While the Shark is Sleeping (3 page)

Today my favourite fairy tale is a little island in the Sulu Archipelago, nameless, because it would be impossible to give names to all 7,100 islands that make up the Philippines. It’s isolated in an immensity of blue and a long way away from all the other islands, which are in turn a long way away from our world. And the photograph’s been taken from up high, so high that it can only be an angelic perspective. Before travelling to other places, Mamma and I always pass by the Sulu Archipelago and caress our idea of happiness.

Ever since she was a girl Zia fancied the brother of one of her friends: Mauro De Cortes. But he was already engaged to a girl that he later married. To console her Mamma would say, ‘How could he be interested in you when he already has a girlfriend?’ Then Mauro got married, had some children, got separated, was sad, went out with Zia a few times and I know they even made love. Mamma would say to her, ‘He’d commit to something serious with you except that he’s so sad!’

But then Mauro got re-engaged, remarried, had more children and got separated again but he still never really seriously considered Zia.

History tells us that we Sardinians are no sailors, that we withdrew inland for fear of the Saracens when actually we could have built a fleet and confronted them instead of escaping into the mountains.

Just look at my mother. Even though my grandfather was a true man of the sea, she’ll only go in as far as she can while still touching the bottom and she flaps around pathetically without getting anywhere. Papà refuses to come to the beach with us. Not even when we were little, when all other fathers do.

He says, ‘You get too carried away with this business about the Sardinian sea. It’s because you haven’t been anywhere else in the world. I’ll tell you how you go to the beach!’

‘And how’s that then?’ He teases us because we go to Poetto beach with the full complement of towels and cream or when it’s crowded. And quoting the Bible he sermonises that he won’t go to Sodom and Gomorrah, with all that human flesh on display in the bars. Then when he’s sure we’re not around, when there’s absolutely nobody around, for instance if the mistral’s blowing at 180 an hour, or it’s raining, or it’s a Monday, then we’ll see him returning with his shoes full of sand and his clothes dripping seawater.

‘Were you at the beach?’

‘Of course!’ And he looks you up and down with snobbish detachment.

Mamma says, ‘Maybe he’s right. Maybe today was better than any other day!’

But nobody will ever know, because nobody was there.

I don’t go to the beach with him either, but if we decide it’s summer I wait for him stretched out on the bed in my swimsuit, and it doesn’t matter that the role of the sun is played by the heater and the sea is outside the window.

‘You have to be the contemplative type,’ he tells me. ‘One of those that just look at the sea and that’s all, and if the water’s not warm they won’t go in.’

Then I think about how my grandfather, when he was a prisoner, had to go under icy showers, in winter, in Germany, and I say if he could endure it, I can endure it too. So in my swimsuit I run along the corridor in bare feet, jump under the cold water and call out to him, so he can see how tough and strong I am.

Mauro De Cortes on the other hand is one of those people that are really serious about the sea. He has a sailing boat he shares with his girlfriend, moored at the little port of Su Siccu. One day I ran into them when I was on my way to see Nonna, who lives nearby, and I said I’d like to watch them set sail. All the sea-going types were greeting each other and adding some comment about the wind, or about a problem with the boats, and even though they were all right there, it seemed to me like they were already far off, away into infinity. Mauro’s girlfriend jumped across that ‘dread, immense abyss’, so similar to death, that separates the pier from a boat’s gangplank, she removed the fenders, released the mooring ropes, and stood smiling and serene at the helm, while Mauro said goodbye and said I should try it too some time. Then they sailed further and further away and disappeared. Zia decided to do a sailing course herself, just in case she ever started going out with De Cortes. But the poor thing throws her guts up whenever she’s anywhere near the sea.

Sometimes we do it in the car. One of those American liberation army jeeps.

‘It’s like flying low in a helicopter,’ he says, ‘but you can look around you, over the roofs of the other cars, at the level of the lamp posts. No one can see you. They don’t think to look up at you, even though you’re flying low, only a little bit above them.’

