The Breaking of a Wave

by Fabio Genovesi

  “You’re sick, Sandro. You know that right? Look. You even made the eyes, the mouth . . . you do realize you’re forty years old? At forty people work, people have families. You on the other hand, look at what you do. You even made little hands. You’re really sick, Sandro. Sick in the head. Plain sick. You shouldn’t be walking the streets. They should lock you up.”

  “Serena, I swear, I didn’t mean to do anybody any harm. It all started by accident with that bone, which I swear I didn’t place on purpose.”

  “What bone?”

  “The whalebone that Luna found. Which actually came from a boar. I brought it to the hospital to give her as a present but she was asleep. I left it there and afterward I wanted to tell her it was a gift from me, but then you showed up and began hitting me and—”

  “Oh right, so this is my fault!”

  “No! Obviously not. I’m just saying I didn’t mean to. It happened by accident.”

  “Of course it did. And by accident you took a piece of wood and made this little statue. By accident you stuck these bracelets with our names on it and planted it by the sea for them to find. Is that it? Do you realize what an asshole you are? Those two are children. They believe in this stuff with all their heart. What did they ever do to you?”

  “Nothing! As a matter of fact I care for them and—”

  “They’re so innocent, a little weird maybe, but what’s wrong with being weird? Nothing. What’s wrong is dicks like you in the world who take advantage of them.”

  “But I didn’t mean to—”

  “So why did you make all this bullshit up, huh? What the hell did you want?!”

  “Nothing, I . . . I wanted, see, I wanted you, Serena. I did it because I had to see you. I had to talk to you. I wanted to be with you. I did it for us.”

  Mom doesn’t respond right away. A second goes by, maybe two, then her voice came crashing down like an avalanche: “For us? Fuck you. What the hell do you want from me? And what do you want from my kids? Leave us in peace, Sandro, leave us in peace. Disappear for good and get fucked!”

  Sandro tries to say something but the words come out in pieces and then they don’t come out at all. I cling to the jeep, my legs shake, my ear is flat against the glass, my eyes, through the tears, fix on Zot, and Zot’s fix on me.

  Of course they do. We can’t look at anything else. There is nothing else. Brick by brick the world around us has collapsed and ceases to exist. Everything splits apart and crumbles. The earth gives way and disappears from beneath my feet. I feel myself falling into nothingness and in no time I’ll be nothing too. Me and everything else, spinning in this vortex, like the drift that rolls around in the sea and is scattered here and there and wherever it ends up, it ends up by chance and for no good reason.

  Fine then. It’s fine to fall and disappear forever, the way the Etruscans disappeared forever and the cities of the Luna people and the way Tages disappeared and even my brother. I feel myself falling and want to latch onto something. I press the handle of the jeep real tight and pull, and the door opens.

  I didn’t mean to open it. Or maybe I did. I don’t know. But I definitely don’t want to look inside. I don’t want them to see me. I open my mouth but nothing comes out. My lips curl and tremble. Because I have nothing to say, nothing. All I had to do was let myself fall and instead I’m here and I feel really stupid and all alone. And Mom opens her arms. She rises and wants to hug me, but I don’t want her to, since all hugging does is squeeze you and keep you from moving, braced for the next cruelty, the next lie.

  Mom says something but I don’t hear her. Everyone speaks but their voices are faint and far off, while I tighten my hood and run, run with all the strength I have plus extra strength and where that comes from I don’t know. I run toward the dark. That’s my place, even if I wish it weren’t. That’s where I’m supposed to be. Where you can’t see anything and nothing exists. Not even me.

  THE DARK AHEAD

  I run. I run real fast. I don’t see where my feet fall or where I’m going. But I don’t care. When you’re running away, it doesn’t matter where you go as long as it’s far. Far from the jeep, from the nasty things I heard, from Sandro who wants to tell me he didn’t do it on purpose and from Mom who wants to tell me she loves me even though I’m an idiot. I can hear them down there but I don’t answer. I just run.

