Me, You

by Erri De Luca

  And so there we were at sea, smashing into waves, drenched, deafened by the wind, and I couldn’t figure out whether we were moving or not. Nicola asked me if I felt up to working, not saying at what. Yes, I was, to combat the cold. He then altered the angle of our course so that we took the sea less from the bow than from the side and started taking on water. I later understood that Nicola was trying to enter into the lee of the island, abandoning the return route in the hope of finding a less exposed stretch of sea. For the moment, the effect was that the storm hit us broadside. I was bailing out seawater by the bucketful, which at least kept me warm. The fishermen in the other boat were doing the same. I kept losing my balance. In the raging blackness of the night I heard the clipped syllables of Nicola’s voice at my shoulders: “Né paù,” the linguistic remains of “Non aver paura,” don’t be afraid. Without turning around, I moved my head from side to side to indicate no.

  Until then I hadn’t even thought about it. Had he been afraid, I would have been more so, but so long as he remained at the tiller and set the course, fear did not touch me. I had no experience of storms, I did not know the degrees of danger, and certainly there was much worse than this. I took the punches of the sea and the yanking of the bucket on my back without knowing how much longer the boat could stay afloat. I was with the best in the trade, on their routes, in one of their nights. Fear of capsizing was far from my thoughts.

  A wave filled the boat above our ankles. Nicola straightened the bow into the knots of wind to give me a chance to bail, then turned her back to getting hit broadside. This happened repeatedly. So long as that sea lasted, my strength would last, measured out to arrive at parity.

  I first became aware that night was changing to dawn when we reached the leeward side of the island. The blended fragrance of sand, pines, and gardens wafted from the land to sea, stronger than the smell of coffee from a kitchen. The island was a dark cup that sent its aroma out to sea. I straightened up and heard again, this time from a broken voice, barely audible, “Né paù,” don’t be afraid, and I turned to shake my head no and look him in the face. During the entire storm I had not seen him. He was soaked and as ashen as the dawn.

  At last the sun rose and the eight hundred meters of Mount Epomeo broke the headwind enough to calm the sea. As we arrived in the bay of Sant’Angelo, the first sound we heard from the land was a bell calling the faithful to mass. Touching the ribs of my back, I felt proud to have worked throughout a storm. There was no pride, however, in the expressions of the fishermen; for them that night was just another night of work, of going out for bread, and how dearly they paid for it. Passing my hand over my face to close my eyes and mouth, I wiped the pride from it, repressing the impulse to talk about that night. I did not listen to the remarks exchanged between the fishermen. They untied the tow rope and pulled out the oars. Only then did I see the olive branch above the prow of the boat. It had remained in place.

  We disembarked at the small pier to notify Uncle at the other cape of the island that we couldn’t reach him. Once on land, my feet on warm solid ground, I turned toward the side of the island where Caia was sleeping at that hour. I would not be relating my little boy’s storm to her.

  My coevals no longer greeted me. But there was among them one fifteeen-year-old girl whose eyes followed me whenever I came by their group. Only the summer before I would have jumped hoops for a glance from her. I was sorry about the poor timing that kept desires apart instead of making them meet. I would have liked to explain myself to her but I didn’t have the nerve to go up to her. I exchanged glances with her when our paths on the island crossed unavoidably.

  One afternoon I saw her walking alone on the fishermen’s beach. It was not the path one would normally take for a walk or a place one would go to expressly. I was sitting with my back to the sea in front of Nicola when I saw her approach, looking all around. She had on a peasant dress and a man’s sandals, and her freshly washed fair hair fell loosely. I waved to her and she greeted me, stopping at a distance. Not knowing what to do, I stood up and she came toward me. I introduced her to Nicola. “Pleased to meet you Eliana,” he said, apologizing for not extending his dirty hand. She took it anyway, by the back of his hand, and it became obvious that all three of us were ill at ease. I asked her where she was headed. She shrugged her shoulders to indicate no place in particular, and before I had a chance to wish her a nice walk she asked me to come with her. “All the way to there?” I asked, copying the gesture she had made. She smiled, yes. We said good-bye to Nicola and started walking toward the castle where the island’s paths end.

