From the Circeo29 on the right, indistinct among the clouds, itself a cloud, distant, isolated, its sharpened points tinted with smoky-blue cinders, down in the semicircle of the beach, detached from the shadows of terra firma and only slightly distinguishable from the sky, forming a long curve beneath the eyes, lined with rows of abandoned bathing huts, running directly into a monumental promontory, lay the sea. It filled all visible space: flat, shimmering, and alive.
Behind the promontory—all stone, topped by a ruined temple, pushing forward against the tide, a granite obelisk, a hundred yards tall and sixty yards wide, solitary between the land and water—the hills of the next bay hurled themselves toward the horizon. There lay the hills of Gaeta and Sperlonga, lined up like links on a chain, undulating, southern, filtering the horizon to its core in the melancholy, rust-colored distance, where the gray of the sky and the sea mixed together in a dreamlike glare.
From the Circeo to Sperlonga the sea looked like an immense lake, one side closed in by the clouds. They were disorderly, heavy clouds, especially over the Circeo, where they darkened menacingly. There was a gap in the middle, and here and there a strip of sky emerged, light blue or yellow. On the left, over the hills, the sun descended in a fan of rays, like reflectors focused on a single point. The sea glimmered there like a drawn sword. Beyond, clumped on the side of the gray, stony hill, lay Terracina.
One could see all of this from the roof of the house of Marcè’s30 relatives, where they were lying. The tiles were wet because it had rained during the night; Luciano was lying there with his hands under his head, gazing into space. Marcello was almost asleep. The roof was high, and the villa was built on a small elevation in the parcel of land, which was covered in small grapevines, like a spider’s web. From up there one could see all around, even if it wasn’t terribly comfortable. This made Luciano happy. Unnoticed by Marcè, his gaze caressed the furthest reaches of the horizon, where the sea was simply that, pure sea, without a connection to the shore, with nothing around it. There, more than anywhere else in the cloudy sky, the sun managed to filter through, coloring the air and water blue. It was going to rain for sure. The clouds over the Circeo were so compact and dark that they had swallowed it up completely, and they were spreading over the light layer of clouds that already covered the entire sky; a cold air had also risen, and seemed about to release the first gelid drops of rain. Lucià would have to detach his gaze from the sea, and interrupt the pleasure he derived from it. It was a well-deserved pleasure; he had already begun to crave it the night before they left Rome, dreaming of a sea just like this, solitary, savage and bare. When they had reached beyond the area of the Castelli Romani31—the morning air was a bit sooty, and from up there you could not yet make out the sea—behind Velletri, just as the Via Appia began its descent toward a gray wall of mountains, Lucià had stretched up in his seat to see it. A white haze lay around the base of the mountains, as well as a narrow plain, and they appeared to the eye like the waters of a gulf.
“The sea, the sea!” Lucià had called out. “There it is!”
“A stronzo!32 answered Marcè. “That’s not the sea! Calm down!”
In Rome and the area of the Castelli, it had been a beautiful, clear morning. They saw a few clouds toward the Circeo, after Latina, but they seemed innocuous. The rest of the sky was serene. The night before in the city there had been a violent storm; it had begun to rain just as Lucià and Marcè were walking to the train station from the Villa Borghese to make some money for the trip. They gave up on the idea and headed instead to take shelter around Piazza Vittorio. They were lucky: Marcè was able to score a thousand lire and a nearly full packet of Chesterfield cigarettes.
There was thunder and lightning, but by evening, the sky had once again cleared. It was the night before the feast of the Madonna, and there were lamps hanging in the windows, sending rainbow-colored shadows down the side streets; thousands of lamps trembled in the crisp, transparent air, and the façades of many churches were covered in an embroidery of electric lights. When they came out of the movie theater, where they had spent most of the afternoon, Lucià and Marcè were struck by the softness of the breeze, and Lucià, looking up into the sky, cried out happily: “Look at the stars!”
They went to pick up bicycles from a repair shop in Trastevere. “Wait here,” Lucià said to Marcè at the end of the Via della Scala, “and don’t let him see you.” Marcè was nervous, and he said to Lucià: “Be careful, he’s a clever one.” But Luciano shrugged, glancing over at his friend with disdain. He went into the shop, and there was a crowd of people as usual at that hour. He took two bicycles, one of which had racing handlebars, and gave his real name to the mechanic, who wrote it down on the ledger.
Lucià and Marcè rode around the Trastevere for about half an hour, and then Lucià returned to the shop with one bicycle and paid for it. The shop owner didn’t remember that he had taken out two, and he took the money and scratched Luciano’s name from the ledger.
