The Breaking of a Wave

by Fabio Genovesi

  Yes, laughter. And surely they all thought you had lost your mind or hadn’t understood. But the problem wasn’t with you. They were the ones who didn’t know Luca. And Luna was laughing too, a little, while you hugged her hard. “Luna! Everything’s fine, Luna, don’t worry. Do you remember that time there was that yacht offshore and Luca swam out to it and they ferried him to the Island of Giglio? Do you remember that day he went out for ice cream and when he caught sight of the snow in the mountains decided to hike up to the top of Mount Pania instead? And he ate the snow and got back home at . . . what time was it? Midnight? One?”

  “Even later than that, Mom! Even later!”

  And you nodded, yes, and you laughed. Because it was clear that something of that kind had happened this time too, anything else would be impossible.

  The ambulance workers in their ridiculous orange uniforms formed a circle around you, and Gemma held your hand while you pictured Luca riding the waves, out there in the ocean, and maybe a French girl had caught sight of him and fallen in love and swum out to him. If it happens to him all the time here, then you can bet it happens in France, where people are more open-minded. They took a shine to each other, she asked him to go home with her, and Luca had left the surfboard behind and gone. Or maybe not. Maybe while he was surfing he’d run into a school of dolphins and he’d straddled one and it had carried him to a wonderful island, a secret and miraculous place, and in a little while he’ll write you to come meet him and you’ll all go live there.

  That’s why, when they told you these things, you started to laugh and squeezed Luna. They all looked at you like you were a madwoman. Sorry, you said, but they were wasting their time, nothing had happened. You wished them good evening and walked into your house with your daughter and Gemma. You went to your room, stood up on the bed, took down your suitcase from on top of the wardrobe, and began stuffing things inside.

  “Let’s go, Luna, give me a hand. What are you going to bring? Summer stuff, huh, and a bathing suit, you’ll need a bathing suit.”

  “Where are we going?”

  “To be with Luca, where else? You’ll see. The sun will be bright. Grab your sunscreen. And your sweatshirt with the hood.”

  Luna nodded and began opening her drawers too, but slowly and without removing anything, while Gemma tried to stop you, tugging on your arms, asking you to sit down a moment.

  “I don’t have the time, Gemma. When we get back we can talk all you want. And you can tell me what Vincenzo did this time, okay? Do you want a tea for now? Luna, make a tea for Gemma, would you?”

  “No thanks, Serena, I don’t want tea. But stop a second, I’m asking you to please hear me out. Luca hasn’t disappeared. He was by his surfboard. I’m terribly sorry, Serena, but they found him. Do you understand? They found him.”

  “Gemma, bear with me, I can’t listen to your problems just now. We’re leaving. Do me a favor, Luna? Bring a pair of jeans and a sweatshirt for Luca—he packed practically nothing and I bet he could use them.”

  Everything you found you threw on top of the suitcase, a mountain of stuff: underwear, socks, shirts, boxes of mothballs, moldy old embroidery your mother had made. And you would have kept on until you’d cleaned out the whole house, who knows what you would have done next, but suddenly your arms became heavy, you bent over, you heard a noise in your head, like a swarm of bees caught in a wind, a strong wind that picked you up and flung you down. And Luna and Gemma must have seen you falling because they ran to catch you before you hit the ground. But you fell faster.

  You hit your head on the floor, though you don’t remember that. You didn’t feel any pain. The same thing happened in the ambulance on the way to the hospital, and you stared up at the white ceiling pitching back and forth. The pain still didn’t come. Maybe it was so great it needed more room and had to empty out your insides first: gone the French girl who’d invited Luca home, gone the dolphins and mysterious island, gone Luca’s eighteenth birthday party with just the three of you. Gone his green eyes, his smile, his way of telling you, “Don’t worry, Mom, what’s the big deal? You don’t have to worry about anything. Ever.”

  From then on it felt like an enormous hole had opened up into which everything fell and was lost: day and night, the hours, lunch and dinner, this meaningless light cutting through the curtain slats. There’s not even a point to rising and fixing Luna something to eat. Soon she’ll be back, saying she was wrong, that school hasn’t started back up, that she had gone there and found the gate locked and a sign saying school was over, that school would never reopen again.

