At night Timoteo and I talked for hours while on our cots in the kitchen with mice and geckos to keep us company. Hearing his voice on the other side of the room made me feel safe and I knew it was the same for him. We couldn’t call our parents because there was only one pay phone on the island and it was expensive, but we had each other. In the darkness we spoke in English and it was like we became two different people, different siblings with different personalities. Language became an escape route. We could switch from one personality to another without being afraid of anyone’s judgment.
Sometimes if my heart beat too fast I crawled into his cot and hugged him. He knew how to make me laugh. We were both learning how to bridge two worlds.
“Max or Robert?” he asked.
“Robert.”
“Zio Antonio or grandma?”
“Antonio, ovviamente!”
We played our game of “Sophie’s choice.” Who would we be more willing to throw off a cliff into burning flames below? Our potential victims were always well calibrated and tough on the conscience.
To know that humans were inevitably bound to make choices, even the hardest ones, gave us peace of mind. Someone always had to go off the cliff and if we could choose between two unbearable options, we’d be able to face any no-win situation. If we could toss grandmothers, pets, parents, and friends into the flames, then we could live anywhere in the world, pick any persona we wanted, accept our own parents’ poor judgment. We played into the morning hours, commenting on each other’s choices, mostly agreeing on them. Except that between our father’s film in LA working out and being given the chance to move back to Rome, I picked our father’s film. Timoteo said he’d move back to Italy no matter what was on the other side of the cliff.
11
Naked on the rocks by the sea the Germans looked like dying bulls with sagging sacs and flat asses. They brought homemade picnics with them, complaining the panini at the alimentari cost a fortune. The yolk from their soft-boiled eggs dripped from their mouths onto their naked bellies. They drank warm beer and laughed. My uncle and Alma conversed with them, sometimes partly undressed, sometimes completely nude—depending on whether my brother and I were around. They told stories from the long winters and gossiped about which islanders had stolen water from whose wells.
I had chased Arash out of my dreams that morning. I learned to control his incursions during my sleep. I knew how to blur the edges of his face into the periphery. My rubber suit kept him mostly at bay, but sometimes not enough. It wasn’t just him. It was the feeling of him that wouldn’t go away. The packaged brick was with me and I kept waiting for the right moment to get rid of it. I reassured myself that Iran and California were far away, that I was safe on my small island. No riots or guns, just the purifying waters of the quiet Mediterranean Sea. I thought being there would cure me. I’d find a rocky alcove where I could dispose of my grief. I looked for that nook every day.
I left my uncle and the German nudists. I swam out to the open water farther down the coast. On the isolated shore I started walking past the natural arch that divided civilization from the wilder side of the island. I walked for hours, teetering on the edge of the boulders, until I reached the ancient lava flow beneath Tindara’s house on the other side of the island. From the shore I could see the emerging red cliffs of the Scoglio Galera in the middle of the sea. They seemed taller now that the tide was low. I swam out to them and climbed up, squinting my eyes to catch a glimpse of Tindara’s cliff dwelling, hoping to see her fluttering a symbolic white flag in the middle of the canyon, proclaiming a truce. “Your duty is terminated. You and Rosalia may consider yourselves healed. Enjoy the rest of your vacation.” But Tindara wasn’t there and the only things flying in the wind were hungry birds.
I took my bathing suit off, closed my eyes, and jumped from the tallest cliff into the water. It felt good to jump into space, so I got back up and jumped again. I did it over and over as the birds quarreled with the goats in the ancient sunlight. I closed my eyes and sprawled my body on the high rock, drying in the sun.
When I opened them again, the tide had come in and the sun was disappearing behind the mountain. The stones I treaded upon on my way in were now submerged and the only way back was by water. It was a long stretch, a quarter of the island’s circumference. I was tired from diving, but I had no choice but to swim.
Back in the water the black shadows underneath the sea looked like gigantic whales. I kicked harder, afraid they might emerge and eat me up. I didn’t have the strength to swim the crawl, so I turned over and tried backstrokes. I could see the dividing line of the natural arch in the distance turned upside down, still too far away. A captain’s megaphone from a tourist boat reverberated somewhere, but I could not see it. A sailboat swept by peacefully on the horizon. No other boats were in sight. I was getting cold and I was now too far from the Scoglio Galera to come out of the water. I tried to hold to a wall of shadowy rocks that hung over the sea, but the tide had risen and there was nothing to latch onto. I thrust my hips against the cliff walls and fell back in. I ran out of breath and closed my eyes, floating, too tired to do anything else.
I drifted over the coal-black lava flows that tainted the submerged world and remembered being four, on a beach in Rome. I had told my father I was ready to swim on my own without water wings, but it wasn’t true. I wanted to test him. He had been away working for a long time and I didn’t like how little he knew about us when he returned. He didn’t know my brother had started walking and I had started swim classes. Some part of me wanted to punish him for this. He let me go in the sea alone. I swam out feeling tall and brave, but when a wave pushed me down, I didn’t make my way back to the surface and I fainted. A tall man in a red Speedo saved me. When I regained consciousness I was in his arms. I hugged him tight pretending he was my father, pretending my father had saved my life. Back on the beach the man scolded my real father and told him he’d report him to the police.
Ettore lifted his arms defensively in the air. “Stop attacking me, man. She told me she could swim.”