Silence again, again nothing. Enough already, freaking A, I’m going. I go and I don’t know what will happen but it doesn’t matter, since maybe it’s a spirit of the people of Luna or maybe Tages has popped out from the underworld but it’s definitely not Luca. My brother was way taller, way stronger, way handsomer. More importantly, Luca would have opened his arms and run to me and we would have hugged each other real hard. So if it’s not him, who cares about the others. I’m going. End of story. Zot shouts at me to stop but he doesn’t stop either and we arrive in front of the person waiting for us under the chestnut tree. But he doesn’t move. He doesn’t talk. It’s not even a person.
“What is it?” I ask. “Is it a statue?”
I ask because this thing is hard, square, flat. Freaking A, maybe it really is a stele statue who stayed behind to protect the woods and has been on his own for thousands of years. Until the night we discovered him.
“No,” says Zot. “It’s a sign.”
“What do you mean a sign?” I lean over and examine it. It says something I can’t make out.
Zot reads, “SAPORI DELLA LUNA ROTISSERIE/
PIZZERIA, 2000 FT. And there’s an arrow. Or there was an arrow. Someone’s drawn a penis on top of it.”
“Ah,” is all I say. Any more than that I can’t.
A sign. Just a sign. A crappy sign for a crappy rotisserie that’s 2000 feet from this crappy chestnut tree that was born weird and grew into a V.
I sit down. I suddenly realize how badly my legs are shaking. All of a sudden, I feel exhausted, I can’t stand on my feet another second. I sit on the ground with my back against this damn sign.
“You okay, Luna?”
“Yeah. But I’m tired.”
“Me too,” goes Zot, leaning against the fake statue and sitting beside me. “And cold. The damp is dreadful. I’m also a little hungry.”
We stand side by side, our eyes aimed straight ahead, scanning the woods full of chestnut trees and bats and nothing but darkness. We stay that way for a time. I’m not sure how long, long enough for me to feel cold too.
“You know, Luna,” says Zot finally, all bundled in his coat, “if it were up to me I would stay here forever. It’s cold and we don’t have anything to eat and who knows what we’ll do when winter arrives with the snow. Well, I’m just fine here. But the grown-ups back at the jeep, what will they do without us?”
I don’t say anything, although I was sort of thinking the same thing.
“Admit it. They’re goners without us. Your mom is just starting to get better. Without you I fear she might shut herself up in the house and addio.”
“True. Ferro, too; what would he do without you?”
“You think he’d miss me?”
“Are you kidding, Zot? He’d miss you a lot. He’s not the kind of person who’d say so, but he would miss you.”
“I think so too, you know. And Mr. Sandro.”
“Yeah, I don’t care about him.”
“Me neither. But think about it, he’s worse off than anybody.”
I nod and we stop talking. Sitting there, chilled to the bone, we lean against a sign for a rotisserie with a penis for an arrow. Just a radioactive orphan and a bright white girl who believe in everything. Or used to believe. On the contrary, the truth is there’s no sea bringing you gifts or mysterious people calling you, no magical powers of the Etruscans and no brothers who talk to you from the afterlife.
I lean against the sign and stand up. Zot does the same. We don’t know where we’re going. We don’t even know where we are. Actually, that we do know: we’re near a rotisserie.
“You know, Zot,” I say, starting off in the direction of the arrow, “I don’t think lies are the problem. The problem is the truth and the truth totally sucks.”
THE BREAKING OF A WAVE
What a dream, boys and girls,” says Ferro, coiled in the front seat. “Maremma Cane, what a dream.”
As the car wended its way past the trees and fields, Zot had asked if he happened to know anything about a V-shaped chestnut tree. Ferro was silent for a second, then whipped around: “Of course, of course! I even dreamt about it last night! I spent the sixties boning this woman named Giovanna. She was married to a guy who ran a bakery in the hills of Giustagnana. At night he’d go make bread and we would meet in the woods just outside of town, under this V-shaped chestnut tree. There was a clearing there we’d lie in. Actually, sometimes she’d be so frisky we wouldn’t even lie down, as soon as she got there she’d grab my—”
“Ferro,” Mom interrupts. “Please.”