  Because there’s nothing to reopen, no reason to go on, nothing makes sense anymore. And you lie here in the dark, catching your breath, between one wave and the next.

  JIMMY PAGE’S DOUBLE NECK

  The cranked-up sound of an electric guitar at full volume—that’s the great dividing line, the axe stroke that splits humanity in half. Six billion people, thousands of different colors, thousands of different languages, thousands of different hairstyles—in an instant you can separate them into just two groups: those who love the cranked-up sound of an electric guitar and those who hate it. There’s no middle road. There’s no one out there who can listen to a blistering solo and remain lukewarm or indifferent. And if by chance those people do exist, Sandro couldn’t give a fuck about their kind.

  He loves the electric guitar. It’s the sound of life, so raw and strange, full of melody infused with hissing, magnetic stuff looping around the notes, with desire and rage and abandon, wrong turns and first shots and total disorder all mixed together, stuffed inside a piece of wood with six strings pulled tight across it and fired into the air at full tilt.

  Yet today the sound makes him nauseous.

  Perhaps because it’s three in the afternoon and he’s just woken up. He hadn’t woken up by himself, either. He’d heard someone calling, “Maestro, maestro,” and opened one eye and saw this boy with longish hair holding a guitar. It took a few seconds for Sandro to realize where he was and in what era, then he pulled a sweater on over his pajamas, sat on the bed, and began the lesson.

  Now he has to sit and listen to the same pentatonic scale being played over and over, the same shrill, creaky notes penetrating the fog of his mind one by one and getting lost there, after a night spent half asleep and half staring at the white ceiling, and the ceiling business is the better of the two, because whenever he goes to sleep he dreams of Luca.

  For the past six months it’s been like this, with the exception of the first few days. The first few days he hadn’t slept at all. He couldn’t even lie down without feeling as though he were drowning, so he sat up and read every article in the local papers, all the farewells Luca’s friends and acquaintances posted on Facebook and blogs and every other e-dump where people offload their thoughts.

  They keep publishing remembrances of Luca and photos of him walking down the street, slipping into or out of his wetsuit on the shore, swimming, picking up a seashell off the beach. And underneath each photo a volley of comments like, “Luca, since you’ve been gone the world’s not as beautiful,” and, “Luca, as of today a brighter star burns in the sky,” and other crap people always feel the need to write out of that repulsive instinct to make everything about them.

  Stupid clichéd crap—all alike in its effort to be unique. Nonetheless, as soon as a new one pops up, Sandro rushes to read it and spends hours studying it. He doesn’t know why, maybe simply out of a desire to make himself feel bad, in the hope that some small part of his brain will register a significant detail, that Luca had gone to Biarritz because he wanted to see a girl he really liked or because he had gotten into trouble here and wanted to hide out awhile or maybe his friends had nagged him so much that in the end they’d practically taken him by force. For Sandro, anything but the truth would do. Because the truth is he killed him.

  There are only so many ways to put it. Actually, there�
��s one way and that’s it. He killed him. And maybe it would have been quicker to use a gun or a knife or a chainsaw, but there are ways of effectively killing people without getting your hands dirty. Enter Sandro. He encouraged Luca, urged him to go, practically pushed him into taking that ill-fated trip by force.

  “You’ve got to go to Biarritz, Luca. I’ll lend you the money if that’s the issue. If your mom’s reluctant to let you go, look, go anyway. Mothers are society’s first line of attack, and society has one goal and one goal only—to keep you prisoner forever. You don’t realize it because it operates slowly. It starts out like this huge fence, so huge you don’t even see it. But it keeps closing in, until one day it turns out to be a cage and at that point it’s too late. Lights out. So, now that you see that fence closing in, you have to take aim, wind up, and knock it down. Knock it down, Luca, break on through and run!”

  That’s what he’d told him, word for word. Had an adventurer, a daredevil, a rebel who lives on the edge and takes great big bites out of life been the one to tell him, well, it still would have been hot air. But out of Sandro’s mouth it was a total joke. At forty years old he still lives at home with his parents and has never once taken a risk in his life—never, never, never.