  My foot lands in a hole. I almost fall and my ankle kills, but I ignore it, the way I ignore my breathing and my heart pounding so fast my eyes jut out. I grit my teeth and run into this wet, dark field, not wanting to stop, not ever.

  But I nearly give up when the field ends and all of a sudden I find myself facing an enormous black wall.

  Just like that the woods begin, out of nowhere, a million trees packed together, trunks and branches that entwine to form this one overwhelming thing that covers the sky and swallows the stars and the moon, and I swear I feel like I’m running into a wall.

  Fine by me. If it’s a wall, I want to slam my body into it. Or if it’s something like a black hole, that’s fine too. That way it can suck me up and shoot me out someplace in the universe, who knows where, as long as it’s far away from the stele statues, from days of studying trash on the seashore, from Tages, from Ferro’s voice as he sleeps, from the whalebone, from that junky wooden sculpture you’d have to be the dumbest of dummies to believe in, you’d have to be sick in the head, you’d have to be me.

  So instead of stopping I pick up the pace. I reach the black woods and jump in. I close my eyes and pinch my nose, as if I were diving rather than jumping in, and when I touch down, there I am, floating in the dark, and nothing exists anymore. Only my legs that continue to run and my arms out in front of me dodging the trunks, although sometimes I don’t manage well and scrape myself and carry on.

  I want to live right here. I want to stay forever and never come out again. That’s how stories are born about the ghost of a girl who can be seen wandering at night when there’s a full moon, and if someone really were to bump into me they would run away in terror, and later say, “I saw her. I swear I saw her. She’s all white with white hair and transparent eyes—a real ghost!” Because deep down that is what I am: a ghost that hasn’t died yet. I don’t have magic powers and can’t foresee the future or talk with the Afterlife. And Mom and Miss Gemma and everyone else can keep telling me I’m a unique creature, I’m special, but it’s not true. I’m not special. I’m just weird, I came out wrong, and the rest are all lies.

  Grown-ups love that, telling lies. Like the story about Santa Claus, which I believed in until middle school, and after that I believed in Tages, in the people of Luna. I believed the sea bore me gifts . . . Fine, maybe I’m to blame for being stupid, but why do grown-ups get a kick out of telling these bogus stories?

  I keep thinking about it, I keep running. Every once in a while my hair catches in a branch, every once in a while I run into a chestnut tree, but it doesn’t hurt. Or maybe it does. I don’t know, it doesn’t matter.

  Even Luca, even my fabulous big brother, what nonsense he used to make up! I was raised with his eyes, with his mouth describing the world to me. And it was all a marvel, miracles and magic happened in front of us every second: the mountains were friendly but severe giants with skin made of stone and trees that grew tall, like thick hairs, and they carried water down to the sea, which is our father, the sea that talks to us and calls to us and hugs us with its currents and waves . . . And yet none of it’s true. The mountains are just stones. The sea doesn’t bring me gifts. It’s just a gigantic tub where people offload garbage and plastic bags and toxins. And the trees you can see for yourself: rotten and reeking of mold and mushrooms that I scrape past while I run, my heart leaking out of my ears and brain. In fact I don’t believe in all that anymore, and I don’t want to stop running, there’s no place in this nasty world I want to stop, and—

  And then I smack into a chestnut tree.
It’s gigantic but I swear I didn’t see it. I hit it with my shoulder and luckily just a small part of my head, my ear and temple, and I fall to the ground that smells damp and muddy. I lean against the trunk to stand back up. My ear burns but in a moment I’ll start running again, in a moment . . .

  Suddenly I hear this loud noise above me, and in the silence of the woods it scares me to death. It sounds like an explosion, or several explosions in succession: two black wings beating the air and a sharp cry. A bat. Only totally huge. And because I’m a moron I think back to the vampire from Sandro’s story, the one in Transylvania or the Apennines, and shield my neck. But it’s not a vampire, it’s an average bat, and instead of attacking me it flies off, ignores me entirely.

  Bats don’t see very well. They wander around in the dark. I’m like that, like a bat or a mole or those white worms that live at the bottom of caves—nice company, huh?

