Me, You

  Daniele was singing one of his own songs which the others already knew, and in that very good passage of the refrain they sang along with him. Caia was next to a boy I had never seen before. When I finished my wine, I undressed and got into the smooth water. I moved carefully so as not to disturb the surface and with every frog kick I glided swiftly, meeting no resistance. I wound up swimming far out. Opening my eyes under the water, I saw a luminosity. By the time I understood what it was I was in its midst—a swarm of jellyfish. Feeling my hands on fire, I wheeled around and broke into the fastest stroke I possessed. I got away but I was covered with stings. Seeing the others in the water, I warned Daniele about the jellyfish which were moving toward the beach. Once on shore I checked my skin: like having fallen into a bed of stinging nettles, red welts everywhere except on the face. I dried myself in order to get dressed; my clothes weighed heavily on me.

  In the meantime the luminosity had come closer to the shore and everybody got out of the water. Caia came out holding a boy’s hand. Seeing me, she came up to me and quietly said, bending over me, “Don’t judge me. I’m a girl and this is a summer holiday.”

  Of course I don’t judge you, Chaiele, I’m on your side. I’m your serf, I’m the stage set behind you, I’m your worst dance partner, your guardian. All of this went through my head in response to her remark, but the only thing that came out as I offered her my towel was, “Don’t catch cold, Chaiele,” which only she could hear.

  In reply, she whispered tenderly, “You, mine.”

  Turning back to the boy, she wrapped the towel around her shoulders. Mine were a hairshirt of needles, and above, the stars were a cluster of jellyfish. I must have had a fever to see them like that.

  I went home and dropped on my bed stark naked. I heard Daniele come back in the middle of the night. He was astonished to find me still awake. He turned on the light and saw the grotesque red mottling.

  “I wound up in the middle of them,” I said.

  “Jellyfish? Why didn’t you say so right away, damn it, what did you put on?”

  “Nothing.”

  He went to the bathroom, found a salve, and tried it out on one area. It felt better. I was grateful for his attentions. I fell asleep as he was saying, “One more day of this and you’d go back to the city in an ambulance.”

  The next day he told me I had talked in my sleep. I was unable to pretend indifference. I was alarmed. I asked him what I had said. He didn’t want to tell me and began teasing me. Then in a burst of laughter he admitted he hadn’t understood one damn thing. I had been speaking in some invented language.

  “You’re a Ukrainian,” was the first crazy thing that came to his mind. “You even had another voice, deep. I thought you might have caught cold.”

  In the morning it was raining. Low clouds dropped showers, got caught on the pines, then moved on. The streets on the island gleamed, the plants gave off a perfume of earth revived. The resin of the pines clung to the air, arousing a desire to make plans for the day—go up to the hills, go across the chestnut grove, or to the hot springs. The island was full of hot springs, even in the sea, near the shore. The rain announced that summer was waning. “Aùsto capo ’e vierno,” Nicola used to say, August is the beginning of winter.

  I went to the fishermen’s beach. Few of them had gone out, most stood in front of their houses amid the beached boats. They had pulled them up on the sand. I ran into Uncle, who had come to discuss the price of a new motor. It was a rare treat to spend time with him. After the negotiations, we said good-bye to Nicola and I accompanied Uncle all the way home. I had inherited the same name as his, a burdensome bequest. I had to calculate the distance between his accomplished manhood and my raw youth, exacerbated by my frequent silences. He must have thought that his nephew was no great tribute to his name. The old timidity I always felt in his presence, for once, that day, was on vacation. We talked about the next fishing trip, trolling for tuna and garfish which would close the season. The day was slow to end. I felt he was in a mood to chat and tried to get him to tell me something about the war.

  First of all he said that trying to find answers from others is like wearing somebody else’s shoes. Answers you have to find for yourself, made to your measure. Those of others are uncomfortable. He found my obsession with those years unhealthy.

  “I would gladly have ceded them to you, I would have swapped with you, and in your place I wouldn’t want to know a thing. For me, those years were torture.”

