The Breaking of a Wave

by Fabio Genovesi

  “So you put her on ice,” concludes Rambo.

  Marino doesn’t say anything. There’s no point. He only answers Sandro when asked about the plaid.

  “What?”

  “The plaid blanket. She was wrapped in plaid.”

  “Ah, yeah, that was me. So she doesn’t catch cold,” he says ingenuously.

  Rambo and Sandro look at one another. They don’t speak. What would they say if they could? Some time passes before they manage to ask him how it’s possible no one has come looking for her yet.

  “Who would? Mom never had visitors and never went out. I took care of the shopping, bought her her cigarettes, withdrew the retirement checks. I mean, withdraw them.”

  Marino stops talking. He keeps his eyes on the ceiling, lies back down same as before, and yet it’s as if something is missing, as if the line between him and the world got disconnected and goodnight, Marino.

  Rambo motions to Sandro and the two walk over to the window, out of earshot.

  “Can you believe it?” he whispers. “I mean, can you believe it, Sandro?”

  Sandro doesn’t know what to believe but nods anyway.

  “Can you believe what a bastard he is? He’s had the house to himself for two months and didn’t say shit to us about it.” Rambo shakes his head in disgust.

  Sandro turns away, toward the window, and looks down at the meadow outside the hospital, at the doctors and nurses trampling it, smoking and talking on their cell phones, and the people coming and going, visiting family, friends, acquaintances, bringing them cookies or chocolates or flowers or magazines, telling them, ‘There you go, there you go, you’re looking well,” and staying for a while talking and listening to the sick. And even if they don’t show it, they’re in a hurry to bid them farewell and get back out of there as soon as possible, past the pine trees in the park, past the walls and the gates, out where they have things to do and days to fill and lives to get on with, all pretty much the same yet each absurd in his own way.

  Like Marino, whom Sandro has known since elementary school, the kindest person in the world who nevertheless wrapped his mom in plaid and stuck her in the freezer. Like Rambo, who only finds the situation scandalous because no one invited him to take advantage of it. Like himself, who when faced with this mess watches the sun setting out the window and wonders whether the stores are still open, because he has to buy a scalpel for reasons he can’t disclose.

  We’re all normal, until you get to know us better.

  DIRTY AND HAPPY

  Oh, today I see real well. Because the sky is all one cloud draped over the sun, the sea below is dark and lackluster and the same color as the sky, and the two hook up at the horizon to form a single gray wall. That’s how it always is: I see fine when there’s nothing to see.

  Anyway, today I walk on the shore and can pick out the wood washed up on the sand, which forms the border of the waves that brought it there, the clumps of seaweed that look like slimy wigs and beached jellyfish that are like huge contact lenses lined with purple. But I’m not happy. I prefer my days sunny. With the sun I see worse but feel better.

  Zot doesn’t get it.

  “The sun is bad for you, Luna, really bad. How can you possibly like it?”

  “Listen, the sun’s pretty, way prettier than the clouds. So it’s bad for me, what does that have to do with anything? Those tragic people who can’t eat sweets? They suffer in silence. It’s not like they go around saying that chocolate is nasty. If they did they’d be tragic and foolish.”

  “You’re not tragic, Luna.”

  “No. But maybe I’m foolish.”

  Zot nods at first. Then he shakes his head. Then he fixes his eyes on the sand and returns to studying the wood, the bits of toys and mysterious soda cans that the sea has carried to the shore. I try to do the same but have absolutely no desire to keep quiet.

  “Long live the sun, Zot! Long live the blue sky and the light and sunburns. I want to lie under the sun and get so burned I catch fire. How awesome would that be? One of these days I’m really going to do it!”

  “Joke all you want. Jokes always end in tears. You kids these days are all the same: you want to be rebels. You don’t do the things you’re supposed to do, and the things you’re not supposed to do you love to death. Reckless reprobates!”

  “We’re the same age, Zot, the same age.”

