Yes, that’s what Sandro wants. That’s what all serious teachers should want. Otherwise, if you lack passion, you’re merely stealing money from the state. So, when another mom walked in with her head hung low, humiliated by her previous conferences and resigned to endure yet another, saying, “Sorry, I’m Erik Conti’s mother, sorry,” Sandro had had enough. He leapt to his feet, swung round from behind his desk, and shook her hand.
“Ah, Erik’s mom, finally! Great kid you’ve got, Miss.”
She peeled her eyes off the floor and looked up at him, confused, like someone expecting to be pummeled and being kissed on the mouth instead. “Sorry? You mean my Erik? Erik Conti?”
“That’s the one. What an intellect! Highly unusual, sure, but very lively.”
“Honestly the math teacher just told me he’s the one reason her class is behind.”
“Oh, that’s typical. Teachers who don’t know how to run their classes always blame the kids. Besides, between you and me, do you really expect someone who teaches math to understand a thing about life?” Sandro winks at her. The woman lets slip a timid smile, tries to conceal it, doesn’t succeed.
He should stop there. He’s gone far enough. But that smile, that look . . . It’s the first time Sandro has felt good at this school. Actually it’s the first time he’s felt good in months. So his mouth runs on autopilot: “Don’t worry, miss, you’ll have lots to be happy about in the future. You might have to swallow some bitter pills today, but one day you’ll be walking down the street with your son and all these people will have to eat their petty words.”
“Are you sure about that? I love Erik and all, but I don’t see this great intellect you’re talking about.”
“Clearly. But his is an original, brilliant, unconventional intellect. Van Gogh was a genius, and you’ll recall he cut his ear off, just like that, to pass the time.”
“That’s true, I heard that.”
“And Einstein? Did you know Einstein couldn’t tie his shoes?”
“Really?”
“Yep. His sister tied them for him. And if his sister wasn’t around, Einstein would leave the house in slippers.” Now that he’s gotten going there’s no holding back. What does it matter if he’s not sure Einstein had a sister? What matters is that Erik Conti has a mom and now that mom is happy. And she’s listening to Mr. Mancini with her hands on her chest and passion in her throat. She’s trying to stay cool but it’s clear she wants to hug him hard and love him till it hurts.
“Neither does my Erik, Mr. Mancini! Erik doesn’t know how to tie his shoes either!”
“Excuse me?”
“Nope, he can’t put on his pants or brush his teeth by himself,” she says, her voice now swelling with pride.
Sandro nods and smiles, though his smile is starting to wane. It’s slowly beginning to dawn on him who Erik Conti is. He’s the “problem” student in sore need of a tutor but after cuts to the budget they’d decided he could go without just fine. And while Sandro conducts his lesson, this boy spends the whole hour at his desk scratching his forehead with his index finger and squinting while muttering under his breath something that sounds like “councilor” but maybe—let’s hope—isn’t “councilor.”
That’s who Erik Conti is. But by now Sandro has spoken, overdone it, ignited a happiness in this mom she hasn’t felt in years. She smiles, giggles uncontrollably, snatches the teacher’s hand and won’t let go. Maybe she doesn’t really believe all these wonderful things about her son but they’re beautiful to hear and she’ll hang on to them for at least the time it takes to travel home from school. A dream, once begun, can last a lifetime or five minutes. It doesn’t matter which. A dream always begins by lasting an eternity.
Erik’s mom bids Sandro goodbye and heads for the door, walking backwards so she can continue to gaze at him and say thank you. And once she’s gone, Sandro feels a tad disheartened when no one else comes in after her.
He’d like to keep this up till tomorrow. He’d like to feel this way his whole life. Indeed he stays there, sits back down at his desk, and waits. But nothing. So he gathers the pencils and papers he’d used to draw circles and lines while he was talking, as if those symbols were an extension of his precious thoughts, and puts them in his bag. He grabs some pens technically belonging to the school but which no one uses, puts them in his bag as well, gets up, and heads for the door.
