by Erri De Luca
“At times I see the world upside down,” she said. “When I was a child there was a river with trees along the banks. I would turn it around and see the trees holding up the river, the bridges were hammocks for lying down in the shade of the river’s current. Even today I see the sky as a floor.”
Her voice made no attempt to be heard, it was very low, but she knew I would hear her. Without changing position on the stone ledge, I leaned back, clasping my hands behind my head.
“Dancing looks like a race to me, everybody rushing to get caught.” I invented this idea so as not to remain silent after her remarks, to prove that I had heard her, that I would always hear.
“Is that why you don’t dance, so as not to be caught?” she shot back with a smile. “I’ll catch you now.” And she stood up, pulling me by the arm.
I tried to resist. They’d only laugh. I didn’t know a single dance step.
“If you can stand up in a boat, you can dance.”
I didn’t try to argue that it was the contrary, that balance on the sea was a resistance to swaying, to losing one’s footing. I said to her in my final entreaty, “Everybody wants to dance with you. If you take a turn with me you’ll make them hate me. As it is, it’s a lot for them to have a kid hanging around.”
“You’re not a kid, you’re an old man, you’re ancient, another generation. I dub you my knight of old.”
She pulled so hard I couldn’t resist without hurting her. I went to the record player and put on a slow song. She took me by the hand, placing my other one behind her back, and led me into the music. The others took advantage of the record to do the same.
“Why did you say I’m an old man?” I asked her, surprised by the deep timbre that issued from my throat.
“You’ve suddenly become an old man in a marvelous way. You are someone who has come from far away, like me, someone who has disembarked in a new land, has gray hair, and wonders how he is going to get along.”
The bite of the moray had left a pattern of holes: a pale letter on dark skin. Her hand was right on that spot and it was the most intimate gesture I had ever experienced with a woman. She was touching the surface of a pain, in a clasp as capable of reviving it as assuaging it. I’m here, her hand said, holding the wound for the duration of the song. I’ll go with you far away and hold your pain in my hand.
I yielded to her willful grasp on the bite, barely swaying, less than on a boat at evening. She held me in her arms, without squeezing, in a light but firm hold. I followed, and inside of me another age took place, remote, beyond time. I became what she saw in me and wanted me to be. Chaie, Chaiele, her name beat in my head to the rhythm of the music, of our feet as they brushed each other in a turn. I could hear the waves crashing against the rocks; her name resounded in the roar. Her breath fell against my wrinkled collar. I was no longer a kid next to her. Chaie, Chaiele was the breath of everything around, as though speaking her name, and I heard it inside my head like a beat to keep me from losing my step: Chaie, Chaiele.
“What did you say?” she asked, stopping abruptly and backing away from me. “What did you say?”
Nothing. I didn’t think I said anything.
“No, you said … you called me … what did you call me?”
I didn’t reply. She stood still in front of me, her voice tense with anger, a frightened look in her eyes. I couldn’t have said her name, I couldn’t. Somebody changed the record, putting on something wild and noisy. Caia pulled me by the arm outside the dance area and said furiously, “Don’t you ever call me by that name again, ever!” Her voice broke on each word. I must have been looking at her with stricken eyes, like an innocent victim, like an old man. She pressed her lips together and swallowed hard. “Go get me something to drink. No, never mind, I’ll go myself.” And she walked away.
I went back to the ledge for a while, then went out to the rocks, heading home. The music grew fainter, at last overwhelmed by the sea, and then I could say out loud my “Chaie, Chaiele.” It was my natural voice again, not that shadowy voice that came out of me when I was close to her. My own voice could not have betrayed the secret by speaking her name; it was saying it now, for the first time, at the edge of the sea. Could the touch of her arms have confused me to the point of not knowing whether I was speaking or not? Chaie, Chaiele. Nicola was right, except for the question of awareness: Caia knew who she really was in the midst of others, and who were her intimates.
