Free The Other Language by Francesca Marciano

complication. A cloud of peace—that was maybe the idea. Pascal stood behind her, silent and impenetrable, but Caterina could tell he too was moved. Moved by what? she then asked herself. Was it the absence of structure, of subject; was it just its mystery? She knew better not to say anything. Nothing annoyed Pascal more than other people compelled to ask the meaning of contemporary artworks.

    The next day Caterina and Pascal were patiently waiting in line at the cashier in a crowded café outside the Palazzo del Cinema after the midmorning screening. This was the busiest time of the day, when everyone’s blood sugar level was at its lowest and people were ready to pay up to nine euros for the crappy panini with congealed cheese that looked like melted plastic. They’d just seen a three-and-a-half-hour-long documentary about an aging rock star from the seventies, who had retired from the stage at the peak of his career, vanishing somewhere at the feet of the Himalayas searching for answers and then retreating to an island off the coast of Spain.
    While Pascal was waiting to order their sandwiches, Caterina felt an undertow of despair envelop her for no apparent reason. She tried to shake it off, but the feeling clung to her like a spiderweb. It definitely had something to do with the documentarythey’d just seen. She kept thinking of the mega rocker’s last interview. It was a time when he already knew he had cancer and only a few months to live. He was speaking directly into the camera, staring straight at the audience with a bold expression, seated on a stool in the middle of his vast, beautiful Spanish garden under the shade of a tall walnut tree. Right behind him soft clumps of different grasses lay beneath a bamboo grove, their silvery and purple plumes dangling in the breeze. Here and there dots of bright color—anemones, daffodils, alliums—glinted among the flickering grasses so that the wild, open feeling of the garden suggested it had grown spontaneously, as if designed by nature itself. The man called it “my last and everlasting oeuvre,” which he had created in the last twenty years of his life. He had explained how looking after it had made him as deliriously happy as all the music he’d written over thirty years. It was a continuation of the same creative impulse, the only difference being that it hadn’t made him any richer. Here he had laughed.
    “If anything, the money only kept pouring out. I guess that is karmically fair, isn’t it?” he asked, staring into the camera with his deep-set eyes.
    One could see why just by looking at the magnificent landscape behind him: his garden brimmed with life just as his music had. Caterina felt a terrible sorrow for the man’s death, for his absence—the world needed more enlightened people like him—and sorry for herself, for getting older, for being mortal, for all the music she still wanted to hear, the books she intended to read, the places she had meant to visit, the things she had promised herself she’d learn one day (the history of Egypt, French, raku pottery, sign language, violin) and probably never would because time was beginning to feel like a fast express train that no longer stopped at all the stations.
    The rock star, his beautiful garden, his lovely songs, the pale blue room at the Biennale and the stark, pristine feeling it inspired,the Turner brume over the Venetian canals in the evening—it all came tumbling back like an ache. Caterina was surprised to realize that all the beauty she’d been exposed to in the last forty-eight hours had piled up inside her and had turned itself into a burden that now was weighing on her chest. Something began to give deep inside, like a building crumbling in slow motion, folding gently onto itself. Pascal had almost reached the cashier.
    “Do you want prosciutto and Brie or tomatoes and mozzarella?” he asked her.
    “Prosciutto and Brie, thank you. Oh, and a Diet Coke.”
    True beauty eluded her