And just as he’s about to leave, a wave crashes down on him. It sends him reeling. He drops on the floor like a wet sock. Sandro barely has time to close his eyes. He no longer knows where the floor begins and the ceiling ends. Everything is spinning, him most of all, and when he hears this sharp crack at first he thinks something far off has shattered into a thousand little pieces before he realizes it’s his tailbone.
Splayed out on the floor, he massages the bone, while a voice above him keeps repeating, “Sorry, sorry, sorry. I’m so, so sorry!” Sandro shakes his head, picks himself back off the ground, and slowly catches his breath. He looks up, sees what almost killed him, and gasps all over again: standing before Sandro is the most beautiful woman in the world.
“I’m sorry! I know I’m late but there was this old woman without an appointment who wanted a perm and then I couldn’t find my car keys or locate the right classroom and I swept into the room and I found you! I’m really sorry. But, look, I never come to teacher conferences. This is my first time and I specifically came to see you. So even if I almost killed you, you can take it as a compliment, I think. Don’t you?”
He doesn’t answer, doesn’t even nod or shake his head. He can’t. He’s staring into her eyes, her big, dark, totally uninhibited eyes under her chestnut-blond bangs. Had someone asked a minute earlier, Sandro would have said that bangs suck, that it’s a haircut for stupid kids or goths obsessed with the Middle Ages. But now he realizes it’s the best haircut in the universe, hands down, the perfect fit for a face like hers, a body like hers (hot even in jeans and an army shirt), two eyes without eyeliner that still manage to dazzle after a day’s work, that give the whole cosmetics and fashion industry a spanking.
“Mr. Mancini, listen, you’re the expert here and I wouldn’t dream of telling you how to do your job, but maybe we could take a seat?” The corners of her lips curl into a half smile.
“Yes, of course.” Sandro bolts for his desk, indicates a chair, sits down, and pops back up again, waiting for her to take her seat before sitting down himself. He looks at her. He knows he has to say something intelligent, say anything, but how can he? They’re so close, and she continues to smile that smile, to have those eyes. Eyes that Sandro now realizes he recognizes: the eyes of Serena, the prettiest girl in school, whom he had spent his entire adolescence thinking about and never once mustered the courage to talk to. Holy shit, here he is, mustering it, by accident, twenty years on.
“Listen, I came because my son won’t stop talking about you. ‘My English teacher this, my English teacher that . . . ’ I figured I’d come see the famous Mr. Mancini for myself. But if it’s too late and you’d rather not talk, just say the word.”
There’s a touch of regret in her voice. Maybe she’s disappointed. Yet her smile hasn’t vanished. Suddenly Sandro gets it, this amazing and terrifying thing: that’s no smile, that’s her natural look, not some momentary marvel but a remarkable condition that goes on and on. The man who loves this woman gets to see that his whole life. All he needs to do is turn around and there it’ll be, even on hard days, even when things don’t go as planned, a reminder he has at least one gigantic reason to be happy.
And Sandro envies him, this man, even if he must have sweat blood to be with someone like her. Because you have to give up your life to be with this kind of woman: no crew of friends, no personal hobby, no concert-binging and crap of that kind, just a life committed to being with her and making sure she doesn’t slip away. Good God, what he wouldn’t give to be that man.
And this thought, half-hope and half-desperation, so addles his brain that when he finally manages to speak, instead of saying something beautiful or profound or, if nothing else, rational, Sandro asks her the most pointless and obvious question there is: “Sorry, whose mother are you?”
And of course she opens her lovely mouth and says, “Pleased to meet you. I’m Serena, Luca’s mom.”