  He had hated to say “sir,” had been ashamed of wearing a uniform, and often took it off at the risk of a court-martial. The eighth of September, the day of the armistice, was the day of deliverance. For him, fascism had been a scarecrow tarred black so as to be the opposite of leftist red. Until the disaster of the war he had regarded it as a tattered travesty of Roman history. Then fascism made the fatal error of taking itself seriously and mistaking itself for a warrior.

  “My mother, your grandmother, Ruby Hammond of Birmingham, Alabama, gave me a taste for freedom, for individual worth, for making one’s own way in the world. I could not have been born into a less fitting period. All those uniforms, rallies, party memberships were bad jokes repeated all day long. I stayed out of it as long as I could by going to France and Switzerland. My mother had taught all of us her English and the French of a proper upbringing. At that time it was rare, and a major advantage.”

  Even in Paris fascism nettled him. An agent tried to enlist him as an informer because he frequented Italian circles. Disgusted, he left Paris and transferred his business to Switzerland.

  Then the war broke out, he was called up, he proffered excuses, delays, and finally had to put on the hated uniform.

  “I saw no enemies and I shot no one. I know that’s not enough for you, but it is for me.”

  Uncle had managed to remain detached from his time, to treat it with pure contempt, not for political reasons, but because of a natural, physical aversion. He had also managed to avoid suffering from isolation, an ill that befalls those who despise their own times. It was impossible to use him as a model. His was an elegance of mixed blood that glows for only one generation. We, the sons, grandsons of that grandmother, carried only vague traces of that successful crossing of an American and a Neapolitan.

  Uncle shunned the reigning conformity of his contemporaries because of his very nature. He sabotaged fascism where it was most sensitive and most pathetic—in its virility—by bedding the wives and mistresses of officials, even famous ones. These things he did not tell me, they were known, handed down. I asked him if he had ever had enemies. There was someone who held him a grudge, the usual stories of adultery, he said, someone who wanted to shoot him, and he remembered an agitated scene in a hotel, right out of an operetta, with a friend of his who flung herself into the bed, taking the place of the other woman, minutes before the woman’s lover burst into the room. Personally, he never considered anyone an enemy. He had, however, hated his uncle, who, on the premature death of his father, had taken over the business and had humiliated him, forcing him to leave. He had really hated him. He was young then and he was right to feel that way. Later he did not experience hostility.

  “Not even toward the Germans?”

  Not even them. Yes, he knew about the war and thought they had deserved a divided Germany and the Nuremberg trials. But he was one of the few soldiers in that war who had not known them. And so he couldn’t feel hostile. Such feelings had to be awakened by personal experience, not history.

  “To hate for political reasons, to hate in the abstract, is something I don’t understand, something I don’t know how to imagine.” He spoke calmly as we wended through the island’s alleys, avoiding puddles. For once we wore shoes because of the rain. Our feet were encased for the first time after weeks of going unshod and they clamored for air, earth, and sea.

  “May I ask why the war interests you so much?”

  I had no short, easy answers like the ones he gave. I only said, “Because it’s
your history, the only one we can learn from voices rather than from books.” I could have added that it was the only one I could challenge, because there were still witnesses, victims who had survived, murderers in good health. And they could be found under the clothing of the tourists who came to bare themselves to the sun, and under the name of a foreign girl you could easily fall in love with, but none of the grown-ups taught you how to recognize those tourists, how to know what world you were in. I had to keep asking people who no longer wanted to give answers, and all the while history was sweeping away the dust along with the ashes of the cremated, forests grew over mass graves, all of life forged ahead, hiding what lay behind. And I was as stubborn as a mule but without reason, for mules rebel when the load is too heavy, whereas I had no load at all. If I had no reason, why then was I so stubborn? Because of love, no doubt, but also because of a snarl of torment and a touch of incipient rage—the froth of my rapid growth during that summer.