  “You can’t say that Luna. You don’t know that,” says Zot, picking up the pace. I don’t say anything because no one actually knows when he was born. Not exactly. First he told me his birthday was October 23rd, but that was only because the 23rd is the Day of Saint Ignatius, for whom the orphanage was named, and some well-dressed women would come by with candy and clothes, and for Zot that was the closest thing to a birthday he knew.

  “Whatever,” I say, “you’re more or less my age, so cut the old man speak.”

  “Exactly, more or less. Perfunctoriness is one of the great afflictions of your generation. What is the world coming to, dear Luna, what is it coming to . . . ”

  I shut my mouth and stare at the sand along the water’s edge, where the waves flatten out for a second then retreat. I don’t know what it’s coming to, but maybe I don’t care much either. First I’d like to know what’s coming next. And I have no idea. So I walk straight ahead with my eyes fixed on the beach, hoping the sea will clue me in. Because I don’t think anyone on land can help me.

  Of course there was Luca; my big brother used to know lots of things and now he knows even more. When you die, you suddenly know lots of new and super important things. For one, you discover what happens when you die. And after taking a look around, you also figure out whether aliens exist. Because, you know, if you die and all you find on the other side are souls from earth, that means that UFOs are make-believe. Or else aliens are pure evil and they all live in Hell, meaning Luca can’t see them, because he’s in Heaven. I wonder if, surrounded by all that splendid stuff, every once in a while he thinks about me.

  But suddenly, as I’m delving further and further into my nonsense thoughts, pain brings me back to the shore: a sting, a tingling sensation, a splinter on the bottom of my foot. I’ve stepped on a piece of wood. Flat, like a thin slice of bark. I pick it up, blow the sand off, hold it up to the sky, and notice something dark on it. I pull it toward my face till it’s almost touching my eye, then Zot arrives and we examine it cheek-to-cheek, so close our breathing becomes a single breath, if we’re able to breathe.

  No, we’re not. We’re breathless because what we’re looking at is totally out of this world. Yet there it is, right in front of us. Here I’d been walking and wondering if maybe Luca ever thought of me, and the whole time my brother was talking to me from the sea.

  “Yes, goddammit, yes!” thinks Sandro. Or thinks aloud. He punches the cabana. Why not? No one can see or hear him. He stands hidden behind the cabanas at the far end of the beach. From here he can spy the two kids down by the shore. They stop at the right spot, Luna picks something up off the ground, and they bend over to examine it, just as he’d hoped they would. “Bravo! kids, fucking A!” He punches the cabana again. He’d keep punching it had his fingers not been aching since the other night. Could be his right pinky is broken.

  Stone carving is no walk in the park. It’s actually pretty dangerous. Sandro had discovered that for himself Saturday night. After the hospital he’d gone to the hardware store. At the back of the store, past the rigging and chainsaws and hedge trimmers and other no-shit stuff, there’s a box of more refined tools, like brushes and paint, labeled FOR WOMEN. He bought a kind of chisel, went to the river and took the biggest stone he could carry back home, scoured the Internet for those stone statues with moon-shaped heads from Pontremoli, and spent the night carving one.

  Meaning he spent the night maiming himself. While trying to turn the head of that mutant freak into a moon, he hammered his pinky so h
ard he cried. It’s still swollen, he can hardly bend it. It looks like a useless appendage produced by accident at the end of his hand.

  Like Van Gogh his ear, Sandro sacrificed a finger to art, and that sacrifice didn’t even serve a purpose. He has to admit that those primitives weren’t primitive at all. Stele statues may look simple, like stone plates with round heads, hands, a knife carved into their chests, tits sometimes, yet after one night of work his opus still resembled a stone someone found by a river and batted around for a few hours. In the morning he flew into a rage, quit smashing it, and dumped it along with his master plan, which had failed miserably before ever getting off the ground.

