The Breaking of a Wave

by Fabio Genovesi

  “Yeah,” says Ferro, “we heard you. Alert the press.”

  He doesn’t say anything else and neither does Rambo, except for bits of broken words to himself that get drowned out by the waves and crash on the shore.

  We stay here, in the water. A moment ago we were in the woods up in the mountains and now look at us, bathing in the sea, in this warm water, so strange and beautiful. It laps at my skin and makes me smile. Actually, it makes me feel like laughing, even though I don’t want to. Because I’m angry and I clamp my mouth shut and try to hold this laughter in without them hearing me. Instead, a minute later, we hear this earth-shattering cry.

  We look around to see what’s happening, everyone but Sandro, since he’s the one shouting and hopping about and trying to lift his foot to see what stung him. But that’s not easy when you’re neck-deep in water. All he manages to do is jump and wail. “It stings! It stings!”

  “What’s gotten into you?” asks Mom.

  Sandro doesn’t answer, just makes this muffled sound with his lips sealed. But I know what happened.

  “A weever!” I say. Sandro nods, his eyes wide open, and hops again.

  Ferro laughs and Mom does too, so finally I can laugh, and I laugh real loud because, with all the sea around us, somehow Mr. Sandro has managed to step right on a weever.

  Weevers are small, dark fish that spend their lives buried in the sand with only their dorsal fins poking out from the surface: three black, poisonous spines that really hurt whomever steps on them.

  “Argh! It burns! It burns! Fuck!”

  “Is it lethal?” asks Zot. “Blessed Saint Christopher, I said that at the end of this adventure someone would pay with his life, I said that!”

  “Way to go, kid, you were right,” says Ferro, laughing along with me.

  “Don’t laugh—this really burns!” Sandro speaks, his teeth clenched from the pain.

  “Of course it’s going to burn in the water,” says Ferro. “You have to put something hot on it. Hot sand would do it, that stuff’s perfect. Only now it’s cold.”

  “So then?”

  “So then, tough luck.”

  “Or urine,” says Mom. “Urine works, doesn’t it? With jellyfish people use urine.”

  “Right,” says Ferro, “urine would work too.”

  So I raise my arms to the sky and scream, “Yes! Come on, let’s pee on Sandro!”

  And he: “Ah! You of all people, Luna! First you won’t speak to me and now you want to pee on me?”

  “Yes! Right away, too, because I’ve got to go!” I say. I’m embarrassed to say it but I do, then I stop myself because I remember that I’m not talking to Sandro.

  “All right,” says Mom, “come on, everybody pee on Sandro!”

  “Please, people,” says Zot, his coat swollen with water and shrouding his mouth. “Honestly, I think this crosses the line of good taste.”

  “The kid’s right,” says Ferro. “No way I’m whipping it out in front of this guy. He’ll fall in love and who knows what he’ll do.”

  “You’re joking, you’re joking,” says Sandro, his voice still choked with pain.

  “Fine, listen,” says Mom. “There’s no warm sand, you don’t want to be peed on—at least swim ashore and improvise.”

  “Yeah, I’m going,” says Sandro. But he doesn’t move.

  “What are you waiting for? Aren’t you going? Go ashore and have a look. The spine might still be stuck in it.”

  “Yeah, I’ll go in a minute, not now.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because I’m scared that if I go you won’t want me back again. That despite this great trip together, because it ended the way it ended, now we’ll never see each other again.”

  For a moment no one speaks. Then Mom goes: “Well, who can say. In my opinion the only person who can decide that is Luna.”

  And even though I don’t see well, I can feel everyone looking at me now.

  I don’t speak because I don’t know what to say, because I feel so happy in this warm water that I’m unable to stay mad at Mr. Sandro or anyone else in the world. And yet that’s not fair and what should happen is that all the Etruscan gods and the people of Luna should arrive and unleash their rain of fire and killer locusts and every divine curse there is on Sandro. Then it occurs to me that something actually did happen—the weever struck. I look at Sandro waiting there for me to say something, trying to keep quiet and motionless while sounds of suffering escape his lips and every so often he hops on one foot. I feel like laughing again, like being happy, and so I keep totally quiet.

