Erri De Luca - Me, You

My body was as immature as before, but the life inside it raced ahead commanded from outside, from far away. I could feel the onset of an icy anger, kept under a control that did not diminish it but, on the contrary, kept it alert, like the nerves in my teeth when I sucked ice.

One night I was allowed to go with Nicola to set the lines. A whole night on the sea. Daniele had gone once and did not recommend it. It was nothing but work, pitch-darkness, and silence. “You don’t feel like saying a word, and it’s not like night fishing when you go out for squid with lanterns. It’s just a lengthy preparation for the next day’s fishing.” It was preparative work and I wanted to participate in it. In addition, I thought I might gather a bunch of impressions to bring back to Caia. Nicola generally left at ten o’clock and returned just before dawn to pick up Uncle and go back out with him at first light. In those intervening hours the fish were supposed to have hooked themselves on the long lines dropped to the bottom.

We left on the absolute calm of a summer evening. The bow of the boat did not move out of the sight line of the Forio shoal on the other side of the island. I held the rudder along the coastline while Nicola cleaned the bait, then he took over the tiller. In the dark he looked for the landmarks that indicate the shoal by their alignment. A lighthouse, the light of a church, the twin-peaked outline of Mount Epomeo: these were the landmarks that were supposed to come together in an angle three miles off the island. Fishermen see the sea under a grid of lines; they follow routes without a compass.

The darkness did not encourage an exchange of words. Nicola remained silent as he groped around in the dark. The moon had not risen, the sea was empty, the sky aglow. Far offshore we came upon two fishermen who were rowing back. Nicola pulled up to them. Their motor had conked out. They lit a kerosene lamp and Nicola went on board to lend a hand. He was the most gifted mechanic in the fishing village. I put the oars in the water and stayed close by. I heard their quiet talk mixed with the wash of the oars, mere fragments of words because at sea they understood one another from just the main syllable, the accented one, a kind of stenography taught by the wind which carried off the rest of the word.

I thought about that evening on land with Daniele and Caia not wishing to turn around and look at the island. On the sea I did not feel distance. A third of a moon rose, losing its red rind on the pavement of still water. A powerful smell of bait filled the air now that we were stopped. With my fist I splashed the baskets with water. The wood of the oars fit snugly into the palm of the hand, legs placed one in front, one behind, to support the body’s push on the oars: and so there I was conforming to custom, to the métier, to the hour of the night; there was a place for me in that vastness of the sea, a place to put feet and hands and do what was needed. Caia was solid ground, eternal woman in a century that held me by the throat out of love and rage, but not out there, not on the sea. There, I was in the commingled nights of the earth’s numberless summers, I was a coeval of the planet, one of its wakeful species.

An hour passed before Nicola made a temporary repair. I pulled up alongside and we set out as the other boat went in. The men barely exchanged a good-bye.

We reached the shoal with a bit of aft wind. Nicola no sooner turned off the motor than he got busy with the line and the bait. The moon was small but bright. He threw in the signal buoy that had a strip of white cloth tied to the top of a stick. I was already at the oars, pushing off in the direction he called out. The boat moved swiftly and in the stern Nicola rapidly lowered the line of the rig with the bait attached. At the beginning of each coil he murmured a wish for top-quality fish in the morning: bass, porgy, grouper. We were making good progress and the wind cooled the work. I had to make an effort to turn my wrist when raising the oar out of the water because waves were coming up.

Halfway through, the moon disappeared and the wind picked up. Nicola was not smoking; not a good sign. I followed his directions: “Right,” “Left,” and the sea covered my labored breathing which was embarrassing me. When Nicola lowered the last float with the flag on top, the wind blew it out straight. The waves were growing heavier and I was exhausted. The motor kicked in; it was two o’clock and we were drenched from the spray.

The sea came over the bow, the crests of the waves were ripped off by the gusts of wind. I had brought along a light woolen sweater which was already soaked, but Nicola told me to put it on even so. We no longer spoke. With a pail I bailed out the water that came in over the sides. The darkness augmented the swelling sea and the shock of the waves. In a storm, the sea is not a plain but a hill full of ditches. The island had vanished behind the wind.

A breach was opening between the impressions I would have liked to describe to Caia and the raw experience that shuts down the senses and ignites the instinct of survival. I was no longer capturing fireflies in my fist to show a girl, I was under the yoke of a job that had to be seen through to the end. I scraped the bottom of my resources in the hope of finding more. My strained scrawniness was wearing to a thread over the empty lines. Nicola kept to his tiller and became part of the boat, more mast than man.

At the top of a long wave Nicola saw the glimmer of the boat of the two fishermen. It was adrift. They had given up on the oars, useless against that wind, and the repair had not held up under all the battering. They had sought refuge under the small shelf in the bow where tackle was stored. Nicola came up on the windward side and shouted to them to come out and be ready to catch a rope. It seemed to me at once that if we towed them, we wouldn’t budge in that sea, that even without them we were barely moving. But there was nothing else we could do. The fishermen would not abandon their boat and it was impossible to bring them aboard ours. Their gestures told the whole story: Nicola would try to tow them and they would cut the rope if our boat couldn’t make it. The only thing they said to each other was, “Catch!” The rope wound up in the water but they managed to grab hold of it with a harpoon.

And so there we were at sea, smashing into waves, drenched, deafened by the wind, and I couldn’t figure out whether we were moving or not. Nicola asked me if I felt up to working, not saying at what. Yes, I was, to combat the cold. He then altered the angle of our course so that we took the sea less from the bow than from the side and started taking on water. I later understood that Nicola was trying to enter into the lee of the island, abandoning the return route in the hope of finding a less exposed stretch of sea. For the moment, the effect was that the storm hit us broadside. I was bailing out seawater by the bucketful, which at least kept me warm. The fishermen in the other boat were doing the same. I kept losing my balance. In the raging blackness of the night I heard the clipped syllables of Nicola’s voice at my shoulders: “Né paù,” the linguistic remains of “Non aver paura,” don’t be afraid. Without turning around, I moved my head from side to side to indicate no.

Until then I hadn’t even thought about it. Had he been afraid, I would have been more so, but so long as he remained at the tiller and set the course, fear did not touch me. I had no experience of storms, I did not know the degrees of danger, and certainly there was much worse than this. I took the punches of the sea and the yanking of the bucket on my back without knowing how much longer the boat could stay afloat. I was with the best in the trade, on their routes, in one of their nights. Fear of capsizing was far from my thoughts.