by Erri De Luca
“At times you have certain gestures that remind me of someone who loved me.” She spoke softly, below the level of noise from the diesel motor. I blushed as though she had shouted this to the entire world from a loudspeaker. She had spoken without opening her eyes.
“And you felt the same way about him?”
Caia gave a little nod.
We headed for the shoals of Capri. The trip took a long time; the noise of the motor helped her to talk. I tuned my ear to the frequency of her voice, which I could have made out in a gale. From the stern you couldn’t tell that we were talking. I replied without looking at her, staring straight ahead, speaking words into the wind. I saw a wave rise up higher than the others and understood it would make her head bump against the wood. And so at the moment the bow made contact, I slid my hand between her neck and the boat to cushion the blow. I then withdrew it at once. Caia looked at me from underneath, her face serious, like a child at a window waiting for someone to return. She was seeing something far away, behind me, a hand that had held her head who knows how long ago. I kept my eyes fixed on her. She seemed to be seeing me against the sky without anyone around, without land.
I think we were talking about religion. She had one; she liked to invoke a remote You, but not in a church or in any enclosed place. I replied that I knew nothing about God or love. She believed that there were spirits capable of staying with us and never abandoning us. I, on the other hand, had no one I could call a spirit or an angel, and no notion of what she was feeling. She said that sometimes spirits feel the need to make themselves known, and so for a few seconds enter into the body of someone nearby and through it make some gesture or say something by which she can recognize their presence. But it happens so fast she doesn’t have enough time to communicate that she has received their signal. Did that ever happen to me? Never. No, even if I wanted to say: I too, always, like you, anywhere, yes, from now on I will recognize those I don’t even know. But I couldn’t lie to Caia, not even to please her in her first attempt to speak to me under the cover of a diesel motor.
Daniele called her and she went back to the stern to learn how to put bait on a hook. When the boat was over the shoals and the motor was turned off, voices reached me in the bow, wavering, fragmented, as though from a pail at the bottom of a well. I dropped the anchor, secured it, and came to the middle of the boat as Daniele lowered his line from the bow. Uncle was in the stern, Nicola and Caia on either side, and for as long as it took for the weights to reach the bottom, there was a rapid whoosh of nylon against the palm of the hand. Caia had the first nibble, a shock that frightened a shriek out of her. Uncle instantly heard the line bounce. Dashing to his feet, he gestured with his arm to pull up. Then Nicola had one, then Daniele; we were over a whole school. So as not to pull up all the lines at once, Nicola told me to hold his while he kept Caia from tangling the line that was being pulled into the boat. I could feel the fish on Nicola’s hooks, at least two. I pulled the line up a few meters to raise their wriggling out of the middle of the school so that the other fish wouldn’t be frightened away. “Nzerréa,” Nicola said about the first line brought up. The weight of the hooked fish made the nylon line rubbing along the edge of the boat produce a cicadalike sound, “nzrr, nzrr,” as each arm’s length came up. “Nzerréa,” Nicola said, and Daniele repeated the verb to Caia, explaining its meaning. The plump, shiny fish, shimmering white against the black depths of the sea, were brought on board.
“Ianchéa,” Nicola said of his catch, it’s all white.
“Ianchéa,” Uncle said of his own.
Daniele, however, pulled up a furious red scorpion fish, its spines rigid, especially the second one, the poisonous dorsal spine that required great care when grabbing the fish to remove the hook. Daniele was quick, he had not forgotten how to do it. He had learned from Nicola, better than I. Nicola. The name of the island’s patron saint, one in every family, a name given to boats and churches, and even to the mountain that pokes through the grove of chestnut trees. Nicola. He went back to the line he had entrusted to me. I told him quietly that I had pulled it up a few arm’s lengths and he nodded in approval.
