After she’s done speaking, we sit in silence for a moment. I fix my eyes on the ground, ashamed, but then the Pheasant laughs, takes a breath, and, a different tone of voice, rich and stagy, begins: “Well then, in the absence of official guides, I will act as your guide today. I’d like to welcome you children to Luni, especially you, Luna—welcome home!”
I smile. I actually laugh. I feel like covering my mouth with my hand.
“This city is the only place in the world dedicated exclusively to the goddess Luna. The biggest temple was the goddess’s, and it faced the sea from the highest point in town. So it’s an honor to be here with you, Luna,” says the Pheasant, giving a little curtsy. I laugh and curtsy back.
Meanwhile Ant Girl stands there and says nothing, and Allegria continues laughing to himself. Neither listens. But when we leave the House of Mosaics they follow behind, which is something.
Past the roof covering this part of the site, we finally find the city spread out before us: you can make out the streets, the foundations of buildings, and a round piazza with a few broken columns. The Pheasant tells us that Luni was an important and very wealthy city, that before the Romans there were many other inhabitants: Italics, Ligurians, Etruscans . . .
The Etruscans! I try to hide my excitement at the news.
But with Zot there’s no hiding anything. He grabs my arm and shouts, “The Etruscans, Luna! The Etruscans were here!” And he looks at me with his great big bulging eyes. I try to smile but it comes out crooked and I nod just once.
“Of course there were Etruscans,” continues the Pheasant. “First there were the local tribes, then the Etruscans, then the Romans came and took control. In the Roman Empire, all of the priests were Etruscans. They were great experts in certain things; only they knew magic. If strange phenomena occurred—say a statue wept, or a bolt of lightning split a tree apart, or a sheep was born with six hooves—then the only thing the Romans could do, despite all their might, was seek out an Etruscan and ask him what it meant. The Etruscans were always in demand. Not least in Luna, which was a magic city where strange things happened every day.”
“Luna?” I ask. “Wasn’t this place called Luni?”
“Later, yes, but the real name was Luna, like the goddess. Like you.” She smiles. “Speaking of goddesses, follow me, I want to show you something really cool.”
We pass by a gravelly clearing where the rest of the group has gathered. The boys are playing soccer and the girls are sitting around taking photos with their phones. The Pheasant tells Venturi that we’re going on ahead. He says they’ll catch up as soon as the game’s over, but then the boys scream something and he says, “All right, all right. We’ll finish this one, play a rematch, and then we’ll catch up with them.”
While the Pheasant takes us down a path in the middle of a field, she explains that everyone came to Luni because it was a splendid natural-made port, perfect for ships. There was an inlet on the coast where the sea was always calm. “Can you guess what that inlet was shaped like?”
Zot elbows me. A pan, he says. The Pheasant laughs and shakes her head. I guess something else. I say that the port was shaped like a moon, and the teacher says, “Brava.” She explains that the coast here is like a huge crescent moon curving inwards from the sea to the heart of the city.
Next we walk as far as the point on the path where the walls and roofs terminate. The Pheasant stops and I stop behind her, wondering why she’s not walking and talking anymore. But when I squint and look around, I understand immediately. Right in front of us, on the top of a hill, is this large dazzling thing, taller than everything else: amid the rocks, ruts, and pieces of wall there stands a building, still erect. It’s too far away and the sun’s too bright to make it out clearly, but it’s white and gigantic and surrounded by all these houses and squares you can only imagine. That thing in front of us is serious business.
“There it is. That’s the temple of the goddess Luna,” says the Pheasant, placing a hand on my shoulder.
I stand still for a second. There are so many things I’d like to ask her but don’t. Instead I start walking toward the temple. But, after a few steps I notice it’s fenced off, and at the end of the path there’s a sign hanging from the gate that says NO TRESPASSING.
I turn around to look for the Pheasant and ask her if we can still go in, but my answer comes immediately in the form of my teacher kicking the iron gate. The gate swings open.
“But . . . is that allowed?” asks Zot.