  But there was no point in his getting upset. Actually, it turned out for the best. Marino explained it to him that afternoon from his sickbed. Sandro had been complaining about how he couldn’t feel his pinky anymore and told him how he’d broken it and while he was at it revealed his plan to his friends, and for half an hour Marino kept telling him how horrific and awful and morally reprehensible his idea was, and how egotistical he was, how for his own vulgar self-interest he was willing to deceive two innocent dreamers who were still reeling from the major loss they’d suffered. How could he even think of doing such a thing, how could he have made up his mind to—

  Marino would have gone on like that for who knows how long had Sandro not reminded him that he, Marino, had locked his dead mother in a freezer so that he could collect her retirement checks. Marino stopped talking for a moment, lifted his eyes to the ceiling, and then broke into that absent, far-off séance voice from the day before. And rather than criticize his friend’s sordid plan, he began to dispense very useful advice about how to execute it.

  “A stone makes no sense. Firstly, it is extremely difficult to carve a stone. Secondly, how could a stone that heavy be carried by the waves? And the inscription on it? Who do you suppose carved that? Luca in Heaven? Please, don’t give me that nonsense. Those two may be young but they’re not stupid.”

  Sandro stood there silently absorbing the lesson from this new Marino, cool and pragmatic as a KGB agent, before stammering out a question: “So what should I do?”

  “Simple. Switch to a piece of wood, a flat board, they’re easier to carve. Sculpt it to look like a stele statue, then throw some dirt on top of it, smash it up so that it looks old, then cover it with bits of moss and woodchips, like it had been dragged up from the bottom of the sea. Then you go to the kiosk by the merry-go-round. Go see that dickhead who sells leather bracelets with names on them. Ask him to make one for Sandro and one for—what’s Luna’s mom’s name? Serena, right? Okay. Then make them look beat-up too. A grater would work. Or sandpaper. Then stick the bracelets onto the wood, as if it had all gotten tangled together at the bottom of the sea. Voila.”

  Thus spoke Marino. And the quick and forceful way he said voila left no room for argument. Sandro, in a daze, tried to remember the instructions, then thanked him and ran off to fetch a wood board and the bracelets.

  Only carving wood isn’t so easy either. He tried cutting it but it came out horrible. Even with the bracelets tacked on, it looked cheap. Rambo confirmed his suspicions. He took one look and said, “What is this shit?” Then he threw it in the back of his jeep and told him if he brought him two more bracelets and a replacement board, he’d handle it himself.

  In all honesty, Rambo’s work is a hundred times better. The names are legible, the shape of the statue recognizable. Sandro couldn’t stop admiring it on the beach. Then he saw the kids coming on their bicycles. He ran downshore, set the wood in the sand—first upright, then, for plausibility’s sake, laid flat—hid behind the cabanas, and turned back to witness his triumph.

  And now he’s watching the kids study this incredible thing that the sea brought them, this miraculous, crystal-clear message delivered by Luca himself: they must go to Pontremoli to see the statues with moon-shaped heads. And they must take their mom and him—their catechist, Mr. Sandro—along with them.

  So long as there isn’t another Sandro in their lives, an uncle maybe, or maybe a friend. He’d thought of writing MISTER SANDRO on the bracelet just in case. Except that might arouse suspicions, so he figured no, better not. Better to trust the kids. They have such lively imaginations and believe in things. And Luna and Zot, man, they believe in everything. Such innocents, lambs ready to roast in Hell, two fawns crossing the highway, stopping to smile at the truck heading straight for them, mistaking the headlights for benevolent stars.

  In fact, Sandro, who’s helming that truck and pounding the gas, feels partly exultant and partly like an asshole: it was one thing to not speak up when Luna mistook the boar bone for a whalebone sent by her brother; it’s quite another to make stuff up out of thin air in order to get them to do his bidding.

