Slack Tide

Light Boats

At one in the morning, nine miles off the back side of Catalina, Rocco Iacono turned on the sun.

That was what his father had called it, the first time Rocco had seen it done, at eleven, in 1972, standing in the wheelhouse door of a wooden seiner with a jacket three sizes too big for him: *Now we turn on the sun.* A switch on the panel, then another, and the bank of lamps along the rail of the light boat came up from orange to white, and the black water under the hull went green, then jade, then a glowing bottle color that went down and down until it seemed the boat was floating over a lit room. Rocco was seventy now. He had turned on the sun perhaps nine thousand times. He still waited for the green.

It came. The swell was long and lazy from the southwest, the kind that lifted the *Isolana* and set her down again without spilling a cup, and under the lamps the water filled with small living sparks: krill, first, then the little silver fish that ate the krill, and then, rising out of the dark like thoughts arriving, the squid.

They came up in a slow cloud, hundreds, then thousands, each one a pale torpedo with two black eyes, hanging in the light and flickering. Their skin went from glass to rust to glass again as they turned. Ray Kovačević, on deck in his orange bibs, leaned over the rail and said what he said every night, which was nothing, only a long low whistle between his teeth. Ray's grandfather had come from Komiža, on Vis, the same year Rocco's father came from Forio, and the two families had been on each other's boats for so long that nobody in San Pedro could have told you whose deck belonged to whom.

"Call them," Ray said.

Rocco got on the radio. Half a mile off, the seiner *Santa Lucia II* was waiting with her net stacked on the stern, and her skipper, a cousin of Rocco's wife, came back in a voice thick with sleep and coffee and said he was coming in.

Then there was nothing to do for a while but hold the light boat still and watch.

Rocco took the plastic sleeve out of his jacket pocket, where it had been riding since Monday, and held it under the chart lamp.

It was a postcard. It was a photograph from before he was born, brown and soft, printed on card that had gone furry at the edges, of a cove under cliffs. The cliffs were pale and pocked, the soft rock the island was made of, and at their foot, in a row, were dark arched doorways cut straight into the stone, eleven of them, each with a wooden door, and in front of the doors a beach of dark sand with boats drawn up on it, bows to the cliff, and nets spread on poles. At the waterline, where the little waves broke, something rose from the sand. Smoke, you would have said. It was not smoke. Rocco knew. His mother had told him a thousand times what it was, and he had never once seen it with his own eyes.

Along the bottom of the card, in white letters printed into the picture: *ISCHIA. PIETRAFUMO. LA SPIAGGIA DEI PESCATORI.*

On the back, at the top, his mother's hand. She wrote as she had learned to at a school with one room and a stove, in a slanting brown ballpoint that bit into the card deep enough to be felt from the picture side with a thumb. Not Italian. The other thing. The island's own speech, which she had kept for seventy-three years in a house on Ninth Street as if it were a coat she might need again.

Under it, in neat print, Rocco's daughter had written the English.

*They want to knock down the cellars of Pietrafumo from the first of July. They have put a fence on the sand. My brother Tore is eighty-eight and he still goes out. Dolores told my son that a man would read this. I want the man to know I have film.*

Then his daughter's initials. Then nothing.

Rocco put the card back in his jacket. The *Santa Lucia II* came out of the dark with her deck lights off and began to lay her net in a great slow circle around the lit water, and for the next hour there was no time to think about Pietrafumo or film or anything but the weight of the catch and the angle of the rings and the shouting.

---

They were tied up at Fish Harbor on Terminal Island by six, under the old cannery walls where the tuna had come in by the million when Rocco was a boy and where now the gulls sat in white rows on dead roof beams. By seven Rocco was in his kitchen on Ninth Street with a towel over his shoulders, and his mother was at the table, dressed, with her handbag on her lap.

"Ma," he said. "It's Saturday tomorrow. Not today."

"I know what day it is." Assunta Iacono was ninety-one and four and a half feet tall in her good shoes. She had been born on that beach in the picture. She had walked off it in March of 1958, eighteen years old, married by proxy in the town hall at Forio to a man she had met twice, with her husband's brother standing in for the groom, and had sailed from Naples ten days later on a ship with twelve hundred people on it, and had not walked on it since. "I'm practicing sitting," she said. "It's a long drive."

"You don't have to come."

She did not answer that. She had stopped answering it on Wednesday.

---

They drove north on Saturday in the dark, Rocco and his mother, in the truck, with a cooler of food she had packed as if for a crossing and a thermos and a blanket she did not use.

She slept through the Valley and past Santa Barbara. She woke above Gaviota, where the hills were already going from green to gold, and ate a peach. At San Luis Obispo they left the freeway for the coast road, and she took her sunglasses from her handbag, settled them on her nose, and watched the ocean when it came back, and kept looking, and north of Cambria the road went up onto the cliffs and the coast began to do what it does below Big Sur, falling away in great pleated folds of rock and brush to a sea so blue and white and furious that his mother, who had lived beside the Pacific for most of a century, said, "Mamma mia," quietly, which from her was not an exclamation but a measurement.

"It's the same water," she said, after a while.

"Same ocean, Ma."

"Not the ocean. The water. It looks hard. At home the water looks soft. Like you could fold it." She looked out at the white lines of surf crawling against the rocks. "Your father said the Pacific was a sea for men who wanted to prove something."

The co-op at Soberanes Cove was a gray shed, a concrete ramp, a hoist, and a woman.

She was standing on the ramp in yellow boots when they pulled in, short and broad, with gray hair under a red bandanna, her arms folded. Rocco had met her twice in forty years, at fishery meetings in Monterey, in rooms full of folding chairs and bad coffee where she had said almost nothing and everybody had listened when she did. She had called him in March. She had said she heard from his wife's cousin's boy that the old lady had something, and she had said that she knew a person who read things, and that was all she had said.

Dolores looked at the truck. She looked at the old woman getting down from it, refusing Rocco's arm, landing on the concrete in her good shoes and standing very straight. Then she walked once, slowly, all the way round the truck and the two of them, the way Rocco had once watched her circle a stretch of water before she set a line, and came back to where she had started.

"Signora," she said.

"Dolores." Assunta held out the card in its sleeve. "My son says you know a man."

"I know a box." Dolores did not take the card yet. She looked at it in the old woman's hand. "There's a post office in Carmel. A box with a number. I put the number on a piece of paper for a girl once, a few years back. She needed somebody. Somebody came." She paused. "I don't know his name. I never asked it. He doesn't know I don't."

"Will he come?"

"I don't know that either." Dolores looked at the sea, at the hard blue water going white on the rocks below the ramp. "He reads everything. That much I know. He reads it twice."

Assunta held the card out again, and this time Dolores took it, and turned it over, and read Rocco's daughter's English, and then looked for a long while at the line of brown slanting dialect above it, which she could not read at all.

"What's this part say?" she asked.

"The same," said Assunta. "But true."

Dolores nodded as if that made perfect sense, and put the card inside her jacket.

---

The card went into the box in Carmel on Monday, in a stiff brown envelope, the address printed in block capitals by a woman who had never addressed anything to that number before, and it was taken out on Friday morning by a man in a canvas jacket who did not open the envelope at the counter. He opened it in his car.

He was parked on the hill above the town, under a Monterey pine, with the window down and the smell of the pines and the fog and somebody's woodsmoke coming in. He slid the card out of the envelope onto his knee.

He looked at the front first. The cliffs, pale and pocked. The eleven arched doors. The boats on the dark sand, the nets on their poles. The white wisps at the waterline that the printer had caught as if they were flaws in the paper.

Steam, he thought. A beach where the ground breathes.

He turned it over. He could not read the dialect, though he tried, the way he tried with everything: *'e cellare*, the cellars; *'a rena*, the sand; a number he could make out, *ottantotto*. He read the English. Then he read the English again.

*I want the man to know I have film.*

He sat with that sentence. The fog was coming off the bay below in long gray ribbons and a man was walking a dog down the hill, a small brown dog that stopped at every tree.

He found his phone and sent his son one line.

*Are you free at the end of June? There's a race where being on time matters more than being fast.*

The answer came while the man with the dog was still in sight.

*Define on time.*

He smiled, laid the phone on the seat screen-down, and started the car.

The Car from Varese

For anyone who asks.

*There is a kind of motor race in Italy where the fastest car can lose. The organizers set an average speed for each stretch of road, often a modest one, and hide rubber tubes across the tarmac at places you are not told about. Each tube records the instant your front wheels cross it, to the hundredth of a second. You are scored against where you should have been, and early is as wrong as late. People who love speed find it maddening. I find it the most honest thing in motor racing. It asks one question, the same question a good doctor asks and a good friend: were you where you said you would be?*

---

His father read the card at the kitchen table with his glasses on, which meant he was taking it seriously.

The old man wore his glasses only for crosswords he could not finish, for medicine labels, and for anything written by hand. He held the card at the distance his arms preferred and read the dialect line first, moving his lips, though he could not have known a word of it.

"Somebody's mother," he said.

"Somebody's mother. Ninety-one. From an island off Naples. She lives in San Pedro."

"She presses hard." His father ran his thumb across the front of the card, over the cliffs, and Eight saw him feel the letters coming through from the back. "A person who presses this hard has been told before that nobody would read what she wrote." He turned it over again and looked at the eleven dark doorways in the rock. "And these?"

"Storerooms. Cut into the cliff. For nets, oars, boats in winter. The family's, and their neighbors'. Somebody wants them knocked down."

"And the steam?"

"The beach is hot. Volcanic. It comes up through the sand at the waterline."

His father looked at the white wisps for a long time. The lieutenant leaned against the table edge beside him, its rubber foot worn to a gray crescent. Outside, the field was still wet, and the float on the porch post turned a quarter turn in the breeze, showed its faded number to the sea, and turned back.

"A beach that is warm from underneath," his father said, "and people who cut their houses into the rock beside it." He removed his glasses and closed their arms. "Those people have been there a very long time. And somebody new has come and said they were never there at all."

"That's usually how it goes."

"That is always how it goes." His father slid the card back across the table. "She says she has film."

"Yes."

"Then the boy should go and see her first. Before you do anything. Film is the boy's country."

---

The son drove down to San Pedro on the second Saturday of May in his small gray car with his recorder in a padded case on the passenger seat and a box of cookies on the floor, because his grandmother had said one did not go to an old woman's house with empty hands, and because she had baked the cookies herself, before dawn, in case he forgot.

He came back on Monday night and sat at the long table with a plate of reheated dal and told it in order, the way he had learned to.

The house on Ninth Street was white stucco with a green trim and a fig tree in the back that took up half the yard. There was a rabbit hutch under the fig, empty now, painted the same green, and Assunta Iacono had told him with great seriousness that until 2004 she had kept six rabbits in it at a time, illegally, against every rule of the City of Los Angeles, because a house without rabbits was not a house, and the inspector who came had been the son of a fisherman from Forio and had gone away again with a bag of lemons.

She had let him record her. She had asked first what the machine did, and whether her voice would be kept, and who would hear it, and she had made him promise that her granddaughter would have a copy and that nobody would ever play it to sell anything. Then she had folded her hands and talked for three hours. Afterward her granddaughter had shown him the family's private page, where under a heading for things the family kept she had already put the tin itself: a photograph of it, the year it was bought, and a line in her grandmother's words about why it lived in the hall closet and not the garage.

"She has four reels," the son said. "Eight millimeter. Her husband shot them in the summer of 1962. It was his only trip back. He took a camera he bought on credit at a shop on Pacific Avenue, and he filmed everything. The cove. The cellars. Her family. A day when the whole village cooks food in the sand." He took a breath. "She's kept them in a cookie tin in the hall closet for sixty-nine years. Nobody's projected them since the night the projector started smoking, when her son was five. Her granddaughter had them copied once at a drugstore and the copy looks like it was filmed through a glass of milk."

