“Eliana.”
Nina's voice was stern without being harsh.
“Don't be rude.”
The Dumas ignored her, or pretended not to have heard.
“So that's why,” she went on, pointing at Gerruso, “he ran through that whole speech on teachers' salaries.”
Gerruso suddenly flushed red as a beet.
The speech about teachers' pay.
That was my personal ax to grind.
It had been the topic of the essay portion of the final exams for ninth grade, three weeks ago. Gerruso wanted to know how I'd done on the exam. Fine, I replied, and no, I didn't give a damn about his exam, and what had his topic been anyway? On the importance of friendship? What kind of essay is that? Fifth grade, back in elementary school?
Then a shiver ran down my spine.
“You didn't mention me in your essay, did you?”
His silence was more explicit than any full confession could have been. My name was there, in Gerruso's essay, and it would be preserved in the archives of the Italian school system until the last echoing trump of time, and anyone who happened to read it was bound to get the tragically mistaken idea that he and I were friends. I was about to shout into the phone when Gerruso asked me what my essay was about. “You don't even deserve a reply,” I huffed indignantly. Still, he persisted, and in the end I gave in. I explained that I had structured my essay around the inequity of teachers' salaries. The underlying theme had been developed during a Sunday luncheon at my home. Over a portion of roast suckling kid, my uncle and I both insisted that elementary school teachers deserved higher salaries than the teachers in middle school or high school.
“Because they do their work at the beginning of the educational process,” my grandma summed up.
“You need to straighten trees when they're still little,” Umbertino chimed in, in confirmation.
We were in full agreement, we knew that your legs, not your arms, were the foundation upon which you climbed into the ring.
Gerruso had taken my theory and used it as a pretext for an argument with the Dumas. I was torn between two impulses: to lose my temper or else tender my congratulations. Using an idea of mine was tantamount to acknowledging its excellence. Nonetheless, the truth remained: any idea, even the finest one, was once and for all discredited in the worst way imaginable as soon as it had been mouthed by Gerruso. He was a stump-finger even in his thinking.
The obnoxious blonde was about to blather on with some unspeakable new drivel when Nina intervened, firmly.
“Let's all go swimming, right now.”
She got everything all wrong again: the lift of her feet, the curve of her spine, and the position of her neck. Nonetheless, there was a certain grace to her movement that made it unique and unrepeatable. Nina had a grammar of motion that was all her own. Certainly, it could stand some polishing, but to eliminate it would be unforgivable.
Gerruso went next. It was a horrible sight. He managed to get a
cannonball
wrong. He made only a tiny splash, plus he rope-burned the inside of his arms because he forgot to angle his elbows into the water.
The evil blonde was about to kick off her dive.
I beat her to it.
An angel's flight, my body in the shape of a cross, arms spread like a swallow's wings, fists clenched, hands cleanly aligned, fingers spread out straight at the end of the dive, to open a passage into the water so the body could make its rapid diagonal entrance.
“Who ever taught you to dive like that?”
Nina's eyes were glistening.
“My uncle.”
We might be poor, but we were talented.
“Ooh, now it's Eliana's turn, watch her, Davidù.”
The only reason I turned to look was that Nina asked me to, otherwise I'd never have taken my eyes off hers, for anything in the world.
And what I saw made me feel sick.
The Dumas lifted off into her dive with precision and balance, executing a perfect and well-calibrated vertical takeoff, snapping into her descent with elegant rapidity, and broke the surface of the sea without so much as a splash. She had executed a stylish and technically flawless jackknife. She rose to the surface and began to swim away. She had utter mastery of an impeccable technique.
“She's a swimmer. She won the regional championship in backstroke and low-board diving.”
She was a far more estimable foe than I had given her credit for. I knew before we ever left the bus stop that she was going to try to take me down. But it only became clear that she actually had the weapons to hurt me the instant I felt the full impact and beauty of her athletic prowess.
If I ever needed anything to make me even more emotionally unstable, I could always rely on Gerruso.
