Me, You

by Erri De Luca

  I was the only person interested in those stories. After the war, the survivors hardened their silence, a callus on the dead skin of wartime. They wanted to live in a new world. Now, Germans were just people who came to the island for vacations. Nicola had nothing to do with them. Hotels and pensioni were far away from the fishermen’s beach, which gave off an unending stench of fish guts rotting in the sun. Nicola didn’t have to meet Germans, and he didn’t want to. He had known them; he didn’t want to hear that language with its guttural consonants.

  The island was full of Germans, old, middle-aged—people who had been young during the war and now in their prosperity hid their former arrogance behind a fake joviality and the pretense of being merely tourists, never anything else. In organized tour groups and small bands they roamed the island from June to October, apopleptic from the sun, constipated from the lemonades, shiny from their sun oils like the baba au rhum at the Bar Calise.

  They were the same ones. Nicola watched them from afar and when one of them asked for directions he replied with the only words he had learned: ich verstehe nicht, I don’t understand. He had seen them in Yugoslavia and no longer wanted to understand them. The islanders, on the other hand, spoke whatever little German was necessary for business.

  Nicola stood with his back to the island and saw only those few who came across the short stretch of beach that lay between his feet and the sea.

  I didn’t like the Germans either. They were the same ones I had found in the books about that infamous period, the ones who had let themselves be intoxicated and ruined by Hitler, and no defeat had been able to strip them of their arrogant madness. The defeated ones were the others, the ones who served them during their vacations on a southern island.

  Where my aversion grew abstractly out of books, Nicola’s was made of flesh. Incapable of hostility, he reacted with outbursts of timidity. One day he told me that the year before, he had recognized a German soldier, one who had been in Sarajevo. They looked at each other, neither one spoke. But Nicola felt the teeth of war tear at his gut. He turned red with shame. He had been in church at the time, at Mass. He left without even crossing himself: “Me so’ mmiso scuorno pe’Ddio,” he was ashamed for God. “Adda tene’ pacienza pure int’a casa soia,” one had to have patience even in one’s own house. The word pacienza is particularly nice in Neapolitan because it contains the word pace, peace, within patience. I asked him if he had ever killed anyone. No reply. He was teaching me not to expect a reply to all my questions.

  When Nicola ran into them on the island, he crossed to the other side of the street. I knew stories about the Warsaw ghetto where the Germans prohibited the Jews from looking them in the eye. That summer I started to stare at them, not as a challenge but in an effort to understand. It was rare for any of them to notice.

  It was the summer of my sixteenth year, my emotions were on edge. Unlike my coevals, I was not attracted to girls of my own age. I liked older ones, an impossible desire. That summer, however, I did get my wish. I was the only one of my contemporaries to spend time with them.

  That was thanks to Daniele, my uncle’s son, who was four years older than I. He was the head of a group of young men of good family who had scooters, and a few of them had boats. Though without such means himself, Daniele was nonetheless the born leader of any group. He was a guest in the house my parents rented, and slept in the same room with me. That summer he became aware of me. I can’t account for his interest, but that’s how it was. He taught me chords on the guitar, he took me to the place on the beach where his friends got together and let me stay with them. My skinny looks, intensified by my sudden growth, were not much to talk about—fuzz on my cheeks more yellow than blond, narrow eyes, a tight jaw that never relaxed. Perhaps he saw me as more mature or sensed that in his cousin an avalanche was gathering.

  I did not go on their excursions to distant places on the island and rarely joined their evening get-togethers or the dances they held spontaneously wherever they went. But I did join them at the beach when I came back from fishing. Over the previous few years Daniele had begun staying out late and was little inclined to get up early. He stopped going out with his father and Nicola. I took his place. And so when I came back from fishing, I would go find him and he would ask me to tell him all about our day’s expedition.