"Why does the film matter?" asked the son's mother. She was across the table from him, her readers pushed up on her forehead and a pen behind one ear, which meant she had been doing the accounts for the garden club.

"Italian law," the son said. "I looked it up on the drive. If a building outside a town was put up before September 1967, it didn't need a permit, because there wasn't a permit to need. After that, it did. Somebody on the island has filed to have the cellars declared illegal. If the families can't prove they were there before 1967, the cellars become the town's property, and the town has promised them to a hotel company that holds a lease on the beach." He looked at his father. "The families have photographs. The oldest one anybody can find is from 1971. A German tourist sent it to them."

"And the film is 1962."

"And the film is 1962."

The son's mother put her pen down.

"Who's the hotel company?"

"Lucerna Terme. They have a big spa hotel on the island already, on the north side. They want the cove for what the brochure calls a thermal beach experience." The son made a face. "There's a picture of it. Sun beds on the hot sand. A glass lift down the cliff. The cellars turned into treatment rooms. Ninety euros to sit where her grandmother cooked beans."

His father, at the end of the table, said nothing. He had his hands round his tea.

"And there's something else," the son said, to his father, and stopped.

"Go on."

"Lucerna sponsors a race. On the island. At the end of June. Old cars. Historic regularity, they call it. A trial round the island on public roads, with timing tubes, and a closed stage at the end." He looked down at his plate. "I didn't find it. Mrs. Iacono's granddaughter did. She said, if your father races, there's a race."

"Everybody keeps telling me that," said Eight.

---

The car came out of a garage in Varese.

He made one call, on the Tuesday, to a number he had not used in four years, and the man at the other end said, in an Italian so northern it sounded ironed, *Give me a day.* The next evening a photograph arrived: a small coupé under a fluorescent tube, two doors, a long low nose with four round lamps, chrome bumpers like a pair of eyebrows. 1968. Thirteen hundred cubic centimeters, twin cams, restored by the man's own father and used every summer since in exactly this kind of event. It was the dull pale gray-blue of a shirt washed too many times.

*It has never won anything,* the man wrote. *It has never been late either. Bring it back with whatever dents it earns.*

A second photograph came an hour later. On the driver's door, in the garage light, someone had already painted it: a plain black 8, no circle, no frame.

Eight looked at it for a while on the porch, in the evening, with the sea going copper below the bluff.

His wife came out with two cups, took the step beside him, and looked at the phone over his arm.

"Italy," she said.

"An island off Naples."

"For the woman with the film."

"The boy told you."

"The boy called me from San Pedro on Saturday night and said the grandmother was the most terrifying person he had ever met. I knew then." She handed him a cup. "How long?"

"Four weeks. Perhaps five."

She drank. A pair of pelicans went past below the bluff, low, in line, as if on rails.

"I don't want anything to plant this time," she said. "The seeds are up. They're doing wonderfully. They hate everyone. I'm very proud of them." She turned her cup slowly. "Bring me a word."

"A word."

"A word I don't know. In whatever they speak there. Not something from a phrasebook. Something somebody actually says." She looked at him sideways. "And you have to be able to say it properly when you get home. In front of your mother."

"That's a harder thing to bring back than seeds."

"I know," said his wife. "That's why I asked."

---

His mother caught him on the stair that night with a bowl of something wrapped in a cloth that she said was for the plane, and he said the plane was not for three weeks, and she said she knew that, and that this was for now, and the next one would be for the plane.

His father was waiting at the bottom, in the dark hall, with the lieutenant.

"The race with the tubes," the old man said. "Who keeps the time? You or the boy?"

"The boy. The navigator does the arithmetic. The driver holds the speed."

His father nodded slowly.

"Then give him the stopwatch," he said. "Mine. Not to keep. To use. A man should know what it is to be responsible for someone else's time before he is responsible for anything bigger." He turned and went toward his room, the rubber foot of the lieutenant squeaking softly on the boards. At his door he stopped. "Tell him early is a kind of lie too. Not as bad as late. But a lie."

Pozzuoli at Four

Kept private.

*My father told me tonight that early is a kind of lie. I have been early my whole life. I arrive in a town weeks before anyone expects me, I learn its roads at night, I am in the room before the man I came for has finished dressing. I always called that care. Perhaps it is. Perhaps it is also a way of never being caught out by anything, which is a different thing from being honest. The boy will hold the time this trip. I will hold the speed he gives me, and not a hair more. I would like to find out whether I can.*

---

Both bays were empty.

Ruiz walked down the ladder from the cabin into the long dim walkway between them on Monday afternoon and stood, hands on hips, looking left and then right, at the bare steel tracks and the tie-down rings and the folded straps hung neatly on their hooks, and the smell of hydraulic fluid and cold aluminum and nothing else.

"I don't like it," he said.

"It's lighter."

"I know it's lighter. I can feel it's lighter. She's going to want to get off the ground before I ask her to, like a horse with no rider." Ruiz scratched his mustache. "Where's the car?"

"Waiting for us. On a dock."

"In Italy."

"In Italy."

"Somebody else's car."

"Somebody else's car."

Ruiz looked at the empty bays a moment longer, then shook his head and went back up the ladder, humming something that sounded, the son thought, like a song about a man who had lost his dog.

---

They took off at four with the fog lying out over the sea like a second coast and turned east, and the plane did exactly what Ruiz had said she would. She went up off the runway before he had finished asking, light and eager and a little skittish, and Ruiz talked to her the whole climb, under his breath, in Spanish, the way the son had heard men in San Pedro talk to their boats.

The son sat in the cabin with the stopwatch.

It was his grandfather's. Steel, gone soft and pale at the edges from seventy years of a thumb, a white face, a black sweep hand, a crown you pressed once to start, once to stop, and a third time to send the hand flying back to zero with a small clean click he felt in his wrist. He pressed it. He pressed it again at what he believed was exactly ten seconds and looked. Ten point two. He tried again. Nine point eight.

Across the table, his father was reading the regulations for the Coppa del Tufo, forty pages in Italian with a dictionary on his phone, and did not look up.

"Early is a kind of lie," the son said. "Dada said that?"

"On the stairs."

"What's late?"

"He didn't say." His father turned a page. "I imagine he thought late was obvious."

The son tried again. Ten point zero one.

He wrote it in the notebook, under the date, under the weather, *clear above the fog, wind light from the west*, and then he wrote it again, because he did not believe it.

---

They came down at Gander in the dark and at Shannon at noon, in a rain so soft it seemed to fall upward, and Ruiz slept for three hours on the folded seats with his cap over his face.

They crossed the Alps at night, a long white crumpled wall under the moon, and at ten past eleven on Tuesday the plane came in over a city poured round a bay like spilled light, climbing hills and filling valleys, with a dark mountain standing up out of the middle of it, alone, with a broken top.

Capodichino near midnight was a short runway between apartment blocks with laundry on their balconies, close enough that the son saw a man in a vest smoking at a window as they rolled out, and the man lifted his cigarette in greeting, and the son lifted a hand back.

---

The car was on the dock at Pozzuoli at half past three.

The town was asleep except for the harbor. Trucks were queued along the waterfront under orange lights for the first boat to the islands, and fishermen were coming in off the night in blue wooden boats with their lamps still lit, sorting the catch into crates on the stone in a smell of diesel and wet rope. Under the salt there was something else, faint and sour, like a struck match.

"Sulfur," said his father. "The ground here leaks. There's a crater a mile up the hill that smokes all day. People used to come to breathe it for their lungs."

The car stood by itself at the end of the quay, off the back of a low trailer, with its lights off. A man in a dark sweater was leaning against the trailer smoking, and when he saw them he dropped the cigarette, stepped on it, and walked away along the quay without a word, and did not look back. The keys were in the ignition. On the passenger seat there was a paper bag with two pastries in it, still warm, shell-shaped, layered like the pages of a book, dusted with sugar.

The son picked one up. It shattered when he bit it, and ricotta came out of the middle, sweet and grainy and smelling of orange.

"Who was that?"

"The man who drove it down from the north." His father walked once round the car. It was smaller than it had looked in the photograph, low and narrow and neat, with its four round eyes in the dark, the pale gray-blue paint gone dull with age but not neglect, the black 8 on its door. He opened the hood and looked in at the engine with a flashlight, a small upright block with two cam covers polished like spoons and two carburetors on its flank, and he closed it again gently with the flat of his hand. "Fourteen hours on the autostrada. He'll sleep in the cab and drive back tomorrow."

"Does he have a name?"

"I expect so."

The son ate the second half of the pastry and did not ask again.

---

They walked the car down the quay at a quarter to four, at a crawl, its engine making a small busy whir like a sewing machine, toward the ferry.

The ferry was a stubby white ship with its stern open and its ramp down on the stone and a crewman in orange overalls at the foot of it waving trucks aboard with a flashlight. When he saw the little gray-blue car he stopped waving. He walked over. He was perhaps fifty, with a gray crew cut and a gold ring in one ear and forearms covered in old blue tattoos of anchors and swallows, and he bent and looked in at Eight through the open window.

"*Per Ischia?*"

"*Sì.*"

The crewman considered the car, then the black 8, then Eight's face for a moment, steadily, the way a man reads a sky.

"You don't have the paper," he said in English. "For the summer. They don't let the cars of visitors on the island in summer. Only residents."

"No," said Eight. "I don't have the paper."

The crewman straightened. He produced a pen and a small pad from his overalls, and wrote something on it, and tore the sheet off, and tucked it under the windshield wiper, against the glass, facing out.

"Now you have the paper," he said, and walked away up the ramp, waving his flashlight, and the trucks began to roll again.

The son leaned over to read it. It was a phone number, a date, and a word: *Gara.* Race.

---

The ferry backed out into the harbor at four exactly.

The son stood at the stern rail and watched Pozzuoli go. Along the old waterfront, below the town, he saw something strange in the orange light: a square of ancient columns standing in a sunken courtyard, three tall columns of gray marble with their feet in a shallow pool, and on each of them, high up, well above a man's head, a band of dark pitting, as if something had eaten into the stone.

"Shellfish," his father said, beside him. "A kind of mussel that bores into rock. It only lives in the sea. Look how high the holes are."

The son looked at him.

"The ground here goes up and down," his father said. "Slowly. Over centuries. The Romans built a market on dry land. Then the land sank and the sea came in and the mussels moved into the columns. Then it rose again, and lifted them out." He leaned on the rail. "It's rising now. A little every month. The whole harbor. They call it the slow breathing. Bradisismo."

"A tide," said the son. "In the ground."

"If you like."

The son took out his notebook in the wind and wrote it down: *Pozzuoli. Columns. The ground has a tide.* And the weather: *Warm already. No wind. Sea like oil.*

The ferry turned out past the dark headland of Miseno, and out of the gray ahead, in order, came the islands: first a small low one with its harbor stacked with houses painted the colors of sugared almonds, still asleep; then, behind it, a long dark mountain with green flanks and a bald gray summit and white towns round its feet, their lights going out one by one as the day came.

"Ischia," said his father.

The sun came up behind them out of the land, over the volcano, and touched the summit of the island first, gray and then gold, and the son, who had kept his hand round the stopwatch in his pocket the whole crossing without knowing it, took his thumb off the crown.

Two Hundred and Twelve Steps

For anyone who asks.