The Pheasant waves me in, takes Allegria and Ant Girl by the hand. “There should be guides, guardians, and researchers here,” she tells Zot, “to conduct studies and show us around.” Instead there’s no one. But look on the bright side: there’s no one around to give us a hard time either.
The grass is tall here, and occasionally it yields large stones I can’t see well. I slip, almost fall, but manage to stay on my feet and keep moving forward, and the closer I get, the higher the temple rises toward the sky and covers everything and seems to sprout up around me. The grass comes to an end and under my feet I feel a hard, flat thing, the first marble step leading up to the temple. I stop and turn toward the Pheasant, who gives me a light push and signals for me to climb up.
The boiling sun beats down on the white marble. I feel as though I’m moving inside one never-ending flash, as if this light were bearing me up and propelling me forward. I arrive at the top of the stairs and look down at the town, and even though everything is white and shining I can feel that I am at the highest point of Luni, or Luna, as it was really called. I take off my sunglasses. The light forms a wall around me, yet I seem to see just fine. I see the city as it once was, flourishing, when its people were rich and had jobs and soaked in the thermal baths and waited for ships to haul in precious goods from unknown lands. I see the harbor and the square—it, too, shaped like a crescent moon—then a long avenue dotted with columns cutting a path from the town to the temple, and all the people climbing up from the street and the sea to the foot of the steps, and standing down there to worship the goddess Luna up here. What they asked her I don’t know, since there were a lot of gods and each specialized in something. So when the Pheasant asks me if everything’s all right, I ask her what the goddess Luna did exactly.
“What do you mean?”
“What was she the goddess of?”
“Luna was the goddess of the night and the afterlife. She was the god who brought our world into contact with the world of the dead.”
Word for word, I swear, and Zot, who had stopped halfway up to catch his breath, shouts up at me all freaked out, “Hear that, Luna? In contact with the world of the dead! With the world of the dead!”
Me on the other hand, I’m totally cool. Because maybe I really am crazy. Crazy and cool. I put a hand in my jeans and feel my whalebone there, safe, smooth, rough in places. I feel like smiling. I do smile.
Meanwhile the Pheasant continues telling us about the founding of Luni and its downfall, about a Viking king who attacked the city with ships, thinking it was Rome . . . But I’ve stopped listening. Too many things are spinning around in my head, like the thoughts that send the waves rolling toward me, and they dance this way and that and they’re all I see.
Zot on the other hand, he does listen. He asks lots of questions, too, finally forcing the Pheasant to finally tell him she doesn’t have all the answers. “But that’s not because I don’t know the answers. No one knows; they’re still mysteries.”
“Mysteries?” says Zot.
“That’s right, this place is full of mysteries. Lots of ancient and unknown magical rituals, undoubtedly linked to the people of Luna, no doubt.”
“The people of Luna?” I ask. I’d never heard of them before but I sure liked the sound of them.
“Yes, they were a prehistoric people that lived in the woods of Lunigiana thousands of years ago. We know next to nothing about
them. They didn’t even have a name. All they left behind are stele statues, stone sculptures that they left in the middle of the woods, human bodies with heads in the shape of the moon. There are tons in Pontremoli. Clearly the cult of Luna gave way to the Etruscans and Romans . . . ”
The teacher goes on, but I can’t manage to follow her because there’s too much stuff to keep straight. Mysterious people from prehistory, statues with moon-shaped heads, magic rituals—they bounce around inside me and I stop listening for a while. When I came back to earth, the Pheasant has switched to talking about another sculpture called the Holy Face. She said it was in Lucca and it was a wooden Jesus, strange and dark and very old. For thousands of years pilgrims from all over Europe have traveled to look at it, because it’s miraculous. It comes from faraway lands, where Jesus was born. The man who sculpted it wasn’t a sculptor. He was a normal guy who happened to be the last person alive to have known Jesus, and so he felt compelled to carve his face. Only he wasn’t a sculptor, so it wasn’t coming out how he wanted. But for some reason he kept at it day and night, night and day.