  That summer I had a baptism of blood caused by a moray eel. It was pulled up on the same line with a grouper. While Uncle and Nicola were busy with the fish, I tried to detach the hook from the moray’s throat. I squeezed its cheeks with my left hand to keep its mouth open. Just as I was getting the hook out, the moray wriggled. I lost my grip on its jaws and its teeth sank into my hand at the joint of the index finger. A moray doesn’t just bite; where it grabs hold it doesn’t let go. Once it sets its jaw, it doesn’t open it again. I managed not to scream, but tears welled in my eyes from the effort. When he finished with the grouper and Uncle resumed pulling up the line, Nicola noticed me and with one stroke of his knife beheaded the moray. Then he broke the jawbone, and only then took the teeth out of my hand, one by one. I kept looking at the sea while Nicola performed this ancient little operation, my wounded hand far from my thoughts. Pain was knocking but I wouldn’t open up. I had heard tales about what happened to me. I had previously experienced the venom of a weever in the sole of my foot and that of a scorpion fish in my palm. I was in a fishing boat and that was part of the deal. Uncle gave me a half smile between one armful of line and another, nodding his head. “Mo’ si’ pescatore,” now you’re a fisherman, Nicola said, when he finished rinsing my hand in seawater.

  I didn’t really understand why masculinity meant having to ignore pain. I saw it exercised by men and tried to do the same when it came my turn. I understood that it was not a rejection of the body but the patience to endure it, a load on a beast of burden that is too heavy at times and can even kill, but up to that point you don’t complain. The body was a patient beast that men tamed with pride. The body was ruled by the unyielding codes of southern virility. The spines of the sea urchin that boys learned to pull out by themselves were left in by fishermen to be slowly absorbed beneath the skin. I was learning from them how to detach oneself from pain.

  When I reached the beach I was feverish from the effort of controlling myself. A vein in my forehead was throbbing. Daniele asked me to tell him what had happened and showed off the glory of my wound to everybody. That gesture of his which made me seem important, that kindness, relieved the pain in my eyes. The curiosity of a girl I had never seen before, the contact of her hands with my multi-punctured one, relieved the pain there too. What remained was a swollen vein that pounded in my temple.

  I looked squarely at that new girl and she broke into an open laugh, ringing like coins falling out of a piggy bank when it breaks. Her teeth, one slightly nicked in the middle of her mouth, shimmered white between her full lips, and her hair cascaded over half her face. My heart lurched. Then the demonstration of the wound ended and I heard Daniele speak the name of the new girl. Her name was Caia.

  A strange name, the feminine of Caio,* and even her voice was strange, a bit nasal but clear, with a foreign accent layered on soft Italian—a pleasing lightness in the midst of the heavy cadence of the south. She had just arrived, a guest of one of the girls in the group, with whom she roomed in a Swiss boarding school. She was Rumanian. She had no family. Daniele told me about her then and there but he didn’t know much. She answered the boys’ queries with an absent smile, dismissing them with a shrug of her shoulders that was a fraction of a dive, like a body that pushes off from the rocks and swims way out. It wasn’t necessary to know more about her. For the boys, her orphan’s freedom was enough of an attraction. None of them knew what it was to be alone in the world.

  No one understood what caught her fancy: it wasn’t the luxurious things owned by rich people—not even the extravagance of a motorboat that one of them had at his disposal.

  Because of Daniele I was admitted to the group, but
as an outsider. The girls didn’t come near me, not even for helpful services, those minimal opportunities for chivalry. I liked to be with them nevertheless, but even more when Caia was there.

  “Your name is Katia?” I asked, thinking her name might be Slavic.

  “No, Caia,” she replied brusquely, turning away. I had taken the chance of approaching her and was rejected, things that happened in a small group all enmeshed in miniature hierarchies. I took it badly, not imagining that she could behave like the other girls. And why not? I defensively convinced myself that she was just like the others. A beautiful, well-bred girl allows herself to be approached only by those she likes. It was a logical explanation, but it didn’t satisfy me. Had I been mistaken? What on earth could have made me think her name was Katia? Hadn’t I heard her called Caia more than once? What was I seeking: to divine, to unearth something the others had overlooked? I think so. That was the motive behind my question, her name. I started from there, from the accident that stays with the life of a person more closely than a shadow, because at least in the dark a shadow lets go, but not a name. And it wants to be so much a part of that person that it presumes to explain that person, to announce the person: “I am,” then the name follows, as though one can be a name rather than have a name. I realized later that she hadn’t said, “I am Caia,” but, “My name is Caia.”