*I am asked sometimes which of the places I have raced I would go back to. People expect a circuit. I tell them about roads instead, roads that were there before anyone raced on them and will be there after, and the people who live at the sides of those roads and lean on their walls to watch you go by. A circuit is built for the race. A road is borrowed from the people who use it every day, to fetch bread and take their children to school and bring the boat home. If you race on someone's road you owe them something. I have never been sure what. I think it starts with slowing down through their village on the way home.*

---

The island road went round Ischia like a loose belt, and they drove half of it in the first hour of the morning with the windows down and the little engine whirring and the son reading the map aloud from his phone, though there was only one road and nowhere else to go.

It left the round harbor at the island's eastern corner, a crater lake until a king cut a channel to the sea for his yacht, climbed through pines, and came down past a bay where a single rock stood up out of the green shallows in the shape of a mushroom, with children diving off it. Bougainvillea came over every wall. Every few minutes a three-wheeled truck came the other way, loaded with tomatoes or a refrigerator or a whole family, and both drivers breathed in and passed with a hand's width to spare.

Above everything, all the time, on the left, the mountain: green chestnut and vineyard going up to a bare gray summit of tufa carved by wind into shapes like melted wax.

Forio was white and gold and smelled of bread and the sea, a town of flat roofs along a wide bay with a round stone watchtower on the front. Past it the road climbed through vineyards held up by walls of green-gray stone to Panza, a bar, a pharmacy, a grocer's with crates of zucchini flowers on the step, and a sign painted by hand on a plank: *PIETRAFUMO. PEDONALE.*

On foot.

---

They left the car under a carob tree beside the grocer's. The grocer came out to look at it, a woman in her late fifties, short and solid, with her hair pinned up any old way and a ballpoint pen pushed through the knot and a pair of reading glasses on a chain against her apron. She looked at the 8 on the door, and at the son getting out, and at Eight.

"The Americans," she said in English. "For my aunt."

"For your aunt."

"Rosaria Mennella." She held out a hand that was dusty with flour. "Zia Assunta comes Monday. She telephones me every morning at six her time to tell me what I am doing wrong." She looked up at the son, a long way up, and then at Eight, not very far at all. "You must be the boy who recorded her. She says you have the patience of a net mender and the appetite of a fisherman. She did not say you were so tall."

"I get it from my mother's side," said the son.

"Good. Somebody in this family should be useful on a ladder." Rosaria untied her apron, folded it over the counter inside the door, and called something into the back of the shop, and a younger woman's voice called something back. "Come. My father is at the bottom. He has been at the bottom since four, waiting. He says he does not wait. He is waiting."

The path went down from behind the grocer's between two walls.

At first it was a lane, with vines on either side and a dog asleep in the shade. Then the land fell away and the lane became steps cut straight into the yellow-green tufa of the cliff, going down in short flights with a turn at the end of each, so that the son, who had begun counting out of habit, kept losing the count at the turns. There was a rope rail on the sea side, threaded through iron rings, and in places nothing at all. Capers grew out of the cracks. Below, through the gaps, the sea came and went, so clear he could see the shadow of a small boat lying on the sand under its own hull.

"Two hundred and twelve," said Rosaria, ahead of him, without turning round. "Every child here knows. You count them going down to the sea in the morning and you count them going up with a crate of fish on your head at night. When you are ninety you go down once a year and you do not come back up until somebody carries you." She stopped at a turn and looked down. "My aunt went up them in 1958 with one suitcase. She did not count. She told me on the telephone. She says that was the one morning of her life she forgot to count."

---

Pietrafumo was smaller than the postcard and more alive.

The cove was a bite out of the cliffs no wider than a soccer field, with an arm of black rock on either side reaching into the sea. The beach was coarse dark sand glittering with flecks of something black and glassy. Along the back of it, at the foot of the cliff, the cellars: eleven arched doorways cut into the tufa, each with a wooden door, every door painted, deep green, sky blue, brick red, a yellow so bright it hurt, most with a name over the arch in leaning white letters. Over the third from the left, the blue one, cut into the stone itself and filled with white paint: *1931 G.M.*

In front of the cellars, drawn up on wooden rollers on the sand, lay the boats. Seven of them. Small wooden boats with high bows and rounded sterns, painted like the doors, the same colors, in the same order, so that the son, at the foot of the steps with his notebook open, saw at once that each boat belonged to the door behind it, the way a dog belongs to a house.

Then he saw the fence.

It ran across the sand from the foot of the steps to the eastern arm of rock, in a straight line, about ten meters from the water: steel posts driven into the beach, green mesh between them, and on the mesh, every few meters, a banner of white plastic printed with a pale blue logo, a lamp with a flame in it, and the words *LUCERNA TERME. PIETRAFUMO THERMAL BEACH. PROSSIMA APERTURA.* Coming soon. On the far side of it, between the fence and the sea, the strip of sand where the steam came up.

He could see it now. Not much. In the morning cool it was more like a shimmer than smoke: a thin trembling of the air, here and there, low along the waterline, where the little waves ran up the sand and drew back. Where each wave drew back the wet sand smoked for a moment, faintly, and then stopped.

On the near side of the fence, by the blue door, on an upturned crate, sat an old man.

He was small and very brown, in a sleeveless undershirt and old blue trousers rolled to the knee and bare feet, with a white stubble and a woolen cap on his head in spite of the warmth, and a face like a walnut someone had kept in a pocket for a lifetime. In his hands, between his knees, he held a net needle, a flat wooden shuttle loaded with green twine, and a corner of net lay across his lap and down onto the sand, and his fingers went on working it while he looked up at them, looping and knotting, without his eyes once going down to his hands.

"*Papà*," said Rosaria. "*'E americane.*"

Tore Mennella looked at the son for a long moment. Then he looked at Eight. Then he spoke, in a voice like a door that needed oil, and Rosaria laughed.

"He says the tall one is my aunt's, he can tell from the ears. He says the other one he does not know yet."

"Tell him that's fair," said Eight.

---

There were notices on the doors.

Rosaria showed them, one by one, without hurrying. White sheets in plastic sleeves, stapled to the wood, with a stamp in the corner from the town hall in Forio and a long paragraph of Italian that she translated in a flat voice as she went. *Ordinance of demolition. Unauthorized works. Structures excavated in the cliff face without any permit. To be removed at the expense of the owners within ninety days, failing which the structures and the land beneath them shall be acquired to the patrimony of the municipality.* The ninety days ended on the thirtieth of June.

"And then," said Rosaria, "the municipality has already signed an agreement with Lucerna. For the 'development' of the acquired structures. Treatment rooms, they say. Massage. Mud." She laid her palm on the blue door, over the notice. "My grandfather cut this one. With a pick and a lamp. In 1931. His initials are over the door. Giuseppe Mennella. My father's father, and my aunt's. He kept his nets in it and his oars, and in winter the boat, and in the war, the family, when the planes came over to Naples." She took her hand away. "The engineer at the town hall says the initials prove nothing. Anyone can cut four numbers in tufa. He says show me a photograph from before 1967."

"And the oldest you have is 1971," said the son.

Rosaria turned and looked at him.

"Zia Assunta told me," he said.

"Zia Assunta tells everybody everything except the things she wants to keep." Rosaria pulled a phone from her pocket and held it up. The screen showed the cove as a simple map, drawn simply, the curve of the beach and the cliff, and along the cliff eleven small pins, one for each door. She touched the blue one. A photograph opened, faded, square, with rounded corners: the same blue door, a boy in front of it in shorts, a dog, a date in a corner. *Agosto 1971.* "Every family looked. Every drawer, every box, every cousin in Germany and Argentina and Brooklyn. We put each one on its door. The oldest for each door." She touched the green door. *1974.* The red. *1983.* The yellow. *1979.* "Nothing before 1967. Nobody here had a camera. You had a camera if you were rich or if you had gone away and come back." She pocketed the phone. "My aunt's husband went away and came back. Once."

"In 1962."

"In 1962. With a camera bought on credit in California." Rosaria looked at the fence. "We have a lawyer. In Naples. She is very good, and very angry, which is the right combination. She has already written the appeal to the regional court. She needs one thing to attach to it, and an expert who will swear to the court that it is what it is, and she needs it before the thirtieth."

"And the court will listen?"

"If the film shows these doors before 1967, the court will suspend the demolition. Then there is a hearing. Then, perhaps, a year of arguing. But the doors will stand while they argue." She looked at Eight. "Lucerna knows the court will listen. That is why they have been very careful about who goes on and off this island with old pictures in their bags. In May my cousin took the hydrofoil to Naples with a box of photographs from 1972 for the lawyer. Somebody took his bag on the boat. Only the bag. Not his wallet. Not his phone."

Eight said nothing.

Tore, on his crate, had stopped knotting. He said something, short.

"He says," said Rosaria, "that the gentleman from America is very quiet for a gentleman from America."

"Tell him," said Eight, "that I came to listen, and that I'm still doing it."

Rosaria told him. The old man studied Eight for a while longer. Then he bent his head and went back to the net, looping, knotting, and after a moment he said one more thing, to the net rather than to anybody.

"He says good," said Rosaria. "He says, then you can listen to the sand. Tomorrow. Early. He says bring the tall one, and tell him to take off his shoes."

Hot Sand

Kept private.

*An old man who could not have known my name studied me today and told his daughter I was very quiet for an American. I have been called many things in many countries. I have never minded being found out by an old fisherman with a net in his lap. They have spent their lives reading the surface of something for what is moving underneath it. My father would like him. My father would sit on the next crate and say nothing to him for an hour, and they would both consider it an excellent conversation.*

---

At a quarter to six he took off his shoes at the foot of the steps, and the sand was cold.

It surprised him. He had expected heat everywhere. The sand was gray and damp and cool from the night, coarse under his soles like brown sugar, and it smelled of salt and very faintly of the struck-match sourness of the quay at Pozzuoli.

Tore Mennella was already at the water, inside the fence. He had come through it. There was a gap at the eastern end, against the black rock, where the fence stopped a foot short of the cliff, and the old man had gone through it sideways like a crab, with his trousers rolled and his cap on, and he stood now at the edge of the sea with the small waves running up over his feet, and he beckoned.

The son looked at his father.

"It's their beach," his father said. "Go."

The son went through the gap.

---

The old man did not explain. He walked. He walked along the waterline very slowly, his feet in the wet sand, and the son walked beside him, and after ten steps the old man stopped and pointed down at his own feet, and the son looked down and felt it.

Warmth. It came up through the sole of his left foot all at once, like stepping onto a place on a floor where a cat has been sleeping. He moved his foot. Cooler. He moved it back. Warm. The old man watched his face and nodded and walked on, and three steps later it came again, stronger, so warm that the son lifted his foot, and the old man laughed, a rusty bark, and said something.

He said it twice, slowly, pointing at the sand, and then at the son's foot, and then at his own eyes, and shaking his head.

The son understood without Rosaria. Not with the eyes. With the feet.

They walked the waterline inside the fence, there and back, twice. By the second time the son had begun to find the warm places before the old man pointed: a patch near the middle where a wave ran over the sand and came back hissing, and a place near the eastern end where the heat came up in a band no wider than a doorway. There the old man stopped and stood with both feet in it and closed his eyes.

He spoke, with his eyes shut. A long sentence. The son caught one word in it, a name, *Nannina*.

Rosaria had come down the steps behind them, with a thermos and four small cups, and stood at the fence.

"My mother," she said. "He is telling you this is where she put the beans. Every year. The best place on the beach. His mother's before that. It should have gone to my aunt." She poured coffee into a cup and passed it through the mesh. "She died four years ago. He still stands there every morning."

---

They drank the coffee on the crates by the blue door, the four of them, with the sun not yet over the cliff and the cove in cool blue shadow and the sea beyond it already lit.

Rosaria told it in order.

