Designs of the Heart

by Renee Ryder

  “It must be a very long rope!”

  “Not really. You know, the closer you are to the coast, the shallower it is. Not just near the beach, but the cliffs as well.”

  “Oh, I never thought.”

  “So, as soon as the anchor touches the bottom, I cut the rope and fix it to a buoy, the one where we left the boat.”

  “Why didn’t you set it closer to the cliffs?”

  “Because the boat has to be out a certain distance, otherwise the waves could smash it into the rocks.”

  “Oh, I see.”

  “Plus, I didn’t wanna give directions to the other fishermen. I’m sure they wonder what that buoy’s doing there when they pass by. If someone decides to check it out, he’d have to be a genius to understand that the buoy marks a tunnel behind the seaweed!”

  She nodded.

  The silence in that grotto was different. On the Vespa, in the hotel, and on the boat it was awkward; here it assumed instead a solemnity, as if they sat in contemplation in a chapel. The incipient sunset turned the opening in the rock into a rose window reinforcing the impression.

  “You know, Hannah. This is a special place. Have you ever thought much about the word ‘special?’ ”

  “Um … No, I didn’t.”

  “In your opinion, what makes something special?”

  “Well, something is special when it gives you a feeling that it’s not like anything else, I suppose.”

  “Yes, but …”

  “This place is special to you because you discovered it of yourself, and there aren’t many places you have discovered.”

  “I’m a fisherman, certainly not a philosopher. But if you start thinking about how many things we have behind a word … For example, my dad explained perfectly to me what ‘special’ means. He didn’t use words, ’cause basically we never talked about it. He just showed me.”

  “Sorry, Nico. I’m losing the thread of the speech.”

  “I told you about my mother, who I lost when I was a few months old …”

  “I remember, of course.”

  “After her, my dad didn’t date other women. I mean, I guess he musta had some flings, it’s not like we discuss his sex life. I’m talking about a woman to live with and let her raise his only kid.”

  “Has he ever thought of finding someone like that?” she asked, interested in both the topic and his pensive expression after the last addition.

  “I remember that my grandparents, my aunt, and the whole family, told him to remarry ‘to give his son a mother and some siblings.’ He said no. I didn’t understand what they meant ’cause I was little. When I grew up, the situation got more clear. So I also asked him why he didn’t try to find me a new mom. His answer changed my life.”

  She waited so as not to pressure him, but a bomb of curiosity detonated inside her.

  “What I’m about to say will probably make you laugh. But if you think about it, you won’t find a clear answer.”

  “What did he say?”

  “He said, ‘If I get married again, then, when I go to Heaven, who’s my wife? Who will I live with in eternity?’ ”

  It was a bizarre question, but she would never laugh about it.

  “So he wanted to be with your mother, no matter what.”

  He continued to scrutinize the cold, clear water. Maybe he was trying to see his mom in the reflection of that trembling mirror.

  “I think your dad is a romantic at heart. He believes in true love and will always love her.”

  “But what do you think? When a man who’s lost his wife remarries and then goes to Heaven, who’s his real wife?”

  “I think it’s a false problem. When you get married, the priest says ‘Until Death will depart you,’ so I—”

  “Hahaha!”

  She was shocked by his reaction on such a somber subject.

  “Sorry, Hannah. It’s just that our priests say ‘Till death do you part.’ ”

  Now that she focused on the meaning of ‘to depart,’ she understood his laughter.

  “However, this settles things with the Church,” he resumed, becoming serious again. “The problem my dad talks about still remains, ’cause even if he’s got the Church’s approval, in Heaven he’d have the two women he married, anyway. And what’s he supposed to do? Should he live with both of them together?”

  “They say that life in Heaven isn’t the same as on Earth. We all would be angels or something like that.”

  “But this doesn’t fix anything. If we’re all angels, will we remember our life here or not? ’Cause if we don’t, then what’s the point of our existence? And if we do, there’ll be the two wives.”

  “Maybe we’d be souls living all together, I don’t know. I can’t pretend to know the designs of God.”

  “See? People don’t know how to solve this. Except, my dad did.”

  “By not re-getting married?”

  “By making my mother special.”

  She was silent to deliberate over his answer.

  “I see,” she resumed at last, recognizing now what he had meant by asking her about the word ‘special.’ “He made her unique when he chose her as his only bride. And therefore, special.”

  “He says Death took her away from him, but if he leaves that place empty, without filling it, it’s like she’s still there in a way … It’s hard to put it into words, and I’m not good at talking. Plus, you’re not Italian, so if you don’t understand it’s my fault.”

  “Oh, no. I did.” She felt moved by him sharing such thoroughly personal thoughts and wanted him to know she understood. “Life goes on and when you lose the partner, it’s normal that you don’t want to be alone. But your dad wants to be alone and keep next to him that void as a constant reminder of his wife,” she said, having experienced the powerfulness of these voids—although in a negative way, thanks to her mother.

  “Exactly. That way he feels her presence every day in his loneliness.”

  “It’s as if you three are always together. Keeping her place for her while she is gone. And when you go to Heaven, she’ll re-come to her place.”

