The Breaking of a Wave

by Fabio Genovesi

“Come on, keep me company.”

  “Fuck that,” Sandro repeats, leaning his back against the wall and sliding to the floor. He crosses his arms and stays that way.

  Rambo starts cursing again. He throws his army coat on and heads for the stairs. First he disappears and then, slowly, so does the sound of his combat boots on the stairs. The echo carries, as if it were coming from a narrowing tube. Finally there’s just the silence of the walls, of the three doors on the landing and the three carpets in front of them, two of which have nothing to say while the other, a fat liar, bids you WELCOME.

  Sandro is by himself in the shadows, which smell like a thousand lunches and dinners lumped together and topped with detergent. He’s sorry for treating Rambo poorly. He hadn’t done anything to deserve it. All he did was forget the keys in his car. It happens. Sandro forgets things all the time too. But Sandro couldn’t accompany him home, he didn’t have it in him and he didn’t feel like explaining why. Didn’t feel like telling him that his Vespa doesn’t work either, that after catechism he’d had to push it from Forte dei Marmi to Querceta, that the road stank of exhaust from the trucks going back and forth from the hills to the sea, that he sweated like a pig on the overpass. No, he hadn’t felt like telling Rambo that. He himself doesn’t want to think about it. All Sandro wants is for things not to be the way they are.

  For their cars, those rusty traitors, to not be stuck or defective or caked with dust or low on gas all the time. He’d like brilliant, powerful cars that also happen to be clean, like the ones bearing the rest of Europe and the civilized world forward. Fast cars with the latest technology that never break down, and if every once in a while they make a sound that’s just a tad off, they’re immediately swept into shops that look like clinics, where serious and honest mechanics in white lab coats replace a single part, and then they’re off again, actually everything continues running without ever having stopped, and the mechanics don’t pretend to have changed two parts if they only changed one or ask you to pay them under the table or leave you sitting here in front of a closed door wondering why the Vespa conked out, why the jeep died, why you’re always left to push and sweat and swear and get oil and sludge on your hands and try to switch them on again, hoping that maybe now, by some miracle, they’ll start, and you can go on for a little longer, just a little, just enough to give some meaning to the day.

  Sandro sits in silence, a silence that seems to be pressing in on him more and more and more and more. To keep from gagging he latches onto the one thing he has with him, the papers folded in his jacket pocket, and tries to read.

  It’s the paper Zot turned in at catechism. Last week Sandro had assigned them a paper for homework so that at least today they’d have something to talk about and he could fill up the hour and half, which was otherwise interminable. The topic was “The Best Day of My Summer”—sunny, clean, perfect. Except it wasn’t. No, actually Sandro is an idiot, because afterward Luna came up to him and regretfully asked him if she could make one up, since she hadn’t seen one good day that summer. Bravo, Sandro, genius topic. Why not ask an orphan to write about his latest adventure with Daddy? Or a kid in a wheelchair about his last soccer match?

  “Of course you can make it up!” he’d told her. “Actually, you know what? Come to think of it, it’s a totally dumb topic for a take-home essay. Don’t bother, scratch it. Use that time to do something you like, okay?”

  Luna smiled her slightly sneaky smile and didn’t do the paper. But neither did any of the other kids. Except for Zot, who had handed him these pages—twenty minimum—saying he was sorry but he had gotten carried away.

  And now Sandro is attacking those pages to distract himself. He pulls them out and finds a weird bulge in one corner. He flips to the last page. Underneath Zot’s signature is a candy stuck on with a piece of tape, milk-and-honey flavor. Sandro tears off the tape, unwraps the candy and pops it in his mouth. For a moment the sound of it between his teeth fills the silence while his eyes run over the crooked lines and he begins to read Zot’s paper.

  An entire page is taken up with apologies for not writing about the summer, but he’d spent the summer taking turns guarding the house with his grandfather, and the shifts are longer in the high season because there are more Russians around. Instead his paper is about last Tuesday, a really beautiful and important day, a sunny day for a nice field trip, though their destination could have been better kept, could have been better looked after, the signs more legible, and maybe a network of tour guides hired and . . . and Sandro, already bored, is about to skip ahead. But a few lines down he sees Luna’s name. He stops and goes back. Rather than how nice the day was, says Zot, he really wants to talk about the mysterious stuff that happened there.

