The Breaking of a Wave

by Fabio Genovesi

  But it’s not your fault. You know where Ghost House is and how to get there. The problem is that it feels strange to come back after spending the afternoon at your own house. Not that it’s yours anymore. You had to call the woman from the agency in order to get in because they’d changed the locks and your keys no longer work. You had told her that you’d left something in the house. Any chance it’s still there? Yes, she’d said, “They’ll be by on Monday for your things,” by which she meant the men from the dump would be by on Monday to carry everything off and your life’s memories would become a matter for the municipality to dispose of.

  Yet you didn’t go back home to save your stuff. You went back is all, needing to see it one last time. You had promised yourself you’d resist going, then you figured that in a little while they would gut the place, tear it down, there would be nothing to go back to, and at that point resisting would be easy.

  So you went with the lady from the company and asked her to let you have an hour, giving her God knows what kind of a look, but it worked. The woman raised her hands and disappeared, leaving you alone with your house.

  You entered, and in the dark rooms, surrounded by the silent walls, what struck you most was the smell. Every house has its own smell. But yours even more so.

  It’s the product of many years, various lives, all the things people carried inside themselves. Her great-grandparents, who built it with their bare hands at the far end of a backwater belonging to no one, with money they’d earned from the powder factory located a little farther on. It supplied the entire Italian army, that factory. They were constantly hiring, since a couple of times a year there’d be an explosion and workers would die and need to be replaced. Meanwhile the economy marched on. How people could die so easily in that factory was a mystery, since the explosives coming out of that place never hurt anyone. The German kind, the American kind—they did real damage. Italian grenades, on the other hand, Grandpa used to say that as long as you had on a coat nothing would happen if one landed near you. That’s why the war was always in the winter.

  In any case, the smell of your home contains your great-grandparents’ gunpowder, and your grandparents’ manure and cut grass, and the hides of wild animals that once provided this place with food. Now the place is crowded with country homes and country mansions but once upon a time it was a jungle. Even your father would carry a rifle out of the house at night or—if his brothers needed the rifle—a club with a nail poking out of the top. Then the trees came down, the walls came down, many lives passed through and added their own something to this smell. Pine resin, boiled potatoes, oakum, motor oil, olive oil, stuff you don’t recognize belonging to lives you hardly brushed past that nevertheless stick in your nose, as well as the wax Luca used to coat his surfboard with, and Luna’s sunscreen, and what you added to this smell—whatever it was, you could smell it along with everything else as you stood there breathing in the hallway of your home.

  But soon the smell would be gone, along with the kitchen, the bathroom, Luca’s room, your and Luna’s room. The bulldozer will tear everything down, piece by piece, until there’s nothing but broken bricks and plaster. The smell will vanish forever, mingled with the fumes of the bulldozer, the workers’ cigarettes, the ground ripped up as they dismantle the driveway and carve out a swimming pool.

  It couldn’t—shouldn’t—happen like that. So you went to each and every window, opened the shutters and the glass and let the light and air in, then returned to the hallway, lay down on the floor, stared up at the ceiling, and lit a cigarette as the current of air began to sweep through the rooms.

  Because if the smell really had to disappear, then you wanted to be the one to make it disappear—no mess, no falling objects—drifting calmly in the air. That way when the bulldozers showed up they’d find nothing left to destroy, only bricks and beams and tiles, nothing of value, nothing of yours.

  You lay on the ground thinking and smoking. The smoke would rise for a moment and then the air would pick it up and send it flying in all directions, carrying it off, out of sight. The wind happily swept through the windows, splintered off into separate rooms, reconvened in the middle, and carried off the smell of home, your smell, joining it to the rest of the world, so that in the end it became nothing, or maybe, who knows, maybe it became everything.

  No, no. It became nothing.

  Anyways now you’re back in the dark, amid the knotty branches of trees that cross like fingers and block out the light and keep the rest of the world from reaching the woods around Ghost House.

