Chapter 97
WHEN TEO AND I ARRIVED at the municipal building, we stopped at a registration table and gave one of the women working the event our particulars.
She handed us name tags and folders, which contained a schedule of events, a pad of paper, and a pen.
“The plenary session starts at nine,” she said in Italian, and pointed us in the direction of the large meeting room on the second floor.
I had no idea what the word plenary meant. “Is that Luca?” I asked Teo as he perused the schedule, but he explained that Luca’s talk would follow a little later in the morning.
In the meeting room, which was already crowded, I looked for Paul. I didn’t see him anywhere.
“Is this okay?” Teo asked, gesturing at two chairs about halfway down the aisle.
“Let’s save an extra seat,” I suggested. “In case Paul comes.”
Teo might have stiffened ever so slightly at the request, but he did as I’d asked.
“Are Luca and Bruno already here?” I asked once we were settled.
“I don’t think so,” he said as he shifted to look behind us, but then he saw Bruno across the room and waved.
Soon the lights dimmed, and the organizers took the floor. There was an elderly man whom I assumed was in charge, and he welcomed everyone, then thanked La Maddalena’s City Council and a host of other supporters for making the event possible.
The plenary speaker turned out to be a man named Luigi Pacchetti.
He was a professor at the University of Sassari and an expert on seagrass meadows, and he had been invited to give a talk on the sudden disappearance of Posidonia oceanic.
I didn’t know anything about these underwater meadows, except what I’d seen when I’d gone diving for nacchere, but I was excited by how much of the talk I understood.
Pacchetti argued that these watery meadows, capable of sustaining entire ecosystems, had begun to shrink in the early twentieth century, due in part to the use of dredges by sponge collectors.
In the sixties, it was the shrimpers and their new bottom trawlers that wreaked havoc on the delicate grass.
And now, said Pacchetti, what few beds of seagrass remained were being degraded by chemical and radioactive contamination.
“With the seagrass goes the algae. And with the algae goes everything else.”
I had begun taking notes, mainly lists of Italian words I didn’t know.
Words like degrado, traslocazione, and resilienza termica.
Teo was looking over my shoulder, so occasionally, he’d whisper a definition into my ear or tell me I needed an accent.
When I stole glances at his notebook, however, I couldn’t read a word.
I suppose he was using shorthand. He seemed to realize this was no fun because soon he was drawing me little pictures.
A sponge and a sea urchin and, at one point, a line drawing of me aboard the Alessandra.
He captioned that one in small block print: EILEEN ARCHER SI TUFFA PER PRENDERE LE NACCHERE.
Maybe a half hour into Pacchetti’s talk, I heard the door swing open and turned to see Paul slip into the room.
I waved to him, but he must not have seen me because he took a seat in the last row, near the door.
Pacchetti continued to talk about the plight of the Mediterranean’s seafloor, but now I found it impossible to pay attention.
I kept wondering if Paul had noticed me and, more importantly, if he had noticed Teo.
I decided I had nothing to hide. I had told Paul I was planning on attending the conference, and it was natural that I might run into Teo—a journalist—at said conference.
So, finally, I forced myself to turn around in my seat and wait, patiently, until I’d caught Paul’s eye.
He raised his eyebrows at me, and I gestured for him to join me, even though I knew he wouldn’t—not with the program underway.
“Paul’s here,” I whispered to Teo.
“Oh, good,” he said, but he didn’t have me fooled for a single second.