  Because lately some very weird things have been happening to us, to me and Luna, and maybe I should keep them secret, but I think that if I tell them to you, our catechist, it’s like going to confession, right, Mister Sandro? So I’m confessing these things to you because I trust in the sacramental seal and that your eyes will only be a conduit and my words are reserved for the Lord. But not the milk and honey candy at the end. That’s for you.

  I digress; please accept my apologies. What I feel compelled to tell you is that some very peculiar things have been happening to us of late, and by us I mean Luna and me, and to keep attributing them to coincidence or chance is out of the question. Luna still tries to, but after last Tuesday it is all too clear. Because, and this must stay between you and me, Mister Sandro, or between the Lord and me, actually . . .

  And Zot launches—literally has liftoff—into pages and pages of stories about the city of Luni, about the goddess Luna who used to bring the living into contact with the dead, about the Romans and Etruscans, about a boy with white hair named Tages, about priests who studied lightning and bird flight. About the sea and waves bearing things to the shore, pans and lids and Serena burning her foot, about whalebones in Luna’s hair and about Luca, how he is the one who sent these things, God knows wherefrom, God knows why.

  In short, Mister Sandro, they’re signs, occurrences we cannot not believe in. Because when Jesus rose from the grave and went to find his friends, Saint Thomas didn’t believe it was him until Jesus said, “Come, feel my hands, put your finger into my wounds.” And Thomas did and then he believed, but Jesus wasn’t happy about it, and he said that if someone needs proof to believe then he isn’t a true believer. Who knows how angry he’d be with Luna and me, after all the proof we’ve had, if we still didn’t believe!

  Therefore they believe, and if they haven’t done anything about it that’s only because they’re too young. Had they a car, they’d immediately take off for Pontremoli to find statues with heads in the shape of crescent moons. Everything is connected. Miss Pheasant said so. They just don’t know how they’re connected, since they haven’t gone yet.

  We asked Grandfather to take us, and I can’t write down the words he used because it would be like writing them for the Lord, and Grandfather insulted the Lord about a hundred thousand times.

  We asked Miss Pheasant too, but she’s a substitute, so she doesn’t count for anything. Then we asked the gym teacher, Mister Venturi, but while I was explaining our reasons for going to Pontremoli, two kids grabbed my arms while another pulled down my pants and wrote something on my backside. I asked them what he wrote but they wouldn’t tell me, all they did was laugh. When I asked Mr. Venturi, he laughed too.

  And do you know what hurts the most, Mister Sandro? That once upon a time I was convinced that all kids are mean and stupid and like to treat others like dirt, but I just had to be patient and suck it up because that’s how kids are, and when they grow up they quit it and become kind and intelligent. I really believed that. And instead Mister Venturi and people like him make me think that won’t happen, that it will always be the same, that grown-ups can be cruel and do awful mean things too.

  I’ll stop there. Thank you for bein
g the Lord’s conduit.

  Sincerely,

  Zot

  Sandro rereads the last few sentences then folds the paper in two and returns to looking out at the dark landing again. But he doesn’t really see it. Instead he sees a kind of gigantic aquarium, and in that turbid water, walled with seaweed, little shiny fish are moving around aimlessly—Luna, Luca, Serena, the whalebone, the Etruscans, Pontremoli. They swim hither and thither but all end up getting snared by the soft ranks of seaweed merging together to form this one thing that keeps getting bigger and denser. It’s dark, slimy, gross, and Sandro is almost ashamed to look at it, since that thing is the diabolical idea taking shape in his head. It keeps expanding, covering everything, and now stands there before him.

  Zot said so himself: adults can do awful things. And that kid can’t even begin to appreciate how right he is.

  LIVES ON ICE

  If one day they actually find a way to shrink a submarine, like in that sixties-era film, and instead of launching it on a mission into a human body they sent it to plumb the depths of an ashtray in a dive bar at the end of a Saturday night, well, the stink couldn’t be much worse than the one that assaults Sandro and Rambo upon entering Marino’s house.