  Walking, you keep your eyes on the sky, on the tops of these crooked, gnarled, bent trees. It’s as if they couldn’t grow normally, as if weirdness were the law of the land. And it works, actually. The woods grow. The wind thrashes them about but the crooked trees lean on one another and remain standing through the late-summer storms and tornadoes that tear up the neighboring lawns and bring down the carefully pruned, straight-backed pine trees and holm oaks.

  And now you take your last steps, looking up, grimacing every time a bit of sun breaks through or a drop of resin touches your skin, and these gnarled trees almost make you feel good. Maybe good is an overstatement. Not bad—that’s it. At least not as bad as before, which is saying something.

  “Hands up! Who goes there?” From the other end of the woods comes the booming voice of Ferro, standing in front of the house.

  “Easy, Ferro, it’s just me.”

  “Me who?”

  “Me Serena.”

  “Ah, we’ve known each other all of two minutes and you answer ‘It’s me’? We’re off to a good start.” Ferro doesn’t say anything else, but you hear a click that must be the rifle being disarmed, his way of saying welcome.

  The woods end and you approach the house. Ferro is standing next to an old rusty boiler split in two, a giant hammer in his hand. He studies the boiler on the lawn, turns it over, picks a spot, and starts hammering away.

  “What are you doing?” you ask. Or try to ask. Only on the third try do you manage to slip your question past the hammer blows and make yourself heard. Ferro straightens up and looks at you, breathless.

  “I’m building a barbywho,” he says, then drops the hammer again.

  “A what?”

  “A barbygue . . . barbochoo . . . a grill for making meat. Whatever the hell you call it!”

  “Ah, a barbecue grill!”

  “Yep, exactly, one of those.” The hammer drops again.

  You stare at this dented hunk, its rusted bits spilled on the ground, and struggle to picture a grill emerging from it. Especially if Ferro’s one solution is to pound it with a hammer.

  “I’ve got a craving for grilled meat. Said so last night and the kids went nuts. ‘Let’s grill out! Let’s buy a grill and grill out!’ That’s the problem these days: People want something and their first thought is that they need money to buy it. They don’t think they can make it themself. But wait and see what I’m about to make. A barbeshoe grill better than store-bought. That’s Ferrucio’s word.” He gets up and dries his head with the sleeve of his shirt, a white shirt with the words IL FAGIANO—ROTISSERIE PIZZERIA—LUNCH ’N’ STUFF emblazoned on the front.

  You nod and think about what he’d just said: Ferruccio’s word. So fitting you almost smile.

  “What are you laughing about? You think I’m not up to the challenge?”

  “No, no, it’s just . . . I was thinking what a beautiful name Ferruccio is.”

  “No shit. Most beautiful name in the world. My mom gave it to me. And when my brother was born, she called him the same thing.”

  “What? You both had the same name? That must have been confusing.”

  “It wasn’t. For six years Mom called us Ferro and Ferrino.”

  “Ferrino’s nice,” you say, and start to smile again. “But why only six years?”

  “Ferrino died.”

/>   “He died?”

  “Yep. Liked tractors too much. He’d always be hanging around them, climbing up on them. Ultimately, one of them ran him over,” he says. He goes back to hammering. You feel the hammering in your head, your bones. For a minute you stop asking questions.

  Then: “And the others?”

  “What others?”

  “I don’t know, your mother? What did she do when Ferrino died?”

  “Nothing. She called me Ferro. That’s all.”

  “You mean she didn’t do anything—”

  “Wasn’t any time for that, kid. There was corn to plant. We had to move on. She still had me. And my sisters. Then another was born, during the grape harvest. Mother left the vineyard and went into the house a minute, had the baby, then went back to picking grapes. Those were different times. People were serious. Not like now, where women go to the hospital to give birth like it were a sickness. The first thing you see when you’re born is a hospital room, those beds, the stink of medicine. Shit, we already have to die in hospitals. The least we could do is come into this world somewhere nice. Am I right?” He makes a phlegmy noise with his throat. “Life goes on, kid, what happens happens. It keeps going on. And it couldn’t care less if you want to leave off or stick around. Life takes you where it wants to take you.”