Once a year, on the first Sunday in July, the whole of Pietrafumo cooked its dinner in the sand. Everyone came down: Panza, cousins from Forio and Barano, boats from Sant'Angelo. They called it *'o furno 'e rena*, the sand oven. Each family had its place along the waterline, handed down mother to daughter the way the cellars went father to son, and you cooked what suited your place: beans in clay pots in the hottest, potatoes wrapped in vine leaves in the middle heat, eggs, corn, a chicken in a pot sealed with flour paste if you were showing off. You dug the hole with your hands as deep as your forearm, buried the pot, and marked the place with a stone painted your door's color. Then you swam, and the men hauled the big net from the beach, and in the afternoon everybody dug up their dinner and ate it on the sand.

"Nobody measures anything," Rosaria said. "You know the place, and you know the pot, and you know the time by the shadow of the cliff on the water. My mother could put her hand flat on the sand and tell you if the beans would be ready at four or at half past." She looked at the fence. "This year the hot sand is behind the fence. Lucerna says they will let us in for the festival. With a ticket. As a show for their guests. My father says he would rather eat cold beans in Forio."

"Has anyone written it down?" the son said. "The places? Whose was where?"

Rosaria looked at him the way people on the island would look at him for the next month, as if he had asked whether anyone had written down how to breathe.

"Ask the Maestro," she said.

---

The Maestro came down at eight with a frame drum under his arm, slowly, a hand on the rope rail at every turn, and the son heard him before he saw him because he was singing.

Nicola Trani had taught every child in Panza to read for thirty-eight years. He was seventy-four, tall and stooped, with long white hair tied back with a rubber band and half-glasses on a cord, and he carried the drum the way some men carry a newspaper. It was a tammorra, Rosaria said, a wooden frame with a goatskin stretched over it and small tin cymbals set round the rim, and when he struck it the sound went off the cliff like a door slamming in a stone house.

"*'E americane,*" he said to Rosaria, and then in English, looking at the son over his glasses: "You are the boy who wants to know who was where."

"If anyone knows."

"Nobody knows," said the Maestro. "Everybody remembers. That is a different thing, and much more trouble." He took out an old phone in a leather case. "I keep the island's words. People say them into this, and I put them in a list with who said them, so the children can hear. *Rena*, sand. *Rezza*, net." On the screen was a long list in two columns, dialect and Italian, with a small symbol beside each word to press. "Six hundred and eleven words. Forty-two people. Eleven of them dead now. And pieces of songs. That is the worst. Everybody has one piece. Nobody has the whole."

"Which song?"

The Maestro did not answer. He set the phone on the crate and put the drum on his knee and began to strike it, slowly, a heavy, dragging beat, one-two, one-two, the cymbals rattling on the second stroke, like a man taking a step and planting his foot. Then he sang, in a cracked high tenor that went up into the cliff and came back down.

*Tira, tira, 'a rezza è chiena,* *'o mare dà, e 'o mare mena.*

He sang it three times, the same two lines, and stopped, and lowered the drum.

"Pull, pull, the net is full," he said. "The sea gives, and the sea strikes. Women sang it on the beach when the men hauled the big net, the *sciabbeca*, from the shore. Two lines. Then there is a verse that is about the ones who leave. And then the two lines again. My mother sang it. She had the first lines and the last lines and she always hummed the middle because she said she had never heard it properly, only from a long way off, because she was from up the hill and the fishermen's women sang it down here." He looked at the sea. "Everyone in Pietrafumo who knew the middle verse is dead. Or in America."

Tore, on his crate, spoke, his eyes still on the net.

"He says," said Rosaria, "his sister knows it. He says she sang it in the kitchen when she was twelve and his mother told her to stop, because it was bad luck to sing about leaving." Rosaria's face changed. "And then she left."

The son asked, carefully, whether he could record the Maestro singing the two lines, and whether the Maestro would put them in his list, and the Maestro looked at the son's recorder with the expression of a man being offered a dog he had always wanted, and said yes, and sang them again, louder, with the drum, and Tore, on his crate, without stopping his needle, came in on the second line in a voice like shingle dragged by a wave, and that was on the recording too.

Afterward the son took out the folded sheet he carried for every recording, the one that said in plain words who would keep the voice and who could hear it, and held it out with a pen. The Maestro signed it with a flourish. Then Tore put out his hand for it, though nobody had asked him, and wrote his name slowly across the bottom in square capitals, pressing hard, the way his sister did, and after the last letter, without lifting the pen, drew a small fish: two curved strokes, a tail, a dot for the eye.

"Always," said Rosaria, watching. "Since the first day of school. The teacher told him a fisherman's son should sign like a fisherman. He has never signed anything without it. Not his marriage. Not his pension."

---

At half past eleven a gray rubber boat came round the western arm of rock.

It was fast and new, with a big black outboard and a console in the middle, and it came into the cove at speed and turned hard so that its wake ran up the beach and over Tore's feet and wet the bottom of the net in his lap, and then it stopped, idling, twenty meters out, rocking.

There was one man in it, heavyset and very tanned, in a white polo shirt with the pale blue lamp on its chest, a shaved head, wraparound sunglasses. He held up a phone and moved it slowly along the doors from left to right. Then at Tore. Then at the son. Then at Eight, on a crate in the shade of the green door.

He held it on Eight a little longer.

"Capuano," said Rosaria, low. "Renzo. He drives Fusco's boats. Before that he fixed engines in the marina at Casamicciola. His father was a fisherman from Lacco." Her mouth went thin. "He comes every day. He takes pictures. He wants us to know he takes pictures."

The man in the boat put the phone away. He called something across the water, in dialect, cheerful, to Tore. Tore did not look up. He went on knotting. The man laughed and called something else, and then pushed the throttle down, and the boat stood up on its tail and swung away round the rock in a long white curve, and its wake came in a few seconds later and ran up the sand to the foot of the fence, and drew back, and where it drew back the hot sand smoked.

"What did he say?" said the son.

For a moment Rosaria only watched the place where the boat had gone.

"He said, *Zi' Tore, go home, the sea is too hot for you now.*" She picked up the empty cups. "My father has been going to sea from this beach for seventy-five years. He taught that man's father to swim."

Eight had not moved. He set his cup down on the crate beside him, very carefully, and looked for a while at the pale scar the wake had left on the water.

---

That night the son sat on the top step of the two hundred and twelve, at the edge of Panza, under a sky gone deep violet over the sea, and watched the lamp boats go out.

They came out from Forio and from along the coast below Sant'Angelo, small dark boats spreading across the water off the cliffs, and one by one, as if someone were lighting candles down a row, they turned their lamps on. Pools of white light on the black sea. In each pool, he knew, the water would be going green.

He had been told about it in a kitchen on Ninth Street in San Pedro. A man of seventy with a towel round his neck had said it at the stove, back turned, while his mother talked: *Now we turn on the sun.*

He took out his phone and found the family's private page, where Rocco's daughter had added him in May, and where every night someone put something up, a photograph, a line, a recipe nobody would ever follow exactly. He took a picture of the lamps on the water off Ischia, and put it there, without a word, under Rocco's photograph from the week before of the *Isolana*'s lights off Catalina.

Ten minutes later, at lunchtime in California, a reply came under it. Three letters. Rocco did not type more than that.

*Che bello.*

The Square at Forio

For anyone who asks.

*In regularity events the navigator carries a board on his knees with the average speeds written on it, a stack of tables, two or three stopwatches and a pencil, and in a good crew he talks the whole way: ahead two tenths, behind one, hold, hold, now. The driver hardly speaks. He is a metronome with a steering wheel. People who watch from the roadside see a pair of old men in an old car going at a sensible speed and conclude that nothing is happening. Inside the car, everything is happening. It is like watching two people play chess through a window.*

---

The cars came into Forio on Saturday morning and parked in a crescent along the seafront under the round stone tower, and by ten o'clock the whole town had come out to walk past them with ice creams.

There were forty-one of them. Small round Fiats from the sixties in cream and pale green. A pair of British roadsters with their tops down. A black Lancia from the fifties polished until it looked wet. A white Porsche that had driven down from Munich. And a Fulvia coupé, small and square-shouldered and a dark wine red, with a tall slim woman of about seventy-five in a striped sailor's shirt leaning on its fender eating an apricot, and a short round man in a cardigan in the passenger seat with a clipboard on his knees, writing.

"*Il cronometrista,*" the woman said, when the son stopped to look at the clipboard, and pointed at the man with her apricot. The timekeeper. Then at herself: "*La pilota.*" Then, in English, pleased with herself: "Forty years. He counts. I drive. Every summer. We have never won. We have never come lower than fifth."

"Franca," said the man in the cardigan, without looking up, "the boy doesn't need our whole life."

"He asked."

"He looked at my clipboard."

"That is asking, Ezio. In any language." She held out the apricot stone to the son as if it were a business card, then thought better of it and dropped it in a bin. "Franca Bertola. Turin. This is Ezio. He is very charming once he has finished his arithmetic, which is never." She looked past the son, down the line of cars, to where Eight stood by the gray-blue Alfa with its hood up. "Your father?"

"Yes."

"The one with no name on the list. Only an 8." She considered Eight across the crescent of cars with frank interest, chin up, the way she might have considered a horse. "Who is his navigator?"

"I am."

Ezio Bertola stopped writing. He looked up at the son for the first time, over his reading glasses, from the boy's sneakers to his face.

"First time?"

"First time."

"How many watches?"

"Three. One's my grandfather's."

Ezio considered this. Then he reached into the door pocket of the Fulvia and took out a small booklet, much used, with a rubber band round it, and held it out.

"My tables," he said. "Average speeds, every distance, every tenth of a kilometer per hour. I made them in 1993. Everybody has their own. Mine are better." He waved away the son's hesitation. "Copy them tonight. Bring them back tomorrow. If you beat us with my tables I will never forgive you, and I will be very proud."

---

The organizer was Matilde Russo, who ran the island's old-car club from a room above a hardware shop and had run the Coppa del Tufo for eleven years on money from its members, two banks and a winery, until Lucerna came. She was small and sunburned, with a whistle round her neck, and she checked the Alfa's papers under the tower in four minutes flat.

"Varese," she said, reading the car's papers. "Good. A car from the north that has learned to behave." She handed them back to Eight. "You know the event?"

"I've read the regulations."

"Everyone reads the regulations. Nobody knows the event." She lowered her voice, not much. "Saturday is the regularity. Ninety-four kilometers round the island, eleven sections, the tubes where I put them. The roads are open roads, closed only for a few minutes as you pass. There will be a bus coming the other way. There will be a wedding. Sunday morning is the closed stage, four kilometers from Citara to the crossroads above Panza, flat out, a separate cup, and nobody cares about it except the men who think they are young." She looked at him. "Are you a man who thinks he is young?"

"Not for some years."

"Good." She made a note, and was gone.

---

At eleven a small stage was set up under the tower, a platform with a blue carpet and a lectern and two large boards on easels covered with white cloth, and a man in a pale linen suit came along the seafront from the direction of the harbor shaking hands.

He was in his middle fifties, slim and brown, with dark hair going silver above the ears and rimless glasses and no tie, and he moved along the crowd like a man walking through his own garden, stopping at each car, saying something to its owner that made them laugh. Behind him, in the white polo shirt with the lamp on it, came the man from the boat, Capuano, with his sunglasses pushed up on his shaved head.

"Leandro Fusco," said Matilde Russo, beside Eight, in the voice of someone naming a weather system. "Lucerna. His grandfather had a pensione in Lacco with nine rooms. Now he has the biggest hotel on the island, two in Capri, and a group in Milan that pays for it all and never comes." She sniffed. "He gave the club forty thousand euros this year. The cup is named for his company. I did not have a choice. I had a choice between his money and no race."

