The seagulls on the cliff seem to do thehalf pipe.
He tells Costanza, who asks him what a half pipe. It's that piece of pipe cut in half that you skateboard on to do stunts. Seagulls attack the walls, rearing on the air currents, darting past the battlements and stopping in the air. They scan the rocks below, then slowly drop and glide towards their prey, or perhaps another air current. They go up and down, just like skaters. Costanza gives him a half smile and goes back to looking at the sea.
His face means, that I took you from Naples to Essaouira, here that Jimi Hendrix also used to come here on vacation, perhaps he would sit right on this pier to look at the sea, the rocks, the seagulls, the Arab fort, old town, and you tell me this thing about skateboarding.
On the other hand, even Roberto doesn't give a damn about skateboarding, he's walked fifteen kilometers with his rucksack and he's tired. He sits against the wall, hugs the backpack and waits. In Morocco you can always find a shopkeeper who lends you a folding chair, but tonight that's just not the thing.
The ship arrives when it is night, they don't even see it as it enters the port. The quay is practically in the dark, there are only two lights at eye level on the sides of the ramp, so as not to make passengers fall into the water as they disembark.
It's an old ferry with white sides and two rows of lighted glass, six or seven meters off the waterline, a halo of street lighting running all around the open decks, yellow in the humid night air.
The line has the pace of a school group entering the classroom in the morning. Roberto and Costanza follow the Moroccans onto the boarding bridge, slip into a small door on the right and up a flight of non-slip steps to a landing furnished like the antechamber of a delicatessen. Towards the bow there are other stairs that go down but access is blocked by a rope, you will go to the engine room. Toward the center is a double glass door, and behind it is the passenger saloon, furnished in the seventies, old and elegant, well lit and too crowded. Roberto expected the Moroccans to want to stay cool, and instead they've all gathered there, some are already starting to smoke. Costanza would also like to stay in the seventies salon but Roberto feels the call of the sea air and goes out.
She follows him, then stops and puts down her backpack. Roberto thinks she's suffering from the heat, and that being away from her will do her good, so he makes a gesture to take her backpack too.
She refuses, but takes the gesture as a signal that we can start over, and tells him that he had no right to talk to her like that anyway.
Roberto doesn't even know what he's referring to. He doesn't let go of the rucksack but loads it in front of him and heads towards the ladder that leads to the second deck. Costanza follows him in silence.
The seats are white fiberglass trunks with a four-finger-wide backrest. They take two, occupy them with their luggage and Costanza gets ready for the night. Maybe Roberto should do it too as long as the port is light, but he doesn't feel like it. He stands still, takes a breath and watches as she concentrates and pays attention as if he were going through someone else's luggage.
He tells her he's going to get some air. She asks what time they will arrive the next morning. A quarter past ten. Costanza closes her eyes as she counts. That's six hours of sleep, she says, better go to sleep now.
He leaves it there and goes to look out to watch the ship leave. If they lie down together now, they quarrel until dawn.
He left her alone with the luggage so that even if she wanted to join him, she couldn't. From afar Costanza has huge, bright eyes like an owl and she keeps them focused on him. If he depended on her he would really quarrel until the next day but Roberto can't stand it anymore. He prefers to watch the dockers at work and pretend for five minutes that he's traveling alone.
The headlights of the cars illuminate the ramp at regular intervals. Boarding is very slow, nobody knows what haste is. There are few cars but the wheels make a noise as if they were walking on iron pipes, the sailors go after the last one and disappear into the belly of the ship. A crash is heard, the floor jolts, the chains that lift the ramp begin to slide. Each ring is the size of a head, the whole ship shaking as they roll back. It's a noise that drowns out all the others and Roberto wonders if he would have woken him up, but for some reason he says no. The water around the stern begins to boil.
All operations are done in the dark, by heart. There is some movement around the bollards, a flicker of huge snakes released and the thud of hawsers falling into the water. You hear the metal gears moaning, the hawsers slamming against the side and the voices of the Moroccans who always have lots of things to say about everything.
It is his favorite moment and he turns towards Costanza, but she has already lay down and is covered by the seatbacks. Roberto stands up on the lowest rail of the parapet and manages to see the blond head among the luggage.
The ship broke away from the quay.
From the ground, the lights make the wake of white water that bubbles around the propellers shine. A couple of gulls detach themselves from a crane and glide towards the stern. The ship slowly slips out of the port: from the sound it seems that the engines are having difficulty keeping idle. The right side passes so close to the entrance that for a moment everything turns red, then it gets seriously dark and they head towards the open sea. The mainland is a row of lights, a motionless stalls overlooking the stage of the sea.