“Hey, they asked. Those were some wild nights under that tree, boys and girls, and that was one hell of a dream last night. Clearly all those chestnuts must have jogged my memory. Maremma Cane, Giovanna was a tramp in real life—just imagine what tricks she could perform in a dream.”
Zot nods, without smiling or anything, then turns around to push back part of the tent that knocks him on the head every time the car brakes. It had taken us hours to assemble and five minutes to disassemble. Sandro and Mom had woken Ferro up and dragged him outside, then picked the tent off the ground and threw it into the trunk as is. But that’s all right. The important thing was to leave immediately. Who cares if now it looks like a pile of trash with bits of grass and leaves, and at every bend rolls this way and that and sounds like broken junk? I listen with my forehead pressed to the window, and all the stones and holes make my head buzz and help me think a little less.
“You two are morons, by the by,” Ferro persists. “How the hell do you get lost in a forest of chestnut trees?”
I don’t answer. Neither does Zot. Sandro, who had been quiet until then, butts in.
“It happens,” he says, his voice all broken as if he were waiting to be told off after every word and is stunned when he’s allowed to arrive at the next one. “Everybody gets lost; it’s not a crime. Getting lost is the only way to discover the truly beautiful things. The day I got lost in the woods I found the largest porcini mushroom in the Apuan Alps.”
“Quit yanking our chains,” says Ferro. “The biggest porcini was found by two pensioners from Seravezza. They even wrote it up in Il Tirreno.”
“That’s not true! They say they did but I’m the one who found it, I swear.”
“At least spare us your swearing,” says Mom. “At least spare us that.”
“But I swear I did, Serena, I swear to God.”
“You can’t swear to God, Mr. Sandro,” scolds Zot. “That’s a sin. That’s taking the name of God in vain. A catechist of all people ought to know that.”
A minute of silence, then I say, “That’s if this catechist stuff isn’t a lie too.”
I don’t say it to him because I’m not talking to Sandro. I say it to the air in the jeep. But Sandro drives and doesn’t answer, and his silence says it all.
Besides, it doesn’t matter to me. Who cares if he’s a catechist or not, if his name is really Sandro or if he made it up, if it’s true he got lost in the woods and found that gigantic mushroom? All I care about is that I got lost in the woods and found nothing aside from a sign for a rotisserie.
But I don’t want to think about it. I press my head harder against the glass and the rattle of the road makes it so I can’t think straightly. I’d like to close my eyes and sleep, dream about something beautiful or at least not dream at all. And even if I don’t believe I can, in the end somehow I manage to.
“No, let’s just go home, my head’s killing me.”
Ferro speaks but I’m not sure to whom he’s talking or why. I open my eyes; we’re stopped. I pull away from the glass and realize I’ve missed a lot of talk and miles of road. Because, although it’s still dark out and I can’t see anything, the air no longer tastes like leaves and dirt, I smell the salt and fresh sand and varnished wood. And that means we’ve arrived at the beach.
“Enough, Sandro, take us home,” says Mom, more tired than angry.
“Yeah, sure, just give me a second while I get the keys. Then we’ll go.”
Ferro asks where the hell his keys are and Sandro answers that Rambo and Marino have them, here at the beach. Which ticks off Ferro, since they were supposed to be guarding the house. What are they doing at the beach at this hour?
Sandro hesitates a moment with the door half open then says he’ll be right back, climbs out, and walks away.
We sit here, hushed, still in the jeep, and from Sandro’s door comes the salt air along with the calm sound of the waves lapping at the shore. And, well, I swear I almost don’t realize it when I open my door and climb out too.
“Can we go to the beach, too, Mom?” I don’t know what she answers, whether she says yes or no or whether she’s even heard me, since by the time I ask I’m already gone.
