The Breaking of a Wave

by Fabio Genovesi

  I didn’t want to but I laughed real hard. Zot kept on repeating that those guys were the foundation of Italian music, treasures that the Italians should be proud of rather than this new junk, that he’d like to see one of today’s rappers try singing “Violino tzigano” or “Scapricciatiello.”

  But now we’re arriving at my house and there’s nothing left to laugh about. It’s quiet and the shutters are closed as if it were night. Zot wants to walk me to the door. I tell him I can do it myself. When he insists, I remind him that just because I don’t see well doesn’t mean I’m an idiot. He nods, turns his bike around, and heads off to his house. I go inside.

  The kitchen is dark and quiet and still, the only sounds are the noise of the fridge and the gurgle of the coffeemaker. Luca and I used to always tell Mom that the coffeemaker consumes a ton of electricity and the first thing she should do once the coffee was ready was turn it off. To which she’d reply that the first thing she did when the coffee was ready was drink it, and afterward she’d forget about it and go to work and the coffeemaker would be left on all day even if no one was home.

  And now seems just like one of those times. And maybe it’s true, maybe no one’s home. I consider turning the coffeemaker off but wait a minute, listening to it continue to gurgle in the empty house, Mom having finally returned to work or at least left the house. Maybe she had put on her shoes, gotten dressed, even combed her hair before leaving.

  Because she’s not here. Not in bed, not in the bathroom. So maybe it really is true. I’d been good today. I could have stayed home and instead I went to catechism, and the Lord made me this present: while I was at the convent he gave Mom the strength to get out of bed, make herself a coffee, and leave the house, and now she could be at Gemma’s shop or out running errands or wherever she wants.

  Yet while I’m thinking of all the places she could be, above the noise of the fridge and the gurgle of the coffeemaker, I hear something else, a soft rustling from Luca’s room. No one had touched it in six months. Even a sock he’d left behind still dangled from the radiator. His friends had been waiting outside in the van and they’d honked their horn and Luca had tossed it over his shoulder and it stayed there, dangling. Last month when Mom knocked it over she picked it up immediately and tried putting it back in place, but she couldn’t remember exactly where it had been. She tried placing it this way and that, shaking her head and crying.

  I go to Luca’s room. The door is half shut and I’d rather leave it that way. I don’t want to open it and look in, I want to remain in doubt a little longer before I find Mom sitting on the ground in the dark by the foot of the bed. Even if I can’t see her well, I know what she’s doing—flipping through her blue notebook.

  The one with Luca’s messages. Mom’s always reading it. And she doesn’t quit, even now as I enter the room and greet her. My voice sounds funny because my nose and my throat itch. Even my eyes itch some. I was right to be happy on the ride home, since that feeling’s long gone now.

  I call to her again, but Mom keeps her head buried in the book. Only after a while does she turn to me with a shudder. She says hi, then goes back to reading Luca’s messages.

  There aren’t even that many of them—fifteen, twenty max, running five or six pages. She reads them first to last, last to first. Sometimes she smiles or laughs, as if the messages had just arrived, as if she’d never read them before. Then she starts over from the top and reads through to the end. Actually, there is no end.

  “Hi, Mom. I was at catechism.”

  “That’s nice, Luna. What time will you be back?”

  “No, Mom, I went already. I’m back now.”

  “Ah, good.” She returns to flipping through the five or six pages in the dark. It’s so dark she probably can’t even read them, but by now she knows the messages by heart and can recognize them by the order in which they appear, by their shape alone.

  “We had a new catechist because our old one wound up in the hospital.”

  “Really?”

  “Yeah. A car ran him over. Did you hear that, Mom? Are you listening?”

  “Yes, I did. How old was your friend?”

  “He’s not my friend. He’s the catechist. And he’s not dead.”

  “Ah,” she says, turning the page.

  And now, after my eyes have stung a little, I feel the heat behind and inside them, but I don’t want to cry. I try breathing deeply but I can’t, the room becomes very narrow and if I think about the smile that had brought me joy on my bike, I feel like a total dummy.

