The Breaking of a Wave

by Fabio Genovesi

  “Usually I prefer avoiding the bus and going by foot. Three-quarters of an hour and I’m home.”

  “Wow. You must like to walk.”

  “Not especially. But if I take the bus I can expect ten minutes of being beaten. Hence my preference for walking.”

  What’s sad is the way he says it, as if that were the most normal thing in the world. Poor kid. Beatings at school, beatings on the bus, perhaps beatings when he gets home—what must go on in his head? Those forty-five minutes on foot may be the best part of his day.

  But you don’t have time to feel too sorry for him. Damiano’s mom has freed herself from the seatbelt and is running toward you with her double chin and big flabby breasts bobbing this way and that.

  “Go with Luna. Get in my car. I’ll take you home. Hurry!”

  “Far be it from me to offend you, Miss, but I don’t know you. I don’t know if I can trust you.”

  “What do you care? Worst-case scenario is I beat you up. But everyone beats you up, so what’s the difference? Get in the car with Luna and wait for me there.”

  “It just doesn’t strike me as being a prudent decision—”

  “Go, damn it!” You grab him by the arm and push him away. Luna calls him over and the pair of them finally takes off for the car just as Damiano’s mom arrives with her enormous ankles and her bottle-blond hair that in any serious country would be outlawed. She pushes aside one teacher and another teacher tries to reason with her but she says if he touches her she’ll have him locked up. She stands facing you, spreads her arms out, and lunges at you with all her weight.

  And you, Serena, you stand your ground, one foot in front of the other. You wipe your bangs out of your face and narrow your eyes, taking your time, sizing her up, poised to strike where it hurts.

  Your name is Serena. And Tuesday is your day off.

  THE KING OF PORCINI

  Come in, over. You find anything? Over.”

  “Hey, Rambo, which one of us are you talking to?”

  “Both of you. You find anything? Over.”

  “Not me,” says Sandro.

  “Come again? Not one? Over.”

  “No. Why? How many have you found?”

  “None. Over. How about you, Marino? Marino, you there?”

  “ . . . ”

  “Yo, Sandro, I’m getting worried. How can he not hear me? Why are you the only one answering me? Over.”

  “I’m an idiot is why. And cut this ‘over’ crap out.”

  “I can’t. It’s the international code for ham radio operators. When someone stops talking they say ‘over.’ Otherwise you talk over one another and it’s total anarchy. Speaking of which, after you receive my communication you’re supposed to say ‘Roger.’ That way we can be sure—”

  Rambo’s words get swallowed up by an electric gurgle as Sandro turns off his walkie-talkie, sticks it in his pocket, and continues his search free of Rambo’s crackling voice in the air.

  The walkie-talkies are a new thing. They bought them yesterday so that if someone gets lost, like last time, they don’t have to spend all night searching for him. Or so they hope. Just as they hope to find lots of porcini, which sell at thirty euros a kilo and could yield serious bank. Even if thus far all they’ve done is spend money—on walkie-talkies—and have spotted exactly zero porcini.

  But that’s inevitable. You have to be connoisseurs, expert mushroom hunters, specialists who know the good spots and the right days. They’re not experts, they’re specialists in zippo, three friends following a dream to make enough money to bid their parents farewell and go live on their own. Well, not exactly on their own. Together, like off-campus students, which is a little sad when you’re forty but it still beats living with Mom and Dad.

  Marino has a sort of ramshackle fixer-upper in Vaiana, the least affluent suburb in Forte dei Marmi and the farthest from the sea. But they don’t give a shit about affluence, they’d be happy just to repair the place and stay there. It’s a dream they’ve pursued since back in high school, yet today, more than twenty years later, it appears even farther out of reach than it did then. But things can’t be this way, this is some sort of trick of the eye. Sandro, Rambo, and Marino have to persevere, keep their heads down and their chins up, stand firm and believe in themselves and keep finding new ways to earn a buck. Technically speaking, Rambo works at his parents’ newsstand, Marino is an on-again off-again traffic cop, and Sandro’s now subbing—but those jobs aren’t enough and there aren’t any others to be had. For them, there is no clear and open road for the future. So they’re trying to pave one for themselves, to beat unbeaten paths in the middle of the mysterious jungle of destiny, all twisted and aimless, and the three of them are condemned to wing it for eternity, jackasses forever.