  We walked through the narrow streets of the village, I barefoot and scruffy, she clean and groomed. I explained my desire to learn about fishing, and told her that I was hanging out with the older group that summer because of my cousin Daniele, but even with them, as with those of my own age, I felt out of place. She suddenly took my hand and held it as we walked.

  “I shouldn’t be holding your hand, I’ve already made it dirty. I’ve changed and don’t even know how. I have the thoughts of a man, about having children, working, leaving school. I’m suddenly in a hurry to learn other things. I can’t come for you at school with a motorbike, which I don’t have and don’t want. I can’t take you to Saturday night parties, be introduced to your parents as your boyfriend, hear them say yes, indeed, he’s a nice boy. I’m not a nice boy. A short while ago I didn’t know that as well as I do now.”

  She looked straight ahead, concentrated on a thought that pinched her eyebrows and furrowed her forehead. She let a few steps go by in silence, then answered that she did not know what was happening to her. She had known me earlier and had no interest in me or in the other boys. She said she was bored with the routine of the group, with the novelty of declarations of love that proliferated out of contagion or rivalry. She had begun to notice me out of a need to look for something new, and then the younger crowd accused me of playing the big shot by choosing to hang out with my cousin’s friends. Her voice became constricted and she left off that little bit of singsong often heard in the speech of young adolescents: “I want to try to be with you. I want to believe it’s possible, even if it’s not for now, even if it’s far off. I need to wait for someone who’s different from the others, and you are that someone.”

  From a ground-floor kitchen came the smell of frying shrimp, followed, as we walked on, by the fragrance of a basket of figs on the terrace. I breathed it all in, even her voice. I gave her back the hand I had withdrawn. She took me back in time, to a time that was right for my age, coming on to me with a line a nice girl of the fifties would figure out. We walked without talking up to the entrance of the castle where the island juts into the sea like a turret.

  “I left a grease spot on your palm. Let me try to get it off.”

  There were pumice stones among the rocks of the isthmus and I went down to find one. I rubbed her palm gently and saw her eyes start to fill.

  “Am I hurting you?”

  “No.”

  “Then don’t look so unhappy.”

  “I’m not unhappy.”

  The first two tears fell, coming as they do in pairs, which is how poets learned to rhyme. I caught them on the pumice stone and wiped away the dirt on her hand. “Hurrah, it works,” I joked to make her smile, and she did, wrinkling her nose.

  We remained hand in hand with a piece of pumice stone between them. She was inviting me to an age that had disappeared from my body and my mind. She told me not to give her an answer. It was true that in our silence I was thinking about an answer. She told me to put her out of my thoughts, to let her wait. She had discovered that she liked the idea of waiting. She was no longer a kid the way she said these things, nor was she talking to one. It was as though there were someone between us, as though a postman were rapidly delivering the letters that we were sending each other. I told her this in search of some fable to explain what was happening to us. Then she said that the island was the postman, that we had explored it
as children going on foot from house to house, and all at once, in a single summer, it was an undiscovered island. We were the only ones on that strip of land, we had lost our city and our age, and we were emerging from our green shell like walnuts in September. I no longer know whether these were her words or whether that was how it sounded in the tube between the ear and the brain. Then, looking beyond me, she added, “I’ve never come to the fishing village before.”

  And I had never gone for a walk with a girl. I saw a spot of white on her lips and commented on it: “Around here they compare a girl to a fig when it ripens and oozes a drop of milk. ‘Ianchéa,’ meaning that it’s white.” I had thought of the milk of a fig when I touched her tears. They had the power to grow, the impulse to become a woman, they had fallen all swollen. I was glad I had collected them. She stood up first.

  “It did me good to come here, to talk to you. I feel stronger now. Before I came, I was very nervous.”