  “But then Mother Greta came,” I add. I don’t know why I say it, but that’s all I say. Well, not exactly all. “She had a cane with her and she beat us.”

  “Really?” says Mom.

  “Really. And afterward she told us to get naked.”

  “Really?”

  “And then she took a bunch of photos of us that she plans to sell to perverts on the Internet.”

  Once upon a time, for a thing like that, or a fraction of a fraction of a thing like that, Mom would jump to her feet, reach the convent in a split second, crash through the gate, and set fire to Mother Greta. And she’d use the tires in the courtyard or the other nuns hanging around to stoke the flames. And that’s not what I want. All I’m asking for is a look of anger, that’s it, at least a look. Instead nothing. Mom keeps staring into the notebook—not listening to me, not caring.

  I clench my teeth. I clench my fists real hard. I plant my nails into my palms. It hurts but not enough. I’d like to feel super strong pain, the kind that commands your complete attention, that erases your thoughts so that all you can think about is how badly it hurts. But nothing happens, not even a little blood spills, much as I’d like gallons of blood to gush from my hands like fountains, two fountains of blood that spray Mom, that fill the room and start floating around in it until the room is full and there’s almost no air left, and Mom finally opens her eyes, looks at me desperately, and with her last breath says, “Luna, I’m begging you, no more, stop bleeding!”

  But Mom sits there reading her blue notebook. She couldn’t care less if her daughter had been caned by a nun, if they’d taken naked pictures of her and right now a million old pigs were eyeballing her on computers around the world. The thought of those old guys almost makes me believe the story I just made up, and I feel kind of nauseated, I feel puke rising in my throat. I open my mouth but no puke comes out. Words do. A lot of bitter, boiling words rolling around in my brain, my bones, my skin, piling up in my mouth and pushing and pushing and in the end they spew out, and I cry so hard the sound hurts my ears: “You don’t care, Mom, do you? You don’t care one bit!”

  She stops reading, lifts her head, and in the dark I think I see her face, which is tired despite the fact that she never does anything.

  “Listen, Luna, I’m sorry you didn’t have a good time at catechism, but why go at all?”

  “I—I went because—because it’s Saturday. And on Saturday there’s catechism. And this year we have confirmation.”

  “Confirmation?” Mom repeats back to me, as if it were a funny word she’d never heard before. She almost laughs, but doesn’t. She opens her mouth and each word is like a kick in the face, and if you were to line up all these kicks in a row they’d sound like this:

  “Confirmation? Catechism? What are you talking about, Luna? After everything that’s happened, you still believe God exists?”

  I swear that’s what she says. Then she turns back to the notebook, as if I weren’t there anymore.

  And maybe that’s the way it is: Mom tells me as much and I really do cease to exist. The floor caves in, the walls crumble, the ceiling collapses on my head and crushes me and I die and I don’t go to Heaven. I don’t even go to Hell. Because those are made-up places and everything ends when this ends. I breathe, or try to, but rather than enter my lungs this shoots out: “Fuck you, Mom, I hate you!
Fuck you!”

  I feel bad for saying so. I scare myself. But Mom doesn’t react. She keeps flipping through that notebook, that shitty blue notebook. So then, just as I had spoken without knowing what I was saying, now I act without knowing what I’m doing. I bend over and tear the notebook away from her. I’d only wanted to take it from her to see if she’d wake up, if she’d listen to me for a second. But now that I have this small, fragile thing in my hands, I feel a huge desire to destroy it, to rip out the sheets and make it vanish from the world forever. I lift it up and start tugging. You can bet Mom looks at me after that. She jumps to her feet and shouts at me.

  But I don’t know what. My heart is beating so hard I don’t hear her. I only hear shouting, her hands gripping me. I hear the paper, the sound of a page beginning to tear.

  Followed immediately after by another sound, a hundred thousand times louder, right in my face. The notebook flies out of my hands, my sunglasses go flying.

  A slap.

  She’d slapped me, slapped me right on my cheek, and I didn’t realize it immediately. For all I know it was a lightning bolt, a tsunami driving me to the ground. It takes me a while to understand what just happened, when the burning feeling crawls up my cheek and half my face, and my ears start to ring.

