Chapter 79
THE ALESSANDRA WAS A SMALL fishing vessel with a pilothouse at the bow and a reel and trawl at the stern.
The net looked like it was a hundred years old, held together with cable ties and twine, and as I stepped over the tow cable and onto the deck, I pictured some old woman with a bad back tying each knot by hand.
A couple of people were already on board, making preparations to leave, and Teo introduced me to them: “Questa è la donna di cui ti parlavo.”
A man about my father’s age, with bushy eyebrows and a bulbous nose, gave me a wave. I waved back.
“This is Bruno Romano,” said Teo. “He’s a researcher with CNEN’s Casaccia Research Center and also has a faculty appointment at La Sapienza. In Rome.”
“Piacere,” I said, and Teo looked the tiniest bit amused, which made me wonder if that had been the wrong thing to say. Francesca had recently begun drilling me on the formal and informal, but I still found it impossible to determine who deserved what.
“Nice to meet you,” said Bruno in English.
There was another guy with Bruno named Luca.
He was a lot younger than Bruno, maybe in his late twenties, with shaggy brown hair and a gap between his front teeth.
Luca had been a student of Bruno’s at La Sapienza but was now teaching physics at a liceo in Cagliari.
I had never heard the word lyceum, let alone its Italian equivalent, so Teo explained that in Italy, there were many high school options but only the best and brightest students ended up at licei, where they studied Latin, Greek, philosophy, and apparently physics.
“Do you like the teaching?” I asked Luca after we’d been introduced, but almost immediately, I realized he didn’t speak English. I tried again in Italian. “Ti piace insegnare?”
He shrugged a little. “Non è male.”
“Luca is a gifted researcher,” said Bruno, “but it is very difficult to get a university position in Italy. So he is biding his time.”
Luca wanted to know what Bruno was saying, so Bruno repeated himself in Italian. Some men might have loved the praise, but Luca seemed uncomfortable. “Possiamo smetterla di parlare di me?”
“He is begging me to stop talking about him,” said Bruno, and I got the impression that this was the way things usually went with them, Bruno singing Luca’s praises, and Luca pleading with him to direct his spotlight elsewhere.
Soon a young woman joined us. “This is Nina Russo,” Teo said. “She’s a current student of Bruno’s. Working on her dissertation.”
She was pretty, with short dark hair and big green eyes, and when she bobbed her head in my direction, I realized she likely didn’t speak English, either.
The last person Teo introduced me to was Salvario Campus, who owned the boat and whom CNEN was paying by the day for its use. Salvario was barely five feet tall, and he had to be at least eighty.
“Salvario is local, then?” I asked Teo.
He pointed to a two-story building that overlooked the harbor. “He says he was born in that house right over there.”
“Doesn’t get much more local than that,” I said, and he laughed.
Once we were all on board and Bruno had given the signal, Salvario made for the mouth of the harbor, and Teo turned a plastic bucket upside down and urged me to take a seat.
When I did, he gave me this sort of disbelieving smile, as if he thought maybe he’d conjured me out of thin air. “I’m glad you came,” he said.
I was glad, too.