  Uncle told me that enemies were bothersome, they required too much attention and emotion. Let someone else make the effort of being your enemy, of expelling the hatred in his body. And he squatted like someone sitting on a toilet, in part as a joke, because he liked to laugh and make fun of the silly, stupid things people do when they’re being serious.

  “You’re too young to have enemies. How old are you, sixteen? You should find yourself a girlfriend. Daniele tells me that you hang around with his friends, but those girls don’t give a hoot about you. They go for the older ones. You’d be better off going around with boys and girls your own age before the summer ends.”

  He was once again talking to a boy from the distance of an adult. I couldn’t make him resume his previous manner, yet I had a tremendous urge to talk to him about Caia, ask him about her.

  We had reached the gate where he was staying, a cool little cottage. For him the summer was a complete separation from his family. His work took him all over Naples, but when it came to vacations, he devoted his time entirely to himself. His wife was in the mountains with their other sons. Daniele, who preferred the sea, stayed with us. If I had talked to him about Caia, about a girl, he would have remained with me longer, he would have talked to me from his experience, would have taken me seriously, because he took love seriously. He would certainly have told Daniele later on. I had to forgo talking to the one person who could have clarified my thoughts and explained what was happening to me. He looked up at the north wind that tore away the clouds, revealing blue between the gaps, and said as he left, “See you tomorrow when we go fishing.” And he extended his hand to shake mine, a significant gesture he had never made before. I was changing in his eyes too, but I didn’t know how, except for that cockeyed one-sided love of mine.

  It would suddenly happen that my voice dropped, and soon after changed back. It would happen that my hands fell into a new position, folded under my armpits like someone trying to warm up. It would happen that I rubbed my nose with the back of my thumb even though it didn’t itch. I would absentmindedly make strange, pointless movements. I had the impression of hearing Caia’s voice from far away, but she wasn’t speaking Italian and yet I thought I understood her. Was I losing my mind? If that was the case, it wasn’t so bad; on the contrary, it induced a kind of generalized love, not a desire for Caia’s body, but merely to be near her, offer her my help, encourage her, cheer her up. I felt growing in me a maturity that gave rise to such thoughts as: You can count on me, I won’t abandon you.

  What could I possibly do for her, what kind of crazy ideas were taking shape in my head? The more I resisted them, the bolder and stronger they became. I felt the weight of many years. An intense feeling of shared intimacy kept my thoughts focused on Caia. I found myself moving more slowly. In her presence my breathing was even; away from her it was agitated. I would clasp my knees the way Uncle did and would stare at the design left by the moray’s teeth. It was a tattoo, an indecipherable red letter.

  I was changing for her. Caia was turning me into someone else and it wasn’t just love that was involved. When I said to myself, “Chaiele, Chaiele,” the tenderness of a father welled up in me, a father who had a little girl to bring up, to put to bed, leaving on the hallway light.

  My body was as immature as before, but the life inside it raced ahead commanded from outside, from far away. I could feel the onset of an icy anger, kept under a control that did not diminish it but, on the contrary, kept it alert, like the nerves in my teeth when I sucked ice.

  One night I was allowed to go with Nicola to set the lines. A whole night on the sea. Daniele had gone once and did not recommend it. It was nothing but work, pitch-darkness, and silence. “You don’t feel like saying a word, and it’s not like night fishing when you go out for squid with lanterns. It’s just a lengthy preparation for the next day’s fishing.” It was preparative work and I wanted to participate in it. In addition, I thought I might gather a bunch of impressions to bring back to Caia. Nicola generally left at ten o’clock and returned just before dawn to pick up Uncle and go back out with him at first light. In those intervening hours the fish were supposed to have hooked themselves on the long lines dropped to the bottom.

  We left on the absolute calm of a summer evening. The bow of the boat did not move out of the sight line of the Forio shoal on the other side of the island. I held the rudder along the coastline while Nicola cleaned the bait, then he took over the tiller. In the dark he looked for the landmarks that indicate the shoal by their alignment. A lighthouse, the light of a church, the twin-peaked outline of Mount Epomeo: these were the landmarks that were supposed to come together in an angle three miles off the island. Fishermen see the sea under a grid of lines; they follow routes without a compass.

