At the end of that summer, none of us any longer spoke any known language. Sometimes, in the presence of a Spaniard who spoke French but not English, two Americans would spend an evening talking French to him and each other. Sometimes, in the presence of an American, who naturally spoke no Portuguese, six Brazilians spent an evening talking Italian to him and each other, although the American didn’t know Italian, either. Sometimes, by mistake, or having made a habit of the effort, everyone spent an evening in a language which was native to no one and inconvenient to everybody. We were under a strain. Once, a heavy man, with a thick accent or combination of accents, was brought by a young French actress to dinner. He was introduced as Boris. He said he was a doctor. When someone asked what sort of doctor, he said “mnnh, mnnh, an healer,” with an “h” as though someone had thrown him a medicine ball. His work, he said, made use of what he must call the most mnnh, mnnh healing words in any language. “The Lord is my shepherd,” he began. “I have not want. He teach me to lie down in the green. Vast, He leads me still to the water. He restore there my soul. Mnnh, hah, yea though…” he rumbled profoundly through to the end. Nobody knew quite what to say to him. Later, when I found myself sitting beside him on a couch, I asked him what his nationality was. His answer was long and deep. I did not understand a word. I asked him what his first language had been. Another intense monologue. I didn’t get it either. I tried another route. What language now, I asked, came to him most easily. “Mnnh, mnnh, ah,” he said, sipping his vodka and managing to breathe, at the same time, insinuatingly, “I speak the language of love.”
The island had no trees. Rocky and bleak, with patches of living scrub and patches of burned and blackened scrub, it floated in the ocean like a worn-out Brillo pad. There were bandits in the interior, and farms with goats that fed on the few green things in the dry dirt among the rocks. The islanders did not care for the coast. They feared the sea. They did not fish. They could not swim. They thought of the sea as a source of malaria. Forty years ago, American scientists on a grant had eliminated malaria from the place. Still, the island fathers, distrustful for generations of the shore, always left to their sons the goat-farming interior lands, and to their daughters the unfarmable coast. The result was that, when the jet outriders came, with their boats, and their architects, and their search for an unspoiled sea, the island women began to sell their beaches and became extremely rich. They still dressed in black, and their teeth were bad. But they travelled, by plane, to the mainland from the new airport. They shopped in Ostia, Torino, and Rome. Within ten years, their sons and husbands had spent all the rest of the money, on cars, appliances, and schemes to become richer still. They were poor again.
The jet outriders had, by this time, built their houses. The rest of the coastline was owned by consortiums. Hotels were going up. The island sons and daughters now took jobs in the tourist hotels. Bandits remained active in the interior. On the coast, in the houses of the outriders, a Communist party formed. The party swept through the staff of the hotels too, of course; but hotel employees ran a risk of being fired, which was not shared by servants in the private houses. The owners spent so much of the year away. The uniformed couples in those lovely houses, then, became the party leadership. Hotel waiters, waitresses, maids, bell captains and porters, party members all, remained wary of management, of mandarins in the front office, and above all, of the cooks. The cooks were mad, short-tempered, morose, individualistic, and elitist to the core. But, particularly in the off-season, the hotel cadres found it possible to come to the meetings, in the kitchens and living rooms of the absent rich, of their party cells.
We did not see Boris again after the night we met him. We did not see the actress again, either. Mixed as we all were on our coast, and in our house, we began to take a shine to expressions, adopting words and phrases from each other all the time. “Écoute,” Marge Brown would say to her four-year-old and to her husband. “Écoute, Bunny. Joe, please. Écoute.” Everyone swore continuously. English was the language for that. Elio Kahn’s French was perfect, except for his accent, which was terrible. He cultivated this terribleness. It suited his humor. His precise French, pronounced in flat-out American Southern, also gave what he said a kind of slow burning quality, as though his words had their own built-in double take. One evening, when we were on a neighbor’s terrace, one of the coast’s most beautiful young wives walked dreamily by. Marge remarked that she looked older. Joe said she looked dissolute. Even Greg, who seldom talks at all, said it seemed she’d put a lot of mileage on. And Elio, Elio just leaned back and said, “Well, yes. She does look un peu défraîchie.” Greg, who had spent the winter in a Patmos monastery, had a single Greek word: Oreia. It seemed to be an exclamation of approval or joy. He used it incessantly, in a tone so flat, bleak and despairing that we all began to like it. Oreia, we would say, when the waiter, after four hours, brought our dinner. Oreia, when, after nine straight days, the rain stopped. Oreia, when the radio, which was dead most nights, woke up and spoke the news.
We were not exactly hated on the island — or if we were, it was likely that everyone else was hated more. We were not exactly home-owners, not tourists, not celebrities, expatriates, or hippies, not exactly anything. We were not always there at the same time. None of us ever stayed long. We were not there out of boredom. We had all been coming there, from our separate directions, for so many years.
The first year I ever came to the island, there was no phone and no hot water. Since there was no electricity, there were no lights. I was alone; I had rented a house. During the month in which I had the house, the road was being moved. Electricity and telephones, it was said, could not be installed even in town until the road was done. My house, for some reason, was built straight down a hill, in a kind of shaft. One entered through the kitchen, the highest point, and then almost immediately fell down three flights of stairs. The walls on the sides of the stairs were covered with framed, glass-enclosed butterflies. Three mornings a week, a woman came to clean. What she spoke was not exactly Italian, not exactly Spanish, not exactly anything. It was local, a result of all the many invasions and immigrations the island had undergone since before the Crusades. She was squat and, normally, sullen. She wore a wide black skirt, a black blouse, sandals and woolen socks. The only sign of animation she ever gave occurred when she spoke of the men who were working on the road. They were from the interior. Darkly, she mentioned their violent, wrathful dispositions, their criminal natures, the atrocities it was their custom to commit. It was a matter of absolute necessity to them, she would assure me, a matter of absolute, hideous, interior, criminal necessity for these men to commit atrocities. For example, and here her own face would assume an almost maniacal slyness, for example, I might have heard chanting on certain mornings, at sunrise? I might have heard it? On such days, the men in the work crews were strangling a cat. No, she could not believe it either; the children had seen it. Here she called Antonio, her nine-year-old. Yes, he had seen it. From their interior, criminal necessity, these men required, at dawn sometimes, to strangle cats. And so, this was her normal peroration, I should take care. That was all, that was what she would say to me: I should take care.