  I feel those creatures crawling all over me and get goose bumps. But a moment later I hear something else and out of nowhere feel a rush of happiness.

  “Ah! A vampire! SOS! SOS!” The cry is nervous, desperate.

  I smile and squint to get a better look but can’t see anything. “Zot!” I shout.

  “Luna, is that you? Oh, thank Saint Genesius of Brescello! Luna, where are you?” he cries. But I’m already by his side.

  “Hi Zot.”

  “Is that you, Luna?”

  It is, I tell him. I should have said, “Of course it’s me, who else would it be?” Only I was about to ask him the same question, so I just say yes. And Zot hugs me. I swear. Real hard. With a strength that, if you ask me, his arms don’t have. And yet I can barely breathe. It’s as if someone else were hugging him and me both. Though that’s not the case—enough with the nonsense. It’s just Zot and he’s happy to have found me and I’m happy he’s here. But he can forget about my going back to the grown-ups with him.

  “Don’t even think about it, Zot, I’m not going,” I say. Going where, he asks.

  “To the jeep. I’m not going back. I’m staying here. There’s no point insisting.”

  Zot pulls away and looks at me even though we can’t see one another in this dark. “Excuse me? Do you really think I want to go back there?”

  “Yeah. I mean, I don’t know. I think so.”

  “Well, you’re wrong. You ran away but I ran away too. What happened hurts me as much as you, you know? Maybe you don’t remember, but I also believed . . . in everything. Clearly I have no intention of returning to the jeep. You don’t want to go back and you have your mother there; why would I, who have no one, want to?”

  “That’s not true. You have Ferro.”

  “I wouldn’t count on it. Yesterday I asked him if we could have a big dinner for Christmas and he said if they haven’t come to take me away by Christmas he’s going to leave me in a dumpster.”

  We’re silent for a moment, there’s only the sound of our breathing, then we start walking together, moving forward. Which is to say, we turn toward a random spot in the dark, decide that it is facing forward, and head out in that direction.

  “Okay, Zot, but my feelings were more hurt than yours cause I thought it was my brother who wanted to speak to me, got it?”

  “Me too! If your brother talked to you, maybe mine could tell me something one day.”

  “Since when do you have a brother?”

  “You never know. A brother, a sister—anything’s possible. Only my parents know. But I can’t ask them because I don’t know them either. I’m ashamed to admit it, Luna, but sometimes I almost wish that they were dead, because if they’re alive, that means they care nothing for me.”

  “No, Zot, what are you saying? That isn’t true. Your dad the violinist doesn’t know he’s your dad. And who can say what they did to your mom. You know how mean nobility can be.”

  “Please, Luna,” says Zot. He stops walking and I stop too. “Please, not you too. Spare me the poppycock. Otherwise Mr. Sandro is right and we’ll go on telling each other lies.”

  “It’s not a lie. It’s the truth. Isn’t that what the nun told you?”

  “You know what the truth is, Luna? The truth is, I don’t know who or where my parents are. All I know is that when I was born they brought me to the nuns. Then the nuns brought me and some other kids to Italy and by the time they returned home they’d forgotten about us. Got it, Luna? That’s the truth. At least you knew your brother and you loved each other for many years and you have a mom who loves you immensely too. I’m sorry about what happened, it grieves me, but look, I always listen to you and understand you, Luna. Every once in a while you could try to understand me too.”

  The voice is his but the words sound nothing like Zot. In the dark I almost doubt it’s him. But it is him, I feel it, only I don’t know what to say. I don’t know what to do. I merely feel like crying, in part for myself and more for him. I don’t want him to see me crying, so this time I’m the one to hug him, and he hugs me back, and all I manage to say is, “I’m sorry, Zot, I’m sorry.”

  “You don’t have to apologize, Luna, but please remember that it is not always you versus the world. You’re not always alone. Actually you’re never alone. I am.”

  “Neither are you, Zot, you’re not alone either.”

  “I know,” he says and squeezes harder. “Not anymore.”