I listen and keep my mouth shut, though I can guess why. It’s the same with me and Mom collecting photos of Luca. The photos pile yet we continue to go around asking his friends if they have others. Because this strange thing happens that the longer you go without seeing a person, the more you love him, the more you forget what he was like. You even forget his face, his appearance. It’s strange, but that’s the way it is. Maybe because, while you try to call it up, so many other things come to mind: his voice, things he’d say and how he’d say them, his smell, the way he walked. And yet his face you forget. That’s why we want all of those photos of Luca and why we’re always looking for more and why we ask for them from people who knew him. That’s why I can picture this man loving Jesus so much and forgetting his face and despite not being a sculptor chiseling away at the wood with his hammer or scalpel or whatever he had. It’s not like there were photos back then.
Poor guy. I think about him and feel sad. But luckily the Pheasant keeps talking and tells us about this incredible thing that happened one day. What with all his working and not eating or sleeping, at some point the man collapsed. He drops like a pear from a branch and sleeps for a whole day and night. And when he wakes up, he lifts his eyes to that piece of wood and there’s the Holy Face, identical to the face of Jesus.
“Incredible!” says Zot. “Isn’t that incredible, Luna? Isn’t it?”
Yes, it is, totally incredible. But there’s one thing I don’t get. “If they sculpted the Holy Face in Palestine and now it’s in Lucca, what does that have to do with Luni?”
“Well,” says the teacher, “they didn’t bring it to Lucca till later. It landed here first.”
“Really? How did it get here? Who brought it?”
The Pheasant answers, and even if her voice is the same as before, even if she answers me while bending over Ant Girl, who is threatening to fall, each word she says sticks deep into my brain and bones and every place in my body where my beating heart can be felt. “No one, Luna. It was brought by the sea.”
I’m speechless. The thing is so incredible that even Zot can’t speak. And the teacher explains that back then a lot of people were against sacred sculptures. Said they were a mortal sin, seized them, burned them. And so our friend put the Holy Face in a boat and let it go. Nobody on board, no oars, no sail. Set adrift. The boat crossed the entire Mediterranean before landing here. It entered the harbor by itself, washed up on shore.
Zot and I stare at one another the same way Allegria stares at the sky and Ant Girl looks at the ground. And my guess is, seen from afar, we hardly look more normal than them.
But what the freak, it’s not our fault. Does the Pheasant’s story sound normal? This thing that’s exactly like the whalebone? Like the pans on the beach? No way. These kinds of things are totally absurd and unbelievable, and maybe a person refuses to think about or believe them, yet they keep happening, in every age, continuously. They happen so often that at this point I don’t know anymore why they shouldn’t be normal.
So I stand here and Zot keeps walking up but not all the way to the top. He stops at the last step and doesn’t speak. Besides, we both know there’d be no point. In silence we look down at the city spread beneath the temple of the goddess Luna, at all its mysteries, and at that sea down there which bears them.
And I pray to God that the rooms they place us in will be decent and have windows, if barred so be it, at least so you can see the sky outside, and that the straitjackets are comfy enough and clean.
Because at this point no one can save us from the insane asylum.
THIS CANDY IS FOR GOD
DEE-sgusting. Can you believe that? Can you believe the world we live in?”
Sandro nods. He’s been nodding for at least a minute, ever since he found himself standing next to Rambo facing Marino’s house inside one of two ten-story apartment buildings called the Querceta Skyscrapers.
Marino’s apartment is on the ninth floor, almost the penthouse. As kids, Sandro and Rambo would come here to look down at Versilia, which from up there seemed to lay down its arms and surrender to them. They’d devise thousands of ways at their disposal to dominate that land one day, from the hills behind them to the burnished blue sea below. But until that day came they were content to stick their heads out the window and spit on the heads of passersby.