Marcè was still waiting on Via della Scala, in a doorway. “So how’d it go?” he asked Lucià. “I’m a genius, didn’t you know?” said Lucià, indifferently. “Yeah, right,” Marcè chuckled. Now, according to the plan, it was his turn; he would have preferred to ride to Terracina on a single bicycle, but instead, Lucià forced him to go into the shop where, trembling like a leaf, he took out another bicycle under a false name. But it went well, and now they had two bicycles; they went to sleep in a shed near the Trastevere train station, off the Viale Marconi.
At the first light of dawn they awoke and washed in a fountain. The entire neighborhood was still asleep, and in the white sky, they could see the skeleton of the oil storage tank among the smokeless chimneys. They jumped on their bicycles and went up a side street, but as soon as they turned onto the Viale Marconi, which was deserted and pale at that time, they ran into Luciano’s father.
They turned to stone, not knowing what to say or do. And Luciano’s father stared at them in shock, which quickly turned to fury. He was still a bit drunk from the night before; his face was bright red, and his eyes were bulging.
Suddenly he began to yell, and hurled himself at them, grabbing the handlebars of their bicycles. “Where’d you get these?” he yelled. But Luciano and Marcello had leaped off the bikes and run off toward the shed. Lucià’s father, still yelling, walked up the side street and turned onto Viale Marconi, toward his friend’s fruit stand.
He leaned the two bicycles against the closed shutters of his friend’s shop. The two boys had followed him at a distance; as soon as he went inside, Lucià yelled to Marcè, “Don’t move!”, ran over to the shop, grabbed the bicycles, and brought them to Marcello. They jumped on and pedaled as hard as they could toward the underpass near the station. The streets were still deserted. But Lucià’s father had returned to the door and seen them jump onto the bicycles. “When I catch you, I’ll kill you!” he yelled after them; and then he came out with another bicycle and began to chase after them.
“Let’s go to the Battaglioni Emme,”33 yelled Marcè.
They took the underpass, to Via Volpato, and raced off toward the shacks of the Battaglioni Emme where, among kitchen gardens, alleys, and piles of trash, they managed to shake off their pursuer. Then, more calmly, they rode off toward San Giovanni in Laterano and took the road to Terracina.
Now they were at Terracina, and the sea that they had been longing for since they passed Velletri, when the Circeo had appeared against the horizon, was still nowhere to be seen.
The town looked as if it had been stuck onto the side of the hill, with its tumbledown towers, criss-crossed with twisting and turning streets like viscera, surrounded by stone retaining walls. This was the upper, old city center of Terracina, but Lucià and Marcè had arrived at the foot of the town on the Via Appia, where it looked like a suburb of Rome or Ostia. “Where the fuck is the sea?” yelled Lucià. “Almost there,” answered Marcè, and on the left, a large stone spur appeared; on the top, between the clouds, they could see the ruins of a temple. Soon they arrived on a small beach.
The sea spread out before them, mud-colored, streaked here and there by a flash of light. Trapped between the promontory with the temple, known as the “Pisco Montano,” and the port, the sea seemed narrow, shut in, limited.
Lucià and Marcè got off their bicycles and walked toward the water. It was calm, fragrant, and gave off a slight rumbling sound. The Circeo was not visible from there. Against the light, on the clay colored water—it looked greenish further out—they could see a boat floating on the gleaming water, and the dark figures of fishermen. On the wet sand of the beach lay boats, falanghe,34 fishing rods stuck in the sand, and rusty traps left to dry in the wind.
Sitting against a wall separating the beach from the road were seven or eight men and boys in a row; they were all crouched over baskets, working silently and diligently. Lucià moved closer to watch them; they did not even raise their heads from what they were doing. They were working the tangles out of long red ropes, coiling them in the bottom of the baskets. There were thin nylon lines attached to the rope, with a little hook at the end of each line. As the men patiently coiled the long rope, they carefully removed each hook and placed it in a piece of cork attached to the side of the basket.
At the end of the beach, in the shallows, there was a group of fishermen, all of them cheerful, who had just come down to the port. The happiest among them were the young men, some of them with their trousers rolled up to their thighs and barefoot, others wearing rubber boots. There was a boat floating on the brown water a few yards away from the shoal, and some fishermen moved around it. The new arrivals called to them jokingly from the beach, and everybody laughed. Then they all began to pull the boat to shore with a rope; a group of them pushed it from behind, their feet in the water, laughing.
“Now this is the sea,” said Marcè, yawning; they were both dead tired and the light of the water dazed them. Lucià, still astride his bicycle, watched the fishermen work, in a trance; none of them lifted their heads.
“These guys can’t even see me,” he muttered. Marcè, on the other hand, didn’t know how to reach his relatives’ house. He asked one of the men, who had no idea. He asked another, a cheerful young man with a basket of fish on his head, but he knew even less. Marcè decided that they should walk past the port to a small canal with greenish water, which, at that hour, was almost completely empty of boats. He remembered that the house was on the water, on this side of the Pisco Montano, on the beach. Just beyond the port they could see a few buildings and the rows of deserted bathing huts on the beach, battered by the wind.