It was a good catch. The wooden basin was packed with fish. Caia had fun counting how much each of us had caught. As was bound to happen, she got her line all tangled. She had pulled it on board in a hurry, letting it drop at her feet. When she tried to lower it again, it had turned into a bird’s nest of nylon. I set myself to untangling it, sitting at her feet on the plank floor. “You look as if you’re sewing,” she said about the way I raised my arm high to unravel the ball, giving it enough slack to loosen itself. It took me a quarter of an hour, pretty good for that kind of mess. Uncle explained to her that she should let the line fall between her feet without stepping on it. He was no longer annoyed about being crowded. The day was serene, there were no other boats around. The coast of the island drifted away behind the mist.
We were far out, no land in sight, no shade on the boat. It must have been noon. The current alone kept the bow aligned with the anchor and slapped at the stern, placing it slightly southeast. There was barely a breath of the maestrale, the north wind.
Uncle dived into the water, followed by Caia and Daniele. Nicola and I held the lines. I splashed some water on my head but did not go in for a swim. Nicola said not a word to Caia. Women fishing? He wouldn’t dream of taking them; it wasn’t done. Not that they were in the way, but he felt intimidated. “Makes me uncomfortable,” he would say.
On the return trip Daniele took the rudder, Uncle lowered a trolling line from the stern, Nicola set to work cleaning the fish. I went forward and Caia joined me.
“If a big wave comes, protect my head.”
I would have given blood for some rough water, but we were moving with the current, the waves pushing us ahead, and Daniele was good at taking advantage of the right angle for sliding down the crest of the waves as though going downhill. There was no chance for me to cushion her neck. Caia fell asleep. I would have liked to wet her hair so that her head didn’t get too hot, but I was afraid to wake her. I managed to place myself so that at least I shaded her head with my body. She slept with her lips parted. I would have liked to put my ear near her breath and listen to it. There was more than breath in that sleep; there must have been words as well, perhaps in a language I wouldn’t have understood. I would have liked to put my nose into that breath and sniff it as it came up from the depth of her chest, becoming perfumed in her throat, its fragrance mingling with the incense of her saliva. I would have smelled the red gills of her river fish, the mist of Swiss forests. I would not have wanted to put my mouth on her breath. My mouth would have understood nothing she exhaled, my mouth would only have sucked recklessly, brazenly stealing the air of her breathing. My body, cramped from the way I was sitting, shaded her, fulfilling its function of guardian.
There is no return, I thought, this trip lacks symmetry, it only goes one way.
If Caia had been involved with both Uncle and Daniele, on that day’s fishing trip she managed to find a mid-point between the two of them, but only when she was in the bow. On awaking she laughed at the fishy smell on her hands. Only later did I learn that her insistence on my coming along that morning was the counterbalance of another trip when she had been prevented from taking with her someone who remained behind.
Our summers on the island lasted for months. We were there long enough to want to stay forever. Leaving the island felt like going into exile. One year there was an outbreak of polio in the city and so we remained on the island until November. Without the summer the island was an empty shell: unheated rooms, silent cicadas in the pine groves. I was a child then and I thought of the island as a shield. Evil came from the land and had to surrender in the face of the sea.
Daniele composed songs, some of them quite nice, certainly nicer than the ones on records. That summer I had a guitar. He would borrow it for the evening, but even in our room he would play something. He thought up music for the pra
yers of Our Father and Holy Mary. The melodies turned out very well; he sang them to me softly without the words. I didn’t know how to pray; I didn’t even know how to ask people for help.
It’s a good thing that stories in books are soundless, otherwise I would try to sing those songs right here, within these pages. They moved you deep down, without being solemn, or needing an organ, at most a violin. That’s how he was, but he could also be hard, even aloof at times. It’s that mixture which can produce a natural leader, the kind that speaks up in a crowd and makes everybody follow him. He never did anything like that, but I later knew such men and often realized how much more exceptional and appealing they would have had to be in order to be a Daniele.
The other boys copied his gags, his grimaces, even his walk. I didn’t have that gift of mimicry. I willingly obeyed him, learned his songs and his chords, but I couldn’t have repeated any of his jokes. They were his; from any other mouth it was ridiculous. Like a mother beaming at her little boy, Caia listened to him sing, smiling encouragingly. One could only rejoice in their affinity.