  Mom may have slapped me, but she seems to have forgotten already. She’s back on the floor holding her precious notebook, far from me. Or maybe not. Maybe I am the one taking leave, moving toward the door, out of Luca’s room. I walk backwards, one hand on my cheek. I hardly know where the other one is. I bang my back against the edge of the kitchen table, fumble for the door, and walk out into the yard and the sun attacks me. Coming out of the dark without my glasses is like being stabbed in the brain. I almost fall but hang on to something. I should stay put for a moment but I can’t. I put my hand out and find my bike. I hop on and pedal hard. And I don’t know what’s ahead of me, maybe nothing at all, nothing nowhere. I don’t even know if cars are passing me on the road or if the noise I hear is a truck coming from far away or pieces of the world shattering and collapsing and dying forever. All I know is where I’m going.

  Away.

  LUNA AT THE BOTTOM OF THE SEA

  I ride so fast I don’t feel it, but it’s cold out. That weird wind has picked up, the one that comes out of nowhere and that Luca would sense immediately. He’d jump to his feet and say, “Here we go.” Then he’d smile and run to get his surfboard. Because this wind is called the libeccio, and when the libeccio blows the sea churns and countless tall foam-filled waves mount along its spine.

  The libeccio comes, the temperature drops, and the clouds shuttle across the sun, so that it’s light/dark, light/dark, which for me is the absolute worst, since I can’t see anything. I keep my eyes open just because I’m on my bike and that’s what comes naturally, but riding with my eyes closed would amount to the same thing. On top of that, the trees shudder and the leaves fall. They scatter, making the ground slippery, and if I’m not careful I’ll fall same as them.

  I had run out of the house without my glasses on or my hat or sunscreen. It doesn’t matter to me. I don’t feel the cold or the sun. I only feel the wind against my cheek, just under my eye, where Mom slapped me.

  Mom hit me. Not hard, not so badly that if I went on television and told my story the audience would scream she was a monster and show an ugly photo of her—although Mom always looks pretty in photos—and all the while she’d be crying on the phone saying she loves me, and the hostess would tell her, “Too late, lady.”

  No, she didn’t hit me that hard, but she did lay a hand on me. Nothing like that had ever happened in our house before. Were Luca there he’d have been speechless too. But that’s just it. This would never have happened if Luca were still here.

  Because when Luca was around everyone was happy. People were happy to run into him. They’d stop to say hi and listen to him with their jaws on the floor and their eyes wide so they could take in as much of him as they could. Mom would smile and I would too as I stood next to him. Occasionally they’d even ask me how I was doing. I’m good, I’d say, but they’d have already stopped listening, they’d have turned back to beaming at Luca.

  And to be honest maybe I wasn’t so good, but now I feel a hundred times worse, and while I ride all that flashes before my eyes is her hand, the blow, the nasty look on Mom’s face afterward. And for what? Because I’d taken away her little blue notebook. Because I’d asked her to spend a second listening to my problems. My problems, which make no sense to her. My problems, which, like God, no longer exist.

  The wind blows harder, the leaves on the road are slippery, at every bend my back wheel skids, going wherever it feels like going.

  Same as always autumn arrives and the leaves fall. The bare tree stands and waits. Then winter ends. The leaves grow back fuller than before and brand new and start doing their job, absorbing the light and sending it all the way into the wood. But us, why is it that when we die we die and that’s it? Isn’t that absurd? It seems totally absurd to me. Wouldn’t it be fairer if Luca were to come back in March? I’m not saying right away, just in March. That’s it. The leaves would grow back and so would my brother. Or maybe it isn’t absurd, maybe it’s just as Mom says: God doesn’t exist and there’s no right or wrong. That things happen at random is normal.

  Random, like the way I’m navigating the streets, which all intersect, narrow and identical. I only see the curbside hedges flitting by and a couple times I come close to crashing into them but then I swerve and go on pedaling. The wind rises and the light/dark makes my head spin, and here comes the third car horn to terrify me though I can’t see the cars. I can’t see whether I’m on the right or left side of the road or—more likely—zigzagging. Yet all the same I head straight toward the one thing that matters to me. I may not see it but I totally feel it. I head for the end, toward the sound of the sea.