Fusco reached the Alfa.

He walked round the car first, slowly, looking at it with real pleasure: the four round lamps, the hump of the hood, the thin wooden rim of the wheel. When he straightened he was smiling.

"A GT Junior," he said, in good English with a Neapolitan music under it. "Sixty-eight. My father had one, the same color. He drove it to Naples on the ferry every Monday for twenty years to buy linen for the pensione, and back every Thursday. I learned to drive in it on the road above Lacco when I was eleven." He held out his hand. "Leandro Fusco. Welcome to Ischia."

Eight shook it. It was a light, dry, sure hand, a hand that had shaken a great many and remembered most of them.

"Thank you."

"You are the gentleman with no name. Only the 8." Fusco's smile did not change. "Signora Russo protects your privacy like a bank. I respect that. I am also a private man, outside of all this." A small open gesture at the stage, the boards, the crowd. "I saw a photograph of you on Thursday. At Pietrafumo. On the beach of the cellars, with old Mennella and his daughter." He said it pleasantly, as one says one has seen someone at the market. "You know the family?"

"A relative of theirs in California asked my son to record her. He collects old people's stories."

"Ah. A noble thing. The memory of the diaspora." Fusco nodded seriously, and touched Eight lightly on the elbow, and turned him a little toward the easels. "Stay for the presentation. I believe in short speeches."

---

It was short. Fusco thanked the club, Signora Russo, the mayor of Forio who was not present, the banks, the winery, and the drivers who had come from so far. He spoke about the island's beauty and its fragility and the duty of those who loved it to give it a future. Then he pulled the white cloth from the first board.

It was a drawing of Pietrafumo.

The cove, seen from the sea, in soft watercolor: the black arms of rock, the dark sand, the cliff with its eleven arched doors, every door painted white. Sun beds in neat rows on the hot strip at the waterline under white umbrellas. Women in white robes. A glass lift running up the face of the cliff beside the steps like a drop of water running the wrong way. Across the top, in the pale blue script, *Pietrafumo Thermal Beach. The wellness of the earth.*

There was polite applause. Someone near the front said something about the lift and laughed.

Fusco pulled the cloth from the second board.

It was a letter. Enlarged, framed in pale blue, on Lucerna's paper, a single page of Italian, and below it a column of signatures. Above the text, in larger letters: *The fishermen of Pietrafumo welcome the project.* Fusco spoke for a minute about partnership. About the respect his company had for the families who had fished the cove, his own grandfather among their friends. About the fund his company would create for the preservation of the fishing tradition, the restoration of a cellar as a small museum, a plaque, a boat on display.

At the back of the crowd, the program rolled in his fist, the son read the column of signatures.

There were nine. Most of them he could not read. One of them he could. It was halfway down the column, in a neat, upright, joined hand, the hand of someone who had learned to write well and wrote often.

*Salvatore Mennella.*

There was nothing after it.

The son kept his eyes on it. Then he searched for his father in the crowd, and found him already looking at the son, from beside the Alfa, with no expression whatever on his face. His father moved his head perhaps a centimeter. The son took out his phone, and stepped sideways behind a woman with a stroller, and photographed the board, once, carefully, as he had photographed a page in an archive the autumn before, and then turned the phone toward the tower and the sea and photographed those too, the way a visitor would.

When he looked up, Capuano was watching him from the end of the stage.

The son held his eyes for one second. Then he looked at his program, and at the line of cars, and walked back along the seafront toward the dark red Fulvia with Ezio Bertola's booklet of tables in his pocket and his heart going in his chest like the tammorra on the beach.

Behind him, he heard Fusco finish, to applause, and say something warm about the future.

---

Rosaria looked at the photograph in the back of her shop that evening, with the shutter half down and the zucchini flowers taken in and the street outside going blue.

She was quiet. Then she went to the drawer under the till and took out a fat envelope of papers, her father's pension, his boat license, his identity card, the deed of the cellar, and laid them on the counter one by one, open, under the lamp.

On every one, at the bottom, the square capitals, pressed hard. And after them, a fish.

"Avvocata Conte," Rosaria said, "is going to want to meet you."

The Boat Called Assunta

Kept private.

*There was no fish after the name. A clerk in some office copied an old man's name in a good clean hand from a list of boat licenses and never met him, and so did not know that he has signed everything in his life, his marriage and his pension and his boat, with a small fish, because a teacher told him eighty years ago that a fisherman's son should sign like a fisherman. Forgers study handwriting. They never study people. That has been true in every country I have worked in, and I have never once understood why.*

---

Tore went to get his sister in his own boat.

Nobody suggested it. Rosaria had arranged a taxi from the hydrofoil and a chair with two poles for the cousins to carry the old woman down the steps. On Monday at eleven Tore was gone from his crate, and the boat with the sky-blue hull and the red stripe was gone from its rollers, and a fisherman said he had seen him go round the point toward Forio standing up in the stern, sculling with one oar, the way nobody had done since outboard motors.

"He's eighty-eight," said Rosaria, on the top step, with her phone to her ear and nobody answering it.

"He's going to get his sister," said the son.

Rosaria looked at him. Then she put the phone away and went down the steps two at a time.

---

The hydrofoil from Naples came into Forio at a quarter past one, riding high on its foils across the bay and then sinking off them in a collapse of spray like a swan landing. The quay was full of day-trippers with beach bags and men with handcarts and a boy selling coconut from a bucket of water.

Rocco Iacono came down the gangway first, backward, one hand on the rail and the other holding his mother's elbow, a big man in a Dodgers cap and a short-sleeved shirt, sunburned already, with a red cooler bag slung across his body on a strap the way a fisherman slings a bag of bait. His mother came down after him, forward, in a navy dress and a white cardigan and her good shoes and dark glasses, with her handbag over her arm, refusing the rail.

At the foot of the gangway, on the stone of the quay, she stopped.

She stood there for some time without moving, and the crowd went round her as water goes round a post, and Rocco, beside her, waited.

She took off the sunglasses.

The son had seen her face in a kitchen on Ninth Street, at a table with a plastic cloth, talking for three hours, and he had thought he knew it. He did not know this one. She was looking past the quay, past the boats, past the round tower, up at the mountain with its bare gray top standing over the town in the afternoon light, and her face had gone completely still and very young, and her mouth was a little open.

Then she looked down at the water by the quay, and her face changed again, and she said a word, sharply, not loud.

Tore was in the harbor.

He was sculling the boat in between the big moored launches, standing in the stern with his feet apart and the single long oar over the stern in its notch, working it in a slow figure of eight, side to side, the blade turning at each end of the stroke, and the boat came on through the flat water steady and silent with no wake at all, like something being drawn on a string. He was in a clean white shirt and his woolen cap. He did not look up at the quay until the boat touched the stone steps at the waterline, very gently, and he shipped the oar and caught a ring and held on.

Then he looked up.

On the side of the boat's bow, in the leaning white lettering, freshly painted, the son read what he had walked past four days running on the beach without understanding: *ASSUNTA*.

---

Nobody on the quay at Forio that afternoon knew what they were seeing, except the six people who did, and they did not tell.

An old woman in a navy dress went down eleven wet stone steps to the water without anyone's arm, one hand on the wall, slowly, and stood on the last one. An old man in a boat let go of the ring and stood up, swaying, and held out both hands. She took them. Neither of them said anything. The son, three steps above, did not take out the recorder. He would not have known what there was to record. Two old people holding each other's hands across a meter of green water, one in a boat and one on a step, for long enough that a ferry hand on the next boat stopped coiling his rope and watched them, and then, slowly, took off his cap.

Then Tore said something in dialect.

Assunta laughed. It came out of her all at once, a loud cracked laugh that bounced off the harbor wall, and she said something back, fast, and he said something else, and she slapped his hand, and Rocco, on the step above her, put a hand over his eyes.

"What did he say?" the son said.

Rosaria was crying and laughing at once and did not answer. It was Rocco who answered, with his hand still over his eyes, in the Italian of a man who had grown up hearing it in a kitchen and never once used it in a shop.

"He said, you're late. She said, the ship was slow. He said, seventy-three years slow. She said, you got old. He said, you got short." Rocco took his hand down. "I don't know what that means. She's always been short."

---

Tore took them home by sea.

Assunta in the bow on a folded blanket with her handbag on her knees, Rocco on the middle thwart with the cooler bag in his lap, holding the gunwales with both hands, Tore in the stern.

The whole cove watched it come in. Word had gone down the steps faster than anyone could walk: the fishermen were out of the cellars, and the women, and the Maestro with his drum, and people from Panza along the rope rail above. Nobody called out. The old woman in the bow sat very straight and looked at the cliff, door by door, from left to right, the way the son had seen her read a list.

At the third door, the blue one, she stopped.

She looked at the four white numbers in the stone, and the two letters.

Then the boat grounded with a soft hiss on the sand, inside the fence, at the waterline, in the steam. Tore had brought it in exactly where his wife had cooked her beans.

Assunta took off her good shoes, one and then the other, and handed them to her son. She swung her legs over the gunwale. She put her bare feet down into the wet sand, in the small waves, at ninety-one, and stood up.

She closed her eyes.

"*È cavera,*" she said. It's hot.

On the beach, someone began to clap, and then everyone, and the Maestro struck his drum once, a single slam that went off the cliff like a gate, and the children on the rocks shrieked, and Tore Mennella sat in the stern of his boat with his arms on his knees and his cap pushed back and laughed until he coughed.

---

They ate that night in the cellar behind the blue door.

It was cool inside, a long vault of yellow-green stone with the tool marks still on it in rows of short curved strokes, going back into the cliff until the lamplight gave out. Nets hung from pegs. There was a table made of an old door laid across trestles, and at the back, in the dark, the shape of an old boat under a sheet.

The rabbit came down the steps in a clay pot wrapped in a towel, carried by Rosaria's daughter-in-law, who had been cooking it since noon with garlic and white wine and the island's small sweet tomatoes and wild thyme and a crumbled red chili, until the sauce was thick and dark and smelled like a hillside in August. The sauce went first, on spaghetti. The rabbit after. That was the rule.

Assunta ate slowly. She said nothing about the rabbit at all until she had finished. Then she laid down her fork and looked across the table at Rosaria's daughter-in-law, a young woman from Barano with a serious face, and said something in dialect.

The young woman went pink.

"She says," Rosaria translated, for the son and Eight, "you used too much chili and not enough patience, and it is the best rabbit she has eaten since 1958." Rosaria paused. "And then she told her that in San Pedro, California, she kept six rabbits in a hutch in the yard for forty years, against the law, and the man from the city who came to complain was a fisherman's son from Forio and went away with lemons."

Everyone laughed, even the ones who had heard it before. Rocco, at the end of the table, rolled his eyes at the son with the patience of a man who had heard the lemon story at every family dinner for forty years.

The Maestro had come down with his phone. He sat beside Assunta and asked her, carefully, in Italian and then in dialect, whether she would say some words for his list. She regarded the phone warily, as she had looked at the son's recorder in San Pedro. Then she nodded, and said a word.

The Maestro stared at her.

She said another. He had stopped writing. She said a third, and he set the phone face up on the boards and took off his half-glasses.

"These words," he said in English, to nobody, to the son. "Nobody says these words. My mother said that one. That one I have never heard in my life." He picked the phone up again. His hand was shaking. "She has kept them in America. In a box. Like the film."

Assunta said something short, and patted his hand, and the cellar laughed again.

"She says," said Rosaria, "she did not keep them in a box. She kept them in her mouth. Where else would you keep a word?"