“Will you teach me to dive?”
“Now?”
“Yes.”
“Climb up on that rock, I'll come over and join you.”
Nina watched him in amazement, then her eyes turned back to mine. Her gaze was filled with understanding: I could hardly have blamed you if you'd told him no.
But I'd made a promise.
“Are you really going to teach him?”
“Yes. At least now, your friend isn't around to see.”
“Don't talk like that. Eliana has a unique personality, but she's a good friend. And, in her way, she's really quite modest.”
“Her? Modest?”
“Yes. Take diving, for instance: she's a champion diver, but she doesn't go around talking about it, in fact, she's always dismissive of any of the fields she excels in.”
“Are there lots of them?”
“At school, for example, she's the first in her class, and next year she'll be attending the classical high school.”
The competition was on.
And I had no intention of losing.
“Me, too.”
“Maybe you'll be in the same class.”
“I'd rather enroll in the nautical high school.”
As she spoke, Nina kept moving to stay afloat. The sun kept sketching different arrays of shadow on her face.
“I'm going to enroll in the school for languages, I like to travel,” she said.
“Traveling's great.”
“Have you traveled lots?”
“Some.”
“Have you been to Rome?”
“No.”
“Venice?”
“No.”
“Milan?”
“No.”
“So where
have
you been?”
“Lots of places.”
“Like where?”
“The Libertas in Milazzo, the Invicta in Catania, the Pugnace in Donnalucata, the Forza e Costanza in Barcellona Pozzo di Gotto, and the Virtus in Sciacca.”
“Haven't you ever left Sicily?”
“No.”
“But you've traveled lots?”
“I think I have. Haven't I? Am I wrong?”
Nina burst into a luminous smile that I was incapable of fully comprehending. But there she was, smiling at me, and there was nothing else I cared about.
“What are all those names you mentioned?”
“Gyms.”
“Boxing gyms?”
“Yes.”
“So you want to be a boxer?”
“My father was a boxer.”
“Was he good?”
“He was the best.”
“Do you want to be just like your father?”
“I don't know, I never knew him. What do you want to be?”
“I'd like to be a translator, that's a job I'd enjoy. Eliana wants to be a musician, she studies cello.”
My heart stopped. The Dumas played an instrument. She exercised her fingers on a musical instrument. Light-fingered, hands capable of delicacy. Fingers that generate sounds.
“She lives in a big apartment on Via Libertà .”
So she was filthy rich, too.
“It's a beautiful apartment, you'd like it, it's on two stories. She has a great big bedroom with paintings on the wall. What's your apartment like?”
I couldn't hope to win. I might possibly fight to a draw, emerge with an honorable mention.
“My family isn't rich, Nina, but my mamma keeps our apartment clean and my uncle comes to have Sunday dinner with us, my grandpa keeps a little garden that he calls a truck garden, and my grandma taught me to read and write when I was four.”
And with a jackknife thrust I plunged, simultaneously, into the cold salt seawater and the dark depths of shame. I swam without stopping for breath and I reached the rocks. The scrape along my ribs was no longer bleeding, it was just a slightly brighter red than the surrounding skin. I took a deep gulp of air and I focused on my next sure losing bet: Gerruso. As if I needed anything to heighten the tension, the virtuoso cellist made her unwelcome return.
“Gerruso, trust me, do what I tell you.”
In the water, Nina was telling the Dumas that I was about to teach Gerruso how to dive headfirst.
“Who is? That guy's going to teach your cousin how to dive? He'll never be able to do it.”
The gauntlet had been thrown down.
“Gerruso, it isn't hard, you can do it.”
“Are you telling the truth, Davidù?”
Gerruso had to be treated with care, like a plant, not brutally attacked the way he deeply deserved.
“Yes, I'm telling the truth. Just do what I tell you. Think of your butt cheeks, Gerruso. Think of them and nothing else. Clench them tight and throw your arms straight out in front of you, like this, up at an angle, like Superman.”
Gerruso tried out the move three times running. He was awkward, but it was technically correct.
