Chapter 2 #2
Tonino smiled, and his smile reached every part of his face, which Rafael's never quite did and mine never did at all.
"Signora," he said. "Everything is dying. The trick is how you spend the time."
I wrote that down too. Not for the report. The report didn't have a column for it. I wrote it in the back of the notebook, the pages I keep for the things that don't belong in anyone's assessment, and I told myself I'd use it as a quote and knew, even as I wrote, that I wouldn't.
I'm going to tell you about the heat now, because the heat is part of this, the way a character is part of it.
By the end of that first week, the ondata di calore had stopped being weather and started being a presence.
The town moved differently under it. Shutters stayed closed against the white blaze of noon.
The streets emptied between one and five, everyone gone to ground, and the only sounds were cicadas sawing in the lemon trees and the slap of the sea against the wall.
At night the stone gave the heat back up, and you walked through air that was warmer than your own skin, and nobody slept well, and the whole town developed the raw, thin-tempered edge of people who hadn't rested in days.
I felt it in myself. The cold I rely on is a discipline, and discipline is harder in heat. Things leak through. The hard outline I keep around myself went soft at the corners in that air, and I found myself doing things I don't do.
I found myself in conversations.
The seventy-eight-year-old pilot, whose name was Battista, who'd lost two fingers to a winch in 1971 and a son to the sea in 1994, told me about the morning the whole fleet went out in a storm to find a boy whose boat had gone silent on the radio.
They'd found him. They'd found him alive.
The young ones think we go out for the fish, he said, we go out for each other.
I wrote it down because I write everything down, and then I sat with it longer than my job required.
He showed me his hands while he talked, turning them over on the café table, the gap where the two fingers had been.
He'd been nineteen, he said, and a fool, and the winch had taught him in one second what his father had failed to teach him in nineteen years, which was respect.
The sea does not hate you, he told me. That is the thing the tourists never understand.
It does not hate you and it does not love you.
It is only the sea. The men — the men love you.
That is why you stay near the men and not near the sea.
He laughed, a dry sound like rope through a cleat.
Though you must go on the sea to be near the men. So. He spread the ruined hands. So.
I had come to count his boat as a depreciating asset. I left having to physically stop my pen from writing down that I liked him.
A woman named Carla who ran the co-op books showed me the grant application she'd been filing for nine years and the column where the club quietly made up the difference every season the grant fell through.
They don't ask for thanks, she said. They get angry if you thank them.
I asked her why the club did it. She looked at me like I'd asked why the sun came up.
Because it's ours, she said. What else do you do with what's yours?
She had a ledger going back to the founding, leather-spined, the early entries in a hand that had been dead for decades.
She let me turn the pages. I am good at reading ledgers; it's half my trade.
And this one told a story no spreadsheet of mine would ever capture, because the numbers didn't balance and were never meant to.
Year after year the club poured money into a thing that lost money, and called the loss the point, and the town had survived three generations on exactly that arithmetic — the arithmetic of people who'd decided in advance that some things were worth more than they cost. I closed the ledger feeling like I'd read someone's private prayers.
The arithmetic held. The boats were old and the fuel was dear and the young ones were leaving. Every number I came for was exactly where I'd known it would be.
And underneath every number was an answer to the question Rafael had said I'd never ask.
The men stayed for each other. They stayed because the harbor was theirs.
They stayed for a reason that didn't show up in any column, a reason I'd spent fifteen years insisting didn't exist because if it existed then my father hadn't died for nothing, he'd died for something, and that was a door I'd welded shut a long time ago and had no intention of opening for a charming biker on the Amalfi Coast.
I told none of this to Rafael.
But I went back to the zinc counter every morning, and I told myself it was for the espresso.
It was not for the espresso. Tonino made a fine cup, but I have had fine coffee on six continents and never once rearranged my morning around it.
I went because the counter was where he'd be, and I had reached the stage of self-deception where I could admit the first half of that sentence to myself as long as I left the second half unspoken.
The cold is a discipline. Discipline, it turns out, has a great deal to say about your hands and almost nothing to say about your feet, and my feet kept carrying me down the hill to that zinc counter every single morning of that long, blazing week.
He caught me at the harbor wall again on the seventh evening, when the light was going down red and the heat had let off just enough to be bearable, and for once neither of us was performing, because we were both too tired in that air to do anything but be approximately honest.
"You found Battista," he said, sitting down on the wall a careful arm's length from me.
"He found me. Your whole town keeps finding me. It's coordinated."
"It's not coordinated." He looked out at the water. "It's just that you're the most interesting thing to happen here since the harbor flooded in '09. People want a look at the woman who's come to decide whether they get to keep their lives. You'd want a look too."
"I'd avoid her."
"No, you wouldn't." He said it gently. "You'd walk right up to her and tell her she was wrong about everything.
Which is what you've been doing all week.
" He turned his head and looked at me, and the red light was on his face, and I am only being honest when I tell you that the list I'd made my first night — infuriating, running a play, gorgeous — had reordered itself over seven days, and the third item had migrated to the top, and I hated it.
He was gorgeous. There. I'd said it to myself.
It didn't matter. Gorgeous was just another road, and I don't drive.
"You're not what they sent you to be," I said, because I wanted to put something true between us that wasn't about the harbor. "The charmer. You do it, but it's not — you keep stepping out of it. Like the smile's a coat you're tired of wearing."
He was quiet for a moment. The boats nodded at their lines.
"And you're not what they sent you to be either," he said.
"The arithmetic. You do it. But you keep asking the man.
" He almost smiled. "You think I haven't noticed?
Battista talked to you for an hour. Battista doesn't talk to me for an hour, and I've known him since I was nine.
You don't price the boat, Mila. You ask.
You've been asking all week. You just don't write down the answers. "
The thing about a man who finds your door is that the second time he finds it, it's not luck.
I didn't have a comeback. That was new. I always have a comeback; the comeback is the wall.
So we sat there instead, the two of us, an arm's length apart on a harbor wall in a dying town in the worst heatwave in a decade, while the sun went down red into the water, and neither of us said the thing that was sitting in the air between us getting warmer than the stone.
A spark is a small thing. You can step on it. I'd stepped on a hundred.
But you have to see it to step on it, and the trouble with that evening was that I saw it, and I looked right at it, and I did not move my foot.
"I should go," I said.
"You should," he agreed.
Neither of us moved for a while. The last of the red went out of the water and the harbor lights came up one by one, and somewhere behind us The Anchor woke for the evening, a low warm murmur of voices and a guitar somebody was playing badly and happily.
He smelled of salt and engine oil and something underneath that was just him, and I was close enough to know that, which was already too close, and I did not move away.
When I finally walked back up the hill to the convent, my face was warm and it wasn't the heat, and I lay awake a third night running, and I told myself it was the assignment, the heat, the strangeness of the place.
It was none of those things, and I knew it, and that was the most frightening discovery of the whole long week — not that the town might be right and I might be wrong, but that I'd come to bury Cala Sirena, and somewhere down on that harbor wall, I'd started, very quietly, to be afraid I might not be able to.