---

Later, when the lamps were low and the old people had been carried up the steps in their chairs and Assunta had refused hers and been put to bed in a room at Rosaria's house above the grocer's, the son found Rocco sitting on the sand outside the blue door in the dark, with the red cooler bag on his knees.

He sat down beside him.

"She made me carry it on my lap the whole way," Rocco said. "LAX to Rome. Rome to Naples. The hydrofoil. The boat. She said things fall out of bins." He unzipped the bag a little way. Inside the son saw the corner of an old cookie tin, blue, with a Danish windmill on its lid. "My father filmed this the summer I was one. He went back alone. He showed it once, on a New Year's Eve, when I was four or five, on a sheet, and the projector started to smoke, and my mother screamed at him in Ischitano for ten minutes. That's all I remember. Smoke, and my mother, and a picture of the sea on a sheet."

He zipped the bag shut.

"Terry says the lawyer needs the real ones. Not the copy. Somebody who knows film has to look at them and swear what year they are. Terry says that guy with the boat, the one who takes pictures, he knows what we brought." Rocco looked out at the water, at the faint steam coming off the sand at the waterline in the starlight. "I'm a squid fisherman, kid. I wouldn't know where to start with this."

The son did not answer for a while.

"I think," he said finally, "you ask my father if he can take it somewhere."

Reel Three

For anyone who asks.

*An old film is a strange kind of witness. It cannot be cross-examined. It does not remember anything except what was in front of it, and it remembers that exactly, including the things nobody meant it to see: a dog crossing the back of the shot, a date on a wall, a woman who looked at the camera when she was told not to. I have seen a few minutes of film undo years of careful lying. It is not that film is honest. It is that it does not know what it is supposed to hide.*

---

Avvocata Lidia Conte came off the morning hydrofoil at Forio with a laptop bag, a straw hat and a face that had not been told it was summer.

She was in her early fifties, short-haired and sharp-featured, in a gray linen dress and flat shoes for steps, and she walked up from the quay to the grocer's in Panza without stopping, read the photograph of the framed letter on Rosaria's phone without sitting down, read it again, laid Tore's pension book beside it on the counter and put her finger on the small fish at the end of Tore's name, and said a word in Neapolitan that made Rosaria's daughter-in-law, behind the till, put her hand over her mouth.

"That," said the lawyer, in English, to Eight, "is a crime. A different one. I will take it to the prosecutor on Friday." She closed the pension book. "But it does not save a single door. The prosecutor will take a year to read it. The doors come down in thirteen days." She picked up her bag. "Show me the film."

---

They did not touch the reels.

Rocco wanted to. He had carried them on his lap across the world and he stood at the long table in the cellar behind the blue door with the cookie tin before him and one big hand on the lid, and the lawyer put her own small hand on top of his.

"No," she said. "If anyone in this room opens those cans and threads that film through a projector, Lucerna's lawyers will say in court that someone on this beach spent a week cutting and splicing it. I want the first person to touch it after your father to be a stranger with gloves and a certificate on the wall." She took her hand away. "Show me the copy. The bad one."

The bad one was on Rocco's daughter's old laptop, which he had also carried across the world. They propped it on the table's end with the lamps turned down and sat on the benches in a row to watch: Assunta in the middle with her handbag on her knees, Tore beside her with his cap in his hands, Rosaria, Rocco, the Maestro, the lawyer with a notebook. Eight stood at the back by the shrouded boat.

The copy had been made at a drugstore in Torrance in 2019. It was as bad as everyone had said. The colors had gone to the pale salmon and milky blue of a sun-bleached poster, and the frame jumped, and at the edges of the picture a fuzz of light came and went like weather. There was no sound. There had never been any sound.

But it was there.

The first reel opened on a ship. A rail, the sea going by, a man's arm in a white sleeve, and then, swinging into the frame, close, the round tower on the seafront at Forio, and the camera wobbled as the man holding it turned to someone and laughed. Then the quay. Then a road going up through vines. Then a girl of about sixteen at the top of a stone stair, scowling at the lens with her arms folded.

"Zia Lucia," said Rosaria, very quietly. "My father's other sister. She died in 1999."

On the bench, Tore said something.

"He says she hated cameras," said Rosaria.

The steps, going down, the camera bouncing. And then the cove from above, in one swinging pan: the black arms of rock, the boats drawn up in a row, eleven of them, and the cliff, and the doors. All eleven. Painted. Open, most of them, with nets hanging in the doorways like curtains.

The lawyer had stopped writing.

The camera came down onto the sand and went along the cellars from left to right, close, slowly, as if the man holding it had known exactly what someone would need, seventy years later, and was taking his time for them. The green door. The red door. And the blue door, with a man standing in front of it, a broad, short, bald man in an undershirt with a pipe in his teeth, who waved the camera away and then, when it did not go, took his pipe out and stood very straight. Over his head, filling the top of the frame, cut into the stone and painted white, the numbers.

*1931 G.M.*

Assunta made a sound.

"*Papà,*" said Tore, on the bench, to the screen, as if the man could hear.

The lawyer reached out and stopped the picture. She leaned in toward the laptop and looked at the frozen frame for a long time, at the bald man and his pipe and the numbers over his head, and then she sat back.

"Again," she said. "From the ship."

---

They watched all four reels twice. Sixteen minutes each time.

The son wrote down everything he could. The second reel was a wedding, somebody's, in a garden above Panza, with long tables under a pergola and a band and old women in black dancing a tarantella with their hands on their hips and their chins up. Tore was in it, nineteen, thin as a rope, in a borrowed jacket, dancing badly with a girl in a polka-dot dress who was, the old man said with dignity, the woman he had married four years later, and Assunta laughed out loud and said something that made her brother throw his cap at her.

The third reel was the sand.

It opened on a crowd on the beach. The whole cove, packed, in the white glare of a July noon, and the camera standing somewhere on the rocks above it all, looking down. Along the waterline, in a row, women on their knees digging. Children carrying clay pots down the beach two-handed, like bombs. Men hauling a rope. A long line of men, twenty or more, in rolled trousers and undershirts, bent back against a rope that ran out into the sea, walking backward up the sand step by step, and where the rope ended, beyond the breakers, the curve of floats, the edge of a great net coming slowly in.

And behind the men, standing on the sand, a row of women.

They were singing. You could see it. Their mouths opening and closing together, their heads going back on the same beat, one woman at the end of the row clapping her hands above her head, a big woman with a scarf round her hair who sang with her eyes shut and her whole body swaying, and the men at the rope stepping back in time with them.

No sound came out of the laptop. Only the faint whir of its fan.

The son looked at Assunta.

She was watching the women on the screen. She had leaned forward on the bench with her handbag clutched to her stomach, and her lips were moving. Very slightly. In time with the women. He could see it in the lamplight, the small movements, the words forming and not coming out.

The Maestro had seen it too. He was sitting on her other side, absolutely still, his half-glasses in his hand, watching her mouth and not the screen.

The reel ran on. The net came in, writhing and silver, and the women stopped singing and ran down to it, and the picture jumped and went white.

Nobody spoke.

"*Zi' Assu',*" said the Maestro at last, very gently. "The middle. The verse."

Assunta sat back. She set the handbag on the bench beside her, laced her fingers together on her knees, and looked at the white screen, and shook her head.

She said something. Not to the Maestro. To the screen.

"She says not here," Rosaria translated. "She says it is not a song for a cellar. She says it is for the sand, with the rope, when the net is coming in." Rosaria's voice was unsteady. "She says if they let her haul the net on the first Sunday of July she will sing it, and if they don't she will take it back to California and it can stay there."

---

The lawyer explained it to Eight in the sun outside the blue door, while the others stayed in the cellar watching the fourth reel again.

"There are a few people in Italy who can tell a court when a piece of old film was made," she said. "Not from the pictures. From the film. The manufacturer printed a small code along the edge that tells you the year the stock was made, and the processing laboratory stamped the boxes. The best of them has a laboratory in Bologna. She can read the codes, scan the reels, write a report and swear to it before a court officer. She needs them in her hands for one night."

"And Bologna is six hundred kilometers."

"Bologna is six hundred kilometers, and from this island there is the hydrofoil, the ferry and the boats of the fishermen, and on every one of them since May there has been a man in a white polo shirt with a lamp on it, watching who carries what." She took off her hat and fanned herself with it. "I can file the appeal without the report. They will say the film is a fake. I can file with the report, and the judge will suspend the demolition before the thirtieth. Those are the two roads."

Eight was silent.

Then he took a phone from his pocket that the lawyer had not seen before, and touched one name, and waited, and when it answered, said, in English, "Bologna. Tomorrow night. There and back by morning."

He listened. A man's voice at the other end said something short. Eight said, "Thank you," and put the phone away.

The lawyer looked at him, with her hat in her hand.

"I have a plane," said Eight. "At Capodichino. I came to the island in it."

"I don't want to know about your plane," said the lawyer.

"No."

"I don't want to know how the reels leave this island, or how they come back." She put her hat back on. "I want them in Bologna tomorrow night and on my desk in Naples by noon on Thursday with a report in Italian, signed, stamped, sworn, and the tin with the windmill on it beside it." She looked down at the cove, at the fence, at the hot strip of sand behind it smoking faintly in the afternoon sun. "And I would like it if the old man did not have to watch anybody take his sister's film away from him on a boat."

"He won't see it go," said Eight.

The Fish Crate

Kept private.

*I have carried a great many things that were not mine across borders at night. Papers, mostly. Once a child's violin. Once a man's ashes, at his widow's request, to a river he had fished as a boy. I have never carried anything as light as four reels of film in a cookie tin, or anything I was so afraid to drop. It is not the film. It is that I watched a woman of ninety-one hand it to her son on a quay, and her son hand it to me in a cellar, and both of them let go of it with their eyes closed.*

---

Ciro Mennella went out to fish on Wednesday night as he went out every night in June, at nine, from the beach at Pietrafumo, in his father's old lamp boat.

It was a broad wooden boat, eight meters, white with a sky-blue sheer and the red stripe of the blue door, with a diesel that knocked like a man walking in clogs. Ciro was thirty-four, Rosaria's son, square and silent, with his grandfather's hands. He loaded the boat the way he always did: lamps, battery, net, two fish crates of ice, a thermos. Nobody watched him do it, because there was nothing to watch.

At a quarter to nine, a man in a canvas jacket came down the two hundred and twelve steps and asked, in bad Italian, whether he might come out for the night and see the fishing, and Ciro said, in worse English, sure, and the man climbed in and sat on the forward thwart beside the ice crates.

Up on the cliff, a young man in a white shirt sat on the wall of the grocer's smoking, and watched the lamp boat put out with a tourist in it. He took a picture anyway, out of habit. Then he looked back up the lane toward Rosaria's house, where an old woman's voice could be heard through the open shutters scolding somebody about the correct way to fold a cardigan.

He did not see anything else. There was nothing else to see.

---

Under the ice in the second crate, inside two plastic bags and a towel, there was a blue cookie tin with a windmill on its lid.

The son had packed it. He had done it in the cellar at eight, with Rocco watching and Assunta not watching, sitting at the table with her back to them and her hands in her lap, talking to her brother about something else. He had wrapped it the way his father told him, airtight, padded, cold but not wet, and Rocco had carried it down the beach to the boat himself in the dusk and set it in the crate with his own hands and covered it with ice from the bucket, scoop by scoop, as if burying a pot in the sand.

Then Rocco had walked back up the beach, and sat on his crate by the blue door, and lit a cigarette, though he had given them up in 1994.

---

Ciro did not go fishing.

He went out round the western arm of rock with his lamps dark and his running lights on, like every other boat going out, and turned north past Forio and Lacco, then east off the northern point, into the channel toward Procida.