Then he gives me instructions. He says if I want no man to be able to resist me, even the man I eventually fall in love with, if I want to become a swan, in other words, I have to be a whore in bed instead of immediately blurting out the story of my life, and above all I have to learn that there’s all sorts of crap in the world and I have to be able to endure the greatest number of things possible. That’s why he wants me to undress – slowly, like a professional – while he’s driving. That’s why he whips me, or gets me to kneel down and give him head and then the next day he makes a point of meeting me and not even saying hello, or he won’t contact me for ages. I also have to be able to endure psychological torture.

In addition he says that I absolutely must tie back my hair and lose weight, and if at our next meeting I still have hair falling in my eyes and haven’t lost at least one kilo – and he’ll be able to tell from how plump my cheeks and arse are – he’ll send me away without screwing me, or he’ll kick me around or he’ll show me what one hundred strokes of the brush really means.

But nor should I become soft, I have to learn to give him orders. When we part company he often gives me the instruments of torture we’ve used – a leather band, or a Japanese chopstick, or the flat hairbrush, or the whore’s clothes he’s brought along to get me out of my pinafore dresses. I’m happy and don’t want chocolates, or rings, or stuffed toys. Nothing but this. I lose weight and I always keep my hair tidy and I hide my disguises in the bottom of my drawer, wrapping them in paper so that they retain his smell.

One day, after making love, he gave me a kiss on the forehead. He stayed like that, without taking his lips away, holding my head tightly in his hands. In silence. And we felt moved.

We’d each taken a hundred lashes without batting an eyelid and now we were crying.

Once I slipped over because if we ever go out it’s always pitch black. I hurt my ankle slightly, but really it was nothing. He carried me on his shoulders for the whole of the walk up the hill, immersed in the perfumed darkness, to the sound of crickets.

I kept saying, ‘It’s nothing. It’s nothing. You’ll break your back.’

But he didn’t want to know until we’d reached the car. Then he placed me delicately on the seat, as though I was made of crystal.

That was the only kiss. I’ve never received any kisses on the mouth, or hugs, and when I try to kiss or hug him he pulls away at once and says our affair isn’t about that sort of thing. That’s only for boring, slobbering types.

Whereas I’d really like kisses on the mouth, they’d give me much more satisfaction than on my feet and shoes, which he practically worships.

One day I asked my father, who knows everything about the Holy Scriptures, if he reckoned the Sixth Commandment meant that you mustn’t do anything unless you’re married.

When he realises that you need him to listen to you, he sits at the kitchen table, lights a cigarette and stretches his legs out to the farthest chair and you see his feet poking out the other side of the table because he’s very tall. Tall and lanky. With a shaved head and prickly cheeks because he neglects to shave his beard. And extraordinarily sparkling eyes, dark green like the colour of a grotto. His jumpers, always directly against his skin because he never wears shirts, give him a rough, wild air, like a barbarian, or a man of the desert.

While you say what you have to say, he smokes at you and the butts in the ashtray pile up into a mountain.

But I don’t care if my eyes water. With my chin resting on the table, hugging my knees tightly, I never even change position because I’m hanging on his every word, as Nonna puts it, and when we finish these discussions I’m bent double.

That time with the Sixth Commandment, my father gave an unforgettable ‘tirade’ about love.

The sexual encounter means truly knowing oneself and being able to do anything, provided the other person does not become an instrument of yours. ‘The sexual act,’ he said, ‘is a kind of apotheotic encounter. It means total acceptance. And this Commandment is extremely poetic. It tells you that sexuality opens the door to a moment of magic. What God advises against is doing it without love. It’s like if he said to you, “Remember that you’re an eagle, why should you peck like a hen? Why are you settling for so little?”’

And that time it was hard not to tell him at least one of my stories, not to tell him that they’re terribly forbidden when recounted by a girl so young and so well behaved, but that they’re stories of love, so maybe for that reason they don’t displease God.

But Papà’s always somewhere else anyway and it’s never difficult to hide something from him.

If you need him to go to a school meeting, if Mamma invites someone over for dinner, or if there’s an exhibition of her paintings – in other words, if it’s necessary to show that a father, or a husband, exists – he says, ‘That’s not what I’m about!’