  “Can’t you see it’s the thing to do, Luca? Go on, don’t be afraid, man up!”

  But manning up sounds easy when someone else is taking the risk. There’s nothing manly about it. It’s called being a dick, period. To add insult to injury, when Sandro had met Serena he acted the philosopher, spouting all that bullshit about a force that can’t be stopped, about that boy’s great destiny, about Wile E. Coyote’s umbrella . . . Sandro shudders at the thought. What an imbecile! What an idiot! No, Sandro is a killer.

  “Keep going, maestro?” asks his student, briefly taking his fingers off the strings and blowing on them to relieve the pain. The mini amp beside the bed sizzles like a deep fryer. His student is sucking back the saliva from his braces. He must have been playing the same scale for fifteen minutes. Sandro had told him to keep going until he said stop. But who gave any more thought to that?

  “That’ll do. Now play it backwards for me.”

  “I was playing it backwards.”

  “You sure? Then go back to playing it normally. But give it more oomph, more verve, more love.”

  The boy grips the guitar neck again with his slender, bent fingers, while Sandro returns to thinking about Serena. In the last few months he’d tried to see her but it had been impossible. She never shows up to work at the salon. They say she doesn’t leave the house anymore. The last time he saw her was at the funeral. Yet Sandro didn’t have the courage to face her that day. Instead he spied on her from a distance. The number of people there had made hiding the easiest thing in the world. He positioned himself behind a group of girls carrying a banner that said “You’ll always ride the waves of our hearts” and watched her following behind the coffin, eyes on the ground, hair disheveled, ushered by a woman who had wrapped an arm around her waist and was whispering into her ear. On her other side, a little pale girl wearing giant sunglasses and a black sweatshirt with the hood up.

  Sandro watched her arrive and had wanted to be the one to embrace her, to say something, yet—what with all his courage—when she passed him by, he stepped back and let the crowd swallow him. What can you say in such painful circumstances? Nothing makes sense. Every word sounds as stupid as that banner advertising waves of the heart. Besides, the truth is, Sandro was afraid. Afraid that extraordinary woman’s dulled look would suddenly ignite with life again, with a hateful light that stabbed his eyes, and she’d lunge for them and try to tear them out, or worse, open her mouth and tell him what was what. “Hey teacher,” she’d say, “you killed my son. Happy?”

  So Sandro stood back and watched the coffin from behind the people shaking their heads as if to say it wasn’t fair, and he imagined Luca’s perfect body in there, his long hair around his face, his eyes closed, total darkness. He had told him to go, to not let himself be confined by fences. Now he’s confined to a wooden box. Take a chance, he’d told him, live your life. And he’d shipped him off to die.

  Since then, every time Sandro manages to lie down, he thinks of Luca laid out in the coffin, and if by accident he falls asleep once in a while, he dreams about him.

  But in his dreams Luca’s not underground or floating lifelessly in the waves. No, that would be a relief. Instead Sandro’s dreams are terrifying, soul-crushing. He sees Luca jogging happily or with his friends at night, drunkenly laughing about nothing, or behind a paddle boat at the beach with a girl he’d known all of ten minutes. He dreams of him sleeping with one, two, three women at a time—a blonde, a brunette, a redhead. He dreams of him holding a pen and notebook, leaning against a motorcycle on a dusty back road in the middle of Mexico, under a wild blue sky where the stars pop like popcorn. He dreams of him shaking hands and collecting his diploma, then the diploma turns into a trophy, then into a newborn baby, and so on and so forth, all these beautiful things Luca was bound to have done, which were awaiting him just a little farther down the road of his twinkling life. But on his way he came across a blockade, a blockade in the form of a shitty substitute teacher, and Luca’s road ended there, and Luca along with it.

  Sandro wakes up from these horrible dreams covered in sweat, his heart rate a hundred. He stands and looks around, unsure where he is until he sees the walls papered with records and magazines, the guitar in a corner, little Ivan’s letter that landed here from Reggio Emilia on a balloon nine years ago and is still awaiting a reply, and the shame kills him. Except he doesn’t really die. Sandro’s still here. For no just cause his sorry ass life goes on.

