The sea was as smooth as a sheet of glass.
Santino wanted to take a raft and row it out to the open sea, but he was alone, and he wasn’t a good rower. So he climbed up on the pier; it was falling apart and full of gaps, and he swam in the sections where there were no boards, until he reached the small rotunda at the end. He lay down on the stone with his head hanging over the side just above the water.
The green, transparent, tepid sea swelled and deflated between the poles of the pier, sometimes as heavy as marble, other times light as air. Even though the water was already about two or three yards deep at the rotunda, you could see each grain of sand at the bottom; the sand was soft and clean, an intoxicating carpet for the underwater life. Every so often a crab went by like a nimble violet, or a starfish. Santino was meditating on that beautiful scene, when a small boy appeared under the pier on a raft. “A maschié,”28 Santino called out, “give me a ride?” The little boy said nothing. “Come on!” Santino insisted. “All right,” the little boy said, gravely. Santino dove into the water and touched the sand with his hands; then he came up to the surface and pulled himself onto the raft. “Let’s go out into the open sea,” he said to the boy.
The little boy paddled as hard as he could, but his arms were too weak and the paddles kept coming out of the water between one wave and the next. “Let me try,” Santino prodded. The little boy traded seats with him and Santino began to row. “It’s not so hard,” he said. “My mother told me not to go out too far,” the little boy said. “So? We’re just going out a hundred yards, that’s all.”
The beach lay beyond the pier; it appeared as an endless arc from one end of the horizon to the other. The sun carved it out of the air in liquefied colors. The brown sand, the colors of the bathing huts, the polished stripes of the umbrellas, the white blotches of the boats, the plaster of the houses, all were amassed under the sun in an unreal stillness which neither the milling about of the inaudible crowd, the back-and-forth of rafts, the flying overhead of a red airplane, nor the glimmering of the sea could shake. But in that stillness, created by distance, one could feel the overflowing joy of a Sunday afternoon.
The raft bobbed indolently in the water, the oars flapping back and forth in the air like broken wings, and Santino began to lose his patience. But he was determined to go as far out as he could. He gazed enviously into the distance, toward the pure blue between the sea and the sky and the sails of the fishing boat. The thought crossed his mind that from over there, the shore must be almost invisible.
Then, almost without warning, a small sailboat, white as a dove, appeared from behind the pier. It sailed smoothly and obliquely, leaning over to one side. Santino stopped rowing and gazed at it. As it approached, it appeared to be flying toward them, and then it went past, almost touching the raft with its hull, painted white. It sailed on, as lightly as it had come, appearing to be an only slightly more material manifestation of the wind, and in a few minutes it was far away, indistinct and tiny in the distance, but still vivid in the veneer of the sea.
Soon it would become a tiny sail lost in the intimacy of the open sea, where the blue was so much deeper and more immutable.
Santino had followed its course in silence, and when the sailboat was gone, he turned to his companion happily and cried out: “Come on, maschié, let’s go out to sea!” And he started paddling more desperately than ever. The little boy kept looking worriedly towards the beach. “You’re not scared are you?” said Santino. “Scared of what?” the little boy responded, offended. “Of the sea,” Santino exclaimed. The little boy shrugged his shoulders, with an expression in his timid eyes that seemed to say: “Are you kidding?” Santino was excited. He was starting to paddle more steadily, catching the water, which swelled and deflated under the raft.
Meanwhile, they were moving farther and farther away from the pier. The beach was a confused mass of colors under the gold-colored sun. And Santino was happy to be so isolated out on the water. But he thought it would be even better to jump into the water and find himself all alone, detached from the boat, amid the silent waves. “Here, hold the oars,” he yelled at the little boy. And he dove in, swimming toward the open sea.
Warm and light as silk, the sea lifted him up and brought him down again; now that he was immersed in its center, his eyes could embrace it all the way to the distant horizon, as if he were in a small valley among flat hills of water, with the crests against the light and the sides tinted by the transparent shadows. He was inside, immersed, and he could sink fully into those shadows. For a few moments, he felt as if he were in a tub, outside of the world, in a circle of solitude, in a small desert full of melancholy green dunes. The reflections of light were deadened by the wide, flat sides of the waves that descended all the way down to the dark depths. Then, a spirit from within the water, overcome by a calm but continuous orgasm, like the breath of a sleeping man, a spirit whose movement extended to every angle of the sea, rose up from the depths, flustering the surface. He suddenly found himself at the crest of a wave, in the burning light, and he could see the horizon, the sails, and the sun.
An immense expanse of low hills spread around him until it melted in the distance into the buoyant, compact expanse of blue. The sea was becoming repopulated, coming to life. Santino swam toward the open sea, leaving the greatest possible distance between him and the raft. He could see it in the distance, its wooden boards shaken by the movement of the water. And further off, the beach, Ostia, terra firma…but this was all very far off in the distance, and as far as he could see, the sea was intent on churning and murmuring to itself.
When he was beginning to get tired, he turned and saw that the raft was truly far away. If he lowered his head, he couldn’t even see it. He became a bit frightened; the waves around him, like silent church bells, were the same green, but now they appeared to contain an indeterminate threat. A threat that lay in the depths, as if the spirit that agitated the waters from within had suddenly changed its mood.
Il Quotidiano, Rome, September 11, 1951; signed Paolo Amari.