  Luckily Zot thinks of something to say. Something, as usual, completely irrelevant. “Wait, but, is the weever going to die now?”

  “Huh?”

  “I was just asking myself whether weevers are like bees, and when they sting you their stinger tears off and they die?”

  “Kid,” says Ferro, “you won’t be happy until someone dies, huh?”

  “Yes. I mean, no. But it seems probable. Which makes me wonder, couldn’t the weever have run away? Didn’t it see the huge foot of Mr. Sandro coming?”

  So Ferro starts to tell him about this one time a stingray stung him, and it could be the best story ever but I don’t listen. I can’t. Because out of nowhere this business about the weever not seeing Sandro reminds me of something else about Luca that, I swear, I hadn’t thought about since it first happened.

  It must have been last year, summertime. He and I were walking on the beach and we came to a place where the sand dies off, at the mouth of the Versilia River, where the water runs down the Apuan Alps and into the sea. There were some really big fish in the mouth of the river. I could only see the shadows of their fins but they were there, held in the current, facing the mountains.

  And we snuck right up behind them, which seemed weird to me since the one thing fish—and all animals—know about humans is to run away when you see them. But those fish weren’t running away. They stayed there, facing the current. Fish always do that, Luca told me. Because the current brings them bits of stuff and smaller fish to eat, as well as sticks, plastic bags, and larger fish to avoid. Really. That’s how they live, always keeping their eyes out for what’s coming. And whatever’s going on behind them, even just a step away, they ignore.

  “See, Luna, we’re here, up close, watching them, but to them we don’t exist.”

  “Can’t they turn around to look?”

  “Maybe. I don’t know. But they don’t turn around. Because the current is coming from over there. Everything, the good stuff and the bad, shows up in front of them. That’s how fish live, Luna. They might imagine we’re here, they might suspect so, but they stick to the current. They go on that way, they go on living.”

  Luca told me that last summer, but because I hadn’t thought about it since, it kind of feels like he was telling me now, on this absurd morning when we’re in the sea, all of us facing the sun coming up, and a light breeze off the shore drifts around the quiet houses and the shuttered stores and the empty streets and carries the smell of fresh-baked croissants from the bakeries along the coast, so powerful I can taste them. And inhaling is a little like eating.

  I think of those fish in the mouth of the river and us just behind them while Ferro finishes telling his story about the stingray, which I don’t understand because I wasn’t listening, then Sandro says he has to go in because he can’t feel his leg anymore, but he asks me again if, once he’s recovered, he can come back.

  I take a breath, look at Mom for a minute, and say no, it’s not up to me, she’s the one who must decide. Then Mom looks back at me and we both raise our arms to the sky and say, “Oh, who knows, we’ll see!” And we laugh, we laugh a lot. But out of the water it’s cold and our arms freeze, so we plunge back into the sea, into its warm, wonderful embrace.

  Sandro limps back to shore, Ferr
o follows after him, and Zot, though not a very good swimmer, tries to swim behind the man he calls Grandfather and who in the end, if you ask me, really is his grandfather.

  Mom and I hang back to watch the sun coming up and the sky brightening everything and the water sparkling with little reflectors of light.

  “We going in, Luna?”

  “No, please, Mom, it’s too nice.”

  “We can’t spend our whole lives here.”

  “No, but we can stay a little longer.”

  And we do. We tread close together and watch the sun rising in the sky up ahead.

  And whatever is behind us we don’t see, though something is there. The whole gigantic sea and the water that never rests and the waves that have always come and will always come, one after the other. They break on the shore and that seems to be the end of them. Only it’s not. They withdraw so that the next one can rise and the next and the next, with a shove from who knows where, but it’s there and it sends us up and down, up and down, sending us up and down, up and down, in this warm embrace that we don’t need to face to feel, it’s all around us, while we keep looking ahead, at what the current carries us, at the break of day, which looks like an enormous orange gift waiting to be opened.