Eventually they stopped coming over because Marino’s mom, though always a ballbuster, had gotten worse with age, and at some point making them remove their shoes wasn’t good enough for her, they had to wear disposable slippers and leave their coats outside to keep from tracking germs and toxins into the house. After all those years, Sandro and Rambo are once again climbing up to the ninth floor. Climbing the stairs, that is; Rambo doesn’t take elevators.
“This is a seismic zone, riding an elevator is suicide,” he says. Not that walking up nine flights of stairs in one go is any better. At least for Sandro. Rambo climbs them quickly and painlessly, with enough breath to keep repeating how disgusting it is, how the world has stooped so low it’s spinning round in the gutter of the universe and pretty soon it’ll be all-out war, every man for himself.
It’s his usual spiel, but today there’s a chance Rambo is right. Because they’re climbing the stairs to get Marino’s insurance card, which the hospital expects you to have the day you check in. Soon he’ll be released and they can’t wait any longer.
“Your mother still hasn’t brought it?” Rambo asked while Sandro was at catechism. Marino replied that his mom wasn’t right in the head anymore, she kept forgetting. And this time Rambo really lost his cool. He told Marino to call his mother immediately and make her pack his insurance card while they were on the phone. Marino shook his head and kept saying it was better if he didn’t, and Rambo insisted, until finally Marino, in this thin wire of a voice, muffled by the pillow where he’d planted his face in shame, confessed to something crazy: His mother never visits him. She couldn’t care less because she has a partner and spends all her time with him. In short, she’s a slave to love. Marino’s mom.
“Do you realize how disgusting that is? I feel like puking,” says Rambo. Sandro doesn’t answer. He, too, feels like he might puke a little. Especially after the exertion of keeping up with Rambo, but also at the thought of Marino’s mom in someone’s embrace, sweaty and bedraggled, her wrinkled skin rubbing up against other wrinkled skin.
“Plus, you know, whatever,” says Rambo, “it’s awful enough that at her age she’d still be thinking about that stuff, but the fact that she’s neglected her son? Shit, that’s taking it too far. You ever see that slut come to the hospital?”
Sandro continues not to respond. He’s out of breath. When they finally reach the right floor, he leans against the wall, bends over, and tries to catch his breath, while Rambo stabs the doorbell and lets it ring good and long. No one answer
s. Rambo rings the bell again and again silence. He pounds the door with his fists. Nothing.
“The whore isn’t in,” he says. “Must be out getting plugged.” He starts searching his pockets for Marino’s keys. For any normal person it would be a quick operation, but Rambo has pants pockets, coat pockets, tactical assault vest pockets; it takes a bit to rifle through each one, plenty of time for him to reiterate how disgusting it is that at five in the afternoon this bitch is out there doing her disgusting business while her son is in the hospital, and how his parents are fundamentally no better, how every Saturday night they go out dancing at the Silver Fox, the nonagenarian version of a velvet rope club, and the only reason they don’t erupt into post-dance orgies is because their legs’ll give out and—
“Motherfucker. I left the keys in the jeep.”
Rambo drives a jeep, a 1980s Defender, practically military issue. He paid nothing for it because it’s ancient and riddled with bullet holes, a castoff from the Civil Defense that he found through a friend of a friend, with a ladder in back, a shovel, thousands of spotlights, and a muffler that runs all the way up to the roof like a kind of chimney, so that he can drive it into a cresting African river and travel with the water up to the windows no sweat. In fact Rambo greets every fair-weather day and dry road with regret, eagerly awaiting the fall and its massive floods that never fail to hit the Tuscan and Ligurian Riviera. Catastrophic conditions are his idea of fun: he slaps on his knee-highs and blasts off in his jeep to lend a hand in disaster areas.
And though the jeep may run great in floods and rising rivers, on a sunny Saturday like today it’s stopped working. So Rambo left it at home. With Marino’s keys inside.
“How the hell did you get here then?”
“By bike,” says Rambo, eyes down.
“Now what are we going to do?”
“Go get the keys is what.”
“Fuck that. I’ll wait for you here.”
The Breaking of a Wave Page 27