The Breaking of a Wave

by Fabio Genovesi

  FLEEING THE FUTURE

  Human life counts for fuck all nowadays,” says Rambo. “How can you treat a person like a dog? I’m speechless, Sandro, speechless.”

  He says he’s speechless but the words keep coming. Sandro listens and nods, and Rambo talks so loudly that the two old guys on the bench, Pino and Topo, can hear him too. Those two have been on the pier forever, holding their fishing rods, scanning the water to see if anything’s bit, hoping nothing has so they won’t have to get up and do something.

  Even Mojito, the dog Rambo occasionally walks for his neighbors, can hear him. Today the dog is tied to the wheelchair of a stiff, unmoving old lady wrapped in three plaid blankets, like an Egyptian mummy yet highly sensitive to the cold.

  “What’s the world coming to when a dog and a person are counted equal? I said it myself: ‘Have you lost your minds? Do you have a conscience? I wouldn’t take that old lady for under ten euros.’”

  He’s referring to her but the lady smothered in plaid doesn’t realize it. She is and isn’t here. Above the cocoon of blankets, her face is set in an eternal grimace, half surprised and half frightened, one eye permanently shut and the other staring out at nothing, her mouth drawn and tilting to the left. She’s been this way since her stroke, and the more Sandro looks at her, the more he’s reminded of those poor souls from Pompei engulfed by the lava of Vesuvius in the middle of the night while they were sleeping and turned into statues, just as scared and bewildered today as they were when the lava woke them one night two thousand years ago.

  Same goes for the old lady, and if she looks like she’s shaking it’s only because every so often Mojito yanks on the leash and rattles her wheelchair.

  Mojito is a husky beagle that pants nonstop. Rambo usually walks him with Rimmel, a younger dog that doesn’t look as much like a garbage can with paws. Only today the owner’s daughter had come back from Milan and they’d all gone out for a stroll, dragging the fitter dog behind them.

  “So, seeing as I have to keep an eye on just one dog, they said I could take the old lady out too. Same price. Can you believe that? ‘Fuck no,’ I told them, ‘for the old lady I want ten euros minimum.’”

  “Why? What do you usually get?”

  “Seven euros. But that’s for two dogs. A person isn’t a dog. You know what they said? They said the old lady was worth less than a dog. She doesn’t talk or run and does her business in a diaper. ‘We should be paying you less,’ they said, ‘not more . . . ’ What dicks. Can you believe that, Sandro? Can you believe that?”

  Sandro nods, half listening. “So what did you settle on?”

  “I stood my ground. It was a question of principle. I said, ‘Fuck no. At a minimum you should be paying me the usual rate.’” He rests his hand on Mojito’s head. The dog closes his eyes and lifts his muzzle to absorb the full weight of Rambo’s touch. “What kind of dirty animal cuts corners on his own mother? And let’s be clear here: They live off this woman. The day she dies, the party’s over for all of them, you know?”

  Sandro nods but neglects to ask what will kill the party. Because he has other things on his mind and doesn’t care. Because the north wind is picking up, and it may not be strong but it’s enough to make his nose ache, his nose that is still swollen and warmer than the rest of his face. Besides, there’s no point in asking; Rambo will go on to explain why with or without his asking.

  “You’ll see. She’s never done squat and he works at a marble sawing mill, but now with the marble crisis he’s almost always at home, and they have this bitch of a daughter studying in Milan, but if you ask me all she’s boning up on is cock. And you know where they went today? They’re taking a break at the spa in Montecatini—a break from what? They don’t do shit! And who do you think’s footing the bill?” Rambo points his finger at the old woman, only right in her face, his index finger is almost touching her eye, which is still open and still bewildered. “This lady’s husband worked for the coast guard. His monthly retirement check was solid gold. But the minute this old lady dies, bye-bye money, bye-bye spa, bye-bye everything. This right here is their wealth, this old lady is their future, and they’re haggling over two or three euros. The world is fucked.” Rambo makes a disgusted sound with his throat. He adjusts his camouflage hunting hat, turns to the sea, spits in it, and then loses himself for a while musing on that shining immensity which captures men’s attention and grants them the gift of confusion, a yearning to do nothing, and a dangerous habit of turning philosophical.

