The water reaches my neck, the sea overtakes me, buoys me, carries me where it will. I feel a piece of wood underfoot. A soft clump of seaweed drifts past and I don’t know if I grab it or it grabs me. There’s no more sand underfoot, it’s all just water—in my hair, on my face. The cold burns every part of me, most of all where Mom slapped me. Maybe her handprint will stay there forever, even after I’m gone. Even if I sink to the bottom of the sea, where it keeps all of its beautiful and mysterious treasures, and every once in a while it would choose one to send to the shore as a gift to me. Now I’m the one traveling toward them. I sink. I feel like I’m falling asleep. Meanwhile I see all these things moving aside to make room for me, rolling about, to-ing and fro-ing, endlessly dancing at the bottom of the sea.
And me with them.
THE BOAR AND THE WHALE
You say, “Was it really necessary to put her with this old lady?” And the nurse says, “Quiet, Miss.”
Quiet? Who gives a fig about being quiet? The old woman is stretched out over there with her face to the wall. You’ve been here for an hour and she hasn’t moved once. She’s probably dead. And if she is alive, she must be three hundred years old and knows perfectly well how old she is. But then you realize you’re not keeping quiet for the old woman’s sake but for Luna’s. She’s asleep too, and the doctors say that the more she sleeps the better. It will alleviate her fever and some other stuff you’ve never understood.
But you don’t understand a thing. All the pills and drops you take must have made you mindless. The hospital called and it took you an eternity to figure out that they had your daughter, and then you hung up the phone and wandered around the house in circles trying to snap out of it. For six months you had been shut inside, and suddenly there you were performing a million absurd tasks. Like putting on your shoes, which were so pinched and uncomfy it was almost impossible to wedge your feet inside. Then you staggered out of the house and down the walkway, and the grass underfoot felt soft and slippery, navigating it was difficult, your legs trembled, as did your back all the way up to your head and the tips of your hair, all disheveled and shaken about by something even more absurd, the wind, which blew wildly and stank of leaves, rotten wood, mushrooms maybe.
You reached the car, plopped down in the seat, and shut the door. For a minute you felt better.
Then you realized the keys might be of use.
You searched your pockets, your tracksuit bottoms, your pajama top, your winter coat. You checked the dashboard, the dusty mats, the seat under your butt and the one next to you. Nothing. As anyone would, you tried to remember where you put the keys the last time you’d driven the car. Only for you the last time was six months ago, the same day you’d picked up Luna at church on your way home and found Gemma out front with the carabinieri and the ambulance. That had been the last day for a lot of things. You stopped looking for the keys, gripped the wheel, leaned your head against it, and started to cry.
And what with all your crying, you hit the horn with your forehead. It went off like a bomb. You startled and your eyes fell on the key still in the ignition, just waiting to be turned. You’d had no idea, hadn’t even checked there.
You turned the key but nothing happened. It just made a sound like a small animal dying. You tried again and again got nothing but that sound. The car had sat too long and the battery had died, or something else was wrong with that mysterious thing they call an engine. You couldn’t check under the hood because you didn’t know what to look for, so once again you clasped the key and turned, as if you were twisting some brat’s ear. And the car realized it had better obey: it came alive.
Street signs, traffic lights, pedestrians crossing, old women tottering on bikes, dogs, badly parked cars. Life went on, people got out of bed, left the house, insisted on doing things. All of it ridiculous, all of it crazy. Meanwhile you kept wondering why in the world Luna had gone to the beach, how had she wound up in the water, had she had fallen in or really wanted to swim.
But you had no idea. You don’t know what Luna did today or for the last six months for that matter. There had been no more lunches, no more Tuesday pizzas by the sea, no more racing to the gate in the morning (with serious kicking and shoving). You had stopped ad-libbing the words of the presenters on the Moroccan TV shows that, for some mysterious reason, you get at home. You had stopped playing the game at night where whoever could stay awake longer than the other got to yell in that person’s ear, “Wake up!!!” You hadn’t even given her a hug, a kiss, a caress. Nothing.
Actually, worse than nothing: you had slapped her. At the last red light, just as you glimpsed that boxy white hospital beyond the pines, you remembered. You sat staring at it over there. When the light turned green the car behind you honked its horn. You told it to fuck off, first with your finger and then in your head.
You slapped your daughter. You slapped her and she ran off, dove into the sea, and now was at the hospital. What did you do, Serena? What the fuck did you do?
In the parking lot you flew out of the car without locking it.
You walked through the revolving door and into the gigantic lobby, and the voices on the loudspeaker, the voices of the people scattered about and brushing past you, the coughs, the variety of faces, the horrible haircuts, the stink of sweat old age mold smoke food—all this stuff you’d forgotten—assaulted your senses and made you feel sick, as did the thought of slapping your child, which memory you had tried to suppress yet now comes back clear, precise, frightening.
And now as you stand by her bed in this room you keep thinking about it, and you clench your fists and your teeth.
