Sandro shouldn’t pander to Marino’s ridiculous fears. Sandro has to hang tough. Again he hears that same shrill noise in the leaves, but he doesn’t care. He takes a deep breath, raises his hand, and plunges it into the leaves, into that damp dark mystery. First he feels the cool grass, then the cold ground, and finally the hard plastic of his telephone. He’s about to pull it out when he feels something else next to it. Something smooth, puffy, much bigger. He brushes aside the grass, removes the stones, pokes his head under the boulder, and almost faints at the mind-blowing spectacle before him: the largest porcini in the world. His whole life he’s never seen one this big, neither in person nor on the screen. (Come to think of it, he’s never seen porcini in a movie before.) It’s enormous, so perfect it doesn’t seem real. But it is real. It’s gigantic. It’s the King of Porcini.
“The King of Porcini! The King of Porcini!” he shouts, pulling it up from the ground, gently at first and then, seeing as the King won’t surrender, giving it a hard tug. But it has to surrender to him; he found it and he’s taking it. Yes, he found it, Sandro found it! He’s got to tell the others. Luca too. Hell, the kid was right, he said he was about to find what he was looking for, and motherfucker here it is! Here it is!
He extracts it, lifts it in the air, and studies its perfect and gigantic profile against the sky, where the buzzard’s still flying around with nothing to show for it.
He shakes the King at the sky, hoping the bird will see it and bow down to him and his bravura. “Hey buzzard, check this out! Up yours!”
He waves at the animal and gives him the finger. Then he cradles the mushroom like a newborn and starts running downhill in long, reckless strides.
Since the upshot of not knowing where you are is that you’re free to look both ways and take the easiest road out.
GIFTS FROM THE SEA
Lately the sea’s been really angry, all black and frothing, crying so loud that I can hear it from my room at night. Why it’s all worked up I couldn’t say. The sea’s a big place. Maybe it’s upset about something that happened on the other side of the horizon, in Corsica or Spain or even farther away. But this morning it has calmed down and it sparkles in the sun with all these bright little squares that I have to look at from behind tinted glasses or else they’ll make my head spin.
But I’m smiling, too, because I love the sun to death. Literally. I shouldn’t be in the sun at all. Otherwise I’ll get burned and covered with blisters and risk dying. I always have to stay in the shade, or, better, in the house, and not come out until sunset. But I put on a sweater and sunglasses and a pound of sunscreen and go outside anyways. It’s better to take a chance and die outside than stay home and let sadness kill you.
Besides, it’s so nice here. I listen to the waves lapping at the shore and forget all about eating my slice of pizza, which is good, but the taste mingles with the smell of sunscreen on my face and neck and hands and arms and all over. Before going for pizza, Mom and I stopped by the pharmacy to pick it up, then we came here to the sea, sat in the shade of the cabanas, and sent a message to Luca telling him he’s missing out on pizza-by-the-sea Tuesdays and that he better hurry home soon. But he hasn’t written back yet. He’s probably on the top of one of those really tall waves in the ocean, looking at the world from up there, which must be like heaven, and if he doesn’t tell me every little thing about what he saw when he gets home, I swear I’ll punch him in the nose.
But Luca always tells me what he sees. Even while we’re walking together he tells me what’s around us, since I don’t see too well, especially things at a distance, which look like a blur of color. Say I see a green-and-red river. He tells me it’s a forest full of trees, birds in the air, blackberry bushes. Then I say, “Let’s go,” and we go. When I’m close up I can make out some dark, round shapes, reach my hand out, pick one, and put it in my mouth, and it really does taste like blackberries. So I tell him it’s delicious and Luca laughs and says, “Did you just say blackberries are good? Hold the phone, Luna. Let me alert the press. It’s sure to make the front page.” I laugh and shove him, only gently. He laughs and pretends to bop me on the head. Anyways, all of that’s to say that it would be great if today, on pizza Tuesday, my big brother were here.
Instead there’s Zot.
We were giving him a ride home when Mom asked him what he’d had for lunch, and I didn’t see the look Zot gave her, but Mom must have seen it in the rearview mirror, because she pulled a U-ie, and we all went for pizza together.