  She was not Caia, a name, she was a person who had that name. Maybe she wanted to keep that little bit of identity to herself, or maybe she didn’t like it. There, I was already investigating her, in search of something she held private. That’s how you fall in love, looking for the one thing in the person you love that hasn’t been revealed to anyone else, that is given as a gift only to the one who searches and listens with love. You fall in love when you’re nearby, but not too near. You fall in love from a corner of a room, off to the side, near a table full of people, on a terrace where the others are dancing to the heavy beat of some silly pop song that plasters a face to your heart like a poster. From the first moment, I fell hopelessly in love with Caia, an older girl, with a chipped tooth in a blinding smile, who had touched my hand without revulsion for the wound and who had become close to me because of it. I fell in love out of an impulse that ran counter to the facts: that I was much more mature, that it was my duty to protect her from the perils of the island, to guard her secret which I didn’t yet know but which had to exist and which I would learn, I alone.

  When she impulsively ran from the beach umbrella to the sea without alerting anyone, I didn’t follow her, which would have made me look ridiculous, but I followed her every stroke as intently as a chained watchdog. If there were high waves my breath became audible, a gargle, a snarl, and if I could no longer restrain myself I walked toward the water with feigned nonchalance in order not to lose sight of her behind a wave. If she dived in with the others, I was at ease. It didn’t matter to me if she turned someone’s head in the morning and someone else’s in the evening. My concern was to protect her. Not one of those boys could get near her secret. Perhaps I couldn’t either, but I had gotten it into my head that there was one, that within Caia was a revelation that could be reached with love. I was making no progress with her; I no longer had the nerve to speak to her.

  Daniele was the obvious choice for Caia’s love. I imagined him singing along with the guitar of an evening. His voice was a touch strained, a little husky, but he could lower it to a whisper without losing the music. His singing surged out of him and when you heard him you began breathing deeply, holding your breath at times. Caia was bound to fall for Daniele, lean, well built; he hooked you with his smile. That was not my business, since I wasn’t a candidate for her affection and I certainly wasn’t jealous. I never knew whether there was anything between them. If so, it didn’t last long. Every one of those boys thought he would be chosen by Caia for at least the evening, and would receive from her arms a sign of preference. She would look at a boy from under her chestnut tresses, eyes wide open, lips slightly parted, hesitating a moment before a word fell out: that was as far as the invitation went. For her those boys were still puppies, great bodies, but clumsy with words. Then again, it was summer; you can’t be too demanding of casual encounters.

  Daniele soon lost interest in Caia. His pride did not allow for falling in love a little bit, just for one evening. He nevertheless remained affectionate toward her and attentive to her voice amid the babble of the group. He wasn’t thinking about secrets, like me, yet he did understand that there was an impenetrable ache in that girl which left for love only the occasional eruption of a smile. Granted, she was an orphan, growing up in a boarding school, and there the knot inside her must have tightened. The girl whose guest she was liked her a lot. They had become acquainted the year she was sent abroad to study languages. Caia, a veteran of the school, took her under her wing, making it easier for her to get used to a new place and to strangers. They became friends, but not even she knew anything worth mentioning about Caia. She wasn’t exactly sad, just moody at times, but basically cheerful.

  A crystal glass broke and the gleaming shards scattered all over the floor, breaking into fragments. Caia laughed at the troubled face of the boy who was trying to clean up the mess and her laughter was a perfect echo of those fragments. Because I was studying chemistry, I happened to say, not to her directly but as an aside about her laughter: “Caia has silicon in her vocal chords.” And she, turning toward me, said suddenly but quietly, “My father was a chemist.” I was so astounded that I didn’t make a move in her direction. I stayed put, swallowing hard. No one around us had heard. No one seemed to have taken notice of this surprising event, everybody was otherwise occupied. Her father was a chemist. She had wanted to say it, and spontaneously, more than in response to me. It had slipped out, perhaps unwillingly, but in this one thing something of her pain and her secret came to light, and I had brought it about. I was moved, and felt even more compelled to protect her. Something had happened between us, a secret exchange, an understanding. I was no longer the kid who went fishing, wore the mark of the trade on his hand, and was always mute. What I was besides that I didn’t know, couldn’t know, but my distance from her had been bridged. Caia had done it with a piece of news communicated to no one else.

