Me, You

by Erri De Luca

  ALSO BY ERRI DE LUCA

  The Day Before Happiness

  Three Horses

  Other Press edition 2011

  Copyright © 1998 by Erri De Luca

  Translation copyright © 1999 by The Ecco Press

  Originally published in Italian as Tu, Mio by Giangiacomo Feltrinelli Editore Milano

  Prima edizione ne “I Narrattori” February 1998

  Originally published in English as Sea of Memory by The Ecco Press

  Production Editor: Yvonne E. Cárdenas

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without written permission from Other Press LLC, except in the case of brief quotations in reviews for inclusion in a magazine, newspaper, or broadcast. For information write to Other Press LLC, 2 Park Avenue, 24th Floor, New York, NY 10016. Or visit our Web site: www.otherpress.com

  The Library of Congress has cataloged the printed edition as follows: De Luca, Erri, 1950–

  [Tu, mio. English]

  Me, you = Tu, mio / by Erri De Luca; translated by Beth Archer Brombert.

  p. cm.

  Originally published in Italian as Tu, mio; published in English in 1999 under the title: Sea of memory.

  eISBN: 978-1-59051-480-1

  1. Teenage boys—Fiction. 2. Jewish girls—Fiction. 3. Islands—Italy—Fiction. 4. World War, 1939–1945—Italy—Fiction. I. Brombert, Beth Archer. II. Title.

  PQ4864.E5498T813 2011

  853’.914—dc22

  2011013295

  PUBLISHER’S NOTE:

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  v3.1

  Contents

  Cover

  Other Books by This Author

  Title Page

  Copyright

  First Page

  About the Author

  A FISH IS a catch once it’s in the boat. It’s a mistake to shout that you’ve hooked it when it has only snapped at the bait and you feel its weight bouncing in the hand that holds the line. A fish is a catch only when it’s on board. You have to pull it up swiftly from the depths with a gentle, even movement, and without jerking. Otherwise you’ll lose it. You mustn’t get excited when you feel it thrashing below and it seems heaven only knows how big judging by the force it exerts to extricate the hook and bait from its body.

  Nicola taught me how to fish. The boat wasn’t his, it was Uncle’s, my uncle. Nicola used it year-round, but when the weather was mild he was my uncle’s sailor on Sundays and during summer holidays. At night he went out with a lantern and fished for cuttlefish, a kind of squid, to make bait for the tip of the hook.

  He got the boat ready and we would leave early in the morning. The island was silent. Going down to the beach barefoot, a boy could feel that he was slippery smooth because of the rock under his feet, that he smelled good because of the fragrance of baking bread that wafted by his nose from the ovens, that he was grown up because he was going out to sea to acquire a skill. The other boys went to the beach later on to meet girls and swim. The rich ones rode around in circles in their motorboats with gleaming wood and multi-horsepowered motors.

  Uncle’s boat had a lazy diesel that crackled on the calm of dawn and made the air vibrate all around, making my nose itch for the duration of the trip. We would sit on the rail sticking out a bit over the edge, even when the waves came up and pounded the prow. Nicola stood in the stern and maneuvered the handle of the rudder with his feet. It was his trade, he was steady, no wave knocked him off balance. Anyone who could stand upright in a small boat that ran against the waves was steady. I was too, and sometimes on the return trip they let me take the rudder while Uncle slept and Nicola straightened up the boat or cleaned the fish.

  It wasn’t right for a kid to hold the rudder. You had to go for the other side of the wave and let it pass under the keel without allowing it to strike the boat, because the boat feels the slaps and the wood wears down. But when the sea was calm and there were no boats in sight, I would ask to take the rudder and Nicola could quickly finish what he had left to do.

  He taught me the sea thanks to the boat and to the permission of Uncle, who invited me to come along because I kept quiet, I didn’t get the line entangled, I didn’t budge when the fish bit, didn’t complain about the heat, didn’t dive off the boat, except for a quick dip to cool off. Never asked to take fish home; it was his fish, and after him, Nicola’s. Never asked him to take me with him, but the evening before, it was he who would say, “Come.”

  Nicola taught me the sea without saying, do it this way. That was the way he did it, and that way was right, not only skillful, but great to watch, never rushed. Nicola’s way had the movement of the waves, his gestures had a purpose that I was learning to understand. He would cut the cuttlefish into finger-length pieces, a slice and a stroke with the flat of the blade to separate them, going at an even rhythm of his own, wholly absorbed in his work. The cut pieces dried in the sun during the ride out to open water. He would pierce the bait in the middle, covering the hook all the way up to where the line was attached. And after the catch, he would retrieve the bait from the mouth of the fish, from its throat, and use it over again. Almost without his watching, his hands worked by themselves. He could look elsewhere, far off or nowhere, letting his hands do the work all by themselves. That was the working part, the front of his body, while the rest of it was just an armature of patience.

  In the boat only the men talked. I listened to their voices, not to their conversation, and to the greetings exchanged with other fishermen: “a’ re nuost,” you’re one of us, a cry I have only heard at sea.

