The Breaking of a Wave

by Fabio Genovesi

  There, Sandro said it, and now that he’s out of words, he’s out of breath. All he has left is the wild and relentless thump of his heart. That strange thing he felt in his throat has disappeared; he can breathe easier. It’s as if, escaping his lips, those words had swept away all that had backed up and gotten lodged there. He lies down on his side, his back to Serena, facing away. He doesn’t say anything, just silence, overwhelming after all those words, just silence and the crickets outside. And the rustle of Serena’s clothes as she lies down too. Maybe she wants to sleep. Maybe, like him, she’s pretending. Who knows. It doesn’t matter.

  What matters is, it went badly. Sandro had held out hope but it went badly. That happens when you take a chance on something. And now all he can do is force himself to stay still while he lies next to Serena and stares daggers sharp enough to carve a hole in the body of the car and infuriate Rambo.

  Rambo must already be infuriated. He’s called ten times tonight and sent a message saying, “Call me, it’s a mess here,” but Sandro didn’t answer and didn’t call him back. Because he’s no friend, he’s a shit who only thinks of himself and what he wants. Or what he wanted and now knows he can’t have. Perhaps he ought to hop out of this goddamn jeep and call Rambo and find out what’s going on and—

  But there’ll be none of that. Because that’s talk, and talk is air. It fades the moment Sandro feels something light and delicate yet real, the way only things you can touch seem real. Touching him, rather. Someone caressing his arm, perhaps, a hand brushing against him. Serena’s hand. Sandro turns to stone. A burning hot stone with his eyes wide open, trying to see behind him without turning over, without moving, because stones don’t move. Besides, maybe it’s an accident. Maybe Serena has already drifted off and rolled over in her sleep. That must be it. But he continues to feel it, this caress, this touch, and Sandro starts to think perhaps it’s beckoning him. Even a rock would respond to the call of a hand that fabulous. Sandro turns abruptly, and Serena is right there, closing her bright eyes, her wonderful mouth, that half-smile that isn’t a smile because it has been permanently affixed to her lips, now trembling and changing into something new and less sure of itself, which Sandro tries to look at but doesn’t see anymore, because Serena’s mouth is too close now, it’s on his, just as she’s on him, or he’s on her, skin seeking other skin, rubbing together so hard they become one, salty and hot and alive.

  They kiss, she bites his bottom lip then puts her tongue back in Sandro’s mouth. He kisses it and doesn’t really know what to do, because his lips are on her lips, and meanwhile his fingers explore her sides and Serena presses her leg between his . . . and suddenly Sandro’s life becomes very interesting in more than one place. After years of indistinguishable days with nothing to rouse him, now there are important occasions all over that require his attention. Every once in a while she pulls herself off of him and says something, although perhaps they’re not words but a warm sigh combined with a kind of moaning in Sandro’s ear. He runs his mouth along her neck, to kiss and lick it but especially to open his eyes and take in this wonderful woman, even if the dim light only hints at her wonders. Women might like this dim light, the soft and romantic mood it creates, but not Sandro. He’d prefer the blazing noonday sun that burns ants in the street. He’d prefer mounting one of those lights that ships use to cast signals on the coast from thousands of miles away and aiming it straight at Serena. Because he’s never laid hands on a woman this amazing—he may never have even laid eyes on one—so he’d like to see her fully. Every contour, every smooth and perfect spot that he can feel with his hands: he’d like to be able to film her and re-watch the tape endlessly, sit on a couch and spend his life in front of the screen and die with his eyes open, like Marino’s mom.

  Well, of course. How like Sandro to think of that. Just as he was running a hand over her cotton army shirt and arriving at the curve of her hips and sliding it up under her shirt, Sandro thinks of Marino’s dead mom on the couch. Like when he was twenty and people told him that in order not to get off too quickly and last a little longer, he should think horrible thoughts about dead people or torn limbs or run-over dogs and cats or the bathroom at a nursing home at the end of the day. And so what if he was twenty at the time and now he’s twice as old and the deal should be different? To make the difference there would have to have been ample experience in the interim. Yet there was no such experience, so Sandro has to keep thinking of dead Lidia while his hands crawl up Serena’s back, bowed and shivering. He feels her legs enclose his, and in a second he flips her around so that now Serena is no longer on her side but on top of him, and they may still be wearing pants but those two wispy layers of jeans and military issue-whatever practically don’t exist. Down below, Sandro’s cock knows it and is delirious. Especially because Serena’s stroking his neck with her hands, leaning into him, and Sandro feels her breasts brushing against his chest. She moves her pelvis up and down, up and down, and again he tries to think of Marino’s dead and shriveled mom, her skin peeling off her rotten bones. But the skin of Serena, the scent of Serena, and the small noises she makes with her mouth are so hot even Marino’s mom in the freezer becomes sensual and arousing.