  She looked around, was reassured, took a firm step and laced her arm through mine, not taking my hand this time. Her sandals squeaked of new leather, the north wind blew her hair forward, covering her face. She said nothing more. We adjusted our stride to walk in step, pleased to be on a route of return.

  “You’ve been a friend to me today. I’m an elephant and won’t forget it.”

  She did not come again. As she walked away, she waved friendly good-byes and gave me toothy smiles.

  The days were getting busy, departures imminent, occasions to meet desperately desired. I did not want to count the time, but it was short. And so I began to look for Caia, hoping to find her alone. That’s when the meetings came to pass. She was coming from the sea with her sandals in her hand, her feet all sandy, when she saw me and I made a brusque gesture with my arm the way one hails a bus at a bus stop. It wasn’t a greeting, it was a reflexive jerk, out of place. We were face-to-face; she scrutinized me carefully and spoke to me as though continuing a conversation begun earlier.

  “I used to call my father Tateh. In our, language at home, Yiddish, it means papa. You just made a gesture that my father used to make at the school bus that brought me home every day. I would look for him at the window and he was always there waiting for me. It was my first year of school. You made the same gesture and I felt chills go down my spine. See, I have goose bumps. This is not the first time I see something of my father in you.”

  I remained immobile, trying to stay still, forcing myself to refrain from any gesture, resisting the urge to make nervous movements that were forcing themselves on me. I did not want to yield to the temptation of blindly imitating unfamiliar gestures. I drew a breath and rubbed the back of my index finger under my nose to scratch it, even though it didn’t itch.

  “That was one of my father’s tics when he was nervous. He rubbed his finger as you did and squeezed his eyelids. What are you doing to me?”

  “I don’t know, Caia,” I said, making myself pronounce her name in the open, keep my distance, keep from embracing her, and keep myself from crying. The sun was out, I was happy to have found her, I could walk her home, tell her about the fishing trip, ask for her address to send her a letter or two when the summer was over, so why the hell did I want instead to cry, to hug her, to make a scene in the middle of the street?

  She saw my confusion, which made me clasp my hands behind my back to keep from gesturing, saw me flounder, and then she smiled and came beside me. She took my arm and spoke with a touch of emotion that made her voice metallic: “Why you? I know there are moments when someone I lost comes close and inhabits an unfamiliar person, just for a moment, to greet me through the body of another person with an unmistakable movement or signal, just a signal, that’s all. I’ve known for a long time that I haven’t been left alone. You can call them fantasies, my need to believe, and you may be right. But I feel protected by this multitude of hardly perceptible signals. Until now, no one has ever brought together so many of them. They come from my father who is no more, but I don’t want to talk about him with anyone, not even with you. They come from my father and you are becoming his puppet, and I feel like asking him to stop it, to leave you alone.”

  “No, Chaiele, I don’t want to be left alone. I don’t know what’s been happening to me in this brief period since I got to know you, but it’s a fulfillment. It’s not just the love of a bewildered kid, it’s anger against an evil I don’t know, or know by only a few names, it’s that I see you so alone you need someone to look after you, and that someone is me, an ordinary kid who feels the weight of years just because he happens to be near you. I don’t know how to tell you I love you because the only spot I’d like to kiss is where your forehead begins, under your hair.”

  “Do it, do it! There’s no point telling you that’s where he used to kiss me.”

  We stopped walking and I placed my palms on her temples and kissed the top of her forehead and I started to cry with a voice not my own, saying without rhyme or reason, “So much time, Chaiele, so much time.” Like an old man at a train, that’s how I cried, quietly, without sobbing, tears falling softly on the window, falling on Caia from my cheekbones, and she said: “It’s me, Tateh, your Chaiele, I know you never left me, I know, don’t cry, you are with me, always, leave this boy, let him have his own age, we’re something else, he can’t know, and yet he offered himself to you and me. I know, that time at the train you let me leave alone, but I didn’t cry then or even now, because I knew that you would find me, and so you did. You appeared behind so many faces, yet I always recognized you.”