For a few days I didn’t join Daniele or even go fishing much. Uncle had guests on the boat. In the afternoon I stayed longer than usual at Nicola’s, hearing about the trip and what they caught. It was the time of Uncle’s vacation and Nicola went out every night to drop the baited lines. He would return home and sleep a few hours before meeting Uncle on the beach and going out with him to bring in the lines. They caught an occasional grouper, more often congers and morays, a few scorpion fish, starfish, even gulls, who followed the boats despite the darkness and dived at the lines, getting caught on the hooks and dragged to the bottom. Once we caught a sea turtle but Uncle put it back after an exchange of knowing glances with Nicola. We saw it swim toward the bottom with leisurely strokes, not at all in frantic flight.
September was nice, when you go trolling for tuna, sea urchins, needlefish, and there isn’t all that work needed for multi-hook rigs. I stood beside Nicola and did the easiest part, which was to arrange the hooks by attaching them to the edge of the cork while he fed me the line and then coiled it into a basket. And we got around to talking, picking up where we had left off the last time. All around us the other fishermen were doing the same thing helped by young boys. Nicola’s sons were still too little. The village houses stood on the shore facing the beached boats. The fishermen helped each other pull in a boat or drag it into the water without having to ask. The air was filled with the shouts of children and the stench of bilgewater mixed with a powerful smell of tar and a touch of diesel fuel that leaked from the motors. A fisherman’s life was not purely natural, but combined the crafts of a carpenter, a mechanic, a tailor, and only in deep water, at the very end of his work, came the fish and the tools for catching them.
There was always something to be done and dusk fell as we stood side by side, facing the sea, while the light dimmed to darkness between our hands. The fishing village caught the last rays. I told him he was right, that he had known the Germans and I the Americans, he the war and I the slow discovery of having been born in a city that had sold itself. The Americans were the bosses, not the criminal tyrants he had known, just the bosses. The mayor was their spokesman, the port was their dock, the bay was crawling with fleets of their ships, aircraft carriers, submarines, cruisers, and the city was the playground for thousands of foreign sailors and soldiers, the masters of the field. The city was the largest bordello in the Mediterranean. They urinated all over the place, which I saw as their mark on our territory.
Our police were powerless during the landings. They had their own police, their own neighborhoods, their own stores, vehicles, movies. Nicola listened without understanding the shame I felt at having that American in my home. They were there because they had liberated us, but in Naples they never finished with their liberation. In the rest of Italy no other cities were held by the Americans, but Naples had become the wartime capital of the southern Mediterranean. They were in command and we were just one of many military ports of call, held on to for strategic reasons. That year I suddenly felt ashamed for my sold-out city.
“Do you hate the Americans?”
No, Nicola, they’re just doing their job, sniffing a little at the stink of us Latins. They run around looking blank or else suspicious, and if you see any other expression in their faces it comes from alcohol. I hate the Germans without ever having seen them in uniform, as you did, and I hate the officials who govern my city which they presented with thighs wide open to the sailors. Nicola admitted to having hated the Germans, but not anymore.
“Today they’re just tourists, even if I can’t
stand that language of theirs. I seem to hear again those shrieked commands and underneath those commands the order Feuer, fire. Who can forget them, those screams and shots? That’s why today when I meet Germans who are my age or older I avoid them. But I don’t hate them. Then, in Yugoslavia, I hated them, I wished for their death.”
I can’t avoid the Americans, but they’re not my enemies.
“You even have their blood in your veins,” Nicola added. “Your grandmother wouldn’t forgive you.”
It’s true, a quarter of my blood is American, but I never felt its presence. It got all dissolved in the Neapolitan cocktail.
“Nevertheless, you are part American,” he continued, “and you keep quiet like a foreigner, not like us. When we keep quiet one can tell from our face what we’re not saying. You keep quiet and one can tell you’re in another place, like me with that family in Sarajevo, God bless them wherever they are, that I never managed to call by name because it was too hard to say, like all the words in their language.”