  So it dawns on Sandro that there’s not much he can do. He grits his teeth and grabs hold of Serena’s ass with both hands, fondling it and guiding it forward and back, forward and back, and at this point it’s impossible to resist, impossible to restrain himself. Sandro could hurt himself, might tear it in two, so he removes his hands from Serena’s hips and promises he’ll be one second, just the time it takes to unbutton his jeans and . . .

  In the meantime Serena whispers into his ear and asks for a blanket. Because Sandro may be burning up, but in fact it’s damp inside the jeep and the windows are drafty. In lieu of a blanket there’s a rubber sheet that Rambo keeps in case of tsunamis and sundry cataclysms, he tells her, and Serena reaches for it while remaining on top of him, arching her back and showing off the criminal beauty of her hips, all the more absurd under those army pants that were made for going to war or hunting or surviving in the woods and definitely not for that kind of splendor. She pushes aside the bags and rummages through the gear, in a long, grinding movement that Sandro feels fully, feels clearly, feels too much. And in order not to bring to an abrupt end this moment that should last forever, he delves back into the world’s most horrific thoughts.

  He pictures Marino’s mom making love with the veggie mart man in the back of the shop, only now he’s in the middle, and it turns into a hair-raising threesome. To make matters worse, Lidia is dead, and while Sandro and the veggie mart man take turns, her eyes fall out and worms and gigantic spiders crawl from the holes—

  Yet even though Sandro has seen millions of horror movies and has a knack for imagining nasty stuff, nothing that comes to mind could compare with what really happens: when Serena finally finds the rubber sheet, wraps it over her shoulders, and leans up against him again, something falls from the sheet and slams against the hard aluminum floor of the jeep.

  Sandro shrugs and returns to fondling her while Serena picks the thing up and is about to move it out of the way. Only she doesn’t. She looks at it for a moment, and gradually her rhythm of grinding back and forth slows until she’s stopped moving altogether.

  And all of a sudden Sandro can’t see her body anymore, her ass, the outline of her legs underneath her army pants. Nope, it’s all blacked out by Serena’s eyes, which are aimed at him, hard as two hammers.

  “What the fuck is this,” she says.

  Sandro lifts himself up to look and an invisible hand reaches down into his throat, slides down the tube conveying air to his lungs, and chokes him.

  “What the fuck is this?” says Serena, lifting that thing and waving it in the air as if she’d like to break it over his head. And wood that coarse and heavy could do real damage. It’s the wood he tried to sculpt a stele statue from, with the bracelets attached, along with t
he hacksaw and other equipment Rambo had used to make a better one. Ancient stuff, from just the other day, but to him it seems to belong to another century, to another Sandro who doesn’t exist anymore.

  He fumbles for an explanation, to make Serena understand it’s nothing, she should throw it away, ignore it, go back to loving him and grinding against him forever, as she was doing a moment ago. But it’s all over, all of it, and Sandro is the only one who still doesn’t understand that. Serena’s eyes do, as do the air around them and the crickets outside that have stopped singing. Even Sandro’s cock gets it. It has shriveled up and lies there lifeless, flaccid as a jellyfish smashed against the terrible cliffs of destiny.

  END OF THE WORLD

  There, did you hear that?”

  “No, what did he say?”

  “I don’t know, it sounded like . . . ” Zot whispers, then we go back to listening to Ferro sleep. We’ve been sitting beside him for an hour. Maybe not exactly an hour, but, you know, even ten minutes is a long time to spend listening to an old man snore, and the noises he emits sometimes sound like a man about to suffocate and other times like a broken car that won’t start. But earlier, amid all those noises, Ferro had said something. We heard him loud and clear. He said, “The chestnut . . . under the chestnut . . . hurry . . . I’m waiting for you under the V-shaped chestnut tree.” Now, someone might say, “Big deal, a lot of people talk in their sleep, it happens,” but you can tell that that someone wasn’t here in the tent, because otherwise she’d have heard how deep and clear and different from Ferro’s normal voice it was, and, like us, would have gotten goosebumps.

  “It’s not his voice,” Zot had said. “He’s under a spell!” Because in Tages’s day and during that whole beautiful past, back when people would listen to nature and thunder and the flight of birds, sometimes someone would get drunk or go crazy and would start talking in a weird voice and saying really weird things, and today they’d immediately send that person to an insane asylum, but back then they’d stop to listen to him, because his words were messages from the beyond and you had to heed them.