  In fact, when Rambo addresses Sandro again, his voice is different, wise and deep. “Look here, Sandrino, look closely,” he says, pointing at the old lady, his finger still a millimeter from her frozen grimace. “Gruesome sight, right? But you know what the real problem is? It’s that we say, ‘That’s life, we all must resign ourselves to fate.’ But it’s not true. It’s not a question of resignation. This here is hardly the worst. This here is the best that can happen. We tiptoe forward all careful about what we do and what we eat, praying we don’t get sick or wind up crushed by a truck, and for what? To hope we might one day turn out like this. Shit, this here is our finish line. Don’t you see? If we’re lucky, this old lady is our future. Our best possible future. You getting this or not?”

  Sandro nods just once. He feels short of breath. His nose aches, his head aches. He’s felt this way since Saturday, since the woman he loves bashed him against the wall like an octopus against a rock. His head was still spinning when he’d left the room, so he’d thought maybe he should get a CAT scan. It was hardly a ridiculous idea. After all, he was already at the hospital; it would cost him little effort. He went down to radiology and asked for a brain CAT scan. The nurse told him he needed to make an appointment, that it would take up to three months. Three months? Aren’t these for emergencies? “Yes, of course,” she said, “when they’re emergencies.” “And how do you know if they’re emergencies?” She told him that emergencies arrive on their backs. Then she looked at his nose, opened a drawer, and handed him a bag of dry ice.

  Sandro left the hospital holding the ice partly to his nose and partly to his head, and the cold calmed him down. Of course, on the road back every so often he had checked the mirror to see if his pupils were dilated, if one were larger than the other, if his eyes could follow his finger. But it was hard to keep an eye on the road and look at your finger and check to see if your pupils were following along. After a while he felt nauseated, and nausea is another symptom of brain trauma, and so he really was about to turn around and head back to the hospital, but then he’d already arrived home, and the sight of the walls, the door, the plastic and iron roof his father had welded and hammered on by himself, gave him a sense of reality, resilience, manliness, and he chucked the idea.

  All that grit, that energy to build things—Sandro must have it lying around somewhere too. This manly spirit that takes stuff by force and alters it to build other stuff, to make the world the way you want it with the swing of a hammer. It must be in his blood. It’s called DNA. It’s science. There’s no disputing science.

  Enough, he said. No more catechism, no more boar bones, no more trying to score with someone who’d rather beat your head against a hospital wall till you were dead. He’d tried, he’d held out hope, but all he’d gotten for his efforts were insults, a (nearly) broken nose, a classroom of pesky religious kids, and brain trauma (or thereabouts). Enough. For real. Sandro had once read something a sports star said—he can neither remember who nor what sport the guy played—but it went something like “a true champion is the one who makes the simplest move at the right time.” Beautiful words to live by. From now on he too would act like a champion, and the simplest move to make was to quit trying, and the right time was immediately. He nodded at the door in front of him, lifted his arms, and shouted, “Champion of the world! Champion of the world!”

  But the door opened abruptly and his mother found him like that, his arms in the a
ir and his nose swollen, and she began to whimper. “Jesus, Joseph, and Mary, what happened, Sandro? Oh my Lord, what happened, Sandrino?” And he told her what he’s told her since he was in elementary school, i.e., he had fallen down while playing with his friends, and he looked on while she, now as then, ran to fetch cotton swabs and peroxide. He heard his mother’s voice in ultrasounds, and he felt the slight burning of the disinfectant on his nose. Its smell entered his nose and pained him, and he let himself be carried off by both her voice and the smell.

  He’d like the same thing to happen now, with the breeze and the scent of the sea, only he can’t stop staring at the old lady and her eternally terrified grimace.

  Because unfortunately Rambo is right: Misery is the most we can expect, the finish line for those who are prudent and take care of themselves and aspire to live for a thousand years. That’s the most divine future awaiting us. So no, goddammit, he’s not having it. If this is the best he can hope for the future, Sandro at least wants to fight for a less miserable present.