One can see, Nicola, that I keep quiet in American.
During one of those afternoons a rare spectacle took place. The Andrea Doria, the transatlantic liner that made the crossing to America and had its home port in Naples, passed in front of the fishermen’s beach. In the narrow stretch of sea between the island and the Vivara shoal the gigantic prow appeared, cutting off the channel used by the ferryboats. The island was dumbstruck. Usually, the ship slid past in the open sea, and you saw her at a distance. But this time she changed course and entered the channel between the islands. I was the first to spot her and I asked Nicola, “What is she doing?” Nicola sprang to his feet, told me to carry the tackle to the house, and called out to the other fishermen. The fishermen’s beach was in an uproar, everybody dashing around. I did not understand what upset them so much. Those whose boats were anchored just beyond the beach raced out to board them and rowed out to deep water. Those whose boats were close to the beach called out to one another and helped one another drag them up on the sand as far back as possible. In the meantime, the ship approached the opening of the channel, the sea foaming white at the point of her keel. From the port, the harbor police sounded the siren in salute and the ship replied with the bellow of a monster. She crossed the channel and everything looked tiny compared with her height, even the castle. Her smokestack alone was the size of a palace. The boats that had managed to reach open water took the first waves. We saw them bounce on the huge crests and the fishermen turned into rodeo riders mounted on a beast that kicked its rump as high as the sky. Hit sideways, they would have been overturned. That was what I had not understood: the waves. They flung themselves against the beach with hurricane force, lifting the few boats still at anchor and hurling them at the shore, and on the beach the foam oozed all the way up to the houses. It was an onslaught of six enormous waves followed by a few smaller ones. The noise on the beach covered the last welcoming blasts of the sirens.
The fishermen were still calling out and helping one another. I had never seen so marvelous and so terrifying a mechanism at such close range. The waves reached the boats that had been beached and pulled two of them out to sea. Fortunately they did not collide with those that had been thrown against the shore and no damage was done. For the rest of the afternoon the fishermen worked together to clean up the mess, each helping the others. I helped too. Nicola thanked me for having noticed in time, because even a minute’s delay could have wreaked havoc. When the other fishermen came to thank Nicola, he pointed to me and they wanted to offer me a glass of rosolio, a sweet wine.
I was appalled by the thought that this stupendous spectacle could be so dangerous to people whose livelihood was fishing. It had already happened before. Every so often, a transatlantic liner slid into the channel to provide the passengers on board with a view of the island, and created a five-minute storm with her waves, big enough to sink all the boats.
The fishermen weren’t angry. A big ship also belonged to the sea, to the whirlwinds, to the storms, to all the fury of nature against which man pitted himself. You could see their patience from their mouths. After the waves and the work of putting the beach back in order, they stood around smoking their pipes, smiling over the success of their defenses.
Daniele’s friends had been on the beach when they caught sight of the Andrea Doria and they swam out to the motorboat that belonged to one of them in order to meet the ship. They had run the risk of capsizing on the waves, but then they rode on the carpet of the wake, following the ship for a while. Under the stern they experienced a reverse vertigo, as if they were clinging to the edge of an abyss. These impressions were Caia’s, always disposed as she was to visions and seeing things upside down. The thundering propeller made the sea boil in front of them and the ship’s answering horn sounded to her like the holy day ram’s horn of her childhood.