Of course. Who else could the most beautiful woman in the world give birth to but the most exceptional kid in the world? Sandro almost apologizes for having asked. He takes a breath and unleashes a cascade of compliments, not much of a challenge after extolling the virtues of Erik, the kid who can’t tie his shoelaces. With Luca it’s a breeze. Except while telling Serena how marvelous and intelligent and magical her son is, Sandro realizes all too well there’s no point. He can hear it in her voice and see it in her eyes; she hears these compliments every day. By now they probably bore her. So, after checking off the thousand wonderful things Luca does and the million wonderful things he’ll one day do, Sandro arrives at the one thing Luca can’t do: the trip to Biarritz she refuses to let him take. Because it’s patently unfair, and helping Luca is very important to him, and the discussion only inadvertently serves the purpose of making a good impression on Serena, of showing her that he’s a teacher, true, but also a man, a real man who lives life to its fullest, who takes the bull by the horns and bites bullets and knows what’s best for himself and others.
“I know it’s none of my business, Serena. Luca is a minor and you can decide whether or not to let him go to Biarritz. The choice is yours. But I’m asking you, are you positive you can choose for him?”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean in my opinion you can’t. In my opinion you can’t decide for Luca. A kid like that, you can’t stop him or push him. He exists on a different plane, he’s up here, doing his own thing. I don’t know how to explain it, it’s as though . . . hmm, I don’t know.”
“I don’t know either, but it’s true.”
“Well then, you can spend your whole life wondering whether or not to let him go, but it’s not as though you can really decide for Luca. It’s more about you just trying to do something, like Wile E. Coyote and his umbrella.”
“Huh?”
“You know the cartoon, Wile E. Coyote, the one who chases after the Road Runner.”
“Yeah, sure.”
“There’s this thing he does all the time. He winds up in a ravine or canyon or someplace like that, looks up, and sees a giant boulder hurtling toward him. And instead of stepping aside, he whips out an umbrella. Remember? A really small umbrella that he opens and huddles under. Then the boulder comes crashing down and crushes him.”
“Yeah, so?”
“So I think by trying to stop Luca you’re doing the same thing Coyote does with the giant boulder. You can open your umbrella, but it won’t do you much good.”
Serena looks at him, sinking her marvelous, liquid eyes into his. “All right, teacher, you’re saying I should let him go, huh?”
Sandro nods firmly, as if he’s a firm man—firm and full of wisdom—someone who knows what’s best in life, and lucky the woman who finds herself by his side.
For a moment Serena says nothing. She gets up, goes to leave, then turns back. “That cartoon always pissed me off.”
“Me too,” says Sandro.
Serena snorts and makes a face. She doesn’t want to smile but she does. And that smile stays with Sandro even after she’s left the room, even after he, too, leaves and goes home.
Even now, as he thinks back on it, and his heart skips a beat or two.
LIKE HELL I’M CALLING HER LUNA
Serena had those two kids herself. She’s not into men, so she went to a clinic in Switzerland and picked their daddy out of a catalog.”
“Serena bought those two kids from Gypsies who abducted them in the market. They charged her half price for the second one.”
But this is your favorite: “Serena had those two kids with a priest, a young handsome priest who was prepared to give up the priesthood to be with her. But when the second kid was born that white he thought it was a sign from Heaven and repented. Now he lives in a monastery in the mountains.”
Those are the rumors around town, those and a thousand worse. New ones crop up every day and sooner or later they reach the ears of Miss Gemma, who relays them to you and you laugh long and hard. Because they’re not born of spite. They grow like mold in the wintertime, when there’s no one around in Forte dei Marmi and if you want something to happen you have to make it up yourself. The kids fall back on drugs or find more imaginative ways of wriggling free of the world. Men go hunting or fishing and spend the night playing video poker or—to save a buck—picking up trannies. Women don’t go in for hobbies that involve getting your hands dirty and they don’t know where to procure drugs, so if they’re decent-looking they have affairs and if they’re not they pass the time making them up about other people around town.
That’s the way it is. That’s the norm. And a young woman with two kids and no man in sight is almost asking for it. That there are a thousand ridiculous rumors circulating about Luca and Luna’s dad is inevitable. The only rumor that doesn’t circulate is the truth, since you’re the only one who knows that, Serena.