“Has Luca written back?” I ask.
Mom checks her phone again and shakes her head. “He must be in the water. He’ll write back after.”
“We can’t call him?”
“I wish, Luna. I’d call him every minute if I could, but we promised . . . ”
True, we had promised not to call him. It had been hard enough convincing him to take his cell phone. We’d given it to him for Christmas, and he never uses it. “But no calls, just texts once in a while. Otherwise what’ll I have to tell you when I get back?”
“But Mom, I think we have to call him. It’s an emergency.”
“An emergency?”
“Yeah, I mean, you going to jail is an emergency.”
“Excuse me? Why would I go to jail?”
“For before. At school.”
“Listen, drama queen, they don’t lock you up for kicking someone,” she says. She eats the last wedge of her pizza and wipes her hands on the blue wood of the cabana. Then she spreads her army shirt out on the sand, lies down, and doesn’t say another word.
Zot and I stay seated, he on his white cotton hanky, the kind old guys carry. He had it tucked into the pocket of his heavy, baggy, gray, old-guy jacket.
“Why aren’t you eating your pizza?” I ask. For the last half hour he’s been chewing the same tiny piece.
“I’m savoring it slowly.”
“Tell the truth. You don’t like it.”
“If you must know, I’m relishing it. But I want to make it last.”
“Look, you don’t have to eat it if you don’t like it. Leave it. Besides, you ordered the Neapolitan and that comes with those super salty anchovies.”
“It happens to be my favorite.”
“Come on, tell the truth, I know why you ordered it.”
“You do? And why’s that?”
“Because you were standing there and couldn’t make up your mind, and the man at the pizza place told you, ‘There’s always the Neapolitan. It’s a classic.’ And you’re a sucker for all thing classic, so that’s what you ordered.”
“That’s preposterous.”
“No, it’s the truth.”
“It is not!” Zot lets out this weird cry that sounds like a mouse being picked up and squeezed.
“Keep it down or you’ll wake my mom! She has to rest as much as possible, because if she goes to jail, we’re in for stress big-time.”
Soon as I say it, Mom springs up. “I’m not going to jail. Cut that nonsense out, I’m not going anywhere! Look around you. This place is paradise. Now be quiet and enjoy the day a little.” She digs around in her shirt pocket, pulls out a pack of cigarettes, and lights one up.
And me, I can’t wait any longer. I stand up and tell her I’m going to the shore to get my gift.
“What gift?” Zot asks, but no one answers him. Like clockwork, Mom tells me to pull my hood on tight, keep my sunglasses on, and not take too long picking out a gift, because the sunscreen wears off.
“Miss,” says Zot, “if it’s not too rude, I would like to go to the shore and see this gift too.” I spin around, but fortunately Mom knows that it’s something I have to do on my own. “Don’t call me ‘Miss,’” she says, “and yes, you are definitely being rude. First finish your pizza and after that you have to tell me what your deal is. Who you are, where you’re from, the whole shebang.”
Zot doesn’t say anything, just opens his mouth, tries to shovel another hunk of pizza in, and stays put while I head off to the shore.
With every step I take, the sea shines brighter and the wind blows harder, and in no time I’m taking faster, longer strides. Without meaning to I’ve started to run.
The sand on the shore is dark and cool, my feet sink a little, and it’s only now I realize that it’s made up of a lot of tiny pebbles, which are rolling over my toes and tickling me. I smile, partly at the tickling and partly at the waves gently lapping at my feet now and again. Even if the air outside feels almost like summer, the water is real cold. I set out along the water’s edge.
I come here almost every day. After all, it’s only five minutes from home. My smile vanishes pronto when I think that pretty soon that won’t be the case. On the day of Grandpa’s funeral, some relatives I’d never seen before showed up. At first all they said was that they were really sorry. Then they must have changed the subject, because Mom stopped nodding. Actually they fought. As they were leaving she shouted, “You have no right! You have no right!” But it turns out they did have a right, since afterward there appeared a sign on the fence with a telephone number and a message saying that anybody who wanted to buy the place had to call that number. In Italian as well as this weird language that’s all over town these days. It’s how the Russians write.