The beachfront road was equally deserted, and the small palms and oleanders seemed wild. The road pushed forward, seemingly endless, down the coast. But less than a mile along, at the very edge of the group of small, loosely scattered houses, Marcè recognized the house he was looking for. It was on the side of a small hill which was covered with vineyards. The gate was open. They pushed their bicycles up to the door, and Marcello knocked, but no one was home. The house was empty as a drum. So he started to yell: “Aunt Maria!” as he walked around the little house along a footpath, and rapped on the windows with his knuckles.
“I’m so goddamned hungry I could faint,” said Lucià. “You’re telling me!” said Marcè, back from his trip around the empty house. Lucià stared at him, “Go to hell,” he said. “Eat this!” answered Marcè. “I’m so goddamned hungry,” Lucià repeated. He got off his bike and went to inspect the premises. Five minutes later, he was on the roof.
Now, all they had to do was move a few tiles and climb inside. They did so, and lowered themselves into the attic, which was full of potatoes and wheat. From there, they went down the stairs to look for the kitchen.
Some women saw them on the roof, and ran over to the fishing cooperative to warn Maria: “There are thieves at your house!” they yelled, and Aunt Maria ran over, frightened, accompanied by three or four young men, and then she cooked four eggs with butter for the thieves. But she hadn’t actually recognized Marcè, who had grown tall in those years. And as for Lucià, all she knew about him was what her nephew had yelled into her deaf ear: “This is my friend! His mother and father died in the war!”
Aunt Maria was not a bad person, but when the other relatives (another aunt and some cousins) returned home for lunch at noon, they were not very welcoming toward their guests. At lunch, in the small dining room that smelled of mildew and cat’s pee, they changed the subject when it came to finding them a place to stay in Terracina, or when the boys told them why they had left Rome. The cousins, an accountant and a student, were somewhat sarcastic and apathetic, and no one even hinted at inviting them to stay.
“So, Marcè,” said Luciano when they were alone, touching his nose as if to say, “What’s up?” Marcè made a face that meant “What do I know?” “I’m out of here,” said Lucià. Marcè gestured for him to speak more softly. “They don’t want us here,” Lucià continued, speaking more softly, and clapping his hands together as if to conclude an affair, “They don’t want us, so let’s get out of here.”
“Just hold on a minute,” said Marcè.
“Aren’t you going to see Uncle Zocculitte?” asked Aunt Maria as she cleaned up in the kitchen. “Of course!” Marcè answered, looking over at Lucià as if it were a good idea. “Let’s go over there right now.”
“You’ll find him home this time of day,” said Zia Maria. They went out and picked up their bicycles, and said goodbye to everyone. “Come back and visit,” the aunts said from the doorstep, politely.
Lucià crinkled his brow and made a sound with his tongue against his teeth that meant “Ma li mortacci vostra.”35 “Are we sick of this yet?” he asked as they went out to the road, “Thanks for nothing; hello, how are you, now get lost. Does that seem right to you?” he insisted; he was on a roll. “Get over it,” snarled Marcello.
Uncle Zocculitte lived on the Vicolo Rappini, under the Pisco Montano, on the little beach where they had first seen the sea. There were crumbling houses all around, and further along, a little snack bar. Behind an iron crucifix with a bouquet of chrysanthemums lay an alley bordered by fishermen’s houses, their front steps covered with ragged fishing nets. Uncle Zocculitte was sixty years old, he lived alone, and Vittorio, his assistant, was about to go off to do his military service. Lucià and Marcè could stay with him.
The very next day they began their life as fishermen; at around ten, after working on the baskets for a while, Uncle Zocculitte decided it was time to go. Vittorio took the rope and placed it outside the door; then he went to a neighbor’s house to borrow a bicycle. They left for Mola, which was about ten miles from Terracina. Vittorio carried the long, heavy hoisting cable. Lucià and Marcè, both on one bicycle, carried the basket. The sky was still menacing, yellow, dirty, and wet, and the scirocco wind was blowing; as it blew, it moistened their skin and clothes. It had rained the night before and everything was still wet.
They quickly reached the Via Appia, by the Ligna River; they could see the two endless yellow stripes disappearing into the distance toward Velletri and Rome, bordered by green trees, farmhouses, and bushes. At Mola they stopped and leaned their bikes against each other so they would stand, and began to fish. Marcè was wearing rubber boots over thick woolen socks, like Vittorio. Lucià watched and learned.