I can see next to nothing but I reach out my hand and touch the oleander leaves, the pods of pittosporum and rows of stiff palm branches, and when those taper off it means you’ve reached the passageway to the sea. But I can’t find it, and instead I feel a hand on my back that by now I know well. It’s Zot, pushing me forward a little. “Now,” he says, and we enter a passageway that smells like sand and stale cigarettes and pee. It’s almost as dark and narrow as the night before when we got lost among the chestnuts in the woods of Filetto, only at the end of those woods all we found was a sign for a rotisserie with a penis drawn on it, while here we take a dozen steps and something marvelous happens: the tunnel ends abruptly, and at the end of that dark, narrow tube the world opens up before us, and there are no more walls or roofs or objects shielding our eyes. We’re on the beach and around us there is only the sun and the sea, and I feel like an astronaut floating freely in empty space. Only I’m freer than them. I don’t have to wear that huge white suit or a helmet on my head that looks like a goldfish bowl. As a matter of fact, I take my shoes off, walk on the cool sand, and start to run toward the shore, even if I can’t see anything, but that’s the point: everything is free and made for running where you please, toward the sky streaked with starlight and toward the sea, which is the same color and reflects that light, making it dance up and down on the waves.
“Luna! Wait for me, Luna! Wait!” It’s Mom calling, along with Zot, and a cloud of curse words coming from Ferro’s mouth. I stop but not to wait for them. I’ve reached the water, the black sea from which a white band occasionally rises, marking the edge of the slow, peaceful waves touching my feet, one by one.
But a little farther out in the water is another white thing, thrashing and tottering, and Sandro shouts at it to come ashore.
“What the hell are they doing on a paddle boat at this hour,” says Ferro.
“They were . . . they went, you know, they went fishing for squid,” says Sandro.
“And they’re coming back now? When the fishing’s good? Sunup is when you catch squid.”
Ferro speaks and Zot touches my arm and points to something behind us. I turn around and at the far end of the sky there really does arrive this kind of light with the mountains silhouetted underneath, a line of several dark and pointy triangles. Not that I see them exactly, but Luca used to tell me about them all the time. He’d say the mountains at sunup look like dogfish teeth, and like dogfish those mountains out there are the first to wake in the morning. Actually, the dogfish doesn’t wake, he never goes to sleep, because in order to breathe he must move constantly and draw water into his gills. If he stops he dies. So, even if just a little, the dogfish keeps going forward.
That’s what Luca would tell me and I’d listen to him and like him I could kind of see this incredible and marvelous world. And now that my big brother is gone, I look back at the sea and the gentle waves, the noise they make comprised of thousands of different sounds mixed together, and in the middle of them all I seem to hear him still telling me his unbelievable tales from beyond the waves.
Yet now the voice I hear off the sea is different, a cry with nothing deep to say, only, “Hold still, moron—”
And immediately after that something happens that I can’t see but the others can, since they all start shouting from the shore, and Ferro goes: “No, don’t turn your side to the wave, don’t—”
Then a splash in the water, a voice crying, “Help,” another emitting a strange noise then breaking up and disappearing, the way Mom disappears. She had been by my side but suddenly she’s not there anymore. She’s out in front, with her army shirt whipping about and the dark water up to her waist before she dives in.
“What are you doing, you lunatic!” screams Ferro, and he runs into the sea too, kicking up sand and a dust cloud of curse words. Someone else dives behind us. It must be Sandro because Zot is still next to me. But I can’t see him exactly, I only see the lights on the water ahead of us, trembling and dashing off like frogs in a stream when they hear you coming.
Here on the shore, I don’t know what I’m supposed to do, so I do what a dogfish does: I keep going forward. The sand is increasingly wet, then a more powerful wave encircles my feet, and as it retreats carries me out to sea. I can actually feel it grabbing me and ushering me out, its hold so weird that for a moment it scares me: I’d been expecting to freeze, to die of cold, and instead I swear that in all my life I have never felt a sea as warm as this.
It comes up to my waist. I take off my sweatshirt and throw it toward the shore, where Zot is yelling at me to come back, that I’m crazy and I’ll get sick again. Then I can’t hear him anymore over my heavy breathing. I hold my breath and dive.