And I’m really sad we’re giving it to them. It sits on a pretty road, small and narrow and closed-off at one end. A lot of people used to live there year-round, then gradually everyone sold their house and now ours is the only normal one left, the only house someone lives in. The others are giant villas that the owners visit one month out of the year, and when they buy our house they’ll tear that down too and build up another villa, and we’ll go live in a place far from the sea and when I miss our house I won’t even be able to come look at it from the outside, since my house will no longer exist.
In fact, I got mad and made a fuss about it. Luca, on the other hand, didn’t say anything. Nada. Yet ever since the day they put the sign out front he stopped showing up for lunch. In the morning he goes to the beach and he stays there till dinner.
I get it. I’d like to stay here till dinner too.
I stroll beside the sea, which after all those days of being angry has now calmed down and sends me the last little transparent waves that sound as if on top of their curly edges they were carrying a bunch of leaves that rustled in the air. The waves come slowly and cover the sand, and before going back out they leave something behind. They leave gifts on the shore.
A million, maybe a billion of them, things it hides on the sea-floor, under all that blue, and every once in a while it picks one and sends it to dry land. A lot of people don’t even notice, maybe because they can see everything around them and get lost looking out at the horizon and sailboats and seagulls fishing and the coast and the mountains up there that disappear into the water. But me, I can’t see these things, and if I keep looking up at the sky I’ll go blind. I walk with my hood over my head and my eyes on the ground, and in the end it’s no wonder I noticed this really weird stuff that the sea scatters on the shore. All the things that wound up in the sea ever since the world began, from the time of dinosaurs to this morning, things born in the water or that fell from ships or were torn from the land by overflowing rivers. They’re on the bottom, dancing this way and that, and every so often one of them catches a current, latches onto a wave, and, before you know it, reaches the sand, waiting to surprise me.
Of course green crabs and hermit crabs and seashells are normal findings. And sadly sticks and plastic bags are normal too. But what’s a toothbrush doing on the shore? How far did this doggie-paw slipper or that remote control travel to get here? And there are shoes, too, and license plates and dolls’ heads with their hair all disheveled and speckled with seashells and one eye open and the other shut, boxes of chocolate and Band-Aids and soda cans with super weird labels, which could come from anywhere, India or Japan or a whole other planet.
I don’t know. But I spend days studying these treasures. I make a note of the pretty things in my journal and the prettiest I carry home with me. Not too many. Mom tells me I can take one a day. I pick them up and place them in my room. One time Luca entered and asked me: “What gifts did the sea bring you today?” And ever since then that’s what we call them: gifts from the sea. By now the room is stuffed with them—on top of the furniture, under the bed, on the windowsill, in the corners, even scattered on the floor. Gifts everywhere.
Today’s the same. I ask myself where each thing comes from, how it got here, and how long the getting here took. And I don’t feel the sun creeping up my sweater and finding my skin. I don’t feel my eyes begin to sting or the tears running down from behind my glasses and blending with the sunscreen that keeps fading.
I do, however, hear Mom’s deafening whistle. She sticks two fingers in her mouth, like a shepherd calling in his sheep. I turn toward the cabanas and see a blue upright shape. That’s her. She yells at me to come back. Already? I was here for such a short time . . . Maybe something happened. Maybe Zot choked to death on his pizza. Maybe they’ve come to take Mom off to jail. I don’t know. But just in case I grab a gnarled stick that looks like a duck, thank the sea, and head back, gift in hand, to see what’s happened.
“Sorry Luna, I couldn’t stand it on my own any longer,” Mom says. She wraps her hands around her neck and pretends to strangle herself. “Look at me. My heart’s so heavy I can’t breathe. Your friend Zot told me the story of his life. I’ve never heard something so sad.”
Zot is still sitting on the wooden railing and holding that slice of Neapolitan pizza in his hand, which looks even bigger than before.
“I’m sorry, Miss, but you asked me to tell you.”
“Stop calling me ‘Miss.’ And how was I supposed to know it would be so depressing?”
“Why,” I say, “what’s his story?”