“Will you show me a dive?”
“Certainly. Watch closely, because you, under my instruction, are going to dive exactly like I do.”
I lifted off with a good, high, long jump.
Look at me, blondie, I've got the legs of a boxer.
The water absorbed me, not a trace of foam on the surface to testify to my passage.
Nina broke into enthusiastic applause.
The Dumas: “Okay, not bad.”
Then the unthinkable happened.
As if he'd fallen into a mystical frenzy, Gerruso shouted from the rocks.
“Not bad?”
“Competent,” the Dumas decreed.
Gerruso's eyes opened wide.
“What does that mean?”
“That it was a properly performed dive,” I reassured him.
“Competent,” the Buttana Imperiale said again.
“I just explained what that means: a perfectly executed dive.”
“Oh, I forgot, they teach you how to use a dictionary in elementary school.”
On her back, the blonde swam away with ample strokes, her arms windmilling easily: Jesus, once again every move she made was the epitome of gracefulness and precision.
Gerruso was furious.
“You need to cut that out right now.”
His voice was rising to a keening pitch.
Nina and I were both surprised by that outburst of rage.
The Dumas, on the other hand, was completely indifferent to anything Gerruso might have said.
“Do you hear me? I'm talking to you! You need to cut it out.”
Nina and I exchanged a look of bafflement.
“You need to cut it out, don't you dare say it again, because Davidù is a poet.”
And, for the whole world to see, he pointed at me, afloat in the salt water.
With his stump-finger.
At that moment, Gerruso somehow seemed different. As if, with that head-on attack, he had begun a process of transformation before our very eyes, under the bright sun at two in the afternoon, on an outcropping of rock at Cape Gallo.
After thirteen years of loserdom, perhaps Gerruso was actually approaching the distant shore of decency.
To bloom at the age of thirteen.
All around me, every detail was sharply carved: Nina's hair, red, tucked behind her ears. Her mouth, open in surprise. Gerruso's arms, raised skyward. The stump-finger pointing at me. Shattering that light-showered moment, the voice of the Buttana Imperiale. She was laughing raucously, repeating one single word over and over.
“Poet.”
Unexpectedly, Nina, too, began to laugh, throwing her head back. Her hair floated out around her in the salt water, like a flower opening its petals at dawn. And, without any logical reason, Gerruso burst into laughter as well. In that chain of contagious laughter, I was the only one left unamused. They were all laughing at me.
“All right, then, if he's a poet, he'll teach you a perfect dive, a dive in rhyming couplets.”
The Dumas's eyes were like the barrel of a rifle.
Nina asked if I really was capable of teaching her cousin to dive headfirst. The cards of the final standoff were on the table now. Any future I could hope for with Nina was going to stand or fall on that dive.
I looked at Gerruso and I saw a cactus. As I watched him, I cherished the all-too-slender hope that perhaps that flower, in defiance of all reasonable logic, would choose to reveal itself to the world on that very day, for the first time, after thirteen worthless years.
“Gerruso, stop laughing and listen to me. Clench your ass and swing your wrists, like that, a little slower. Then sink down, bending your knees slightly, throw your arms up fast, take off hard with your feet, and your body will do the rest. Come on, let me have a nice, strong, competent dive and we won't say another word about it.”
“Do you trust me?”
The coin had been flipped and was spinning in midair.
“Yes, Gerruso, I trust you. You're going to do an amazing dive.”
The Dumas looked at me and me alone, with the eyes of a cannibal. Nina was watching, open-mouthed.
Gerruso shook his wrists, in front of and behind him. He curved his back and bent his knees.
Come on, Gerruso, come on.
His wrists shot out fast ahead of him, then his knees straightened, his feet lifted into the air, his body leaped up, his torso straightened, and there was flight.
Unfold, blossom, right now.
Please.
For an instant, the sun was darkened by his body. He flew horizontal over the miseries of the world, eyes wide open lest he miss even a second. He seemed happy, a cactus in the heat of the desert.