  A MONTH LATER

  RHINOCEROS

  Ivan regards the rain and for a moment the rain regards him, then it spatters against the windshield and dies. But he doesn’t give a damn. He tightens his grip on the throttle as if he wanted to break the handlebar, and maybe he really does want to break it, because that thing is the bane of his existence. Not the handlebar itself, mind you, but the entire Ape 50 pulsing under him on his way home from another hellish morning at school.

  Hellish as his summer, which the other kids spent sleeping in and going to the public pool, or hanging around acting like idiots, or enjoying themselves anyways, the way you should during the summer you’re sixteen years old. Ivan, on the other hand, would wake up at 6:30 and by 7 he was already in the square outside Alga Bibite loading cases of water and Coke onto the bed of an Ape and delivering drinks till evening to the families of Reggio Emilia, drenched in sweat and with one objective in mind: to purchase a scooter.

  Practically everybody else had one, and they were acting all smooth and taking girls for rides. Ivan’s father, however, told him times were tough and in this recession they couldn’t afford anything, and so he understood that he had to take matters into his own hands. The whole break he worked his ass off and finally in September when he took his money to the dealership he found himself standing before her instead: a used Ape that looked brand new. He’d had fun cruising around in the Ape this summer, and come winter he would be warm inside the cab rather than sucking fog all the way from Villa Cadè to downtown Reggio. And when it rains, well, when it rains there’s no question how much better off you’d be inside an Ape.

  To cut a long story short, Ivan bought it, and for the first time in his life he awaited the start of school as if it were a party, a party to celebrate his new life as a stud on wheels.

  When he arrived at school, he parked near the entrance, opened the door, and climbed out, ready to be met by the stares of the whole school, and in the expectation of general applause Ivan headed for the courtyard, and toward his doom.

  Yes, doom, because, just as Ivan had predicted, everybody gathered around him and his vehicle, except they began to laugh, to point at his splendid Ape and riddle it with disses. “What the hell is that? A loaner from your grandpa? Did you jack the janitor’s car?” They were shouting and taking photos with their cell phones, and the biggest dicks of all hugged each other, happy to have a target that big and easy to ridicule.

  And that target is him, Ivan, increasingly preyed upon in the morning, increasingly depressed and humiliated. His last hope had been for it to rain someday; he wanted to see what the others would do then, shivery and soaking wet, while inside his Ape he’d be dry and happy and finally cool, at least a little.

  Which explains why this morning, when he saw all that water pouring down from the sky, Ivan’s was the one happy face at the yellow windows of Villa Cadè. He ran out of the house, jumped into the Ape, and got to school, where he’d imagined everyone else would be devastated and was confident that at the end of the day the girls would come say, “We’re sorry, Ivan, we were wrong to make fun of you, would you please take us home?” And he would have chosen the prettiest, or maybe not the prettiest, maybe it was better to choose the one with the biggest tits so that he could watch them jiggle on the way back.

  Except when classes let out, no one, pretty or ugly, came. They simply climbed on the bus. Or the more spoiled kids got into their parents’ cars. So Ivan was stuck offering a ride to his one friend, Maicol, who told him, “Thanks, Ivan, but in the Ape? Here in front of everybody? They already shit on me enough as it is . . . ”

  Ivan nodded, locked himself inside the solitude of his Ape, and stared past the foggy windows at his defeat. Then he switched on the engine and returned to Villa Cadè, where he’s now docking this dilapidated ship in front of the house without locking it—I mean really, who would want to steal an Ape?

  He enters and Dad tells him Mom is running late and if it’s all right with him he’d prefer to wait, that way they only have to throw the pasta in once. Ivan says he’s not hungry, tosses his bag on the couch, and goes to his room, but Dad hands him this weird package.

  Flat, rectangular, all white. It’s a paper envelope with a stamp on top and his name, Ivan Cilloni, written in ink above the address.