Vittorio went into the dirty, plant-filled water of the Ligna up to his ankles. He held the hoisting cable by one end. At the other end of the cable, where the fine, deep net was attached, there was a smaller rope, the end of which Vittorio gave to Marcè to hold, telling him to go into the water two or three yards further and walk forward, dragging the rope. They began to walk through the mud, slowly, and the net dragged along between them, beneath the surface of the water.
Lucià followed the two of them step by step, as if in a procession. Every so often, Vittorio looked up to check the weather. It was a bit clearer now, and one could make out the color of the Circeo. Around them, the birds were singing, and in the middle of the river you could hear the gurgling of the water as it was displaced by the net; these were the only two sounds they could hear. Vittorio and Marcè continued for about half an hour, until they had covered five hundred yards or so; they could see the bicycles standing by the road further down. “Let’s go back,” said Vittorio. First, he dragged the net out of the water and picked out the water plants that had gotten caught in it. Lucià moved closer and saw that the bottom of the net was swollen and alive. “How much have you got there?” “About twenty pounds,” Vittorio answered. Then they started back toward where they had begun. Every so often, they stopped to clean the edge of the net. When they reached the bicycles, they climbed onto the bank and poured the forty pounds of crayfish into the basket.
Back at the Vicolo Rappini toward noon, it was quiet. The round nets and poles lay on the muddy cobblestones. Every so often a woman walked by with a terra cotta jar on her head and, moving aside the old net that served as a curtain across the doorway, disappeared inside. Dirty children, their grubby little faces already as rough and rusty as fishermen, played on the steps, wearing ragged hand-me-downs. Some men were still working their way through the nets, sitting against the crumbling walls of their houses with their legs open wide. The noontime sun gilded the alleyway; it smelled of fraulini36 soup, with oil and preserves.
Uncle Zocculitte’s house consisted of a single room on the ground floor. In the middle of the room there was a double bed that filled three quarters of the space; the black iron headboard was decorated with elaborate spirals. The limited space left over was as packed as the hold of a ship. Between the open door and the wall were piled poles, harpoons, and long, narrow jackets; and in every angle of the house there were old nets, hooks, and wound-up lengths of hemp rope. Two wires hung from the central beam of the ceiling, holding an axle, on which nets were piled. The stove, where the fraulini soup was bubbling, stood in front of a small window. As soon as they finished eating, work began again. All of the Vicolo Rappini echoed with sounds, as if it were a single courtyard. Everybody worked, including old men and children, and as they did so, they yelled and talked amongst each other and with their neighbors. They sat leaning over the baskets between their legs in the street. Even the people inside seemed to be outside. Vittorio and Uncle Zocculitte took the baskets they had finished preparing that morning and opened them one by one, leaving the fishing line coiled at the bottom. They removed the hooks from the cork and fastened a crayfish on each one, then placed them on the basket cover. There were one hundred and fifty hooks for each line, and the task took them until four o’clock. Then Vittorio changed and went off to the dance hall. Lucià and Marcè were left to do as they pleased, and they went for a walk near the port; there were boats of different types: rowboats, big trawlers, small trawlers, launches, night-fishing boats, motorboats. Uncle Zocculitte’s launch, which he had baptized Mariagrazia, was sitting on the little beach at the end of the Vicolo Rappini, the first beach the boys had seen when they arrived the day before.
That night they went to bed early; they shared the double bed with Uncle Zocculitte, and Vittorio slept on the floor. At one in the morning they got up to go night-fishing.
The sky was dark and covered with heavy clouds, though here and there one could see a few stars. It was so dark out that the sea was barely visible, except for a few flashes. On the other hand, the darkness of the sky magnified the sound of the tide—so fragrant that it filled the night.
The beach was full of lights. The fishermen had lit the lanterns hanging from the hulls of their launches, and they moved about in the circles of light, bending over the falanghe, standing up straight, straining their arms against the side of the boats until they slid into the water.
Vittorio lit the lamp on the Mariagrazia; the boat had reached its twenty-third year the previous season. It was still robust, solid, and light in its elegant zinc coating, and inside the boat, everything was in order. They pushed the boat over the falanghe until it bobbed up and down in the water.
Uncle Zocculitte started to row outward, toward the Circeo; they couldn’t see two yards ahead of them. The sea and sky were a single, impenetrable, cold abyss of shadows. Here and there in the gulf one could make out the points of light of the other boat lanterns, still sparse. At that moment, a brightly lit boat was heading out of the port. But it quickly distanced itself from the shore, and became a small point in the far-off waters of the Circeo.
Uncle Zocculitte rowed while Vittorio and the other two sat at the other end of the boat. They said nothing, and all they could hear was the rubbing of the wood of the oars against the iron of the oar locks, and the great roaring of the sea.
“Are we going far?” Luciano asked Marcello after a bit, with a thin voice. “What do I know?” said Marcè. Uncle Zocculitte and Vittorio said nothing. They changed places.