  “Maestro, can we play a different scale?”

  “Sorry?”

  “Could you teach me another scale? I know this one pretty good.”

  Sandro stares at his student, trying to bring him into focus. Then he turns to the door and shouts, “Coffee!” He waits a minute before shouting again. His mother doesn’t answer, but the sound of things being moved around in the kitchen implies she’s heard him.

  “It’s too soon,” he tells the boy. “The pentatonic scales are very important. We’ll do the second once you’ve nailed the first. Go on, start over.”

  The boy nods, sucks back his saliva, and looks down at his instrument again. But before playing he raises his eyes a moment and observes Sandro. Even from that angle, even for just a second, Sandro recognizes that look under his pimply forehead and knows the moment has arrived for this kid. Sooner or later the moment always arrives. It depends on how sharp the student is, how gifted, yet it’s always just a matter of time. Even if for Sandro time didn’t do shit.

  He’s been playing guitar for twenty-six years. Twenty-six! How pathetic! He started playing in junior high after his uncle Roberto told him about Jimmy Page. Uncle Roberto had long hair and wore a leather jacket and skull T-shirts he picked up at a place in Florence called Hell ’N’ Suicide. Nineteen years old, he aspired to be a rock photographer so he could tour with bands and hang around the music scene he loved to death. The one thing he owned more of than skull T-shirts were records. Had he spent less on accessories and purchased an actual camera, he might have become a photographer. But he wound up doing landscaping with his dad. The two of them would climb to the tops of trees to remove pinecones. One day he fell from a branch, no safety rope, and now he’s stuck in a wheelchair. Twice a year he travels to Medjugorje. He’s never seen Our Lady but he met a one-legged woman from Antignano there and now they live together and build giant crèches year-round, with waterfalls and mountains and figurines that run by themselves.

  But back then Uncle Roberto was a wild man. They were having dinner at his grandmother’s that night to celebrate his birthday and Uncle Roberto showed him a photo of Led Zeppelin that he kept in his wallet. There was Jimmy Page holding this insane double-neck guitar.

  “Jim
my Page slays a ton of pussy. Jimmy Page slays so much pussy that every night he walks into his hotel room and finds twenty or thirty chicks who want to sleep with him because they know that if they sleep with him, at the next concert Jimmy Page will dedicate a song to them. And Jimmy Page sleeps with all of them—three, four, seven at a time—never the same number—that would be bad luck—while the rest wait on the floor and get it on with each other. But afterward at the concert Jimmy Page can’t play enough songs to dedicate one to each. Led Zeppelin’s songs are never-ending; they play ten, maybe twelve a concert, when there’s, like, minimum thirty chicks a night, and Jimmy Page is a man of his word. He attaches importance to dedicating a tune to each chick. So what does Jimmy Page do? Jimmy Page gets a double-neck guitar, and he plays one neck a little and the other a little, so that every song counts for two and he can kill two pussies with one stone. See how sly Jimmy Page is, Sandro?”

  Sandro didn’t have an answer ready. He sat there, speechless. But he understood perfectly: he had to learn how to play guitar.

  He started out playing a used Eko acoustic. Every day he practiced and studied, and even if at first it was all burning fingers and notes as derelict as the instrument they issued from, Sandro smiled and persisted, confident he’d get good over time, that his hair would grow out and he’d get an electric guitar and finally the moment would come when he’d have a double neck to keep up with all that pussy dying to drop into his arms.

  Except things didn’t go down that way. This here has nothing to do with math, that bogus realm where one plus one always equals two, where playing ten years automatically means you’ll be ten times better than when you started. Not music. Because besides practice and hard work and determination, there is this totally unfair, malicious factor that worms its way in and couldn’t care less about dedication or hard work. And that factor goes by the name of talent. And Sandro, poor bastard, had none. He was utterly hopeless. Years went by, enough time for his hair to grow long and short again and fall out, and yet Jimmy Page’s double neck never materialized. Sandro’s slow and clumsy fingers struggled to find the right places on one neck, never mind two.