  We stay there, and I cry and laugh and nod, and even if I don’t see him I know that Zot is doing the same. There’s no point looking at one another or talking. The silence is total, like the dark, and it seems weird not to hear anything, not the wind in the leaves or the voices of the grown-ups calling us. Maybe they went looking for us in the wrong spot or maybe these woods are so dense that the sounds of the world, like the light, can’t reach this far. In which case, this really is the perfect place for us.

  “What do we do now?” Zot asks.

  “Now . . . I propose that from now on we only believe what we see. Deal?”

  “Consider it sacrosanct. Except I can’t see anything,” says Zot. For a while we don’t talk, peering into the deep darkness of the woods.

  But it’s not that dark. Not like when I dove in. It’s weird, even the tent seemed dark to me. Then I went out and discovered that the real darkness was in that field. Then I got to the woods and in comparison the field was showered in light. And now even this dark leaves me something to see. Maybe that’s how it works. Maybe remaining in the real dark is impossible. The dark is always and only ahead of you, and when you reach it you realize it isn’t as dark as you’d thought. You take one step forward and it’s no longer there, it’s moved a little farther on and is waiting for you to arrive so it can disappear again.

  In fact now that I open my eyes I can recognize certain shapes. Shadows, darker patches, leaves. And off in the distance, something different and quivering, something neither black nor shadowy: an actual light.

  “What is it?” asks Zot. His hand grips mine and we walk toward it slowly. Though it isn’t easy to reach. The trees are more densely packed, and in the middle are these kinds of wires, brambles with thorns my sweater snags on, but they break off when I pull away. We get closer to the light, and from a few feet away we can see that it is round and sits high up, like a beacon in the sky, illuminating a precise spot. Because suddenly the mass of chestnuts vanishes and in the middle is a clearing with one lone tree underneath a light that shines down on the earth around it and its gigantic crown. Two crowns, actually, since there are two trunks. They were born attached but one climbs this way and the other that, each crooked in its own way, and together they form an incredible and gigantic V.

  “Jesus, Mary, and Joseph,” goes Zot. And we stand there, planted in the ground, more stationary than that dark, unreal tree. Only after a while do I manage to say, “I, I don’t believe it.” Cause what the freak, I don’t want to believe it.

  “Me neither, Luna. Yet
I see it. Please tell me you don’t see it.”

  “I do. Not well, but I see it.”

  Zot gasps and I gasp too. Just when we’d worked so hard not to believe anything anymore, there appears this V-shaped chestnut tree that Ferro’s voice told us we had to hurry to. But why? What’s waiting for us in the dark behind that tree? Why these woods? More importantly, why us? Do the people of Luna have something to tell us? Or does Tages himself? And what do they want? What . . . ”

  I don’t know and maybe I don’t want to know. I try to convince myself that it’s all nonsense, that Zot and I should ignore it and continue on our way. But we don’t have a way, and even if I don’t want to, I think, well, maybe Luca is waiting for me down there. I don’t know how or why, but it would be pretty easy to check; the chestnut is right there. So, without deciding, without wanting to, I start moving.

  I keep going and Zot goes with me. We exit the woods and stop inside the light circling the tree, but underneath the tree it’s dark and you can’t see a thing. Another couple of steps, I squint, and there beside the trunks something emerges. Actually someone, a dark figure, standing there, waiting for us.

  Zot gets a better look at it than I. He says it has a weird head, wide and rounded on top. “Maybe it’s a hat, or maybe . . . ” He spits out a kind of cry and claps his mouth and says through his fingers, “Heavenly Father, it’s the people of Luna!”

  Which is ridiculous, but heck, that is their head: round and shaped like a crescent moon. I open my mouth. Nothing comes out. I take another breath and try again. “Hello.”

  The figure doesn’t answer me or move. It stands there staring at us.

  “I, I’m Luna. And this is Zot. Were you waiting for us?”

  Again, nothing. Only the wind makes the leaves tremble, although compared to us, they seem cool and calm. We take another step. Two, actually.

  “Should we get closer?” says Zot. Not to me but to that person. “Or would you prefer to be left alone? We understand if so. We wouldn’t dream . . . ”