“Let’s go as far as the reef,” said Uncle Zocculitte, who was sitting on the macellaro.37 “At the foot of the Circeo,” he added. Vittorio and he took turns rowing for almost two hours. The shore seemed terribly far away; there was only the sea all around, almost threatening. But in reality they were not very far from shore; if the moon had been out, Lucià would have been able to see something that looked like an enormous black wall rising before him, blacker than the sky; it was the Circeo with its crags and forests.
At the foot of the Circeo, the boat came to a stop and Vittorio leaned over and stared into the water. “Is this a good spot?” asked Uncle Zocculitte. “Twenty-four,” Vittorio responded, “that’s good enough.” “That’s twenty-four fathoms,” he explained to Luciano and Marcello. “We’re above the reef,” said Uncle Zocculitte. From under the prow, Vittorio picked up a square piece of cork in which was inserted a pole about half a yard long with a black piece of cloth on the end. He tied the second lantern onto the pole and lit it. “Under here,” said Uncle Zoculitte, while Vittorio worked, “lies Quadro.”
“What’s that?”
“It’s an ancient city, buried under the water.”
“It’s here under the boat?” Lucà asked.
“That’s right, churches, houses and all. It was as big as Rome,” said Uncle Zocculitte.
Meanwhile, Vittorio had attached one end of a long rope to the bottom of the cork, to which he attached the first line with hooks.
The gulf was filling up with small lights; every boat had put a pole with a lantern out to sea. Vittorio too threw in the lantern on its cork buoy; the cork floated, meandering as if drunk on the surface of the water, while the weight disappeared with a splash into the water, pulling down the rope and the line with the hooks to a depth of twenty-four fathoms. Uncle Zocculitte began to row slowly, while Vittorio, standing at the back of the boat, let the rope sink down into the water, steadying it with his hands. The rope sank along with the nylon strings onto which the crayfish had been hooked. When he was finished with one rope, he tied one end to the end of the next one. There were ten in all, almost a mile of rope, and one thousand five hundred hooks. Uncle Zocculitte moved the boat in slow curves, so that the ropes would land on the sea bottom in a serpentine motion; when they finished the last basket, the lantern bobbed up and down brightly less than a quarter of a mile off. Vittorio tied the last stretch of rope to the hoisting cable, and then tied on a piece of cork with a pole stuck into it (this one without a lantern), and threw it into the sea.
Meanwhile, the moon had begun to shimmer, released from the clouds that covered the hills of Sperlonga. The sky was clear now, and the only clouds were further down, blanched by the moon. The sea, between the Circeo and Sperlonga, was dotted with hundreds of lamps. The side of the Circeo, caressed weakly by the moon, reached up to the stars, deep blue against the dark blue of the sky.
Under the light of the moon, Lucià saw the first fish begin to swim up from the bottom. The boat moved away from the second cork buoy, and Uncle Zocculitte rowed rapidly toward the first, which blazed in the night. Vittorio pulled it onto the boat and turned off the lamp, and then repeated his actions, but in reverse: he started to pull the rope onto the boat, dumping them into the baskets. Lucià and Marcè drew close, anxiously. The rope was coming up with the lines hanging limply and the hooks empty. Then, after twenty or thirty hooks, the first fraulino appeared, flapping about. Vittorio pulled it off the hook and threw it into a basket at his feet. Lucià leaned over to look at its shiny stomach glimmering in the moonlight and its pink eyes.
“Here comes the cable with the big hooks,” said Vittorio, continuing to work with his hands.
“Just one fraulino so far,” said Lucià, disappointed, as he watched the fish die in the boat. Vittorio and Uncle Zocculitte said nothing. The cable with the big hooks was emerging from the water, dripping wet and empty. Then suddenly a sea bream appeared, and then another sea bream, big, heavy, and shiny as silver. Then a schiantaro,38 a white bream, and another sea bream, and then a six-pound dogfish. Uncle Zocculitte let go of the oars to come over and watch. Seeing that he was silently satisfied, Lucià exclaimed: “We brought you good luck!”
The ropes continued to emerge, one after another, sometimes empty, sometimes dripping with fish, their scales gleaming in the moonlight. Vittorio’s big hands pulled them off and threw them into the boat, where they flopped about. Variati, palombe, mafroni, coccie, schiamuti, cergne, traci, and little fraulini, white as milk.
It took almost two hours to pull in all the ropes; the last fraulino that fell into the basket glimmered in the sunlight, and the side of the Circeo rose up darkly against the sky and the sea, which were blanched by the daylight.