Costanza hasn't fallen asleep, but is lying down and looking at the dark sky. Roberto pushes some of her luggage aside, sits down and lets her rest his head on her legs. They don't say anything, he waits for her to fall asleep. He sometimes she doesn't sleep through the night, after they have argued, but it's been a busy day.
Costanza has huge, blue eyes, and she doesn't close them. She rolls onto her side a bit and continues to look at the sky.
It's full of couples who have broken up after a trip, thinks Roberto. If Constance and I can't last a fortnight in Morocco, it's useless to insist.
He wakes up with his arm thrown over his eyes.
Above him is a very clear sky, cut in half by a plume of white smoke. He hasn't gotten half as much sleep as he needs. The seagulls are still here, screeching like idiots and overtaking each other. In his sleep he has taken off his sweatshirt and his wet shirt is sticking to his chest. He takes water from his backpack and drinks nearly half the bottle as his eyes adjust to the sun.
On the next seat Costanza is still sleeping. She has leaned back and has a hand cupped over her eyes to block out the light. He should drink too, Roberto thinks, but if I wake her up, in this heat, he won't go back to sleep. It is the typical situation he imagined when he said that perhaps Morocco in August was not their ideal destination. Obviously this perplexity cost him two or three hours of useless conversation, but on balance it was founded.
Costanza has never been a lover of summer. Roberto has a photo of her by the sea, before they met her, where he looks like another person. Her head is wrapped up in an enormous turban, her skin shiny with sweat and a stupid gaze more suited to a mystical illumination in the desert than in Marina di Camerota. He met her in the winter, with the scarf up to her nose and her eyes running everywhere, and she wanted her right away.
There is really too much light for ten o'clock, and in fact when he looks for the sun he finds it much higher than where it should be. Either the sun has risen much more forcefully than usual or the ship is not keeping up. It will be at least eleven, and land cannot be seen: with these premises today will be even worse than yesterday, but it is natural that an old Moroccan ferry will be a few hours late. Even the guide says so: the imperial cities are suggestive, the camels drink a lot and transport is delayed.
At the end of the row of box seats are two little girls playing. Each has a collection of scarves wrapped around their heads, Roberto wonders how they don't blow away with the wind.
The youngest has climbed onto the railing, like he did the night before, but she's six or seven and even with her feet on the rail, her chin can't reach the handrail. The parapet has three metal bars running horizontally about a foot apart. The girl is so small that she could slip between one barrier and another and end up in the sea.
Roberto stays looking at her, but doesn't know how to get close to two little girls without frightening their parents, and he couldn't even tell who the parents are. It seems that nobody notices it.
Her mother would say: do these little girls have a mother?
There's a woman two benches over. Roberto gets up, attracts her attention and points to the girls.
She doesn't understand.
Roberto tries to tell her that it is dangerous, looking off the cuff for a possible ending to the word.
The woman laughs. Dog problem.
You have been warned! a le, Roberto would like to insist, but his French betrays him. The woman laughs again and he returns to his seat defeated.
There is also a sign, attached to the parapet, it's a slightly old but pretty big plastic plate, with red on white writing: "Caution, don't lean over".
Below is the one with the instructions for the lifeboat and he reads it all, before realizing he's reading it. There's also the Arabic license plate, much newer, bolted next to the Italian one, he almost didn't take it for something to read.
Roberto gets up and walks up to the stairway that leads down to the first deck, and with each step it is as if he were doing a complete circuit of the ship. He looks out, recognizes the delicatessen hall furniture and yet he still doesn't believe it, so he goes back and goes to look out where the girls were playing and looks at the name on the side.
It's really her.
Adeona, Naples.
He doesn't remember the first time he took the ferry to Ischia. He's always been there. There were three of them doing that stretch, Adeona, Naiad and Dryad, but Adeona was the oldest and his favorite.
He made the departure at ten past nine. He took it when his mother took him to the bath, when she went there with Tommaso and the others in high school, when he took a girl. Summer with Lucia, they took it every week. Nadia never wanted to go. You also took it by yourself, countless times, to go to lunch with your grandfather.
It has the same colours, the white of the side, the funnels, the handrails, the finishing touches and the entire blue floor. The Moroccans have kept the same color, if they've ever repainted it, but basically it's a bright blue, a Tuareg blue.