“Never mind, Luna, don’t ask, not ever. Spare yourself. I’m begging you. It’s not to be believed.”
“I don’t find it so sad,” says Zot. “There were good days.”
“Believe me, kid, I hope every day for the rest of your life is a good day, starting today, but you don’t know the first thing about good days. If I think about that one Christmas and the puppy with a spot over its eye, or that story about the shoes stuffed with—enough, don’t make me think about it!”
“Thanks a lot, Mom, I thought you’d called me over because they were taking you to jail—”
“Again with this jail business? I told you, I’m not going to jail!”
“I really hope not. But you beat up Damiano. And his mom.”
“I didn’t beat them up, drama queen. I kicked each of them once. Big whoop!”
It’s true. One kick apiece and that was that. The same spot-on kick in the same place, and both of them hit the ground. Then she ran to the car and while she was hurrying to start the engine she looked at me and told me to always remember this one important thing: Not only does a kick between the legs work on boys, but, delivered hard enough, it can take a woman down too. “Got it, Luna?” I nodded. And maybe one day that info will be of real use to me but I sure hope not.
“If you do go to jail, can I still live at home with Luca?”
“I don’t suppose so,” says Zot. “They’d probably place you in an orphanage. But perhaps they would pick one close to the prison.”
“That’s enough!” Mom shouts. She jumps up, grabs her purse, and takes out her cell phone. She dials a number and cradles the phone while fishing another cigarette out of her army shirt, which used to be Luca’s but doesn’t fit him anymore, so now it’s hers, and even if it’s for boys, it looks good on her. Everything looks good on Mom.
“I’ve had it up to here with both of you, let’s settle this thing. I’m sick of hearing about it . . . Yes, hello?” Her tone sudd
enly changes. “I need to talk with the doctor. No, right away, tell him to stop whatever he’s doing. Tell him it’s urgent. No, wait, tell him Serena wants to speak with him.”
She looks at me and winks. Ten seconds later she’s back to talking, only this time she speaks in this soft, low voice I’ve never heard before.
“Hi Giancarlo. How are you? You’ve already heard. Just as well. I know, I mean, that’s why I’m calling. I just want to tell you how sorry I am. I screwed up. I acted like an idiot and I’m very sorry about your son. But not about your wife. That was self-defense. She jumped on top of me. What are you supposed to do when you see someone her size coming at you? I know, I know, she’s right to press charges. It makes perfect sense. She deserved it but Damiano didn’t. He can’t help it if he’s not the nicest kid . . . Look, Giancarlo, I don’t know how to say this and maybe I shouldn’t say anything at all, but when I look at that boy, it’s like coming face-to-face with the emblem of your life with another person. And I know you’ve built something important with her, that it’s too late for . . . Anyways, I don’t know, I thought I didn’t care, but this morning I saw him and this feeling came over me—all this anger, disappointment, pain . . . I’m an idiot, a fool. No, no, Giancarlo, it’s true. I made a mistake and I know it. Just telling you these things is a mistake. I’m probably better off keeping my mouth shut. I know, I know you can understand me . . . You and I don’t need words to understand one another. We have a spiritual connection, you know. But I shouldn’t be saying these things to you. You have your life and family, it’s not my place to . . . Forget it, Giancarlo, I’m begging you. My life has always been a disaster and I don’t want to ruin yours too. And who knows what’ll happen when the court and lawyers get involved? I can’t even afford a lawyer. I don’t know what I’ll do. But that’s as it should be. I screwed up and have to pay the price. No, no, Giancarlo, this is how it ought to be, and maybe even these thoughts, these screw-ups, will help me stop thinking about it so much, about how I really feel about you. Maybe we’re better off that way, you know? No, no, don’t do anything, don’t you dare. Don’t mess things up with your wife. Really, I don’t want you to. I can’t ask you to . . . Go back to your patient, Giancarlo. You do good things for people. It’s a beautiful thing. It’s a calling. I don’t deserve your kindness. I don’t deserve you. Forget me, Giancarlo, my sweet Giancarlo. Au revoir.”
The Breaking of a Wave Page 6