And maybe it’s better if Signor Sevilla Mendoza doesn’t show his face – all the women are enchanted by him and it would embarrass me to see my schoolteachers raving, like that one time in fourth year at the
ginnasio
, or that evening at one of Mamma’s exhibitions, when the ‘enchanted’ woman hung on my father’s lips until everyone else had gone home and she’d bought two paintings without so much as looking at them.

His garage, too, is always frequented by a lot of women. They’re terribly attracted to this man who, as he fixes your engine, talks to you about God, about good and evil, about distant places where people are dying of hunger and the spiders are this big. And you can tell that those women would go anywhere with him.

I witnessed this only once when my Vespa had broken down, but I could tell that the scene must have been repeated very often.

Signor Sevilla Mendoza was bent over the engine. Blessed with miraculous powers, his splendid hands – like my brother’s on the piano – were busily fiddling around the mysterious breakdown. A lady was hanging over him and laughing at all his jokes. Although it’s practically impossible not to laugh at my father’s jokes, I walked back home sadly, leaving my Vespa with him so as not to have to stay there a moment longer.

I knew full well that after a while he would ask the lady if he could light a cigarette and then he’d go and sit at the table with all his tools and his feet would poke out the other side and when the butts had formed a mountain in the ashtray the lady would think, and perhaps also make clear to him, that with this barbarian, with this man of the desert, she’d be prepared to go anywhere.

‘Papà, do you like all those women?’

Then he explained to me a fascinating thing. He told me that he finds a great number of things in life erotic. A chat, for example. I mustn’t think that he was doing Mamma any wrong.

‘It’s a bit like learning to use your left hand. What’s wrong with that? I experiment.’

Besides, what more do we want from him? He works all day and this allows Mamma not to. He can take any problem and turn it into something funny for you, he makes you laugh. He knows how to tell you stories, how to convince you that God exists.

‘So you don’t care about those women. It’s only Mamma that you truly love,’ I concluded that time.

‘I’ve already told you, I care about everything. However the woman I’d happily go to South America with has never arrived.’

Zia’s boyfriend even gets Mamma to dance the tango. She moves all the chairs in the dining room but then she tries to get out of it. I can’t do anything. I can’t do anything. I’d have to change my shoes. I don’t have the shoes. I’ve never known how to dance. I don’t know how to dance. I’m fine sitting down. I’ll fall over. You know I’ll fall over. You dance and I’ll watch. I like watching people who are good at it.

But Zia’s boyfriend says it’s easy and everyone can do it. He’s a doctor specialising in human movement and he says that even the seriously ill can manage to walk, so of course Mamma can manage to dance. She has to rest one hand on his shoulder and put her other hand in his and let herself be carried away. Be light. She doesn’t know where he’ll take her. She has to have faith.

The tango begins and Mamma gives him her hand, looking at him terrified, and it’s like she’s been dipped in starch but this thing about even the seriously ill managing has convinced her. He smiles at her. He smiles and dances with her as though he knows about the yellow pegs and the dreams of extermination camps. As though he knows about the holidays in autumn and the squared moon. He moves her feet with his feet, her legs with his legs. The basic steps, but getting faster. Faster. Thank you. Thank you. Why are you wasting all this time on me. But Doctor Salevsky truly is a little special and in the end you give in to that desire and nostalgia for life that is the tango.

And Mamma, too, weaves her steps in and out and in and out in sets of eight and away she goes, off to Cape Horn. To America. To the end of the earth. And it doesn’t matter if she stumbles or falls backwards, it doesn’t matter because Zia’s boyfriend makes you realise that you shouldn’t think happiness is only possible for other people, it can be yours too if you try. What a
milonga
! What a waltz! When he comes over, it only takes a nod and she’s up moving the chairs and running to take off her slippers. Forget about the cinders, Mamma, this is the King’s hall. Forget about those clothes hanging off you.
Bolero!

Zia says that it’s better dancing in our dining room because when she goes to real bars with her boyfriend she gets the impression that all the women are involved or have been involved or intend to be involved in a relationship with him and so are watching them in a dejected, or nostalgic, or predatory way. They don’t seem to know that she and he are together so bad luck, there’s nothing any other woman can do about it.