  Some afternoons I went to the fishermen’s beach and if I found Nicola alone cleaning fish I would go up to him. Amid the debris of the catch, a hen would scratch around in search of an anchovy head to swallow along with the sand. I was a city boy, but in the summer I turned into a savage. Barefoot, the soles of my feet as leathery as the carobs we ate from the tree, bathing in seawater, salty as a herring, dressed in blue jeans, smelling of fish, a few fish scales in my hair, walking with the short strides of a sailor’s gait. In one week I lost my city look. I peeled it off along with the dead skin of my nose and back, where the sun penetrated all the way to the flesh.

  The sun is a smoother of surfaces, a kind of sandpaper that during the summer smooths down the earth, evens it out, polishes it, leaving it thin and dry, a film of dust. With the body it does the same thing. Mine, exposed until sundown, split open like a ripe fig, but only in a few places, on my shoulders and nose. I never used sun oil, already available by the mid-fifties. That kind of greasing was for foreigners, shiny skin like a sardine dipped in beaten egg before being fried.

  Piscitello addevantasse

  int’o sciore m’avutasse

  m’afferasse sta manella

  me menasse int’a tiella

  ’onn Amalia ‘a Speranzella.*

  With these lines by Salvatore Di Giacomo, Uncle would make fun of people who oiled themselves. His sons and I, the males of the family, from the time we were little, were used to getting burned at the beginning of the season, and then it stopped. I endured the pain as a perfectly legitimate tax on my delicate city dweller’s skin. The new skin cost plenty, on my feet as well before I could walk barefoot on the scorching noonday pebbles.

  Nicola had been in the war, an infantryman in Yugoslavia. That had been his only trip, from the island to Sarajevo. He met a family out there. In the evening when he had a pass, he went to vis
it them, bringing them a little pasta, coffee, bread. They in exchange offered him slivovitz, an infernal alcohol that he barely tasted. They communicated in sign language. The Italian Black Shirts had shot one of the sons of that family. It was on that occasion that they got to know each other, when the family came to collect the body. Nicola had helped them and they invited him to their home. He saw a Muslim cemetery: “Like one of ours, but on the stone instead of a cross there was a crescent.” He felt at home hearing the sounds of mourning, the same high notes as the wail of the women on his island when the tide brought in a drowning victim. That’s how those women sounded with the boy, shot because he was a partizan.

  He used to tell me these things with the warning that I was not to talk about them with anyone else, that he knew nothing about politics, that these were only stories about when he was young and the war was going on. There was war just as there was the southwester, drought, a season when tuna didn’t run. There was: a single verb covered all the good and evil that befell human beings. The war lived on in a few odd details that he would relate over and over again: an empty window seen from the street, and behind the window no house, not even a roof, and you could see the sky. Windows are made to see the sky, but not like that. And there was a market square where grass grew because there was nothing to sell and no one ever went there, not even to exchange a few words. Grass can be a sad thing when it grows between the cobblestones of a market.

  He told me a few things because I kept insisting and because that summer he began to trust the boy who copied his gestures, who came to listen to his stories without opening his mouth, without asking this or that. I never repeated his stories, nor did I ever say where I spent some of my afternoons while the other city boys vacationing on the island got together with their first girlfriends. My family didn’t ask me to account for my whereabouts, since it was customary for the discipline of the city to be relaxed on the island, except for the observance of mealtimes.

  The heat unbound the body. Freedom was a change of skin accompanied by the song of cicadas. The beach was the boundary where the life of men began, a flat surface for those who saw it from the shore, but which was really full of paths, currents, crossroads, depths made shallower by shoals. The boats were keels of perils and miracles; some of them had an olive branch, blessed at Eastertime, tied to a pole in the bow for luck.

  I had no personal contact with deep water, nor with those who go deep down with guns. Nicola didn’t know how to swim and taught me respect for the depths of the sea. You get from the sea what it gives, not what you want. Our nets, lines, traps, are a request. The reply does not depend on us, on fishermen. Whoever goes below to take the reply with his own two hands lacks respect for the sea. We have a right only to the surface; what lies below is the sea’s, is its life. We knock at the entrance, at the surface of the water; we must not enter as though we were masters of the house.

  No fishermen armed with guns or oxygen were allowed on Uncle’s boat. Uncle saw eye to eye with Nicola. What he liked was the struggle with a grouper that burrows into its hole with a hook in its body, and you need all the power of the boat and the oars to force it out, easing it along the lay of the hole, exhausting its strength to resist. And many a time the grouper would win. By evening hands were raw from the ropes of the suspended fishing tackle that we call coffa, and sea salt was encrusted in the cuts and scrapes. These stigmata were renewed at the beginning of each season. Nicola taught me how to harden my palms with a piece of rope.