  That’s why he’d sat on his plan for so long. Well, not that long. He’d sat on it for a solid few minutes, while he was writing up the list of things he needed. But he’s not to blame. The fact is he has to see Serena again, spend time with her, talk to her, make her understand what, at the moment, he himself doesn’t even understand.

  Because now is the time he has to do something. Anything. Sandro is forty years old, goddammit, forty. As a boy he’d think of the year 2000 and picture himself taking his kids to school in a spaceship and leaving them with robots for teachers. Instead we passed 2000 a ways back and we’re still stuck with cars that spit oil and toxins, and the most robots can do is whisk your fruit and switch on the sprinklers in your yard. Besides, Sandro doesn’t have any kids to take to school. He doesn’t even have a real job. Nothing real has ever happened in his life. No big break, no major decision. The few things that have changed changed because they disappeared: love run its course, hangouts closed or burned down, open fields transformed into shopping centers, people gone elsewhere to live or who quit living altogether. Sandro’s life isn’t about following a path; it’s about losing parts along the way and still trying to go on.

  So fuck it. No matter what, doing something, deciding to make a move, feels novel and right. Exploiting the innocence and pain of a little girl and her gullible friend may be cruel, but if Sandro wants to become someone who makes things happen, someone who leaves a mark on the world, he has to accept the fact that that is how the world works. It’s full of potholes and puddles, and getting your hands dirty is part of the game.

  Right now, in fact, from behind the cabanas, Sandro watches the kids swallow the bait and feels very dirty and very happy.

  PARIS OR PONTREMOLI

  Are you asleep, Mom?”

  “No. You?”

  “Not really.”

  “How come?”

  “I don’t know. Why aren’t you?”

  “Beats me. But you need to get some sleep.”

  “And you don’t?”

  “I do, but you have school tomorrow.”

  “True. In fact I’m going to sleep now. But can I ask you something first?”

  “Shoot.”

  “Actually, two things, Mom.”

  “Okay,” you say, “shoot.” But Luna doesn’t speak right away. You hear your child breathing on your neck, the soft noise she makes chewing the skin around her nails.

  Then: “Have you ever been to Pontremoli?”

  “Pontremoli? No, I don’t think so. I passed it on a train once. It’s in the mountains on the road to Parma. Why do you ask?”

  “Cause. Would you like to go?”

  “No.”

  “What do you mean No?”

  “I don’t know. Of all the pretty places in the world Pontremoli is the last place I’d go.”

  “Yeah but you don’t go anywhere.”

  “Fair enough. But if I were to go somewhere it wouldn’t be Pontremoli.”

  “Why not?”

  “How should I know? Why do you suddenly care so much about Pontremoli?”

  “No reason. But i bet i
s it’s a nice place. We should see it.”

  “Okay. And I bet is it’s not. Glad that’s settled.”

  You turn on your side and slam your knee against one of the boxes stacked beside the bed. You need to organize them better. Tomorrow you can take care of it. Tomorrow you can open them, take everything out and put things in order. It won’t take much: stick the clothes in the drawers, throw away some of the boxes. But just thinking about it makes you anxious, makes it hard to breathe. Spending an entire afternoon going through, piece by piece—you can’t handle it. Not now. Maybe tomorrow or the day after tomorrow. Maybe—

  “And the stele statues?”

  “Huh?”

  “The stele statues. Wouldn’t you like to see them?”

  “What on earth are the stele statues?” you ask, although you’ve heard of them before, maybe you read about them somewhere, maybe saw them on TV.

  “They’re these beautiful sculptures built years ago, three thousand years ago, maybe more. They’re in Pontremoli and I’d really really like to go see them.”

  “Oh God, Luna, look at you, a girl your age, of all the places in the world, that’s what you’re thinking about? You’re not drawn to Paris? New York makes you gag?”

  “No, but right now I’d like to go to Pontremoli.”

  “Good for you, Luna, good for you. Now go to sleep.”

  “Okay, but can we?”

  “Can we what?”