He spoke not once on the crossing. Eight sat on the forward thwart beside the crates with his hand on the lid of the second one and watched the water.

The channel between the islands was calm and black and alive with lights: ferries lit like towns, lamp boats lying in their white pools with men moving on their decks like figures in a lantern show, Procida going by low and close with a dog barking on a terrace. Ahead came the black headland at Miseno and, beyond it, the long glow of the shore toward Naples.

Ciro took them round under the headland into a small harbor Eight had marked on his chart three days before and had never seen: a crescent of old stone quays tucked into the inside of the cape, with a few dozen fishing boats moored stern-to and a single orange lamp on a pole, and above it, very dark, the cliffs of the old Roman naval port where, the son had told him over breakfast, an emperor's fleet had once lain at anchor.

There was a car on the quay with its lights off. A small dark hatchback. The engine was running.

Ciro brought the lamp boat alongside the stone without a bump. He held it there with one hand on a ring, and looked at Eight, once, the way his mother looked.

"*Domani,*" he said. Tomorrow. "Here. Six."

"Six."

Eight lifted the towel-wrapped tin out of the ice and stepped up onto the quay with it against his chest. The hatchback's passenger door opened from the inside. He got in. The driver was a woman of perhaps sixty in a dark cardigan with her hair in a gray plait, who did not look at him. She put the car in gear and drove off the quay and up a narrow road between high garden walls before the door was fully shut.

Behind them, in the little harbor, the lamp boat backed off the quay and turned and went out again past the end of the breakwater, and Ciro swung the lamps out over the stern and turned them on, one by one, so that by the time the car reached the top of the hill there was one more white pool of light on the black water off Miseno, and a fisherman sitting in it alone, beginning his night's work.

---

The woman drove to Capodichino in thirty-eight minutes, by roads Eight had not known existed, through tunnels and along the back of a hill of apartment blocks and down a street where people were eating dinner at tables on the sidewalk at eleven at night under strings of bulbs, and she said only one thing the whole way, at a red light.

"My husband had a boat," she said, in English, looking straight ahead. "It was taken from him in 1991 by men who said he owed them. He did not owe them. A year later the papers came back to him in an envelope with no name." The light went green. "That is all I wanted to say."

Ruiz had the engines turning when they came through the gate at the general aviation apron. He did not ask about the woman or the car or the towel. He looked at the tin.

"Cookies?"

"Film."

"Old?"

"Nineteen sixty-two."

Ruiz considered this. "Older than me," he said. "Barely. Strap it in a seat. Not on the floor. Old things don't like floors."

---

Bologna at a quarter past one in the morning smelled of hot stone and linden trees.

The laboratory was in a long low building beside a canal on the edge of the old city, and the woman who opened the gate was small and sixty and already wearing cotton gloves. She took the tin in both hands without opening it and looked at the windmill on the lid. "Danish butter cookies," she said in perfect English. "Every family in America kept their films in these. I have a whole shelf."

She took him through a corridor into a room as cold and quiet as a cellar in January, with machines along the walls under gray covers and a long bench under a lamp, and she sat down and opened the tin.

Four small gray reels lay in it on a bed of tissue paper, each one in its own yellow box gone soft and brown at the corners. On each box a typed label and a stamp. On each reel, wound round and round, a thin brown ribbon of film.

She lifted the first one out and held it under the lamp. She unwound a hand's length, slowly, and raised it to the lamp, and turned it, and studied its edge through a magnifier on a stalk.

She was silent a good while.

"There," she said at last, and moved the magnifier so he could look. Between the tiny sprocket holes, along the very edge of the film, there was printed lettering, and among it a small geometric mark, repeating. "The manufacturer's code for the year the stock was made. It repeats every twenty years, so alone it could be 1942 or 1962 or 1982. But this film was not made in 1942, and by 1982 the edge print looked different." She showed him another reel from the shelf beside the first. "So. Made in 1961. Processed by a laboratory in California in the summer of 1962. And never spliced. One piece, every reel, from the leader to the tail. I can show that to a court with a microscope."

"How long?"

"Scanning, all four, frame by frame, at the resolution I want, five hours. The report, two. Then at half past eight I go to the court office in the via Farini with the report and swear to it before the clerk." She looked up. "You can sleep there." She nodded at an old leather sofa against the wall under a poster for a film festival from 1989. "Or not. People who bring me films usually do not."

He did not sleep. He sat on the sofa with his jacket on and watched the reels go through a machine a frame at a time under a light as bright as an operating room, each frame appearing on the wall for an instant, so that the cove at Pietrafumo came up in front of him in colors that were not the drugstore's pale salmon and milk but deep and clear: the sky-blue door, the black sand, the bald man's white undershirt, the four white numbers in the stone.

At four in the morning the third reel came up, and the beach, and the row of women singing.

He watched their mouths, frame by frame, in the cold room in Bologna, for a long while, and found that he was counting their beat under his breath without noticing, one-two, one-two, the way the Maestro struck the drum.

---

At six in the evening on Thursday, Ciro Mennella came in off the sea to the small harbor under the headland at Miseno with a crate of anchovies, as a fisherman might put in anywhere for ice. A small dark hatchback came down the narrow road between the garden walls and stopped on the quay, and a man in a canvas jacket got out of it and stepped down into the boat.

He had nothing in his hands.

The reels were in Naples, on a desk in an office on the fourth floor of a building in the via Toledo, beside a report in Italian of thirty-one pages with photographs, signed, stamped and sworn, in a sealed transparent bag with a court officer's seal across its mouth. In the morning the lawyer would file. On the second of July, she had said, at the hearing, the judge would want the tin itself on the table, still sealed, carried into the room by the woman whose husband had filmed it.

"The old woman," said Ciro, starting the engine. It was the most English the son would ever hear him speak. "She will not let go of it again."

"No," said Eight. "I don't expect she will."

The Village Dance

For anyone who asks.

*A painter of boat names once told me that the letters have to lean forward, always, a little, because a boat is always going somewhere, and a name that stands up straight on a bow looks like it is waiting to be told what to do. I have thought about that more than I would admit. My cars carry a number, never a name. But I would like the number to lean, if anyone ever paints it by hand again.*

---

The lawyer filed on Friday morning, and on Saturday afternoon she brought the tin back to the island herself, because Assunta Iacono had telephoned her office four times on Friday to say that it was hers and that it went where she went.

"There are safes in Naples," the lawyer said, on the beach, in the shade of the blue door, holding the sealed bag in both hands.

"There were safes in Naples in 1958," said Assunta, through Rosaria. "Where is everything that was in them?"

The lawyer studied her, and then laughed, the first time any of them had heard her laugh, a short surprised bark, and gave her the bag. Assunta put it in her handbag, which was large and black and very old, and snapped the clasp shut, and from that hour, the son noticed, she did not put the handbag down. She ate with it on her knees. She slept, Rosaria reported, with it on the pillow beside her head.

"The president of the court did not grant the urgent decree," the lawyer told the others, by the boats. "He said the demolition is not until after the thirtieth, and the hearing is on the second, so there is no urgency. He set the hearing for Wednesday the second of July, at ten, in Naples. Bring the old woman, bring the tin, bring the expert's report. He will look at the film on the court's own machine." She took off her straw hat. "In a normal country that would be the end of it. In this one, I am going to sleep with my telephone on."

---

On Tuesday morning the *Assunta* was in the sea.

Ciro found her at five, coming in from the night's fishing. She was not on her rollers in front of the blue door where Tore had drawn her up at dusk. She was in the shallows at the eastern end of the cove, inside the fence, lying on her side in a meter of clear water with her sky-blue sheer just under the surface, swamped to the gunwales. There was a hole in her bottom boards the size of a man's two hands, splintered outward. Someone had dragged her down the beach in the dark, through the gap in the fence, and knocked her bottom in, and left her for the old man to find.

Ciro did not wake his grandfather. He woke everyone else.

By seven there were fifty people on the beach. They came down from Panza with ropes and blocks, and nobody called a meeting. The fishermen waded in up to their chests and got ropes under her. The women took the rope in a line, as the son had seen them do on a laptop screen in a cellar, and the Maestro on a crate at the waterline began the slow dragging beat without being asked, and the line leaned back in time, and the *Assunta* came up out of the water, pouring, onto the sand.

Tore came down the steps at half past seven with his sister's arm through his, and stood on the beach and looked at his boat lying on her side on the sand with the hole in her bottom and the water still running out of it.

He walked round her in silence. He bent, slowly, with one hand on her gunwale, and put the other into the hole, and felt the edges of the broken boards. Then he straightened, and said one word to Ciro, and Ciro went into the cellar and came back with a saw, a box of copper nails, and a length of pale new wood that had been waiting at the back of the vault under the sheet for some years for exactly this.

By eleven she had a new piece in her bottom, let in so cleanly that the son, running his hand over it afterward, could hardly find the seam. By noon she was caulked. By one, a man the son had not met came down the steps with a paint box under his arm.

He was sixty-six, small and stringy, with a white mustache and a bucket hat crusted with paint and forearms speckled to the elbow with every color on the beach. His name was Gaetano Buono, Rosaria said, and he had painted every boat name and every door in Pietrafumo for forty years, and his father before him, and before his father the job had belonged to Rosaria's own grandfather, the man with the pipe in the film, Giuseppe Mennella, who had taught Gaetano's father to letter, as a boy, on the back of a cellar door.

Gaetano did not speak to anyone. He knelt by the bow and sanded the scraped old name off with a block, and wiped it, and took from his box a brush so fine it looked like an eyelash on a stick, and a small pot of white, and began to paint.

Rocco came and crouched beside him.

The son watched them from the crates. The painter's brush went down the bow, and the first letter came out of it, an A, leaning forward, the crossbar low, the right leg ending in a small curl like a wave turning over. Rocco watched it without moving. When the second letter came, and the third, he reached into his back pocket for his wallet, and took out a photograph and held it out beside the bow, without a word.

It was the stern of a boat, at a dock, under a gray California sky. On its transom, in white, the name *ISOLANA*. The letters leaned forward. The A's had their crossbars low. The legs ended in little curls like waves turning over.

Gaetano stopped painting. He took the photograph, with paint on his fingers, and brought it up close to his eyes, and studied it a long while.

"*Chi l'ha fatta?*" he said. Who did this?

"My father," said Rocco, in English, and then in his kitchen Italian: "*Papà. Gennaro.* He did every boat on the dock. Thirty years. Everybody asked him. He said he learned it from his wife's father. On the beach. When he was a kid."

Gaetano Buono looked at the photograph, and at the big sunburned man from California crouching beside him on the sand, and then he did something the son did not expect. He held out the brush.

Rocco looked at it.

"I'm a fisherman," he said.

The painter said something short in dialect and did not lower the brush.

"He says so was everybody who ever held it," said Rosaria, from the door.

Rocco took the brush. His hand was enormous on it. He bent to the bow, beside the old man, and painted the last letter of his mother's name, slowly, the A, with the crossbar low and the leg ending in a curl, and it was not as good as Gaetano's, and it was not bad, and Gaetano looked at it with his head on one side and said one word, which Rosaria did not translate, and which the son found out later meant *again*.

---

At eight that evening the whole of Pietrafumo went up the mountain to watch the swords.

They went up the mountain in Rosaria's van and Ciro's truck and the Alfa, through chestnut woods and vineyards to Buonopane, high on the southern slope, where the air was suddenly cool and smelled of pine resin and cut hay. The little square was packed, lights strung across it between the houses, children on every wall, and the noise dropped all at once when the drums began.

Then the dancers came in.