She’s still sleeping, her sheet tucked under her chin, white as her hair and the pillow underneath, white as her skin, which, however, now has dark streaks from the cold she suffered in the water. There’s a strange halo on her cheek and, impossible as it seems, you think it might be the mark from where you hit her, so you lower your gaze and close your eyes. You feel anger mixed with guilt, remorse, and a hundred other things that make it hard to breathe. If you don’t smoke a cigarette you’ll suffocate to death.
You take one, put it in your mouth, and start to leave, but before you go you look back at Luna a moment and wave to her even though she’s asleep. If your daughter doesn’t hurry and wake up soon, you’ll wake her up yourself, because you want to hug her and tell her how much you love her, that and a million other things that for now you carry with you as you go.
Sandro climbs the stairs, running his fingers over this flat, smooth, bright white object in his grip. It’s a bone, a wild boar bone. It had once been inside that animal and allowed it to function well for years, yet to look at it now you’d think it were completely unrelated to that dark, wiry-coated wild animal.
Death’s like that. It takes everything away. Actually, no, that’s not true, not everything. Death always leaves something behind, only what it leaves behind no longer has anything to do with what came before. And yet it’s all that remains, so you cling to it.
Sandro is in fact clinging to the bone as he climbs to the third floor to visit Luna, hoping his present will make her smile the way she had at catechism.
He’d gotten it from Rambo, who belongs to a group called the Friends of the Wild Boar, a coterie of men perpetually sporting fatigues who demonstrate their friendship with the animal by climbing the Apuan Alps and shooting at it every time they cross its path. Then they haul its carcass to the valley and hack it up into equal parts. And seeing as Rambo doesn’t have a wife or children or any friends besides Sandro and Marino, his freezer is always packed with cuts of wild boar.
To get rid of it, occasionally he invites his two friends over, and his mother prepares boar crostini, pappardelle with boar ragu, boar stew, and, to top it off, chocolate-covered boar, a famous dish that might sound nasty but one taste and you’ll discover for yourself just how nasty it really is.
At the end of such
a dinner, Rambo was regarding the bones on his plate when he found one that, in his opinion, was shaped like a shark’s tooth. And maybe it was the wine or that their blood, busy digesting, had evacuated their brains, but the three men hit upon a genius idea to make some money in the “indigenous artisan” trade: foreign tourists would totally flip for these hand-carved bones—engraved, say, with seafaring sayings in Latin or drawings of ships and fish. So what if none of them knew how to engrave? Bully for them: the shoddier the drawings, the more primitive they’d appear. They’d string up broken nets by the pier and, barefoot and dressed in rags, sell them as shark and whale bones. “The tourists will kill each other to get their hands on them—kill each other!”
They each took a few home to get started on. And Sandro can’t remember now whether it proved too challenging or someone cut himself, but whatever the reason, nothing came of it, and they had put it out of mind.
Until one morning at school it all came back to him when Luca asked, “Teach, you think I’ll find a whalebone up there?”
“Huh?”
“A whalebone in Biarritz, think I’ll find one?”
“Beats me. Maybe. I don’t know. Why do you ask?”
He asked beacuse every day, several times a day, his sister would ask him for one: “Please, would you bring me a whalebone?” She’d read somewhere that Biarritz had once been an important port of departure for whaling fleets and now she was obsessed. “A humpback whalebone. No, wait, a spermwhale bone. No, wait, humpback. Or whatever you can find. What difference does it make?”
Luca had told her he would. But whaling fleets, that’s century-old stuff, nowadays it’d be easier to kill a person, and whalebones must be in short supply, or maybe, who knows, maybe even banned.
So Sandro told him, “Don’t worry, go have fun in Biarritz and keep your eye out. If none turns up, I’ll take care of it. I’ve got this fantastic bone to give you, white and smooth. It belongs to a wild boar but it could easily pass for a humpback or sperm whale or what have you.”
And now Sandro is about to meet Luna and preparing to tell her that the bone in his hands belongs to a whale. He knew that she’d wanted a whalebone and that Luca hadn’t been able to get one for her, so he’d taken it upon himself to bring her this gift and wish her a speedy recovery.
In the hall Sandro passes patients and relatives and feels almost happy to have a nice speech, a beautiful gift, no troubles in sight. Well, besides one, which is why his legs tremble when the number on the door comes into view. Would he bump into Serena in there? They hadn’t spoken since the day at the newsstand that spring. So much had happened in the meantime, including the awful event that had robbed her of everything and for which he was to blame.
But wait a second. It’s also true that some tragedies unfortunately happen and there’s nothing anyone can do about them. Serena’s smart. She knows that. She has no intention of making judgments or allocating blame. There’s no place for accusations in a situation this serious, no point in hatred. All that the survivors can do is hug one another and give each other strength. Yes, that’s it, that’s how it must be. Sandro reaches the door, takes one last breath as if rather than entering the room he were plunging into deep water, and then plunges.
But no one is in the room.
No one, that is, besides an old woman in the corner sleeping on her side with her face to the wall, wrapped in at least three blankets. And Luna, also asleep, in the bed just in front of him.
Sandro approaches and takes her in. All the whiteness—of her, the bed, the walls around them—make a strange impression on him. She’s like a ghost, or a dream with a ghost in it. He gets scared. About what he couldn’t say. Ghosts, maybe. Or something more realistic, like the noise coming from the hall that could be the footsteps of someone entering, that could be Serena, and Sandro hopes it both is and isn’t her.