There was no other occasion to be close to Caia. I kept remembering the things she said in the boat, about my reminding her of someone, without telling me who, nor would I ever ask. I had the nest egg of a confidence that came to me by chance, but I was no closer to her secret. I was still on the surface, waiting for some word to come from her. I was too young to force it out of her and my ineffectiveness made me miserable. There was not a soul I could talk to without betraying myself.
I spent my days fishing in the morning, then back to the beach, a visit with Nicola if he was in front of his house, and in the late afternoon I looked for Daniele’s crowd. Days without change. Evenings, I watched the sun go down too fast. With Daniele I never spoke unless he spoke first. He liked Caia, but there were others. She was attractive but not important to him. Had I talked to him about Caia, he would have made fun of me.
One afternoon I asked Nicola if he remembered the girl who had come fishing with us. He nodded his head. To induce him to say something, I invented the story that she was going out with Daniele. Nicola said nothing and continued to arrange the lines of the multi-hook rig. He gave a little sigh and shook his head. Was there something he didn’t like about her?
“It’s none of my business, but it’s better to go with girls of your own kind.”
Did he have something against Rumanians? Nicola wasn’t concerned about that, that’s not what he was talking about. Caia was Rumanian, did he know that? No, he didn’t know where Rumania was. He remained silent for a while, his hands falling idle, which made me think I was bothering him. I was about to apologize when he said with effort, “The girl is not one of those people you’re talking about.”
What the devil could he know about it? Two conflicting emotions made the blood rush to my face: anger and shame. Finally I was able to talk about her, and I was hearing offensive suspicions from someone who had seen her only one morning and had not addressed a word to her. I was about to stand up when Nicola said gruffly, lowering his voice, “The girl is Jewish,” stressing the dj sound. I looked at him, narrowing my eyes. A chasm opened between us, a collision, a slap, a betrayal. Why? How did he know? But I couldn’t bring myself to ask. An anchor had plunged into my throat.
“The name is Jewish. In Sarajevo there were lots of Jewish women whose names were Sara and Caia. Not Caia, the way we say it, with a k sound, but with a heavy h, like when you clear your throat, Chaie. The little girls were called Chaiele, Sorele. There were lots of them, and then they were taken away. First they were locked up, then they were put on trains, not in coaches, but in freight cars. By the time we arrived, all the men were gone. People said they had all been killed by the Germans. The only ones remaining were women, children, and a few old people.”
His hands had remained still, his head bowed over them. Then, before returning to his work, he added in closing, “Gualgiò, che brutta carogna è ’a guerra,” Oh kid, what a dirty rotten thing war is.
And what kind of a war was it? A war against women, babies? What kind was your war?
“What do you want to know? When you came along it was all over, no Germans, no Jews, all you saw were Americans, smuggling, black market, a whole business of dollars. I could talk till tomorrow, tell you what the war I saw was like, you’d still know nothing. You have to know with your own eyes, with fear, an empty stomach, not with ears and books. We were twenty years old, they pressed us like olives, and like olives we didn’t make a sound. There were Jewish women, they asked us to save their children, they handed them over to us, to us, Italian soldiers who were the enemy, and we could do nothing.” Nicola choked up on his last words and couldn’t go on.
Nothing. Only you, Nicola, managed to say this word, digging it out of helplessness and fear. Nothing. There are nothings that you can never get rid of. Each time I hear someone say “nothing,” it rings false; they don’t know how to say it. They don’t know what nothing is. You know, Nicola, and those women who handed their children over to enemy strangers, they knew. I couldn’t reply. I was a kid who didn’t even understand sunlight. Caia was a Jew. I was mortified not to have thought of it myself, with all my pretensions at discovering a secret from those crumbs she had confided in me. How was I different from the other city boys vacationing on the island? They were hospitable by nature, by indolent custom, not out of any genuine wish to meet people or get to know them. Caia was just a funny name for us. The accident of fate that sent a fisherman from the south to make war in Yugoslavia provided the most basic fact. She came from a people who had been eliminated house by house, her parents killed. Her life had depended on being saved, unlike ours, exposed at worst to the ills of the south. Perhaps she was one of the children placed in the arms of a stranger who carried her to safety.