  Ferro looks at you for a moment, stares at you, narrows his eyes in an expression of dead seriousness. Or maybe they sting from his sweat.

  Then he raises his hammer again and starts pounding away. This time it’s clear he won’t stop until he’s done, until that rusty tank has been fashioned into a barbecue grill. You look at the boiler. You still don’t see how it could possibly turn into one. But with each blow its shape changes. Every time Ferro hammers it, the boiler becomes something different. So who knows, maybe at some point it really will become a barbecue grill.

  The only thing to do is keep going and see what happens.

  WHERE DID YOU GO, CHECCO?

  Wood pigeon?” I say, twisting my mouth in disgust. “I’m not eating wood pigeon.”

  “Why not?” asks Ferro.

  “Because I don’t like it.”

  “Have you ever eaten it?”

  I look at him. We’re sitting close to each other. He’s at the head of the table with some kind of green blanket for a napkin slung across his belly. Then I turn to my Mom standing over the stove. In the neon light, I can’t see her very well, but it looks to me like she’s shaking her head.

  “No,” I say, “I’ve never eaten it before, so? I’ve never eaten a . . . a porcupine before, but that doesn’t mean I’d ever eat a porcupine.”

  “Come again? For your information, porcupine is real tasty,” says Ferro. “What I wouldn’t give for a nice porcupine right now. But wood pigeon’s good too. You don’t know what you’re missing.”

  I shake my head, cross my arms, and shut my mouth tight, meaning I’m done talking and I’m not letting one bit of dead bird pass my lips. Partly because before sitting down I walked by the stove and caught a glimpse of that scrawny animal, its chest out and its legs shriveled, drowning in a pan of boiling tomato sauce. I may not know how to cook very well, but if there’s one thing I do know, it’s that the darker the food, the bitterer it is, so that wood pigeon must be real bitter.

  “All right, your loss,” says Ferro. “That means more for us, right, kid?” He looks at Zot sitting next to me.

  “Zot, are you really going to eat that poor bird?” I ask, and only then do I realize why he’s kept silent until now, not butting into the conversation the way he always does.

  In fact he remains frozen, fork and knife in hand, his face over his plate. Then he says softly: “Luna, once upon a time wild pigeon was the food of kings.”

  “Hear that?” says Ferro. “Kings used to eat them. And you won’t even taste it. You know what you could use, kid? You could use a little wartime. Or else being born in a shithole like him. Then you’d see. You’d be doing cartwheels if you caught a whiff of this scent.”

  I close my mouth again and try not to think about it, about this scent, which isn’t a scent at all and that’s the biggest problem. Because with an ugly thing you can close your eyes and not see it, you can keep far away and not touch it. But smells don’t ask permission. Smells turn up and creep into your nose and there’s nothing you can do about it. And this smell is filling the kitchen and climbing down my throat—bitter as that stiff black bird.

  “I’m not eating it,” I say. “I’ll eat a piece of bread if there’s any, but wood pigeon, no way.”

  “That’s fine, Luna,” Mom says. “I bought fish sticks. I’ll heat up the oven and they’ll be ready in a second.”

  “Fish sticks? What the hell are fish sticks?” asks Ferro.

  “Good stuff,” I say. And I picture the crunchy, golden crust that you lift with your fork and underneath is the fish, so soft, so white.

  “Where did they come from?”

  “Teresa’s,” says Mom. “I went shopping. Do you want some, Zot?”

  Zot sits there, dumbfounded, still gripping his silverware tight. He looks at Mom all excited, then looks at Ferro, who replies: “No, not him! You’ll spoil him and he won’t eat what’s in the house anymore.”

  “Grandfather, I’m begging you, just this once, just tonight!”

  “Out of the question.”

  “I swear I won’t get spoiled. As God is my witness.”

  “I don’t give a holler. Tonight we’re having wood pigeon. Did I shoot that thing for nothing?”

  “You shot it?” I ask.