  Then she spoke in a language I had never heard and it was a cascade of words fit for a lullaby. And so I stopped crying and raised my lips from her forehead and my hands from her temples. I took her by the arm and walked her to the door of her house and watched her climb the stairs, turn to wave good-bye, and add that gesture of hailing a bus. I was left with rinsed eyes, a feeling of calm in the palm of the hand that had touched the pulsing of her veins, and the most absurd tenderness I had ever experienced, just from the sound of that name, Tateh.

  She no longer reproached me for having infiltrated her secret. She had entrusted me with a name, a piece of her heritage. I had placed a kiss at the top of her forehead and she accepted it. She did not become angry as she had that evening on the terrace when she thought she had heard me say her secret name, Chaiele. I forgot to ask her address, but it didn’t matter. Even without letters I had a place close to her and a name, Tateh, that came from a time before I was in the world and awaited me on an island to be pronounced. So long as I was near her everything seemed natural, but away from her I did not understand the story of Caia and her father. I was aware only of the good fortune of serving as a bridge to her childhood. I could feel how much she depended on that bridge and on me. And I could feel growing in me a severity that contained both blessings on life and curses on the evil perpetrated against that life, and a serenity coupled with an urge to bang my fist on the table.

  That’s why what happened afterward was the inevitable consequence of her childhood and of my precocious aging which had resulted from having met Caia. It had to happen that night in a pizzeria where Daniele’s friends were having a farewell dinner before separating one by one in the departures to follow. And it had to be that I was there too.

  It was an evening of repressed high spirits that erupted in bursts, not choral and steadily rising, but nervous, self-indulgent: someone laughed by himself till the tears came, another drank one glass too many, someone else tried to find the right tone to take leave of the island and of the others. Toasts were proposed to all the different kinds of fish. Few other clients were in the pizzeria when a group arrived. The owner seated them on the terrace where we were. They may already have eaten, since they only ordered drinks.

  No one paid them any attention except me. They were middle-aged Germans, men and women, about fifteen of them. Our dinner was in full swing and we were making noise. We were deciding where to go afterward and wild proposals were being made that in
creased the racket. The sound of clinking glasses and a few loud remarks began coming from the Germans’ table. Caia looked distracted and was staring in the direction of the sea. Someone called out to her, asked her how she thought they should spend the rest of the evening, and for a moment she was back among them with an answer. But her thoughts were elsewhere, perhaps on the forthcoming departures, or the interruption of the summer’s friendships by the return home.

  From the other table came the humming of a song. Caia stiffened and looked far off, above the heads. When that song ended, another began, a kind of march. Daniele became aware of Caia, of her tenseness, and asked her something. He had barely touched her when she sprang to her feet and began shouting in German at the people sitting at the next table. Her voice was clear and sharp, and rose above their singing. Daniele and the others fell silent in astonishment at the peal of her voice assaulting strangers. They did not understand what was happening. Daniele turned to see at whom Caia was shouting. They went on singing but were listening, and a few of them stopped. All of them were looking at her. She was aflame, a fire no one had ever seen before or understood. Her outburst ended in a shriek, a wounded rage that must have contained some terrible insult because at the other table the chorus stopped dead and they began shouting, and one of them got up amid a clatter of chairs. Still lacking any understanding of what was going on, Daniele jumped up, knocking over his chair, and grabbed one of them. He moved instinctively, accurately, and tackled him, knocking him to the ground. I fell on the second one who was about to intervene, taking him by surprise from the side and rolling him over the table. It turned into a free-for-all. From either side people tried to break it up, the owner came running, as did people in the street. It didn’t last more than a minute; more noise than punches. Caia remained riveted to her final shriek, rigid, absent from the ruckus. During the confusion the other group wound up near the exit and began to leave the place. Our group got busy straightening up. Daniele explained that the Germans had insulted us, so the owner did not call the police, seeing that we were decent kids, good clients. In the end, nothing happened.