  As a child I heard about the war. At home there were stories told at the table about planes swollen with bombs, sirens that gave little margin of warning, silent races to a shelter, loud growls in the sky followed by the louder growls of explosions on the ground. And once in July with no warning at all bombs fell at random from high up, tearing clumps of the living out of the world in broad daylight. Mama knew these stories: Papa was a soldier. She used to describe their races to the shelters. They fled from the house, a hundred times in their young life, burrowing into the Piedigrotta tunnel in a recurring contest with the other families. Whoever got there first had the best place. Each of us was expected to grab whatever we could and carry it to safety. Mama carried me, Grandpa snatched a suitcase kept near the door in which a set of china tried to stay intact. The women put their valuable things into a handbag that never left their arm in the shelter. Mama remembered a very poor family. The wife always kept an old handbag clutched to her chest. Her children were amazed that she had anything worth saving. One day as she was running to the shelter she fell and her treasure tumbled out: buttons. So as not to lose face, she too had provided herself with an inseparable handbag, stuffing it with buttons to make it look full. Even as bombs fell, a poor woman did not want to look inferior to the others. After that no one ever saw her again.

  And after the hundred batterings, the city shook the Germans off its back like a kicking mule, with the kind of kicks that restore dignity to a people. When the Americans did not enter the city, a rebellion suddenly erupted against the Germans and the entire population formed a noose around them, turning their retreat into a rout. Finally the Americans arrived and every family adopted one. In our house there was Jim, a giant of a black man, always cheerful and hardworking. And it was Jim who saved us. After the hundred Allied bombings, a German one arrived. At the wail of the sirens no one wanted to move, it had to be a mistake, the war was over. Jim was in the house and would hear no nonsense. “No, no!” he shouted in his booming voice, forcing everyone out of the house and plucking Mama’s grandmother out of her wheelchair, while she screamed for help as she was being carried off by the colossus. And so it was that a German bomb fell smack on the building and on the family’s few possessions, evening the score with my father’s previously razed house. Mama, who always looked for the funny side when telling these stories, did not forget to add that by the time they reached the shelter, doubled up with laughter over Grandma Emilia’s shrieks in Jim’s arms, the German bombs were already exploding. She was still laughing about those bombs that had ruined her.

  Stories about survival in the city, about interrupted nights, babies who didn’t cry, soldiers who escaped unhurt, German orders plastered everywhere—these ancient tales were part of childhood. But as I grew, the time span got shorter. Those events were no longer remote but recent. That past had barely taken place; the holes in the streets were still gaping. And when my folks stopped talking about it I began to ask, which they did not like. My questions must have had an insistence that I can’t remember, since they sent me to the library in their exasperation: that’s where history is, it’s all written down there, read about it all you like but leave us alone, we don’t want to revive those painful memories. Things were getting better, they talked about a new house, our own, not a rental anymore.

  The war no longer entered into their stories around the table, where children became adults as a result of listening. Instead, they talked about politics, about mayors as piratic as Captain Hook. These were just pathetic news items, lacking the dimensions of adventure or satire.

  That was how I learned their history, a very different subject from the one taught in school out of textbooks, which explained the past and made it logical—a free fall all the way down to us. Theirs was a history filled with infamous events, raids rather than battles, mass executions, vileness, massacres of defenseless people. It was a history that went nowhere, prepared no sequel, but aspired to be the last, the end of history. Jews—I learned the word from books about the war. Before, they were an ancient people like the Phoenicians, the Egyptians. Jews, but why children, women, old people, hunted in the most wretched places throughout Europe? Strange to learn geography by looking for the cities and regions of the dead: Volhynia, Bukovina, Podolia, Lithuania, a cemetery of flatlands had opened up in the middle of Europe and a boy from Naples looked for it amid the nations awarded to the Soviet Union.

  My family stopped asking me what I was reading so as not to have to collide with my determi
nation to know. The questions had multiplied and insidiously held them accountable. Had they taken part in the resistance, had they helped any of the persecuted? No, they hadn’t. My mother, still a girl then, had to save her family, and Papa, impoverished by the bombs, flung himself into surviving. He was nonetheless burdened by regret, not to have committed a single act of sabotage, not to have saved anyone outside of himself and his family. He was also burdened by a son who wanted answers. He no longer wanted to discuss the subject with me, so as not to jeopardize his rightful authority. He was sorry to reject my questions but they were becoming more pressing and he had to ward off any suspicion of impertinence: “How dare you speak to your father like that!” I don’t remember what “like that” was, but it must have been disrespectful.

  Nicola was the only one who talked to me about the war. I would ask, and before answering me he would react to my insistence, “Si, capòtico.” It’s true, I was stubborn, but only about that. He would reknot the nylon line around a hook, coiling the long length of tackle without looking at me. While he spoke, his breathing came in time to the movement of his hands. He would hold on to part of the line while pulling open a knot with his teeth and the topic might be a snowy night guarding the ammunition dump, or else he might talk about a German reprisal against unarmed people while he swiftly stitched a torn net, his tone remaining flat as he related the story. History had become nothing but an accompaniment to work. Behind us was the island, in front were the afternoon ripples as the maestrale, the north wind, subsided. That was the present, most powerful of all, master of time, and Nicola’s voice yielded to the place and to the task at hand.

  That Sarajevo family saved him after the armistice of the eighth of September* when the Germans imprisoned Italian soldiers in order to send them to work camps in Germany. The family took Nicola into their house and hid him, and when Tito took over they helped him return home.