  If he lets a few punches, a swollen nose, and slight brain trauma stop him, well then, Sandro can’t claim to have tried. He tried a little, but a little doesn’t amount to dick. Did he take a beating? He has to take double that. He has to welcome every scuffle and every smackdown coming to him as if it were a push in the direction he desires. Without asking himself what he wants, without always kowtowing to his damn brain, which is only good at coming up with excuses to do nothing.

  And if Sandro drops dead from one of these beatings, well, that would be fair, sort of: that’s what happened to Luca and he’s to blame, so, worse comes to worst, Sandro pays for what he did.

  He clenches his teeth and regards the old lady. For a moment she seems to smile, to twist that drawn, fixed mouth of hers and say, “Right on, young man, right on. Rock out, run free, burn!”

  But it’s just a trick of the light. Or perhaps Mojito is yanking the leash and shaking her. Perhaps it’s a hallucination brought on by Sandro’s very real brain trauma that, without a CAT scan, won’t be discovered and will pretty soon carry him off to heaven or hell, if such places exist. They exist all right. Of course they exist. He’s a catechist now, a believer. He has to believe. Because Sandro is a fighter, Sandro doesn’t cave, and if the future sucks so much, then shit, we’re better off diving headfirst into all the present we can find.

  TU SEI ROMANTICA

  Bambina bellaa

  sono l’ultimo poeta che si ispira ad una stellaaa.

  Bambina miaaa

  sono l’ultimo inguaribile malato di poesiaaa.

  E voglio bene a te, perché sei come mee

  romanticaaa . . .

  That’s what I wake up to, after a night of deep dreaming. Tages and I were at the beach. The dream lasted all night but we didn’t speak, not once. All we did was swim. Then suddenly these words come crashing into my ear, accompanied by a kind of busted accordion.

  I sit up, scared, and bump my head against Mom’s. She’d also jumped in fright. Then we both fall back in bed, Mom smothers herself with a pillow, and I can hear her saying underneath it, “I’ll kill him, I’ll kill him.” It’s one thing to wake up in the morning, but Zot’s singing and that accordion blaring is pure murder, and I’d rather be stuck in a horrible nightmare where werewolves eat you bit by bit than hear this stuff, and if his pathetic notes were to come barging in on your nightmare, you’d turn to the wolves and beg, “Eat my ears first, please, my ears first!”

  This has been our alarm clock since Monday, when we came to stay at Ghost House. I’d been scared of hearing chains rattling, doors creaking, spirits moaning, but Zot’s morning serenades are much, much worse.

  The first night, when we found Mr. Ferro passed out from Dry Death, I had had no clue we’d be staying here. We went to get groceries at Teresa’s and bought a bunch of stuff, then we came back to Ghost House and Mom made tordelli. They’re like tortelli except spelled with a d rather than a t and filled with meat instead of anything else.

  Around here tordelli is food for the holidays—Christmas, Easter, and, unfortunately, Ferragosto, when the lifeguards gather on the beach and eat a pot per person. You heard me right, Ferragosto, when the beach gets so crowded you worry the water will spill over the edge, like in a bathtub, and flood town. During Ferragosto the tourists feel compelled to go cliff-diving even if they swim as well as cinder blocks. The lifeguards know it but they eat their pots of tordelli anyway because that’s the tradition, then wash it down with a bottle of black wine and afterward stare at the sea and pant for air, and if they see an arm waving for help, it takes a few minutes for them to remember what they’re supposed to do.

  In fact someone always dies on Ferragosto. There’s a saying that goes, “Holy Mary, every year you carry one away.” It has scared me ever since I was a little girl and would picture the Virgin coming down from Heaven, looking at all those happy people in their bathing suits—ladies and daddies and children—and picking the person to carry away that year. Then I thought about it some more and realized it was just an excuse, a way of laying the blame on the Virgin, when really it’s the fault of the lifeguards struggling to digest their tordelli.

  Which were awesome the other night. I didn’t even know Mom could cook them. Her most complicated meal was fish sticks with melted cheese on top, and even those she managed to burn from time to time. The tordelli were delicious. Mr. Ferro had three helpings and afterward he practically fell asleep in his chair. He held his stomach and finally burped so loud I could hear it inside my stomach. Then he turned to Zot.