They changed the lifeboats, of course, and maybe that's what put Roberto off course. The tops are yellow instead of orange, and there are no drinking fountains, but he really doesn't understand how he failed to recognize the seats. The box seats, white with aluminum hinges, for all the times he's slept in them he could call them home.
He climbs once again onto the railing and takes a good look at it, like a captain at his first command: towards the stern there are the stairs that go down to the first deck, the winches of the lifeboats and those two white metal mushrooms that no one can see. he could tell what they were for. Towards the bow are nine rows of seats that slide under a large metal canopy stretched between the two funnels. In the background, the gaze is interrupted by a wall, in which the doors that lead down to the bathrooms, the bar and the passenger lounges open. Behind the wall, however, is the control room, but Roberto has never seen it. That's all you see of a Caremar ferry, half towards the stern: beyond the wall are the sailors and you never go there. When he was a child his mother could have asked permission, but he liked to look at the sea and the ship paid no attention to it.
The engine must be at half cruising speed, thinks Roberto, not even in the Gulf of Naples did they go so slow. The effect is of a ship intimidated by all this open sea. It makes him strange to see her like this without the island or the gulfs in the background, as if she were lost.
He would like to wake up Costanza and tell her everything, but obviously he doesn't. More precisely, she'd like to tell it to the other Costanza, to the sweetest one of all the others, and not to this pissed off who fell asleep last night.
This one from tonight makes us couscous, with her memories, takes them, breaks them up and cooks them. Finding out you're traveling on Adeona is one of those sensations that her first desire is to share it, but this Constance has taught him to follow the second wishes more than the first.
You look at the sea, you look at the ship and then you look at the sea again.
It will be midday, and Costanza doesn't wake up, her head is stuck between the backpack and the seat back, her breathing is heavy and her arm is folded over her eyes. She doesn't stop sweating, she has two shiny stripes between her neck and shoulder, but she doesn't wake up.
Roberto slept there as if it were his bed, on these seats: his father keeps a photo of him sleeping on these seats, under the July sun, with a Latin book under his head. And it was a maturity that kept him awake in any other bed.
The seats under the canopy were the best. Ventilated but protected from the sun, with the rows of seats facing each other. When he came with friends, places under the shelter were a must: on the outward journey we were all together to make noise, while on the way back, tired from the day at the beach, everyone found his own place to sleep. Even with their mother they took those, but because she was far from the parapet, the dreaded parapet with the bars too far apart. He was fine with it, she would open a book and read. He read well on Adeona, better than on other ships, but most of all, he slept. More than once, when he traveled alone, Roberto had been awakened by the siren, and he had found himself alone between the seats, the ship ready to leave. The sailors didn't tell him anything, as long as he was outside, they would have left him there to sleep even all day long, Naples and Ischia, back and forth, ad infinitum.
Costanza says something in her sleep and turns towards him. Her skin is red and swollen, it seems that the sun is slapping it. Roberto pulls her backpack over her and puts it on his shoulder, then Costanza's, her backpack and her bag.
He wakes her up by shaking her, as softly as he can.
He tells her he takes her to the shade and holds out his hand. She takes it, sits up blankly, her eyes dazed at her photo. Roberto smiles at her, makes her get up and takes her under the canopy: the seat in the center that looks towards the sea. It's very cool, the side doors are open and there's a breath of wind that comes and goes.
He hands her the bottle of water and makes her drink.
"We have arrived?"
"You can sleep a little longer."
She starts to answer something, but then lies down, rests her head on his legs and closes her eyes again. Roberto unbuttons his shirt and waits for the wind to return.
He doesn't tell her that on that seat he sat next to his mother, all his friends, three girls he's been with. He especially he doesn't tell her about the three girls.
Constance does not fall asleep immediately but remains there to think. Roberto leans over to his backpack, looks for the cleanest thing they have and uses it to wipe the sweat off her forehead. She stares back at hers, blue eyes like inverted rainbows. Then she goes back to sleep.
The author
Simone Laudiero was born in Milan in 1979 but is Neapolitan from a Neapolitan family. He works in Milan and lives in Rome. He has been a comedian since 2006: they bear his signature Camera Café, Kubrick and other programs. He created Professor Schiaragola. In 2008 he published Gianluca's difficult detoxification Arkanoid for Fazi Publisher. Author of several other novels, his latest published work is The return of the sea. The lost heroes (Piemme, 2019). He is one of the founders of La Buoncostume, a group of television and web authors.