  Like today, when they haven’t seen a mushroom yet and Marino may have fallen in a ditch and so long, Marino. Nonetheless, Sandro is happy to be hiking in the mountains. It beats spending the morning at school, all those hours behind his desk struggling to make it to lunch. The best strategy is the translation exercise: you feed them a phrase in Italian, the kids write it down in their notebooks and then have to translate it into English. When they’re done, you call on one kid at random and make her read aloud. Then you feed them another, then another and so forth, until the bell rings. But the real trick lies in the amount of time you allot for translating the phrase: ten long minutes, maybe even a quarter hour. The kids jot down their completely wide-of-the-mark translations and then sit still, more or less behaving, minding their own business, while he reads the paper, fires off some texts, or simply closes his eyes and sleeps, sort of.

  To think that when they had called him about teaching, despite flipping out at his mom, Sandro had felt kind of happy. The first day, he was running ten minutes late and had rushed off to school on his Vespa with his leather bag—a never-before-used graduation gift from his aunt and uncle—between his legs while a movie played in his head. It opened with him entering the classroom. The kids’ jaws dropped when they saw this professor—so different, so cool. He tossed his bag on the floor, slid behind his desk, and told them the deal. “Hey, I’m Sandro Mancini, I teach English. And I don’t give a damn about deadlines or grades or schedules. I only care about the heart. Lend me your hearts, kids, and I’ll lend you mine.”

  Yes, just like that. And perhaps it was the freezing air on his face, or the hour of the morning, a time that hadn’t seen him on his feet in ages, but Sandro had rushed off to school completely convinced that he’d enter the classroom and immediately form a special bond with these kids. To the boys he’d be big brother; to the girls, forbidden fruit, a kind of fascinating guru who crash-landed in their lives and changed them forever. And that’s how, as he shook these kids out of their torpor, as he taught them to take life by the horns and bow to no man, Sandro would discover his true calling.

  Which had not been the guitar, nor poetry, nor a combination of the two, which he had tried, becoming a low-fi singer-songwriter called Total Darkness. (No one ever actually called him that.) He sent demo tapes to record companies, rock magazines, even venues that booked Toto cover bands. Radio silence. Not a word back. Sandro blamed Italy for being a small, sanctimonious country where, if you don’t know the right people, you’ll never become anything, where real talent goes unrecognized and the same old bullshit keeps getting spun. But that was a lie. The truth is that music wasn’t his calling. Sandro Mancini was born to teach.

  Well, that’s what he’d thought anyways, gunning down the back road on his Vespa, passing one warehouse under construction and another just shuttered, and the closer to school he got the more he believed it.

  But between the custodian’s welcome (“Classroom’s over there. Get going, you’re late”), the expression of the few kids who had deigned to sit up when he walked into the room, and the whiff of chemicals coming off the radiators running full blast, he knew it wasn
’t meant to be. He may have sucked as a singer-songwriter, but as a teacher he was Total Darkness too.

  Not that he doesn’t know his stuff. Sandro speaks English a hundred times better than the full-time faculty, the doddering old guard who spend a month explaining the difference between a wristwatch, a wall clock, and a cuckoo clock, so that when the kids travel abroad they can’t even order a sandwich. It’s that he doesn’t know how to convey to others all the things he knows. And even in the rare cases when someone learns something thanks to him, Sandro—why pretend otherwise—doesn’t give two shits. He’ll be in that classroom for a month tops and that’s that. He knows it and the kids know it too. They’re like two passengers boarding a train, and one is already preparing to get off at the next stop.

  In fact, if a leprechaun or magic dwarf or something of that kind were to pop out from behind a tree right now and offer him a hundred euros for every one of his students’ names he could remember, Sandro would still be broke. He could call up a few faces, especially the girls’ faces, but zero names. A few kids he couldn’t even say for certain are Italian, and he still hasn’t figured out whether one of his students is a boy or a girl. And you’re asking him for names?