  His mom smokes four packs a day, four, except in May, the month of the Virgin, when she cuts back to three in honor of the Blessed Virgin Mary of Montenero. And everything in this house is enveloped by that sick acrid smell, like a coat of bad varnish poisoning the walls the furniture the sofa the lace pillowcases and lace curtains and in a matter of seconds it clings to Sandro and Rambo’s clothes as they wander around the living room trying to inhale as little as possible.

  Marino’s dad has been dead a long time, felled by a smoker’s affliction. The doctors took X-rays and told him he had to quite smoking immediately, only he’d never touched a cigarette in his life. Marino didn’t smoke either but by dint of living with his mom one day he’ll meet the same fate as his dad, while she goes on sucking down her four packs a day and feeling fine. Around the room there are thousands of flyers for organized trips to sanctuaries, forgotten cities in Umbria, thermal spas, one- or two-day bus trips she permits herself every month, only to spend the next week complaining in her tarry voice how uncomfortable the seats were, what invasive bores her fellow passengers were, how she ate poorly and slept worse. And while she grumbles she scans more flyers for the next trip, and the room is full of these colorful slips of paper with photos of a cross, an olive tree fronting a wall, Padre Pio with his hand raised.

  But Marino’s insurance card is nowhere to be found.

  Marino hadn’t, in fact, been able to remember if it was in one of the drawers in the living room or in his bedroom, where Sandro and Rambo now stand stiff, like two people who have just exited a time machine and are trying to figure out what era they’ve landed in. Because Marino’s room is identical to when he was in middle school: the same white furniture with the same stickers, the headboard painted with roses and a nightingale on top, on the wall above his bed a painting of Jesus made by his uncle Terzo, who owned a hardware store but loved to paint landscapes of the sea and mountains. But no one wanted the landscapes; all his relatives asked for were paintings of Jesus to hang above their children’s beds for communion or confirmation. It made Terzo livid, and he would vent his anger by saddling Jesus with a giant black cross and smearing the canvas with rivers of blood that dripped from the crown of thorns down his face and neck to his chest, a splatter scene that helped him stay sane yet without fail chewed through his little tube of red paint.

  On the opposite wall there are still posters of Bon Jovi and Kelly LeBrock in Weird Science, the movie where two kids use a computer to create this up-for-anything superhottie, clearly a complicated enterprise but more probable than the classic alternative, i.e., finding a real woman who’ll date you for who you are.

  While Rambo opens the dresser drawer to look for the insurance card, Sandro continues to ponder all this stuff, this room just the same as it was thirty years ago when they would come over for playdates. Seeing it like this feels funny yet somehow seems perfectly normal.

  He leaves Rambo there and goes to the kitchen for a glass of water. He drinks. It tastes rusty but it’s better than the stink of smoke that has stuck to his palate. He coughs. He looks out the window with a view of Versilia below and tries to empty his mind.

  Then he puts the glass in the sink and is about to return to Rambo when he passes in front of a gigantic freezer by the door. He stops, suddenly grabs the handle, opens it, and looks inside.

  Just like that, not looking for anything, not apprehending anything, not even intuiting anything. He’d overlooked the dirty plates in the sink, the moldy red sauce, hadn’t detected the basil plant dead of thirst next to it, its leaves scattered around the pot. Not even the gigantic freezer struck him as odd; it had been there since they were little and they would use it to make popsicles by stirring water, sugar, and lemon juice in plastic cups. Their popsicles always turned out gross yet they ate them all summer anyway. Sandro is thinking of those popsicles, of popsicles and nothing else, when he opens the freezer and the icy smoke drifts up to the ceiling and disappears, leaving him to look inside.

  Two frozen pizzas, Tupperware filled with homemade ragout, a small carton of mozzarella sticks, and finally this huge hard thing crowding everything out and touching the top.

  Marino’s mom, wrapped in plaid.

  Marino cries, his face hidden underneath the covers. He makes a low, continuous sound that is chilling enough on its own, but even worse for Sandro, since it’s the same sound that damn freezer made. It enters his ears and climbs up to his brain, where it will stick forever alongside the vision of Marino’s mom, her hard blue face encrusted with ice.