The Terracina market is a square piazza surrounded by tall white walls, with an iron gate on either side. At seven in the morning the activity there is already intense. Fishermen arrive panting from the effort of running with baskets on their heads to meet the vans owned by cooperatives from Fondi, Naples, Priverno, and Rome, and by the women of Terracina, whose husbands are artisans and shop owners. They come down from the intricate maze of the old city, which is as tough and cold as the rocks on which it is built, pierced by narrow stairways and steep alleys. They gather in the market, making a commotion. The air is deafening. Marcè and Lucià followed Vittorio with the case of fish on his head. There were 16 pounds of fish that morning, and Vittorio had no problem selling them off at four thousand lire per pound, a good price. They had gone there directly from their fishing expedition, just before seven, and had not even had time to pull the boat to shore before running off to market. The fishermen helped each other pull in the boats; it was quicker that way. As the boats arrived, the men who were already on the shore helped pull them onto the beach, first with the rope, and then sliding them over the falanghe. Marcè and Lucià pushed from the stern; Marcè was wearing the rubber boots which had become his, and Lucià was in his bare feet and legs. The cold, seething water stung his skin, but Lucià didn’t dislike the sensation: he was happy, like the others, and they all joked and laughed as they pulled the boat to shore under the burning sunlight.
It was not even eight o’clock when they returned from the market, their basket empty. As soon as they reached the Vicolo Rappini, they began to prepare the hooked lines once again. They took twelve baskets, ten of their own and two belonging to a neighbor who needed some help, and they went to sit on the little beach at the end of the alley, along the low wall. The light in the empty sky and on the water was blinding, but everything was still soaked from the previous day’s rain and the Pisco Montano sparkled in the sun. The boats were still coming in, and every so often the boys got up to help someone pull a boat onto the beach. Then they went back to their task: they had to disentangle the mass of rope and hooks and place the rope neatly into the basket, while detaching the hooks and placing them in the cork. Lucià was still barefoot, and his trousers were still rolled up on his thighs, just below the groin, his skin burned by the salt and the sun. The sun was already high.
After two weeks in Terracina, Lucià and Marcè had learned the trade. If Lucià had trouble with the paddles, or took too long to tie the sail, Marcè would yell, “Come on, slow-poke!” and Lucià would counterattack, “Chi t’è morto.”39 Meanwhile, back at the Vicolo Rappini, they had become friends with everyone; the other boys vied for their attention, and the little ones would look at them and giggle. Some of the older boys would ask them about Rome, which Marcè and Lucià had all but forgotten.
In their free time they danced to records at the house of one of Vittorio’s friends; Vittorio had left for his military service. In those two weeks, the sun and the salt had tanned and coarsened Lucià’s face, making him look much older, and the trousers that Marcè’s rich relatives had handed down to him from one of Marcè’s cousins no longer fit him. But the jacket looked nice. Marcè had washed his blue sweater, the one with the yellow stripes. So one Sunday, decked out in their best clothes, they decided to follow Uncle Zocculitte’s advice and go to Mass.
That day, all of Terracina was happy: after weeks and weeks, the good weather had returned. The Circeo, the Pisco Montano, the hills of the gulf, the towers of the old town, the water, the air, everything seemed to be sculpted out of crystal.
The passers-by, rich and poor, and dressed in their Sunday best—wearing black, but in no way seeming to contradict the brightness of the air—walked upward toward the beautiful church, chatting cheerfully. Lucià and Marcè, who had not set foot in a church since their First Communion and Confirmation at the church of the Divina Providenza on the day of the Ferrobedò heist, were not unhappy to be there, and actually enjoyed themselves. Then they descended the long, steep road at the foot of the church, surrounded by the smells of lunch and the sounds of the radio, and the crowd of people headed home in long streams. When they arrived at the Vicolo Rappini it was newly washed and silent. They didn’t change clothes, but walked to the beach in their fancy getup, and Lucià went off to sit in the boat on the macellaro. He turned his back to the shore and stared out at the sea, imagining that he was out there all alone, in the open sea, far from shore, as far out as possible, with only the sky all around.
There was only a small group of boys at the snack bar on the beach, near the alley, and the bar itself was deserted. The floor was wet, and there were a few tables set out here and there in the emptiness. The radio was on, and you could hear it blaring from outside, on the beach, echoing against the Pisco Montano and amid the crumbling houses at the end of the Vicolo Rappini. As it played the notes of an old tango, the sky and the sea seemed even more solid, immaculate and blue, as on a summer day.