  “I think he believes that, but I don’t know. He’s not the kind of man who likes to talk about this kind ’a thing. Me, I like to, but I don’t have anyone to talk about it with. My friends are interested in other things. They’re good guys, but if they’re not talking about women, it’s their jobs. If it’s not about food, it’s sports. Stuff like that.”

  Her advice to him would be to find himself a nice, sensitive girl, but she kept quiet because the answer would have involved her …

  “So I come here and think. That’s how I got my perspective on life. A sad perspective.”

  This clarification perplexed her. She looked at him, and saw that a shadow had crossed over his features. The angle of sunlight had shifted more toward her—they had been there for maybe half an hour—but it was his expression that had changed.

  “My dad solved the problem of the ‘two wives’ the way I told you ’cause he’s a believer. He’s got no doubt about the Kingdom of Heaven. He’s not a saint and doesn’t go to church much, but he thinks Paradise is the next phase of life. Kind of … Birth, Childhood, Youth, Old Age, Death, Paradise. He sees it that way. But I don’t.”

  “And how do you see it?”

  “Simpler. Everything starts with birth and ends with death. There’s nothing more. There are only the hopes that we create in our head, but that’s fantasy.”

  “It’s kind of gloomy to see life this way.”

  “More than gloomy, it depresses you. But I’d be more depressed if I was fooling myself tryin’ ’a convince myself that what I hope for is reality.”

  The quiet of that grotto was cathartic, almost surreal when they stopped talking. She loved that atmosphere, but she wanted to penetrate his philosophy.

  “How did you end up to think like that?”

  “Until a few years ago, I occasionally fished
with a rod as well. Once I happened to get a dreamfish. It was small. I could hold it in one hand. When I took the hook out of its mouth, I don’t know why but I started staring at it. I looked into its eyes. It was alive. It was thinking. Was suffering. It was dying. I wondered what it was thinking about in that moment. In its place, I would of hoped someone would come to rescue me. In reality, the dreamfish was in my power. This means that if its god wanted to save it, they had to intervene on me, by moving me to pity or making me slip so that it’d run away from my hand. That one, though, was a simple fish, like thousands that end up in our nets every day. Think about how many fish exist in the oceans! Fish understand their world, not ours. Perhaps Man is the Devil to them. But we know we’re not the Devil. We’re only the inhabitants of the land, just as they’re the inhabitants of the sea. And like them, we only understand our own world. What we don’t understand, we call Good or Evil, depending on what it does to us.”

  “I see your point, but … I don’t know. They’re just fish.”

  “You’re saying so maybe ’cause you’ve never had one in your hands when it’s still alive. But I assure you that if you observe it, you’ll see that it’s a living being like you. Only that it doesn’t speak and lives in the sea. And outside the water it can’t breathe and suffers just like you do when you go underwater and run out of air. It’s the same suffering.”

  The comparison was grotesque, but it impressed her because she’d just experienced the beginning of asphyxiation while entering his secret place. Fortunately, no one had prevented her from going to the surface and breathing …

  “But do you really think that fish have their own god?”

  “How can I know? But if they do, I’m sure that they wonder if we humans, lords of the world, have a god, too.”

  “Probably they would.”

  “So we believe the world was made for us, but really we’re as insignificant to the world as the fish are to us.”

  “I don’t think I like the way you see things.”

  “Me neither. For example, when a storm comes and surprises me in the middle of the sea on that small boat, with lightning that streaks the sky and waves that push you all over, the thought that someone up there would protect me gave me so much comfort. It helped me to face the danger. But now … Do you understand what I mean?”

  “Yes. Everyone hopes that there’s a power above us in those kinds of situations,” she added, to show him that she grasped his complex reasoning.

  “But just ’cause we all hope it doesn’t mean it exists. Fish probably hope for some help, too, when they’re caught … So I told myself, ‘You’re alone, Nico. If nothing protects the fish, why would something protect people? If you can’t make it, that’s your own shit.”

  “What’s ‘your own shit?’ ”

  “It means it’s your problem.”

  “Oh, you shouldn’t think this way.”

  “But if I try to think differently, it feels like I’m fooling myself.”

  She remained silent, continuing to fiddle with the water. She raised her feet and watched them drip, while the sun made the waves she had caused with her movement shine.

  “Seeing life like this, you feel like a prisoner of yourself … Let’s say that you are in this grotto and there’s no underwater passage. From that opening, you can see the sky and hear the outside noises, so you understand that you have a whole world out there. It’s then you look around and realize you can’t reach it to get away. So you have nothing left but to live your time hoping that sooner or later, in one way or another, someone or something will come to free you. ’Cause it seems impossible that you can’t get out of here! You wonder, ‘If I can’t, why was I ever born? To spend all my time in here fantasizing about the sky I see through that hole?’ ”

  There was anger in his voice. In that pause she saw him sigh, perhaps to calm down.