  “What’s this?”

  “A letter.”

  “For me? How come?” He had never received a handwritten letter before.

  “How should I know if you don’t? It’s from Forte dei Marmi.”

  Ivan nods even though he doesn’t know anybody from Forte dei Marmi. Forte dei Marmi is where soccer players take those sluts they date on vacation; that’s the extent of his knowledge.

  He enters his room and closes the door behind him, hoping to shut out the rain, the Ape, the laughter of those bastards at school, thoughts of how dreary a summer he’d had while soccer players weren’t doing dick and taking beautiful women to Forte dei Marmi and how they had enough money to buy a million Apes, and yet they wouldn’t deign to buy them, since soccer players may not be smart but neither are they idiots.

  He, on the other hand, is. He’s a bona fide dumbass, and he dives on the bed like something to be disposed of. He tears open the envelope, looks inside, and finds four square postcards from Forte dei Marmi, one of which pictures a beach from up high with the sand and several colored circles for umbrellas, while in the others there are people crossing a lit-up bridge at sundown, and seagulls, and the surrounding sea.

  He turns the postcards over. On the other side are several different messages in cramped, slightly crooked handwriting. And with the rain outside unrelenting, Ivan begins to read in bed.

  Forte dei Marmi, October 22

  SANDRO: Hey Ivan, You don’t know me, but I found your note attached to a balloon that you released when you were in elementary school. Remember? I found it in the pine grove in Versilia, my hometown, and I know that nine years have gone by, and I could tell you that I’ve just discovered it again or that I’ve faced many hardships or lost it and didn’t find it again until yesterday. But that wouldn’t be the truth, so I won’t. I’m writing you now because up until today I never decided to pick up a postcard and write you. See, I’m telling you how things really stand. If it’s not pretty, I’m sorry, but my storytelling days are over. Maybe the one way to tell pretty stories is to begin living them. In fact, I’m beginning today by writing you. I’m not sure if you’re still at this address, but I hope so. In your message you said that you would send a drawing of a rhinoceros to whomever wrote you back, but nine years have gone by and I understand if you no longer want to. It doesn’t matter. I’m just glad to be finally mailing
you this postcard. Cheers, Sandro

  SERENA: I don’t know why I’m expected to write to you too. Hi, pleasure to meet you, this has nothing to do with me. Sandro is the one who took a lifetime to write you back, and all of a sudden sending you these postcards is so important to him. I explained to him that you’re sixteen years old now and couldn’t care less, that you don’t even remember this balloon business, but he wanted to mail them to you and he’s mailing them to you, and it’s important to him that I write you too, although I don’t know why. I tried saying no, but that’s not easy with this guy. He doesn’t understand the meaning of the word No, and he persists, and in the end sometimes you just have to say, ‘Okay, listen, all right,’ and see what happens. So there you have it. Now I’ve written you too. Bye, Ivan, be good. Actually, be whatever you feel like. It’s better that way. S.

  FERRO: Look kid I don’t know who you are nor do I care and I don’t know anybody in Reggio Emilia although once there was a client from Reggio Emilia who used to come to the beach club. She was a coldhearted skank and in the mornings I’d take her to the cabanas. Don’t worry. That was years ago and she couldn’t have been your mother. Your grandmother at best. But that doesn’t matter. All that matters is that you stay put and don’t come here since I was perfectly fine on my own and now there are four of us, plus this moron Sandro who comes around in the evening to get on my tits. Bye kid, and do me a favor, stay put.

  LUNA AND ZOT: Hi Ivan! Don’t listen to Ferro. If you come see us we’d be super-happy and we’ll find a room for you. We have a tent that we can set up in the yard. It’s pretty and there are trees and Grandfather even took out the mines. We’re waiting for you. If you come we’ll take you to the sea. We found a killer dinghy and we can sail it together. About that rhinoceros you know how to draw so well. Well, if you still have it we would be curious to see it, and we swear we’ll hang it up in our room. Bye. See you soon, Luna and Zot