Lucià and Marcè went inside, and the others turned toward them, inviting them to join in. One of them broke away from the group and timidly walked over to Marcè: “Want to have a drink with us?” he asked. Lucià and Marcè accepted, a bit stiffly. But after a few glasses of wine, Marcè became more talkative; he was red in the face and vociferous. “Trastevere,” he said to his new friends, “You’ve gotta see it! The women! You wouldn’t believe the women.” And he told them about Rome on Sunday mornings, walking from Donna Olimpia down to the Trastevere, bumping into people you knew, and about the Noantri40 Festival in July, and summer nights on the Lungotevere, and swimming in the river or at the beach at Ostia, and about the heists they had pulled off, the people they had blackmailed, all the mischief they got up to. He told them about when they bumped into La Manfrina and that friend she was so jealous of, Nadia, who lived behind Piazza Mastai. They had run into them at about two in the morning at the end of the Via della Lungaretta, in a dark deserted spot. Nadia was fooling around with the guys, but she kept saying, at the top of her lungs, “Don’t tell her or she’ll kill me!” “Did they give her money?” asked the boys from Terracina. “Of course,” answered Lucià, grinning, “She’s a real lady.” Lucià and Marcè had not actually witnessed these events; they had stayed outside in the street, where they could hear their older friends from the Trastevere laughing with Nadia, while La Manfrina, drunk out of her mind, talked to the others. Their Trastevere friends were all pimps, tricksters, shoplifters: the cream of the neighborhood. Marcè also told them about the time he had gone to Via del Tritone with two guys from the gang, and they had slashed someone’s tires. The car had finally come to a stop somewhere down the Corso. The owner had gotten out, leaving his jacket on the driver’s seat; Marcè and another guy had come by on a bicycle and stolen the jacket and a briefcase out of the car. “There were twenty thousand lire and a gold watch in there,” boasted Marcè. Luciano smiled to himself and thought, “Li mortacci tua!” It wasn’t true about the briefcase, and there had only been four or five thousand lire in the jacket. “We were friends with the biggest pimps in Rome.”
While Marcè continued to talk to the boys from Terracina, Lucià walked off with his hands in his pockets to look at the boats on the beach; the elegant hull of the Mariagrazia pointed out toward the empty sea. He was afraid to bring up what he was thinking with Marcè. But when they walked toward the alleyway at around one o’clock, he took the plunge: “Hey Marcè,” he said, “I really feel like taking the boat out.”
“But we go out on the boat every day,” Marcè exclaimed.
“But we go fishing,” said Lucià, impatiently.
“So?”
“I feel like going out for a ride in the boat just like that, just to go out for a ride in the boat.”
“Hey, what do I care? Ask the old man.”
“Just for fun, you know?” Lucià concluded.
When they found Uncle Zocculitte, he was singing. He was in the house, singing as he sat on the red floor, his head leaning against the curlicued railing of the bed. Every Sunday morning he sang, and he didn’t stop till it was night.
At least the sea was smooth, even if the air wasn’t too clear, and Uncle Zocculitte didn’t have any objection to letting them take out the boat. So after lunch, the boys ran down the alley to the beach, followed only by the sound of Uncle Zocculitte’s singing.
The beach was even more quiet and empty than before. The traps hung between the ends of the rusty poles in the dead calm, and the boats were lined up as if they were sleeping, their blues, reds, and greens eroded by the salt water. There was no one around, and they could hear even the slightest gurgle in the endless motion of the Tyrrhenian Sea, from the very edge of the beach to the furthest points of the gulf and the horizon.
The water was as calm as on a summer day, and blindingly blue.
Lucià took off his jacket and threw it into the boat, and then, with Marcello’s help, pushed the boat into the water. It started to bob up and down on its own, as if the wood had come to life, and Lucià jumped over the side and into the boat; Marcello gave him a last push.
“Later, Marcè,” said Luciano.
Marcè couldn’t believe that Lucià really wanted to go off by himself; he stood there on the beach laughing to himself. “Yeah, later,” he answered.
Lucià picked up the oars without tying them to the oarlocks and started to row.
As Uncle Zocculitte had said, the sea was calm, but the wind was more uncertain; you could feel the scirocco wind coming on. After he got past the first few yards where the crests of the waves broke on the sand, Lucià rowed easily. He had promised that he wouldn’t go out too far, and he wanted to relax and enjoy his adventure without getting too tired. But as he rowed, he sat looking toward the rear of the boat, and he could see the shore, always the shore, as it receded; he felt that it would never recede enough to disappear from sight.
As the boat went out toward the open sea, the shape of the gulf became clearer in the light of the afternoon. First the beach became distinct from the area around the Pisco Montano, which was buffeted by the sun, then the port opened up around the sleeping masts and cranes, and finally the row of bathing huts on the beach disappeared. Meanwhile, the two arms of the gulf, toward Sperlonga and toward the Circeo, became more and more vast and clear to the eye. And in the middle, Terracina rose up high against the side of the gray mountain, with the sun bearing down on the city and the rocks.
After rowing for an hour, Luciano had covered but a small portion of the distance that Uncle Zocculitte covered in the same period when they went night fishing. Though the Circeo was still far off, its blue color was darker now, and he could distinguish the forests and the white of San Felice at the top.