  “Anna, I was positive that yes, I couldn’t see anything around me that gave me a shred of reason to believe in help from above. I was born where I was born and that’s my place. It’s my shit if I feel like a sculptor. If you’re born as a snake, you have to crawl. You see the birds fly and you’d like to fly, too. But scales is all you got. Then you understand that you’re doomed to stay in here and that, if you wanna enjoy life a bit, you have to focus on the pleasures of crawling instead of dreaming about flying. ’Cause that’s all life is. Once you’re dead, your soul rots with your body under the ground. It’s not a spirit that goes somewhere else,” he said, with a disarming sadness. “But how can you enjoy life when you find out that you’re a bird in a snake’s body and you know that nothing is gonna change that reality? When you feel that you should be flying, but you’re only allowed to crawl, and that no fairy will ever come to change you with her wand?”

  She thought about her career and felt like a bird; but if she thought of Lifeline she totally understood what he meant.

  “I enjoy the pleasures of life, don’t get me wrong. But if life is nothing more than that delicious bread that we got at the festival, buying beautiful things that make life more comfortable, making love … Until Monday that’s how I saw life. A prison that I couldn’t leave. And once I served my sentence, the great void waited for me.”

  “What happened Monday?”

  “I saw you. That morning, at the precise moment you entered my sight, I felt that something above us exists. I felt it so strong, I can’t explain it! … Look, I can’t put it in words, but the feeling in my heart was so powerful! I hadn’t even picked up the chisel for months until … It’s as if wings appeared with the scales all of a sudden. Now I know I’ll fly out through that opening. I don’t know how, I don’t know when, I don’t know who’ll help me, but I’m gonna get to that world out there! It’s gonna happen. I feel it in my heart that the world isn’t made only for the senses. There’s something for the soul, too. Even though I’ve got no fuckin’ idea what I’m talking about, hahaha! That’s another reason why I wanted to keep seeing you. Somehow I thought that by being with you, talking with you, I could understand this light that I now feel inside. It’s like it comes from the angels. A light that you, Hannah, brought to me!”

  She was speechless. He’d spoken so passionately, eyes sparkling, voice confident, his face … joy shone on his face!

  “Then, well, I hoped that something would of happened between us ’cause I like you so much. So when you hugged me in that hotel …”

  Having heard the secrets he kept in his heart, she ultimately understood what was behind the attempted kiss. It transcended the usual process of falling in love because it was based on a supernatural premise. And inside this was a contradiction that shook her even more: he loved her, she’d rejected him, but instead of despairing … he rejoiced? It couldn’t just be a pretense to soothe his disappointed pride. It was too authentic.

  “But that’s okay,” he continued. “Now I’m just happy that you came into my life to heal my soul. You brought light where I had only darkness. It’s not like you helped me get hope back. You gave me certainty, like my dad has … I wanted to bring you here because in a way your voice and scent, your presence, will kind of remain. This place will remember you. So when I’m alone in our genie’s bottle and think of you, your face will seem more real and I’ll be able to feel you here with me.”

  23. In the Boat

  On the way back to the beach, Nico told her his version of when they first met, but otherwise remained quiet. Maybe because he had already said everything he needed to say to her. The silence pressed on her, his voice and conversation ringing in her ears. To make it stop, she chattered about nothing in particular, asking about how he spent his days, his friends, common words in Italian that he used but she didn’t know, and her most frequent mistakes in Italian. She even told him about how she might draw his secret place to commit it to memory. All to stop the metamorphosis that was inexorably changing a rejected lover’s lament into a beguiling whisper.

  Twilight fell as they
reached the mirror of water before the beach. Some clouds stretched out, a stubborn stronghold of the now impotent remains of the storm from the morning, stealing the oranges from the sun as it set and standing out in the wash of deep blues.

  When they were approaching the beach despondency squeezed her heart, like when a wonderful movie is drawing to a close.

  The scent of the sea, the colors in the sky, and the overarching peace gave her a striking glimpse of deep joy. At the same time, she languished in sadness because she couldn’t reach that joy alone. In this conflict of feelings, in the grip of a painful happiness and a sublime grief, she felt as alive as ever. The unforeseen desire for this moment to last longer made her quiver, but the waves conspired against her, pushing the boat toward its gloomy destination.

  Who knew if he, too, felt this way. Maybe not, because he appeared tranquil as he rowed slowly to the shore. But perhaps that tranquility was an act.

  The beach now seemed bleak. The shadows of the buildings almost reached the shoreline. A lonely dog wandered among the boats looking for who knew what. The closed umbrellas stood at attention like soldiers at the moment of surrender. A few workers raked the sand, whose gray tint stood out now that people and towels didn’t cover it … The whole place held the atmosphere of the end of a concert, when house lights come on for people to leave and the spell is broken. But she knew she was watching an ordinary scene that happened every day. The desolation she felt was coming from inside.

  She stopped thinking when he let go of the oars and headed for the bow by stepping onto the board where she sat. Then he jumped down into the shallow water and towed the boat until the hull scraped to a stop on the sand. She stood up, made sure everything was back in her purse and slid it on crosswise. Finally she retrieved her sandals from the prow and climbed down, too.

  “And now? How do we pull it to the sand?” she asked, remembering that two days ago, he and his father had a couple of other fishermen and still asked for Roger’s help.