  I haven’t been back since the day Luca died. I didn’t even come this summer. I don’t know why. Actually I do. Luca may have died far away yet he still died at sea, and the sea is the same everywhere. In a certain sense, it’s kind of like he died right here.

  Not coming here over the last few months hadn’t felt weird. Maybe because so many weird things have happened that in the end I got used to not coming. Yet now that I’ve arrived at this broad, straight, shining road, and the whole sky has opened, and there’s nothing to button it up down there, it seems impossible that I’ve stayed away from the sea for so long.

  I still don’t see it. A line of wooden cabanas conceals it though I catch the smell of sand and salt, hear the swish of water spreading along the shore and that slightly different sound of water raking the surface on its way back out to sea.

  I squeeze through the narrow passage between the cabanas, then the shadows cease and I’m struck by the light from the sky, reflecting off the sea. I turn my head. My eyes burn. Yet even if I shut them tight, I feel the whole horizon opening out around me, the whole world laid bare before me. Suddenly there are no more obstacles no more trees no more billboards no more building walls. Here by the sea everything is open, all is mine.

  Well, not just mine. I hear shouting and see something running down by the shore. People. Boys. From the sound of their voices, they must be my age or a little older, and there’s no need to hear what language they’re speaking to understand they’re foreigners from way up north where it’s always cold. Because despite the chilly wind and dark clouds and frozen water, they’re horsing around, diving into the water as if it were mid-August.

  They’re a tougher breed, Grandpa used to say, they live in places where nature is merciless. As soon as they’re born they’re accustomed to suffering, therefore pain weighs less heavily on them. And Grandpa may have been thinking about the German pilot who’d shaken his hand rather than shot him, except that soldier never existed. Just as Grandpa no longer exists and Luca no longer exists and since that day God
doesn’t exist either. Nothing exists. Nothing.

  And if that seems so awful to me, I’m to blame for being an egomaniac, for thinking only of myself. I shouldn’t care one bit. I should stay in bed with Mom and let the days drift by—all the same, all meaningless. Instead here I am by the sea and the sea looks wonderful to me. I head toward the shore, toward these kids who are playing and laughing, and even if the world seems like it’s over and doesn’t make any sense, I want to be like them with all my heart.

  Plus I look a little like them. They have pale skin and fair hair. Even their eyes are a lighter color. I’m much more like them than my classmates. So why am I shaking from the cold the closer I get to the shore? No, I have to resist. I take off my shoes and feel the water. It’s so freezing I can’t tell if it’s cold or boiling hot, if I’ve stuck my foot in ice or in lava. I don’t know and I shouldn’t care.

  Just as I shouldn’t care about school, catechism, the nasty way my classmates treat me, God (who doesn’t exist), these foreign kids laughing and having fun and completely ignoring me.

  Except I do care, I dwell on it, because I’m an evil egomaniac. Mom was right to slap me. She’s the good one, not me. I don’t care about anything but me. Of course I have to; shucks, if I don’t think about me, no one will. Sounds absurd, but when there was Luca, I existed a little. Now that my brother is gone it’s as if he had been the only thing that existed. Thank God the icy water helps me not think about it or anything anymore. All it tells me is to enter, to keep going farther. A taller wave splashes my shirt and gets my stomach wet. A shiver travels up my spine to my ears. But that’s just fine, I don’t care, I stop thinking, all I do is walk straight. The water reaches my belly button. I can’t breathe anymore. I can’t see anything with all the little squares of light dancing over the surface and hitting my eyes. I just feel the cold rising all the way up to my chest, to the spot where many of my classmates already have boobs and I don’t. Mom used to tell me it was too soon, that at my age she was flat as a board: “I didn’t get them till high school and look at what great boobs I have now. Don’t worry, Luna, it’s too early, it’s just too early.” That’s what Mom used to say before she stopped saying anything. First it was too soon, now it’s too late.