It was that same evening, after the ship’s appearance, that we met by chance for the first time since her anger on the terrace over her name. She was heading for the beach, to the house where she was a guest. I was coming up from the fishermen’s beach, covered with sand, oil, and grease like the boats after the near catastrophe. I saw her approaching and when she noticed me she ran up to me gaily, her curls bouncing in the air and her sandals sliding on the smooth road. She excitedly related the whole adventure, the thrills and the screams on the rearing motorboat, the disappointment when the waves subsided, the wonder of that white tabletop of flat sea produced by the immensity of the stern, and all the rest up to the ram’s horn. She stopped at that reference to her childhood, which at the time I could not understand—the sound of the shofar in the synagogue on the occasion of Yom Kippur. I was unfamiliar with those holidays. She stopped, as she had in the middle of the dance floor, surely remembering her outburst and abrupt departure, but this time she looked at me differently, like a little girl at an old man. Even her voice lost its secure, enveloping tone and was replaced by a childlike trill. She saw how dirty I was, and reproached me for not making better use of my vacation, for spending too much time on fishing. I didn’t want to tell her about the upheaval on the fishermen’s beach and spoil her pleasure by injecting an afterthought of fear. I nodded my agreement. Yes, I knew how messy I looked to her. I cleared my throat, gestured with my palms up to indicate the condition of my clothing, and said in a strange deep voice, “I’m sorry.”
In a near whisper, almost without opening her lips, she said, “Let me hear my name again.”
I looked at her, not at her eyes but a little higher, at the edge of her hairline where her thick chocolate strands lay flat and where I would have liked to plant a kiss.
“Chaiele,” I said in a voice not my own.
“Again.”
“Chaiele.”
She closed her eyes, squeezing them hard, then opened them wide and said, “Try to make the l soft, let it melt in your mouth like candy,” and she pronounced it for me. I repeated it. “That’s how I was called, the way you said it now. I don’t want to know how you found out. I don’t want to tell you anything. You are not to say that name in front of the others. For them I am Caia. Only for you am I Chaiele. Do you understand?”
This time I closed my eyes and no longer saw that place on her forehead. I answered yes, in that strange deep voice that came from the bottom of my throat, the bass tones of a guitar. She kissed my cheek while my eyes were still closed.
“I love you very much Chaiele.”
“I know,” she said, stepping away. Then, changing her tone, she was Caia again. “Let’s see you around, and get yourself cleaned up.”
At the house I told Daniele about the waves on the beach, about Nicola’s bravery and the way the men helped each other. He said nothing about the speedboat ride in the ship’s wake. Perhaps he wasn’t with them. He was dressed for tennis, having just returned from a game. We were both dirty from our island vacation, but our sweat was different. That evening I washed with fresh water and soap, emerging from the bathroom without a trace of
salt on me. I told Daniele that now I needed a dip in the sea.
“Good idea,” he replied. “I’ll try to convince the others to go for a night swim.”
I was happy to join them to get rid of my soapy smell. Mama intervened, asking Daniele if it wasn’t unusual for a boy not to stay with boys of his own age. What was he doing in a group of older boys? Daniele replied that I was ahead of my age and that I was more comfortable with them.
“You really consider him one of your group?”
“You know him, Aunt, he starts talking to someone or stands around watching, and when he’s had enough he goes off without even saying good-bye,” he replied, pretending to be reproachful. It was a joke between us. It was summer, even if we were growing up in hard times, the postwar years. Those months on the island were a free port. Unimaginable liberties were allowed and each individual character could emerge and develop. Those of us who became adults after that time were more the products of an island than of the mainland.
That evening I went out with a towel that my mother forced on me along with a sweater. The beach was dark. Light came from the lanterns of the fishing boats offshore, a stripe across the water. Daniele was already there with his crowd and he asked me to go back to the house to get the guitar. Those were the kinds of services asked of the newest member of a group, and it was natural for me to perform them, but Daniele asked with courtesy. Something was happening that summer. I was becoming another person in the eyes of others but I didn’t know who. By the time I returned, they were already singing and there was wine. I didn’t like wine but a glass was put into my hand in recompense for the guitar. I sat down outside their circle and wet my lips with little sips. The night was still. The water at the shoreline didn’t seem to move at all. When it’s like that it’s no longer sea, it’s like sky. On the dome above our heads the stars were clustered as thickly as granules, and in the pine forest the air stood still.
