The Scent of Your Breath

At the beach at Roccalumera there was an enormous NO SWIMMING sign, and yet it was the most crowded beach in the whole of eastern Sicily. There was no sand, there were no rocks. Just pebbles. Pebbles that got stuck between your toes, that dug into your tender skin.

“Here, put on your rubber shoes so it won’t hurt,” you said.

I always hated those horrible rubber shoes. They made me feel ugly, like one of those old German tourists with little white hats and those inevitable rubber ballet shoes.

I preferred to hurt myself, and when I did a lot of walking I even ended up liking the sensation, that gentle torture that I inflicted on my childish skin.

I didn’t like going down to the beach in the morning; the ideal time for me was early afternoon, straight after lunch.

“You can’t go swimming, not right after lunch,” you, Grandma, and my aunts all chorused, while the men inside snored, back from their night’s fishing.

“No, I swear, I’m not going to go swimming. I’m going to lie down in the sun,” I said seriously.

“You’ll get sunstroke!”

“I’ll wet my head every now and then,” I replied wisely.

I set off with all the paraphernalia, accompanied by Francesco and Angela, who had previously dispatched me to persuade you to let us go.

We crossed the street, the three of us hand in hand, and once we reached the shore, we threw the inflatable mattress into the water and lay down on it. We played at betting who would get their belly wet first. The water was extremely cold and it felt as though all the food we had just consumed was freezing in our stomachs. After initial unpleasant experiences, we had grown used to jellyfish. Around here they’re small but lethal. We brought olive oil, Nivea Creme, and butter, mixed them all up together, and greased the places where we got stung. In contact with these substances, our skin fried like bacon and eggs. Then we put a hot stone on top, gritted our teeth, and beat our feet on the ground.

Francesco, small as he was, managed to impale the jellyfish with his dagger. On the water’s edge there were dozens of decomposing jellyfish, melting in the sun and giving off steam.

While he was cruelly killing jellyfish on the beach, Angela and I ran in under the shower, sure that no one could see us. We let the water run over us and sang the theme song from a television music program: “Brancamen-ta! Ta-ra-ta-ta…,” we crooned, writhing like snakes in a bowl.

You and my aunts arrived at about five o’clock. From a distance, washed out by the sultry air, you looked like characters from a Sergio Leone film. The heat, the silence all around, you armed with your fighting gear: sunglasses, cushions for your backs, hair bands, eye masks, sarongs, transistor radios, Tupperware containers full of biscuits, fruit, and panini made with oil, tomato, and salt — my favorites, the ones that burned my chapped lips.

We looked at one another from a distance and felt like thoughtless beasts, instinctively assessing an opponent’s weak points. After a few minutes you started running and shouting at us, “You scoundrels, you’ve been swimming, haven’t you!”

“Eight wasted years! You’re eight years old and you’ve wasted them all!”

“I’ll have your soul, you wicked child!”

“Mum, how are you going to take my soul?”

It seemed a lovely image, you making a hole in my stomach and pulling out my soul with your hands, as though it were a rope.

We felt an exponential joy: the joy of our aquatic play and the joy of transgressing your stupid rules. Why…if you didn’t want us to go swimming after eating, why on earth did you bring food to the beach?

At seven o’clock, when the sun started shrinking and the sea turned gray, down came Grandma, the Boss.

The Boss was no taller than us children, she had short fair hair, big green eyes, her skin was smooth as silk, and her breasts were worn out from having six children in as many years, her belly swollen and hard. And her thighs…the most beautiful thighs I have ever seen. Slender and sleek, without a hint of cellulite, toned and soft.

The Boss came down to the beach even more heavily armed than you, with jars of water, trays full of food, boxes of ice creams, and big bunches of bananas. The Boss filled us with awe, and we were forced to eat the bananas beneath her gaze.

“Eat it up for your Nonna, it’ll do you good.”

At the eighth banana, if one of us said, “That’s enough, Grandma, I’m full,” she cast you a glance so grim that you wet yourself, and it was a good thing our swimsuits were wet already.

Our stomachs became endless storehouses of food — we could have kept going for months. It was her way of expressing her affection.

Then, down came Dad and my uncles with their own gear: cameras and movie cameras. They said they wanted to photograph us children, but in fact their lenses were always trained on the bottoms of the women in the sea. You got furious, but still you took the sun, mumbling, “What’s so lovely about that bum, what do they see in it? It’s flabby, sagging…”

Every weekend the band came and set up in the central courtyard surrounded by the villagers’ houses. I watched it all, sitting on the concrete step, letting my legs dangle because I couldn’t touch the ground with my feet. There was Signor Sibilla, who, when his wife went away, flirted with his neighbor, a fat, vulgar woman who gave off a strong, rancid smell. Then there was the Witch, who came down covered in sequins, her eyes surrounded by gleaming, green eye shadow, her black, black hair down to her shoulders, always wearing tight, fluorescent clothes. She sat down next to the band’s keyboard player and tried to follow the music so she could play the songs on her pianola the next day. She was our band for the rest of the week.

Grandma’s thighs, on these occasions, were sublime, especially as she danced. “Put your hands in the air, shake them all about…Do it when Simon says, and you will never be out.”

They were sublime both to me and to Signor Loy, the Sardinian who looked like a tarantula. Every weekend the band had to leave earlier than planned because Granddad started punching Signor Loy, who, undaunted, went on slobbering over Grandma.

Queen of the summer, she was more radiant than the rest. She gleamed, and her brilliance was more powerful than the sun’s reflection. More glittering than the Witch’s sequins.

Fifteen

Sometimes I think about you. No, that’s not true, not sometimes: I think about you all the time. And every time I do a tear slips out, from only one eye. If Thomas asks me why I’m crying, I reply that it’s nothing, that I’ve focused my eye on a point on the horizon and that’s why my iris is stinging. I’m thinking about you and your unbroken solitude.

The pizza has just turned up and you’ve been searching through the money box to find coins because the boy has no change. When he (and his pimples) have disappeared, you laugh and say, in Sicilian dialect, “Che scemu carusu”—“What a stupid boy.”

You sit down on the sofa with your legs crossed and switch on your TV, trying to find a film that might move you. A costume drama, preferably, with a tight, romantic plot. Francesco and Morino are sniffing at the tomato on your pizza; you hold out a little bit of sauce on one finger. You’ve already opened the windows, the terrace with the little garden is a few feet away, and you catch the freshness of the newly watered lawn. It’s lovely to see Ornella lying on her belly on the carpet, head on a cushion, face pointing straight at the TV. But her eyelids are closed — she’s just gone to sleep.

I love hearing her tell you to fuck off when you call her to go to bed, to get between the sheets. She rises to her feet, looks at you with her direct, imperious eyes, and says, “You’re a fucking idiot, why the hell did you wake me up?”

You don’t reply, because if you did the two of you would come to blows.