  “Where are your manners, kid? You should be ashamed of yourself!”

  And Zot said, “Calumny! I did nothing of the sort. Luna, you know it wasn’t me, right?”

  Mr. Ferro stood up and went to the bathroom. Then he stopped at the door, close to where Mom was clearing our plates.

  “So, you sold your place just like everyone else, huh?”

  “I didn’t sell anything. My mother’s asshole siblings did.”

  “Aren’t they in Milan? What the hell do they want?”

  “Money. They waited for my dad to die and it was either sell or pay them their share.”

  “Sons of bitches.”

  “Exactly. To think that after my mom died they had the temerity to ask for rent every month.”

  “What shits. How much did you give them?”

  “I never game them a cent, but it was a ton of money that they’re now claiming I owe them, and they’re going to take it out of my share of the sale, so I’ll get practically nothing.”

  Although it was the first time I ever heard such things, I understood immediately they weren’t good. I stood up, took the empty plastic soup bowl that a moment ago had been full of tordelli, and carried it to the sink. Zot did the same with the glasses, then said, “But that’s highway robbery. Is there nothing we can do? You must be protected under the law.”

  Ferro started to say something but Mom beat him to it: “What law, kid? Laws are written by lowlifes to protect lowlifes.”

  Mom rinsed a plate and handed it to him along with that tart truth. Zot took it and dried it off then handed it to me to put away. But how was I to know where the plates went? I mean, I didn’t even know where I was supposed to go. This wasn’t our home. Nor, so it seemed, did we have a home anymore.

  Mom had tried calling Miss Gemma, and she’d picked up, but her daughter was crying hard in the background over a fight she’d had with her boyfriend and had come home to spend the night, so Mom didn’t ask Miss Gemma for anything. Maybe we would go sleep on the street or in one of the big yards belonging to an empty villa. Who knew?

  “Impossible,” said Zot, “the law has to help you. The point of the law is to punish wrongdoers.”

  “Sure, kid, the law punishes wrongdoers,” said Mom. “The problem is that according to the law they’re not wrongdoers. The law lets
them do their shady business. Actually it protects them. But if I were to take a shovel and stab them in the brain, the law would be quick to identify its wrongdoer, and I’d go straight to jail. You happy, mister friend of the law?”

  “That’s the straight stuff,” said Mr. Ferro, still standing by the door. Then he said it again with all his heart, “That there’s the straight stuff.”

  Zot said nothing. Or rather, he dried a plate and handed it to me, and something escaped his lips that sounded like, “No. I’m not happy. Not one bit.”

  “All right, I’m off to bed,” Ferro finally said. “Don’t make a racket and don’t clog the crapper. Your room’s over there. Sheets are in the closet. Rifle’s by the window.”

  I turned abruptly to Mom. Up until that moment I honestly had no idea we were going to stay here at Ghost House. There was barely any light and I couldn’t see if she was happy or not. She just washed the plastic soup bowl and—maybe—nodded. Then I looked at Zot. He wore a smile so wide I could see the white of his small, crooked teeth randomly tossed together in his mouth.

  And I see them again now as he sings his morning serenade at the top of his lungs.

  Tu sei romanticaaa

  amarti è un po’ rivivereee

  nella semplicità, nell’irrealtà

  di un’altra etààà.

  Tu sei romantica

  amica delle nuvoleee

  che cercano lassù

  un po’ di sol, come fai tuuu

  The most I’d been able to tell him was that maybe he could just sing instead, without the accordion, but he took it badly. He says he taught himself how to play with the talent he inherited from his dad, a violinist who used to roam around Russia playing for spare change. What with all his roaming around, his dad met a beautiful young baroness. They spent one night together and Zot was born. But Zot never met either of them. He’d heard the story from a nun, Mother Anna, the only kind person in the orphanage. She told him that his mom and dad never saw each other again, that his dad left for another town the day after, and having a son out of the blue would have been a scandal for his mom, so her super-conniving family gave him to the nuns. His dad didn’t even know he had a son, had never had the chance to play with him, had never taught him the facts of life. But according to Zot he’d left him this great gift for music.