  The darkness did not encourage an exchange of words. Nicola remained silent as he groped around in the dark. The moon had not risen, the sea was empty, the sky aglow. Far offshore we came upon two fishermen who were rowing back. Nicola pulled up to them. Their motor had conked out. They lit a kerosene lamp and Nicola went on board to lend a hand. He was the most gifted mechanic in the fishing village. I put the oars in the water and stayed close by. I heard their quiet talk mixed with the wash of the oars, mere fragments of words because at sea they understood one another from just the main syllable, the accented one, a kind of stenography taught by the wind which carried off the rest of the word.

  I thought about that evening on land with Daniele and Caia not wishing to turn around and look at the island. On the sea I did not feel distance. A third of a moon rose, losing its red rind on the pavement of still water. A powerful smell of bait filled the air now that we were stopped. With my fist I splashed the baskets with water. The wood of the oars fit snugly into the palm of the hand, legs placed one in front, one behind, to support the body’s push on the oars: and so there I was conforming to custom, to the métier, to the hour of the night; there was a place for me in that vastness of the sea, a place to put feet and hands and do what was needed. Caia was solid ground, eternal woman in a century that held me by the throat out of love and rage, but not out there, not on the sea. There, I was in the commingled nights of the earth’s numberless summers, I was a coeval of the planet, one of its wakeful species.

  An hour passed before Nicola made a temporary repair. I pulled up alongside and we set out as the other boat went in. The men barely exchanged a good-bye.

  We reached the shoal with a bit of aft wind. Nicola no sooner turned off the motor than he got busy with the line and the bait. The moon was small but bright. He threw in the signal buoy that had a strip of white cloth tied to the top of a stick. I was already at the oars, pushing off in the direction he called out. The boat moved swiftly and in the stern Nicola rapidly lowered the line of the rig with the bait attached. At the beginning of each coil he murmured a wish for top-quality fish in the morning: bass, porgy, grouper. We were making good progress and the wind cooled the work. I had to make an effort to turn my wrist when raising the oar out of the water because waves were coming
up.

  Halfway through, the moon disappeared and the wind picked up. Nicola was not smoking; not a good sign. I followed his directions: “Right,” “Left,” and the sea covered my labored breathing which was embarrassing me. When Nicola lowered the last float with the flag on top, the wind blew it out straight. The waves were growing heavier and I was exhausted. The motor kicked in; it was two o’clock and we were drenched from the spray.

  The sea came over the bow, the crests of the waves were ripped off by the gusts of wind. I had brought along a light woolen sweater which was already soaked, but Nicola told me to put it on even so. We no longer spoke. With a pail I bailed out the water that came in over the sides. The darkness augmented the swelling sea and the shock of the waves. In a storm, the sea is not a plain but a hill full of ditches. The island had vanished behind the wind.

  A breach was opening between the impressions I would have liked to describe to Caia and the raw experience that shuts down the senses and ignites the instinct of survival. I was no longer capturing fireflies in my fist to show a girl, I was under the yoke of a job that had to be seen through to the end. I scraped the bottom of my resources in the hope of finding more. My strained scrawniness was wearing to a thread over the empty lines. Nicola kept to his tiller and became part of the boat, more mast than man.

  At the top of a long wave Nicola saw the glimmer of the boat of the two fishermen. It was adrift. They had given up on the oars, useless against that wind, and the repair had not held up under all the battering. They had sought refuge under the small shelf in the bow where tackle was stored. Nicola came up on the windward side and shouted to them to come out and be ready to catch a rope. It seemed to me at once that if we towed them, we wouldn’t budge in that sea, that even without them we were barely moving. But there was nothing else we could do. The fishermen would not abandon their boat and it was impossible to bring them aboard ours. Their gestures told the whole story: Nicola would try to tow them and they would cut the rope if our boat couldn’t make it. The only thing they said to each other was, “Catch!” The rope wound up in the water but they managed to grab hold of it with a harpoon.