And it’s much more ridiculous than any of the tales you’ve heard.
Spring, 1996. You’re twenty-two. You finished high school without a single fail and enrolled in pre-law, just like all your friends. And for a few years you manage to plow ahead, mornings on campus, afternoons studying, but every once in a while you look up from those millions of minor laws policing minor issues and think you owe an apology to the hours spent in doctors’ waiting rooms or in line at the post office, to homebound Sundays sick with fever, to afternoons Mom sent you kicking and screaming to flute lessons and you sat in a room with the blind instructor who smelled like piss. You owe an apology to all the worst things in your life, because now that you’re studying law, you realize they were hardly the worst. This is the worst. And continuing any further is impossible. You can’t do it. Your mother always told you that you’d never amount to anything in life because you never saw things through to the end. Sure, you may be partly to blame, but so are things that suck, and instead of seeing them through you just want to drop them. Or rather, instead of abandoning them all at once, you do what you do, setting them on the ground for a minute, pulling away just a tad, staring up at the sky, and taking one step, then another, then another, continuing to get farther and farther away from them, leaving them to wilt on the side of the road.
You do the same with college. You don’t drop out or withdraw or do anything as drastic as that. You just decide to find a summer job to pay for your loans and books, and then a friend of your dad offers you a weird job working the county fair circuit.
Your dad’s a butcher and the guy who supplies his meat slicers and scales has a side operation selling other weird equipment at county fairs in Tuscany and Emilia. He needs someone young, someone who can stand on her feet all day and has a way with words to call people’s attention to the Super Mondial 2000 and convince them that this marvelous device for crushing garlic cloves, scaling fish, pitting olives, and slicing cucumbers will change their lives.
So you begin touring the country, traveling nonstop, a new town every day, like a starlet. True, rather than New York and Tokyo your bus pulls into Settignano, Ponte a Egola, La Rosa di Terricciola, Terranuova Bracciolini: bizarre places crammed between two intersections and comprising a couple of slanted houses, half a church, and a bar with an arcade in back. Places so godawful on the big day of the trade show, with its riot of people and kids and bands, you shudder to think what they’re like the day after, when the streets have cleared and paper, torn plastic, and bean skins spin around silently in empty space. Lucky for you, you’re gone the day after. The day after you�
��re already at another town fair, telling a new yet totally identical public about the miracles this stainless steel tool performs.
Old ladies lured by the power of garlic presses, sniveling kids, men only interested in the snug, low-cut shirt you’re forced to wear (“A skirt’d be nice but it’s not obligatory. You’re behind a table so your thighs barely show”). To avoid facing them, you look down at the Super Mondial 2000, take a breath, and fire away:
“Ladies and gentlemen, I hold in my hands something you could call a garlic press or a meat tenderizer or a fish scaler or an olive pitter. You could call it many things. But it’s actually something much simpler and more significant. What you see in front of you, folks, is the Future. And the Future will save you a lot of hard work, a lot of time, and a lot of useless gadgets.”
Meanwhile you slip two or three cloves of garlic (four won’t fit) into the special groove, crush them, and exhibit the pungent pulp that has slid through six holes in the front grid. Then you reopen the utensil and hold up the two empty skins in your fingers.
“How many times have you had to crush tons of cloves, ladies, while also pitting olives and scaling fish? And how confusing are all those contraptions? And who’s going to clean them? You are, clearly. Because even if you pray your hubbies will handle it . . . ”
The women shake their heads, smile bitterly, volunteer their own comments: “Yeah, right.” “Fat chance.” “Dream on.”
“And just look at how sturdy and powerful this tenderizer is, ladies. It works well for pork chops and scaloppini . . . and your husbands when they’re not listening.”
At this point people start laughing and—you hope—someone decides to take this shitty hunk of steel home.
The Breaking of a Wave Page 8