I asked Nicola to repeat her name to me, as he remembered it, and its diminutive: Chaie, Chaiele, Chaie, Chaiele: a thick h never heard before, followed by the vowels of a little shout. I was learning her secret by pronouncing her name. I was afraid someone might already know about it, but Nicola had told no one, not even Uncle. In fact, he didn’t want to talk about it at all, and rightly so because he had let this slip, but only because I had asked him to talk to me about the war. He regretted having told me and asked me not to repeat it to anyone. It wasn’t right to put your nose in other people’s business. I promised willingly, relieved. I said I had understood nothing, that I could not have figured it out by myself. In his rapid dialect Nicola said: “I don’t even understand the sea. Don’t know why a boat floats, why wind and storms make waves on the sea and dust on land. I live by the sea because I was born to it, but I don’t understand a thing about it. What is it after all? It’s just sea, water and salt, but it’s deep, very deep.”
And then he left me troubled by the thought that perhaps the girl didn’t know anything about her own background. In that case, her secret was mine alone. I couldn’t even share it with her.
I got up from the sand of the fishermen’s beach reeling, drunk, consumed with shame. Without Nicola, master even of that, I would never have known anything about the most sought-after truth. Caia’s secret was handed to me as a gift, in view of the fact that I would never have acquired it all by myself. I wandered off to the Aragonese castle on the bridge of the isthmus that connected it to the land. I climbed down among the rocks in search of a blank space for my eyes, stopping at a point that opened out to the horizon and nothing else, just water. Dusk was falling. Exhausted by my emotional upheaval, I fell asleep. It was night when I woke up, my head was cold, the sky packed with stars. My steps were wooden at first, then looser, and then I broke into a run which set me racing through deserted streets, accompanied from time to time by hunting dogs left loose on the island. Aimless happiness, warm stones under my soles, soft breezes in my ears, my throat parched, I broke into the house like a thief. Daniele was asleep in my room whistling through his nose, my guitar lying on his sandals. I picked it up and hung it on i
ts nail. Its sounding box pinged a delicate A on contact, and in my head the name Chaie, Chaiele kept coming back, telling me why I felt happy. I murmured the name until sleep overtook me.
In the morning I was faced with my mother’s reproaches and Daniele’s questions. I had fallen asleep on the beach, having gone to watch them fish with lanterns, and had no awareness of sleeping on the warm sand. That half lie came out with cheeky veracity. I never told lies. Daniele said that’s what he had thought, and had proposed going to look for me precisely on the beach. It would not happen again, I promised. In our family, oaths were not permitted. It was enough to say with conviction, I promise.
Chaie, Chaiele became music in my ears. I repeated it in the morning, barely awake, I put my thoughts to rest with it at bedtime. Lovers pray with only one word, a name. I didn’t write it, I didn’t pronounce it out loud; I couldn’t jeopardize the secret by leaving traces behind.
One evening I was with Daniele’s crowd on a terrace very close to the sea; they were having a party. A boy kept putting on records with a fast beat, dances with a lot of jumping and turning, and Caia bounced back and forth amid arms and shirts, or so I saw her from my observation spot. Needing a rest, she came and sat down next to me, a friendly gesture. I had no idea that she had seen me. She wiped away a film of perspiration with the back of her hand and as a joke spread it on my face. I smiled over the borrowed sweat and didn’t wipe it off. The music started up again. She declined to go back, putting off till later the boys who called out to her. Daniele was standing off in a corner with a girl. Caia turned her back to the party and faced the sea so that we sat side by side but in opposite directions.