  “You bet I did. I tried to coax it down from the tree but it wouldn’t listen.”

  I sit there, not saying another word. No one says another word. Then Mom: “Come on, Ferro, just tonight, this once and that’s it.”

  Ferro remains motionless for a minute, then makes a noise with his throat, a cross between a cough and a burp, which is his way of saying, “What do I care? Do what you want.” And while Zot’s crying “All right!” he fills his glass to the brim with wine, swallows it in one gulp, and his face turns weird, like someone who’s thinking a thought so huge it makes him sick. Then he opens his mouth and burps for real.

  “Fish sticks, what a load of crap. Where’d you get the money to buy them anyhow?”

  “Don’t fret, Ferruccio,” says Mom, “I paid for them with my own money.” She checks the pigeon again, and every time she lifts the lid a mushroom cloud of smoke springs up, a steaming mushroom that rises in the air like the Hiroshima bomb our history teacher at school brought us a photo of and had us pass around our desks while she explained the perils of nuclear energy. She’d talked about the bomb and told us about Chernobyl too, where there had been an accident so serious that even in Tuscany people didn’t eat lettuce for months.

  At that point everyone looked at Zot. Maicol Silvestri said, “Thanks for poisoning our food, half-blood,” and then people threw a book, two pens, and a calculator at him, so that amid all the chaos someone managed to doodle a penis on the photo.

  “Well, paying for it with your own money seems like the least you could do,” says Ferro. “But where did you get the money if you don’t work?”

  “We still have some set aside.”

  “Ah, then you can find a nice little house to rent, no?”

  “No. We’ve got money for fish sticks, not rent.”

  “My point exactly. Know what a person does when she doesn’t have any money? She looks for a job!”

  “But Mom already has a job,” I say. “She’s a hairdresser.”

  “Is that right? Then I guess hairdressers have changed since my day too. They used to go to a store to cut hair far as I remember. I guess nowadays they stay home and don’t do shit, huh?”

  Mom puts the lid back on the pan. She wipes her hands on her army pants. “It’s been a while since I’ve bee
n back,” she says, not turning around.

  You haven’t been back since March, Serena. There are many things you haven’t done since March, and regardless of the fact that you’ve begun to get out of the house a little, you still can’t go to the shop. You know too many people there, and even those whom you barely know stop you in the street. Those who before wouldn’t even wave to you feel the need to say, “Chin up,” or worse, they look at you with those pained smiles, as if someone in a wheelchair had just passed by, some three-legged dog.

  But today was even worse. Today you left Ferro banging on the boiler to grind out his barbecue, went to Teresa’s to buy fish sticks, and walked straight into the jaws of Vera, a woman whose daughter waitressed one summer in a seafood restaurant on the promenade. The night of Ferragosto she’d been working late, and Vera was waiting up for her at home when she began to feel somewhat uneasy at the thought of her daughter returning home so late on her scooter. So she asked her son to go pick her up in his car, and he was pissed off, he was already in bed watching TV, and he made a stink about it but in the end he went to fetch his sister. They had almost made it home when, at an intersection, a jeep failed to stop at a red light. The driver was so drunk he hadn’t even seen the signal. So long, Vera’s kids. Ever since, Vera wanders the streets of town, and people keep a wide berth, because if she catches you, you can expect an earful of her usual complaints: that they shouldn’t sell jeeps—or alcohol for that matter—and how is it possible that restaurants stay open until one in the morning? Who eats dinner at one in the morning?

  As soon as she saw you enter the grocer’s, puffy-eyed Vera walked right up to you and hugged you hard, like a massive rock chained to your neck and dragging you to the bottom of the sea. When she finally let go, she looked at you with her permanently bloodshot eyes and said, “Brave, we need to be brave. It’s tough right now, I know, but it’ll get worse with time. Much, much worse.” That’s what she said to you, smiling bizarrely. Then she went back to staring at the cheese and ham in the display case while you snatched the fish sticks and took off, all the air trapped somewhere between your stomach and throat.