  There’s Luca, of course, but Luca doesn’t count.

  They’d struck up a conversation on day one, during recess, while Sandro was by himself leaning against the wall in a corner of the hallway where neither students nor teachers ever hung out. He was stroking a pack of cigarettes in his jeans pocket and cooking up a way to duck out for a smoke without being seen.

  “We smoke in the bathrooms, but the teachers sneak off to the teachers’ lounge,” said this kid who’d appeared out of nowhere. Tall, with long blond hair, he wore a faded blue T-shirt with a picture of a palm tree. He was the kind of boy that girls wind up taking pills to forget, that makes men uneasily recall the time when they were fourteen and realized that one of their classmates seemed handsome to them, really handsome, and so they tossed and turned all night, terrified they might be queer and ahead of them lay years and years of lying to their parents, of people’s petty jokes and perhaps a few gay-bashings by gangs of suburban Nazis.

  “Thanks for the information,” said Sandro, stifling a smile. “And the teachers’ lounge is where?”

  “Top floor. It’s the only one with a door in one piece. How long you here for?”

  “Here where?”

  “School. How long do you have to stay here?”

  “I don’t have to,” said Sandro, and he was about to break into a speech about the special role that teachers play in society, about the importance of his occupation for the future of the country. But he didn’t feel like saying that bullshit, and the calm expression on the kid’s face led him to understand there was no need to. Instead they started talking abut music, the big acts Sandro had seen live, and Luca went wild at every name he dropped, couldn’t believe Sandro had really seen so-and-so play, and Sandro felt simultaneously badass and prehistoric.

  Then they started talking about other concerts slated for that summer, about how Luca had no money but still wanted to go. How he wanted to travel to Biarritz the following week to go surfing with his friends who had rented a camper. Only his mother might not give him permission to go.

  That word, “permission,” drove Sandro crazy. How could you suffocate a kid like this? How could you keep him caged up with the excuse that it’s still too soon, with that shitty lie that one day he’d be able to do as he pleased? That day never comes. So he told him, teacher to student, what the deal was. How at forty years old he’d come here to teach at his mother’s bidding. Which is crazy stuff, right, and even crazier to admit to a kid who was supposed to consider him a beacon of light. But Luca listened carefully. It seemed like he cared, like he even understood him, so Sandro carried on. He told him about the time his mother called him because she had heard an ambulance pass by and had gotten scared, about the time she’d made a vegetable quiche and written his name on top with a slice of Kraft and drawn a little heart next to it. He was even going to tell him about how he comes home at night to find his mom has laid out his pajamas on the radiator . . . but fortunately the bell rang, like an explosion of metal over their heads, and Sandro remembered where he was and what he had to do. He stopped talking, and each hurried off to where he was meant to be.

  The same thing is happening now, in the dense woods. A loud noise brings Sandro back to reality. A sharp cry from the sky. A buzzard circling around and around, hunting for prey. The noise makes him shiver, and he realizes that for a while now he has been wandering aimlessly in the middle of the woods with his head in the clouds—not the ideal method for finding mushrooms.

  He looks around and sees only trees and stones, stones and trees. He could either press forward a bit and see what happens or head back to where he’d started, but which way is forward and which back is anyone’s guess, and the more he thinks about it the less he can be sure, and the only thing that’s clear among all these stones and branches is that, motherfucker, Sandro is lost.

  He checks his cell phone but there’s no coverage, there’s never coverage up here in the mountains, otherwise like hell they’d buy these walkie-talkies. He turns it on. “Help, guys, I don’t know where I am. Where are you?” But all he hears is a confused noise, like a swarm of wasps struggling to bust out of the transmitter. “Can you hear me? Rambo, can you hear me? If you can hear me, please say something . . . over.”