  As soon as he and Rambo had walked into the hospital room, Marino asked them with a nervous smile if they’d found his insurance card. They didn’t answer, but they must have looked at him in such a way as to make everything crystal clear, because he threw the blanket over his head and began making this continuous moaning sound, which has been going on for ten minutes now and may never let up.

  Yet it does, suddenly, as soon as Rambo asks, “Well, did you kill her?”

  For a minute nothing, then Marino tears the sheet away to reveal two bulging eyes. “What? Are you crazy? You guys are my best friends, my brothers, do you really think . . . that I . . . you’re both insane! Totally insane!”

  “Whoa,” says Rambo. “We were just at your house and found your mom in the freezer and you’re calling us insane?”

  Marino stares at him, then at Sandro, then raises his eyes to a spot just above them. His eyes narrow to slits and stay that way. His mouth stops trembling, his arms lie at his sides, and when he speaks his tone is flat and faraway, like in those films with séances where guys slip into a trance.

  “It wasn’t me,” he says. “I swear. It was this summer, when we went to the pine grove in Versiliana to study the pine trees.”

  Sandro nods. He knows it doesn’t matter what happened, he could never think ill of Marino, of someone who could stuff his dead mom into the freezer yet talks about studying pine trees because he’s too ashamed to admit that they had been steal pine nuts to sell to restaurants.

  “Afterward I went back home. I was filthy with resin. I said hi to my mom who was on the couch smoking and watching TV. She’d already laid out vegetable minestrone on the table. It’s what we start every meal with. It’s good for you and expands your stomach. I was starving. We’d really worked up a sweat that day at the pine grove.”

  “Yeah, and we hardly even turned up any pine nuts,” says Rambo. Sandro glares at him and signals for him to shut up, but Marino appears not to have heard.

  “I said hi to her and went to take a shower, a good long one, because the resin wouldn’t wash off. Then I went back to the living room and my mom was still there. She wasn’t smoking anymore but there wa
s a weird smell. Something burning. She had the butt between her fingers. It was all black. And her fingers were all black too. The cigarette had burned down to the filter and singed her hand, but she kept clutching it, her eyes glued to the TV. I shouted at her and tried to wring the butt from her hand. But it took a while since she kept clutching it, her hand was hard as a rock, it felt fake. I shouted, ‘Put it down, Mom! You’re burning yourself! Let it go, Mommy!’ And I pulled hard, but she wouldn’t let go. I was tugging and sweating, pulling on her hand, no idea what was happening. I mean, maybe I knew, but I didn’t want to admit it. I didn’t want to call an ambulance or the police. I didn’t want to call anyone. I didn’t want them to answer. I didn’t want to have to tell them what had happened. If I didn’t know what had happened, how could I explain it to them? What had happened was, everything had come crashing down, that’s what had happened,” he says. Then he stops. He keeps staring at that same vague spot, and sneers with his mouth closed.

  “What did you do after that?” asks Sandro. Marino takes a deep breath. They can see his skinny, prone body rising under the sheet. Then with the same breath he responds: “After that I sat down at the table and ate the minestrone.”

  “Wait a sec,” says Rambo. “Your mom was lying dead on the couch and you ate dinner?”

  Marino nods once, his eyes still fixed on the ceiling.

  “Shit, you must have been starving.”

  For a while no one says anything. Only the sound of the freezer rises up from Marino’s throat, once again giving Sandro goose bumps.

  “I ate my bowl. And hers. And while I was eating I told her about Versiliana. What a beautiful place it was. How I’d take her one day. I kept it up all night, and I think . . . yes, I think that was the moment. I mean, had I called somebody right away, even you guys, maybe things would have turned out differently. Had I cried and screamed maybe. Instead I sat down at the table, ate my minestrone, and started talking to my mom. Meanwhile I kept thinking about what would happen. Now they would come and carry her out of the house. Forever. I would never see her again. And the same thing would happen to me. Not that they would carry me out of the house but that I’d be forced to leave—without Mom’s retirement money, who was going to pay the rent? And where would I go then? For her it was simple: they’d put her in a wood box and that would be the end of it. But me?”