The English brothers, it turned out, came every summer, because their parents owned a house in the village.
They came and went to the beach every morning, barefoot and silent. Their cutoffs were bleached by the sun, their T-shirts ripped, their perfectly hairless legs were long and scratched, their longish hair tousled. Emma found the casualness of their wardrobe fascinating. She had never come across a similar style before—the Italians looked too dainty while the Greeks were so unsophisticated. She observed the boys as they put on flippers and masks and watched them as they swam slow and steady all the way to the island.
Emma gathered the details from one of Nadia’s aunts who spoke a little Italian.
“The mother and the father buy our cousin’s villa. Rich English people,” the woman said, fanning herself with a newspaper.
Emma asked her which villa it was; she hadn’t seen any building worthy of that word.
“In front of the souvlaki place. The big villa, you cannot miss. The biggest in the village.”
She shook her head with irritation as if the loss of this piece of family property had been a personal affront.
That same afternoon Emma spotted it. Villa was a big word for what it was: a plain two-story house on the main road, just across from the bakery and the souvlaki stall. The dark blue shutters had been newly repainted and gave it an air of nobility, but that was about it. There was a car with an English license plate parked outside. Emma ate her souvlaki in silence, staring at the house for a long time.
Nadia was lying on a towel in her bikini, flipping the pages of a comic book, her skin shiny with tanning oil, her hair done up in a twisted bun.
“Come on, why don’t you go talk to her?” said the father again.
Emma shrugged; Monica imitated her.
“I don’t speak any Greek,” she said.
“We can’t understand her,” Monica echoed.
Emma turned her gaze to the English boys in the distance as they were putting on their flippers, getting ready for their swim to the island. She loved the hushed, clipped, refined sounds of their language, the way they exchanged quick sentences, hardly moving a muscle in their bodies. Emma wished she could speak the boys’ language instead. It sounded authoritative, distinguished, exact.
“What’s wrong with you two?” said the father.
“Nothing is wrong. We’re fine,” said Monica, suddenly defensive.
“We’re fine playing with each other, Papà,” Emma said.
She observed Luca and Nadia splashing each other in the shallow water. They no longer needed a common language to get along.
Come the start of August, there was a new arrival, a group of well-groomed adults. The women were tall and slender, and wore similar sleeveless linen dresses way above the knees and flat Capri sandals. The men showed up for dinner in soft loafers, pastel-colored sweaters wrapped around their shoulders and tied by the sleeves, their wet hair parted on the side.
“Milanese,” said Luca disapprovingly.
Emma, her brother and sister had become proprietorial by now, as if they had always owned the place, so used had they become to their particular sunbathing spots, their favorite rocks, their table at breakfast, their access to the kitchen where Iorgo’s wife, Maria, erect, hands on hips, would holler the name of the dish each time they lifted the lid. Nadia and her family also watched the new group with an air of superiority.
The Italians ignored their stares, and pretty soon were all over the kitchen lifting lids from the pots just like the rest of them. They too were early risers and breakfast was no longer a quiet affair of tiny waves lapping the shore, birds, breeze, hushed voices and Papà quietly flicking pages of his book while they ate bread and honey. The Milanese were loud and jolly and never stopped talking. It felt so unfair to have come out such a long distance, undertaken such a perilous voyage, having had to learn the Greek words for milk, honey, bread, cheese, good morning, thank you, please, to have actually established a silent complicity with the English boys by the mere fact of sharing the same beach, and now, with the intrusion of the Italians, to have this sense of foreignness and adventure be disrupted. Emma resented their calculated stylishness as if it didn’t make any difference to them to be in Milan or in a tiny village of the Peloponnese. She had made sure not to speak Italian in their presence, confident that by lying low, she, Monica and Luca would be able to shroud their identity.
But only a few days later Emma and Monica came back from a swim just before lunch and saw that their father had joined the Milanese’s table and was drinking iced retsina in an amiable mood. He called the girls over and introduced them to the group. They had to shake everyone’s hand, giving their names as they had been taught to do. The grown-ups sized them up with circumspection, squeezing the children’s hands longer than necessary. Emma knew right away what that expression of pity meant and felt doubly betrayed.
She felt ashamed, as if the loss of her mother had made her a lesser person in the eyes of the world.