

“Which others, dear?” Mirella strained to smile.

“Your friends from last summer.”

Mirella put a hand in her hair absentmindedly, not quite meeting Emma’s eyes.

“Friends? Oh. I don’t know. I came alone, this time.” Another awkward silence followed, as though Emma had asked the wrong question.



Monica was the first to broach an exploration of the potential consequences of Mirella’s arrival.

“Why does she have to sit with us all the time? Can’t she eat at her own table?” she blurted out, completely out of context, while she and Emma were looking for green glass pebbles on the beach. Since Mirella had arrived, if Emma had become sulky, Monica had turned morose. The woman’s presence had made their mother rise from the dead, and they felt frightened in ways that they couldn’t decipher, let alone discuss. Meanwhile, this summer Luca had abandoned them for good, in favor of his new group of teenage friends from Athens; he was to be counted upon neither for solidarity nor for help.

Emma shrugged, pretending not to know the answer to her sister’s complaint, but Monica wouldn’t let her off the hook.

“She is in love with Papà. Otherwise why is she here again, all by herself?”

Emma handed Monica a dark blue pebble. Blue was a rare color. Monica put it in the jar without looking. She persisted.

“Why do you think she came back?”

“I don’t know. I doubt Papà is interested in her.”

“How do you know? He lets her eat with us every day. They play cards at night. They are always together.”

“I think he’s embarrassed that she came back but is just trying to be kind to her.”

“Why should he be kind?”

Emma didn’t answer, which made Monica more anxious and angry.

“Why does he have to be kind? Because of what? Huh?”

“Stop it.”

“Stop what?”

“You are screaming.”

Monica lowered her voice.

“Why does he have to be kind to her? She’s nothing to us. She’s just a stranger.”

“Because he’s feeling sorry for her, okay?” Emma said calmly, although she felt this wasn’t the best answer. She looked at Monica. She was as dark as the fishermen, and her curly brown hair hadn’t been brushed in weeks. Her little body had grown sturdy and strong, a bomb ready to explode.



Then one early morning Emma looked up from her yogurt and honey and there they were, the English boys, back on the jetty in their canvas shorts sitting low on the hips, slipping on flippers, ready to dive in. They too had grown up since the previous summer, in that shocking Alice in Wonderland way that happens between the age of twelve and fifteen: they were much taller, sturdier, and their hair had reached their shoulders. She followed the trajectory of their arms and fins breaking the stillness of the water like two dolphins behind a boat till they reached the shore of the island and turned into two tiny vertical figurines, jumping from rock to rock just like the goats.

“What are you looking at?” the father asked.

“Nothing,” she said, smiling at him.

He was such a handsome man, her father, still so young and lanky, his sandy hair falling across his face. He wore a white shirt with a threadbare collar over what he called his Bermuda shorts, the sleeves rolled up to his elbow. No wonder women fell in love with him. He was so quiet, and—by then she could tell from his enduring silences—lonely.



Emma doesn’t remember now how the magic happened. Who said what first, which words were exchanged. All she knows is that the memories of that summer turned into English because that’s what she found herself speaking. It was like an infant going from blabber to complete sentences in just a few weeks, letting the brain do the job in its mysterious way. It came like a flow, an instantaneous metamorphosis she was completely unaware of. All she remembers is that one summer the younger boy was speaking incomprehensible phonemes, and the next—thanks to the Beatles, to Joni Mitchell’s lyrics, to the promise of love?—the same clipped syllables turned into verbs that described actions, adjectives that specified attributes and nouns she now grasped as if in her hands and succeeded in using them all, ordering them in the right sequence to make herself understood.