Because the white of this room and the smell of disinfectant and the neon light make him gag, and if there is one place not to see her again, this is it. Now watch: she’ll walk in and find him holding this bone and the girl asleep looking like she’s dead, and it will all turn out sad and anguished, and sayonara.
So Sandro tiptoes over to Luna, sets the bone on the blanket next to the pillow, and turns to leave. They can catch up at the next catechism. She’ll thank him for the gift and perhaps tell her mother what a kind and swell guy the new catechist is. Yeah, sure, but now is not the time to dwell. Now is the time to get out of here. He looks at Luna for another second and then hears footsteps coming from outside, voices, her voice. Here she comes. What will Sandro do? Why did he come here? Why the fuck did he come here?
Rather than move he remains standing next to Luna, thinking, facing the door, totally frozen, as if he were waiting for fate to take his photo.
“No, not like that. You have to go from the root to the tip, from the root to the tip. You’ll see. It’s another thing altogether,” you say. The nurse thanks you and keeps walking.
You’d bumped into her smoking downstairs, and she’d wasted no time asking for advice about her hair. Which you gave her, surprised by how much you still remembered. Then she offered you a coffee at the café, and now you’re returning to the room with a greater craving to smoke than when you’d left. And you realize that you could have bought your daughter something, a snack, cookies, anything would do, anything would be better than the nothing you got her, the nothing you’ve given her for months. Maybe you’ve unlearned what being a mother entails, as if maternity were a battery that ran out of juice and died, and there was nothing you could do about it. You enter the room with this combination of anxiety, anger, guilt, and shame clinging to your skin like a cobweb, and you’re about to grab one of the hundred sheets covering the old woman to wipe your face with.
But there’s someone in the room, right beside Luna, and you stiffen when you see him. The two of you freeze.
He looks at you and you at him, and it all comes rushing back: school, the parent-teacher conference, Luca’s nonstop talk about Mr. Mancini, the English sub you’d liked too. He’s to blame if you were about to break your record of zero dates in ten years. He’s to blame for your sending Luca to Biarritz. He’d been so insistent about that Wile E. Coyote story, the umbrella, the boulder plummeting toward you.
In actuality you’re not sure how much he’s to blame but you’d rather not think about it. At first you’d dwelled on it, you were in a fury, then you stopped caring about him along with everything else. You’d let it go. But here he is, the asshole who’d taught English to Luca, and now Luca is gone and he’s here at the hospital hovering over your daughter. And you have no idea what the hell he wants or what he’s up to, you just go flying. You fly across the room, land on top of him, and throw him against the wall.
You smack him, lift him to his feet, smack him again. He looks at you bug-eyed and opens his mouth to say something, but the only time you let go of his throat is to hit him and then you go back to cutting off his airflow. And even if by some miracle he were able to get a word in, it would be drowned out by your deep raspy cry, which before escaping your mouth passes through your flesh, your guts, your blood—those places inside that ignite you and pump you full of life. It doesn’t sound like your voice, Serena, it sounds as if all of your anger at the world balled up inside your body were exploding in the sky. “Do you want to kill both of them, you son of a bitch? Do you want to kill both of them?” You say it again and again, and after every cry you shove him against the wall, harder each time. You have no intention of stopping.
But a minute later everything comes to a halt. The fury of cries is checked by just one word, so faint and faraway who knows how you managed to hear it. It comes from the bed across from you. “Mom,” it says, and it has Luna’s voice.
She’s awake. She looks at you, holding something in her hand.
“Who brought this, Mom? I—did you bring it?”
“Sweetheart! How are you?” You let go of that idiot teacher hanging from the wall like a crooked painting.
“Did you bring it, Mom?” Luna rattles this white thing, white like her, like her beautiful hair in which it’s caught.
“No, Luna. What is it?”
You take her in your arms and squeeze her tightly. She looks over your shoulder at the teacher.
“It’s a bone. A whalebone. Did you bring it?” Your daughter’s question is directed at the moron leaning against the wall. You turn and find him covering his nose to stop the bleeding. He doesn’t answer right away.
“Hey, asshole,” you say, “was it you brought this thing?”
For another minute he does nothing, then he shakes his head.
And you’re shaking your head too as you look at your daughter staring at the bone. She untangles it from her hair, lies back down and holds it—and you—tightly to her chest. “I knew it, I knew it!” she says, her voice muffled because she’s prone, because she’s laughing and crying at the same time.
She’s laughing and crying, your Luna, and repeating, “Yes, I knew it, thank you, I knew it!”
Bully for her, Serena, since you haven’t a goddamn clue what’s going on.
SAVE OUR SHIP
The doctors finally said I could go home and home is where we’re going, me and Mom and the raindrops hitting the windows and splattering across the road, and as the wheels roll over them they make a noise like tape being torn.
“I’m going to get some money and we can go shopping, Luna. Or would you rather stay home while I went? What would make you happier?”
The Breaking of a Wave Page 20