The sea is warm and slippery and soft. Maybe it’s that I hadn’t swum all summer, but I don’t remember it being this gentle and smooth and friendly. I swim and it laps at my skin and makes me smile, as if it were tickling me, as if it were caressing me. Then I come back up and hear Mr. Marino far off saying in his broken voice, “My Lord, I thought I was going to die, thank you, Lord, I could have sworn I was going to die.” To which Ferro replies, “Some loss,” while from the beach Zot continues telling me that I’m going to wind up in the hospital again.
“But it’s not cold,” I say. “It’s really warm!”
“Yeah, I bet not! Come back, Luna, please! For the love of God come back!”
“Coming,” I grumble, and return to the shore. And in fact as soon as I exit the water the air is chilly and makes me shudder. “Help me, Zot, I have no strength left. I’m exhausted.”
“There, you see? Those are the symptoms of hypothermia! Do you have the shakes? Let me see how pale you are.” But he shuts up as soon as he realizes that last symptom doesn’t work much with me. He merely takes my hand and tries to help me out. But I grab his arm and pull him backward with all the strength I have, and Zot falls into the water with me—coat, scarf, and all. He cries as he falls. He sinks under the water, comes back up, and screams again, thrashing his arms and trying to remove his shoes, which are seriously heavy and tight as a boa constrictor wrapped around your neck. When he can, he thrashes less, then stops altogether and looks around, baffled. Breathlessly, he goes, “Pardon me, Luna, why is it so warm?”
I laugh. I say nothing and laugh. Then I grab onto his coat and we swim over to the others, while all alone the paddleboat comes reeling into shore on the waves.
Us, on the other hand, the waves carry us up and down, up and down, we’re bathing in the sea at the end of September with the sun emerging and the full moon hanging back a little longer to watch what happens, and the most absurd thing about it is that it seems totally normal to me. Here we are, only our heads sticking out, our feet touching the soft sand at the bottom and occasionally some harder bit: seashells and hermit crabs and crabs and all the life that lives down there, checking out our huge feet and thinking, “What’s with these morons? What came over them this morning?” And they’re retreating, shoving off, because, indeed, to them it’s weird. But not to u
s. We’re here, bathing in warm water, and I hope that the others feel the way I do, because I feel really good.
Mr. Marino not so much. Rambo and Sandro take him by his arms and he says his back hurts and he has to go ashore. “But first I have to thank you,” he says to Mom. “You saved my life.”
“Don’t get carried away. Ferro deserves credit too.”
“Yes, of course, thank you both. From the bottom of my heart, thanks.”
“No sweat,” says Ferro. “I’m a lifeguard, it’s in my blood. Besides, if you had to count on your two queer pals here . . . .”
“That’s it!” says Rambo. Yells Rambo. Really loudly. “You can’t call me queer! That I won’t accept.”
“Easy, kid. You will accept it because that’s what you are.”
“No!” says Rambo, crying and punching the water hard. But he’s not angry. He’s not trying to hurt anyone. He’s more like someone who has just stopped beating himself up and has really harmed himself. “I won’t accept it because it’s not true! Why are you all saying that? I hunt. I dig car rallies and guns. How can a guy like me be gay? I can change a tire on a truck. I’m good with my hands.”
“Yeah, I bet the boys tell you that,” says Ferro. And Rambo looks like he wants to say something back or tackle him or who knows what, but Mr. Marino makes this wailing sound, says his head is spinning and that he has to go ashore. So Rambo takes him by the arm, asks Sandro what he’s doing, and Sandro says he’ll be right there, but in the meantime he hangs back with us.
“Sure, leave us to fend for ourselves, bravo,” says Rambo, walking backward in the water with Marino in his arms. “Look, just because I won’t stoop to your level to be with a woman, just because I have a little bit of pride, that makes me a fag? Well then, you know what I have to say to you? Well then, yes, I’m gay. I’d rather be gay than a sorry-ass like you!”
The Breaking of a Wave Page 42