Tired of facing the shore and frustrated at his slow pace, Lucià decided to raise the sail just as the sun was beginning to go down. He turned the pole around, attached the sail, inserted the mast into the hole in the macellaro and raised it. Then he sat down in the rear of the boat, even though it was still rather impractical to do so, and the boat, pushed by the strong winds of the scirocco, headed toward the open sea. On the horizon the water was incandescent, no longer blue as it was behind him, and the Circeo, which loomed larger and larger ahead, was a huge dark blue mass against the light. Very soon he could distinguish the forests from the clearings and the clearings from the rocks, and above, in a shimmering fog, he could make out the bell tower and houses of San Felice. And then he was almost at the foot of the Circeo. Down there, under the water, which the reflection of the Circeo colored violet, was Quadro, the buried city, and the rocks were just beyond. He decided to sail along the edge of the Circeo to the tip of the promontory, and then beyond, up to the very edge of the deserted sea, beyond all borders or limits.
The wind blew more intensely now and the air was misty; the clouds had amassed over the hills of Gaeta, at the extreme edge of the gulf. A still bank of clouds, transparent but heavy, cast a long, gray shadow over the sea. The lovely blue of the early afternoon had begun to turn dark as the wind picked up, and the sea was no longer perfectly smooth and had begun to swell slightly.
Perhaps night was beginning to fall; it was later than Luciano imagined. Perhaps that was why the sea had become leaden and colorless in that part of the gulf where he had never gone before, strange, unknown, indifferent. And it was beginning to get cold, so much so that Luciano put on the jacket, which lay on the bottom of the boat where it had fallen.
But behind him, toward the mainland, the air and the blueness seemed unchanged; perhaps they had become slightly more intense in the crystal light that sculpted them out of the air. Other mountains and hills and plains had appeared, behind and around Terracina and all the way to Mount Leano,41 opening up and widening toward the heart of Lazio.42 It would take him only half an hour to reach the furthest tip of the Circeo, and the scirocco blew harder and more continuously, flattening the surface of the water.
By the time the boat reached the tip of the Circeo, the sun was already very low on the horizon, surrounded by a blurry light like a haze along the boundless line of the sea.
There, the sea had no limit except the reddish, serene sky.
The hills of Gaeta, and further south the peak of the Massico,43 were hidden by clouds or erased by the night, and beneath them, all the way to the foot of the Circeo, the waters were gray and agitated. Quite suddenly, after two or three tired gusts, the scirocco wind stopped blowing and the sail dropped against the mast. There was not even a whisper of wind. But this didn’t last long; just as suddenly as the scirocco had stopped, a southwesterly gale rose. In the bend between the Circeo and the plain, with nothing to hold it back, it had broken free and ran wildly through the dead calm of the water, until finally it struck the boat’s sail with a blind blow. It lasted but a moment, and then the sea calmed down, under the again soft and regular gusts of the southwesterly wind. The sea gathered itself peacefully, as if waiting for the profound calm of the night, waiting to be still and alone.
From the folder in the archive entitled The Ferrobedò (and other notes and stories, some of which went into The Ragazzi), 1950–1951.
In a previous version, found in the same folder, the end is a bit different, and reveals more clearly the death of Lucià. It reads:
In the bend between the Circeo and the plain, with nothing to hold it back, it had broken free and ran wildly through the dead calm of the water, until finally it struck the boat’s sail with a blind blow. The boat was found overturned the following morning by a trawler. It was drifting along in the boundless sea, above which the moon had just set and which lay deserted and tranquil beneath the first light of day.
29 Circeo is a promontory in the Bay of Gaeta, south of Rome, near Terracina. In the Odyssey, this is the place where Ulysses is bewitched by Circe.
30 Shortened version of Marcello.
31 The Castelli Romani is the area of towns in the hills around Rome, the Colli Albani. Castel Gandolfo, the summer residence of the Pope, is located here.
32 Stronzo, or “jerk,” can be used with differing levels of aggression; here, it is used jokingly or affectionately by Marcè to mean something like “you idiot!”
33 Battaglioni M, or Battaglioni Mussolini: Marcello is referring to the old barracks that had been employed by the army.
34 Beams slicked with wax or animal fat, so that the boats could easily slide over them and into the water.
35 Roman expression that is literally an insult against someone’s dead relatives, and which is used to mean, roughly, “go to hell.”
36 A local fish, a variety of which is known as “dorade.”
37 Local dialect word for a bench in a boat.
38 A local fish, as are the variati, palombe, mafroni, coccie, schiamuti, cergne, and traci.
39 Another version of the Roman insult against someone’s dead relatives.
40 The Noantri—or “we others”—Festival is held in Trastevere in July.
41 Mountain in Lazio.
42 Region of Italy that includes Rome and Terracina.
43 A mountain south of Gaeta.