  Same as us. We’re sitting here quietly, holding the flashlight, primed to hear that voice speak from Ferro’s mouth again, in case it has something to add.

  “There! There!” goes Zot again. “Did you hear it? He said ‘chestnut.’ I heard it clearly this time. Or maybe ‘checkmate.’ Whatever it was, I’m sure it was a word.” We lean toward Ferro but there’s only the noise of the broken car and the stink of Dry Death that makes my eyes sting. The tent is full of this smell, and if I think about how it’s coming from Ferro’s stomach, I stop breathing. I try to stand but the tent is low. I bump my head on the tent and the whole thing shakes.

  “Careful, Luna. Did you hurt yourself?”

  No, I didn’t do anything to myself. But I can’t stay in here any longer. My legs are burning under my skin; they really don’t want to stay still. And neither do I.

  “Enough, Zot, Ferro’s got nothing else to say. Let’s go.”

  “But where?”

  “You heard the voice. We have to go under the V-shaped chestnut tree. He said to hurry.”

  “Okay. But, first of all, what is a V-shaped chestnut tree? And how are we going to find it in a forest brimming with chestnut trees?”

  “I don’t know, but if we stay here we definitely won’t find it. We have to go.”

  I say so and as I say so I’m and convinced by what I hear. I look for the tent zipper by running my hand along the side but I can’t find it. I thought it was right under here but it’s not. So I start poking everywhere, harder and harder, more at random. I feel trapped. I feel locked in this plastic cage that stinks of mold and grappa. Then Zot gets up and I hear the sound of the zipper opening. It takes a moment and finally I stick my head outside, into the real world, with no stinks with no roofs and with a full moon up above bigger than I’ve ever seen.

  “Are we going, Zot?”

  “Frankly, Luna, I don’t think it’s a prudent idea.”

  “Me neither, obviously. But we’re here. We were waiting for a sign and the sign has arrived. I heard it loud and clear and you heard it too. So if you’re not coming, then this is goodbye, because I’m going.” And I step out of the tent.

  I pull on the hood of my sweatshirt and start walking. The stars above are so bright they sizzle in the sky. The truth is I don’t see them very well, one by one. I see one whole light smeared across the blackness, but Mom and Luca always told me that they’re actually like many tiny dots of light, and that must be beautiful but if you ask me it’s even more beautiful the way I see it, as this single, magical immense thing.

  Then a sound pulls me away from the sky. It’s Zot, in his coat and scarf, tripping and stumbling but finally reaching me. “Wait up, Luna, I’m coming with you!”

  I look at him and feel like smiling. Not because of the way he’s dressed; I’m happy because he didn’t leave me on my own. I signal to him to speak quietly because the jeep is a foot away, and if they hear us, Mom might not let us go. I’d rather she kept cool inside the car with Mister Sandro. And maybe they’re sleeping but I hope not. I hope they’re talking, explaining themselves, getting to know each other. I don’t know what will happen, like if they’ll become boyfriend-girlfriend, although I doubt it because Mom has never had a boyfriend, but you know, before when we were in church and Mom came in and I heard the rare sound of her laughter, I hadn’t heard that sound in a long long time. So I’d rather have her stay in the jeep with Mister Sandro and learn how to make that sound more often.

  Only I get closer to the car, and from inside there comes a different, very loud noise. It’s still Mom but she’s not laughing. Actually she’s shouting. And I know I shouldn’t but I lean against the back of the jeep and Zot does the same, and we start to listen.

  It’s sort of fun for me at first, like we’re two spies listening in on super secret conversations in the heart of the night. I watch Zot and signal for him to be quiet, and he does the same to me, and we have to clamp our lips to keep from laughing.

  Then I hear what they’re saying in there, and laughing ceases to exist.

  “No, Serena, I wouldn’t follow them! They told me at catechism. You know how much Zot talks. He told me all the stories about things the sea carries, messages on the shore, the Luna people, Etruscan wizards, the statues in Pontremoli . . . ”

  “And you came up with this crap,” says Mom, waving a dark object that I can’t see. “Why? What the hell did you want?”

  “Nothing, Serena, nothing bad, I swear! I only wanted them to come to Pontremoli.”

  “Why the hell should you care if they came to Pontremoli,” asks Mom. And Sandro tells her he cares because he wanted to come with us, and with her.

  “And that’s why you attached the bracelets with our names?”

  Sandro doesn’t speak. Maybe he nods his head. Not even Mom speaks, and this silence hurts my ears. I breathe and feel this thing building up inside me, like I’m in a car winding through the mountains and from one moment to the next I have to get out because I feel I’m going to puke.