  Nothing. Not even “over” works. So Sandro stops walking and posts up under a massive tree, much wider and taller than the others. He sits down and stays put. In a situation like this the one thing to do is locate a landmark and cling to it. Moving around makes things worse. A lot of people think getting lost is a black-and-white, cut–and-dry matter: you either know where you are or you don’t. On the contrary, there are a thousand gradations of lostness. Each of us is always a little lost. But if you aren’t aware of it and keep walking around at random, you risk getting really lost and ending up all alone in the dark of night, where you can’t see anything and the only sound you hear is the soft drop of drool from the mouths of approaching wolves.

  Not Sandro, he won’t make that mistake. He may know nothing about mushrooms but he’s a pro at getting lost. He leans his back against the trunk of the tree, closes his eyes, and tries to relax. But hearing the beep of his cell phone, he jumps to his feet. In the silent woods it sounds like music from Mars. Coverage! He’s saved! Maybe this tree works like an antenna, picking up the few radio waves in the air and channeling them down here.

  But no, Sandro checks his phone. No coverage, zippo. Then he checks to see who sent the message and everything becomes clear. It’s Luca. Sandro had been thinking of that magical kid and his dreamy trip to Biarritz, and at that moment Luca had been thinking of his awesome teacher and written him a text, which would arrive with or without coverage. Because when things are meant to be, they have great powers, they defeat impossible odds, they plow forward at full speed and simply happen.

  2:07 P.M.: Hey teacher, everything’s tops here. As always you were right. Did you find what you were looking for? Keep trying. You’re almost there. L.

  Sandro reads and smiles, shaking his head as though Luca could see him. No, he hasn’t found what he was looking for. He doesn’t even know what he was looking for, and on top of that he’s lost. But that’s okay. Everyone talks nonsense now and then. Even Luca.

  Luca, who’s in France, having fun with his friends, riding the waves by day and, who knows, talking game to girls by night. Girls here hound him so much he has to duck for cover. The most hard-up devise ways to corner him. They loiter by the women’s bathroom waiting for Luca to pass by, and if he’s not careful one day they’ll take him by force, drag him into the bathroom, and whatever happens happens . . .

  The buzzard shrieks again, circling the sky, and its cry doesn’t even give him time to imagine that scene, with all tho
se girls in the women’s bathroom and himself in Luca’s shoes. The call brings him back to reality, long on trees and stones, short on group sex.

  Sandro looks up and sees it circling and circling, scanning the ground for something to catch to live another day. In this sense the buzzard isn’t that different from him and his friends. Only it flies high in the sky and never stops, while he is sitting here, bewildered, not doing dick.

  He grabs hold of the trunk and lifts himself up—he may not know how to fly but somehow he has to get out of this stony, leaf-blown hell alive. But first he points his telephone at the buzzard and tries to take a photo of it to send to Luca along with the message: “I haven’t found what I’m looking for but I’ll be damned if I’m not looking.”

  Yeah, that’s it, what a line. Placed in the right spot in a song, it’d be real tight. Maybe he’d finally write a new track and call it “Buzzard.” But before that he has to get this godforsaken bird to stand still so he can take its photo. On the first shot he only catches a wing, on the second the sky, on the third he drops his phone. It hits the ground, rolls a few feet downhill, and vanishes in the tall grass beside a boulder.

  Shit. Sandro pounds his thigh, hurting both leg and hand in the process, then runs downhill and kneels beside the boulder. He reaches out his aching hand and is about to rummage in the tall grass when he hears a hissing noise, like someone exhaling, and quickly pulls back. Great. Perfect. That shithead Marino had put the fear of snakes in him. All morning he’d kept on whining about how nuts it was to hike in the mountains without antivenom or knee-highs or walking sticks. In his opinion these mountains were oozing with snakes.

  But were they to heed Marino they’d never do anything in this life, let alone find work. They go forage for mussels around the jetty piers and Marino’s scared that the harbormaster will nab him or that he’ll catch a cold. They go dumpster diving and he’s scared he’ll get bitten by mice and infected with leptospirosis. They go steal pinecones in the pine grove and he’s scared the warden will find out and never call him back to traffic duty. That’s no way to live—that’s not living—that’s dying in slo-mo.