  At their gatherings around a table I participated from a back row. If they were in a pizzeria I also took a seat but I didn’t eat with them, and they didn’t invite me to do so. Boys of my age did not go out to dinner. I would meet Daniele and the others after I had eaten at home. I would stay and watch their high spirits, their noisy laughter, and even in the confusion of their voices I could single out Caia’s laughter from the others. I would play a stupid game. I’d put an ice cube in my mouth and hold it there until it melted, while the nerves in my mouth turned into a tangle of thorns. My teeth froze and I could feel their roots pulsate. They were the keys of a painful organ. With my eyes shut tight, the clamor disintegrated in my ears and I could isolate Caia’s voice, separating it from the noise. The nerves of my mouth jangled for a moment, Caia’s timbre resounded in my head, in my frozen teeth which were as sensitive as antennae. I heard her voice with my teeth. Boys go in for tortures in their search for ecstasy. No one paid any attention to me. I could leave without saying good-bye. If I caught Daniele’s eye, I could tell him I was leaving with a glance.

  Maybe Caia liked grown men. I later heard rumors about her crush on Uncle. He was in his forties, was attractive to women, and knew how to tell them they were attractive to him. Uncle was the opposite of the beach macho. There was a sobriety about him, his gestures were measured, precise, more restrained than those of most southerners. His American mother had endowed his looks with something from the West, from the open plains, in his clear eyes, his smooth forehead, the flash of spurs in his smile. You could hear the gallop in his open-throated laugh. During the summer he wore nothing but a shirt tied at the waist, a pair of unpressed pants, and went barefoot. He had an elegance in his carriage that was inimitable. I watched hi
m walk out of a room, open a door, hold a glass, and couldn’t help but recognize that no one could do those things so well. He was always aware of his body. And if he happened to have an accident, ran into a door or stubbed his bare foot, even in his clumsiness he was elegant, dignified, not even then was he awkward. Many years later, when he let himself die rapidly, it was because he had ceased being at the center of his body.

  If there had ever been an intimacy, an infatuation between Uncle and Caia, I never even suspected it. Still, I had seen them together at the beach, at friends’ houses, and there was a playfulness between them, but in jest, not like when he knew he was raising goose bumps on a woman’s body. I did not see him turn on his charm with Caia, not in his voice nor in those attentive gestures that made a woman queen for an hour.

  I noticed nothing, not even the time Caia came with Daniele and went fishing with us. It had been decided at the last moment, which was why I found myself on the beach early one morning, one person too many. Uncle looked annoyed. Daniele had not told me to stay home. I made my excuses to Uncle and said good-bye to them all. But Caia broke in with a peremptory outburst that was inappropriate. Her sudden interference took us by surprise because a woman, a girl, had no right barging into men’s affairs. “He is here and he comes with us!”—said in a tone it was better to pretend not to have heard. Light was breaking, the sea was calm, her words made a small commotion. Uncle looked at her squarely, beckoned with his head, and I pushed off, jumping into the boat as it slid into the water. Caia’s mood instantly brightened when she saw she had prevailed. Uncle gave her a quick smile in return.

  If you go out in a small fishing boat with lines, you can’t drop too many, since they easily get tangled on the bottom because of currents and fish snapping at them, and then it’s a job to get them untangled. I knew that, and for that reason I didn’t fish that day, but I didn’t care. I did mind, however, that Uncle had an extra person on board. With five people it’s crowded, so that on the way out, I sat in the bow with my legs over the rail to keep out of the way. Nicola was at the rudder, Uncle was stretched out, Daniele was cutting bait. Caia came forward. She lay down with her head near my knee. I could look down at her, at a strand of her hair that fell over the rail and bounced with the rocking of the boat. The sea shimmered so brightly behind her I had to squint.