There were eighteen of them, men, young and middle-aged and one who must have been seventy, in two lines. They wore knee breeches and white shirts and short embroidered waistcoats, and tall soft caps that flopped at the tip with a tassel, and every one of them carried in his right hand a short wooden sword and in his left a short wooden stick. A drummer and a man with a reed pipe walked in front of them, and the pipe was shrill and sweet and the drum was the same slow dragging step the Maestro had beaten on the beach that morning, and the dancers came round the square in their two lines, stepping in time, and stopped in a ring.

Then the swords began.

Each man struck the sword and stick of the man opposite, clack, and turned, and struck the man beside him, clack, and turned again, and the ring went round, and the strikes came faster, and faster, the pipe going up and the drum going faster under it, until the whole ring was a clattering whirl of wood and white sleeves and flying tassels, every man striking and turning and striking without one of them ever missing, and the sound of the wooden blades was like hail on a roof, and the crowd began to clap on the beat.

The son's notebook was open and stayed empty.

"*Me ricordo,*" said Assunta, beside him, on a kitchen chair someone had brought her, with the handbag on her knees. I remember. She was watching the ring with her chin up. She said more, and Rosaria leaned down to listen.

"She says she came up here when she was nine, on the back of a mule, with her father. She says the old man in the dance is the grandson of the man who danced it then, she can tell by his knees." Rosaria straightened. "She says nobody in San Pedro ever believed her that there was a village on her island where men dance with swords and nobody gets hurt."

Rocco, on the other side of his mother, was watching the dancers with his mouth a little open.

"She's right," he said to the son. "I never believed her."

When the dance ended the square roared, and the crowd came forward to dance among the dancers in no order at all; and Rocco Iacono, seventy, from Ninth Street, who had told the son that he did not dance, was pulled in by a twelve-year-old in a tassel cap and danced, badly, enormously, until his face was red.

Assunta watched him from her chair and kept her thoughts to herself.

On his phone, the son opened the families' private calendar, where on Saturday Rosaria had put in the day of the sand oven, *first Sunday of July, Pietrafumo, all day*, and saw that under it, in the last hours, eleven people in California and three in Brooklyn and one in Buenos Aires had marked themselves as coming, or wishing they could.

The Engineer

Kept private.

*An old woman has put four reels of film in her handbag and will not put the handbag down. Everyone on the beach finds it funny, and so do I. I also know that a man who wants those reels gone has a man who takes photographs of everything, and that by now he has a photograph of a small woman of ninety-one with a large black handbag on her knees at a village dance. I have spent tonight thinking about how to make that handbag the least interesting object on this island. It is the kind of problem I was trained for, a long time ago. I did not expect to be solving it for someone's grandmother.*

---

The engineer came down the two hundred and twelve steps on Wednesday night at half past eleven, with a pocket flashlight and no hat, and knocked on the blue door.

Rosaria opened it. The son, at the long table inside with his notebook and his copy of Ezio Bertola's tables and a calculator, looked up and saw a man of about sixty in a pale blue shirt with the sleeves rolled, gray and soft and damp-faced, with a briefcase clutched against his chest the way a boy holds a schoolbag in the rain.

"*Ingegnere,*" said Rosaria. Not warmly.

"*Signora Mennella.*" The man looked past her into the cellar, at the son, at Eight by the shrouded boat, at Tore with his net, at Assunta at the table's end, the handbag on her knees, and he flinched slightly at all of them, as if each was a separate small blow. "I am sorry. It is late. I must speak to you. And to the lawyer, if it is possible. I could not telephone."

His name was Aurelio Pace. He was the head of the technical office of the town of Forio, Rosaria said afterward, the man whose signature was at the bottom of every notice on every door in the cove, and his father had been a schoolteacher in Panza and had taught Rosaria her letters.

He sat at the table. Rosaria gave him a glass of water and did not give him wine. He drank the water in one swallow and set the glass down and opened his briefcase and took out a single sheet of paper.

"This came to my office this afternoon," he said, in careful English, addressing the son, who looked the least frightening of them. "From the mayor's office. It is an order to execute the demolition. Not after the thirtieth. On the thirtieth. On Monday. At first light." He pushed the paper across the table. "By sea. There is a contractor's barge at Forio, with an excavator, hired by the municipality, they say. The contractor is a company that has done all of Lucerna's work for ten years." He swallowed. "The order needs my signature as the responsible engineer. I did not sign it. I said I would read it overnight. In the morning, I think, I will be ill. Then my deputy will sign it. He is twenty-nine and wants to be mayor."

Nobody said anything.

"The ninety days end on Monday," said Rosaria finally, in a level voice. "The hearing is Wednesday."

"Yes," said the engineer. "By Wednesday there is nothing for the judge to suspend. You cannot suspend a pile of rubble. The lawyers for Lucerna will say: the structures were removed in accordance with an order that no court had stopped, the matter is closed." He laid both palms on the table. "And they will say the film is a fabrication, made by Americans, and ask the court to examine the originals, and if there are no originals —" He stopped.

Assunta closed both hands on her handbag.

"I signed the notices," the engineer said. "In March. All eleven. I signed them because there were no permits, and the law says what it says, and I told myself that the families would find some photograph and the court would decide." He looked at Tore, mending his net, who had not once looked up. "I have known your father since I was seven years old. He taught me to swim off this beach. I signed anyway." He looked at Rosaria. "I am not here to be forgiven. I am here because I read this order this afternoon, and I read who the contractor is, and only then did I understand what I had signed in March, and I could not sleep."

He lifted his hands from the table. They were shaking.

"There is one more thing," he said. "In the office they talk. Fusco's man, Capuano, has been asking in the harbor at Forio which fishermen keep things in the old cave under the point. The one you call the Mouth."

---

The lawyer came on the first boat on Thursday, and by noon she had filed again.

"A renewed request for an urgent decree," she said, on the beach, by the boats. "With the order of execution attached, and the name of the contractor, and the date. Now there is urgency. Now the president cannot say there is no hurry." She looked at the sea. "He will decide by Saturday. Perhaps Friday night. Perhaps not at all."

"And if not at all?" said Rocco.

The lawyer looked at Rosaria. Rosaria looked at the boats on their rollers in a row in front of the doors, and at the fishermen sitting on their crates outside the cellars, mending, and at the steps going up.

"Then on Monday," said Rosaria, "the barge comes in, and finds us."

She did not explain, and nobody asked her to. That afternoon the son saw Ciro go along the cellars from door to door and speak to each family for a minute, and saw the Maestro on the bench by the yellow door send something from his phone and watch the replies come in, one after another, from up the hill and round the island and across the water. Nobody told the son what the plan was. Nobody told his father. That was correct, the son thought. It was theirs.

---

That night Eight drew the cards at the long table in the cellar, after the others had gone up.

He did it alone. The son had offered and his father had said no, gently: the son had a page of tables to learn by heart before Saturday and a stopwatch to argue with, and the cards were not for this beach. The son stayed under the lamp at the table's far end with the Bertolas' tables and the calculator and pretended not to watch.

His father had one pen and a box of blank white cards. He drew them steadily, one after another, the single line looping, crossing, looping and closing, and set each one face down on the table to dry. He drew eleven. Then he stopped and looked at them, and drew eleven more. Then he capped the pen and sat.

He had not heard Assunta come in.

She was standing in the doorway in a long cardigan over her nightdress, with the handbag on her arm. She had come down the steps in the dark, at ninety-one, on her own, while Rosaria thought she was asleep. She said nothing. She took the bench opposite him, and put the handbag on her knees, and looked at the cards.

She reached out and turned one over, with one finger, and looked at the line.

Then she said something in dialect, quite quietly, and the son, down the table, understood almost none of it. But he heard a name, and a number, *sissantasei*, sixty-six, and *San Pedro*, and the word for boat.

His father looked at him.

"She says," the son said slowly, piecing it together from two weeks of listening, from the few words he had, "that in 1966 there was a bad year in San Pedro. The tuna went away. Half the boats owed money to the bank and the bank was going to take them. Her husband's boat too." He listened. She went on, and he caught it, mostly. "And one week in the winter, every man who owed money got a letter from the bank. Paid. All of it. No name. Nobody ever found out who." He stopped. Assunta said one more thing, and tapped the card under her finger, once.

"What was that?" said his father.

"She says her husband looked for that man for forty years," said the son. "And he used to say, when he couldn't find him, that it didn't matter. That the man who paid was the kind of man who would be paying somewhere else by then."

Assunta looked at Eight across the table for a long moment. Then she laid the card face down, and stood, with the handbag on her arm, and went out of the blue door and up the steps in the dark, alone, and the son heard her the whole way, one step at a time, two hundred and twelve, counting under her breath.

---

His father went out onto the beach afterward. The son went with him.

The cove was black and still and very warm, the sand still holding the heat of the day, and the steam at the waterline was invisible in the dark but they could smell it, sour and faint, under the salt. The lamp boats were out on the sea beyond the point in their white pools. The cliff above was dark except for a single lit window high up in Panza.

His father took out his phone, and stood with it a while without dialing, looking at the water.

Then he called home.

The son heard it ring half a world away, where it was mid-afternoon, and heard it answered, and heard, very faint, his grandfather's voice, and behind it the sound of the sea at home, which was a different sound, longer and heavier, the Pacific's sound.

"Papa," his father said.

He did not say anything else for some time. He listened. Then he said, "Yes." And then, "An old woman and her handbag." And then he listened again, and the son, standing a little way off on the warm sand, saw his father's shoulders come down, slowly, the way they did after a long drive.

"Yes," his father said. "That too."

He put the phone away.

"What did Dada say?"

His father looked out at the lamp boats.

"He said a calm sea is the one you should trust least," he said. "And that I already knew that, and that I had not called him to be told it. He said I had called him to hear somebody say it out loud." He turned back toward the blue door. "He was right. He usually is."

Tubes

For anyone who asks.

*People have asked whether it bothers me to sit beside someone else's arithmetic. It did once. For most of my life the car went where I put it and I answered for every tenth. In a regularity trial the car goes where the navigator's numbers put it, and I answer for holding them. I have found that it changes what I notice. I no longer watch the road for the corner. I watch it for the place where a man with a clipboard might have laid a rubber tube under a scatter of leaves, and I listen to my son breathe.*

---

The Coppa del Tufo started at eight on Saturday from the seafront at Forio, one car a minute, under the round tower, with a brass band from Lacco playing something that might once have been a march, and the son had not slept.

He had the board on his knees: plywood with a clip, Ezio Bertola's tables copied onto squared paper and taped down, eleven sections, the route book under the clip. On a lanyard round his neck, a modern stopwatch with an orange button that counted hundredths. On his left wrist, strapped over his cuff, a second one. And in his right hand, warm, his grandfather's.

"Three watches," said Franca Bertola, leaning down to the Alfa's window at the start, in a white scarf and racing gloves with the fingers cut off. "Ezio uses two. One for the section, one for the next. The third is for courage."

"Which one's mine for courage?"

She looked at the steel one in his hand.

"That one," she said, and returned to the Fulvia, and the starter waved her off, and the dark red car went away along the seafront at a gentle, perfect, maddening forty kilometers an hour while the band played.

A minute later his father put the Alfa in gear.

---

"Section one. Forty-two point oh. Four point six kilometers. Go."

The son pressed two buttons at once.

The first section ran south along the coast road past the beach at Citara, absurdly slow, the little engine burbling in third, a three-wheeler loaded with watermelons overtaking on the left with its horn going.

"Ahead point three," said the son. "Ahead point four. Lift."

His father lifted. The needle on the speedometer drifted back a hair.

"Ahead point two. Point one. On. Hold that."

His father held it. The son watched the sweep hand of the orange watch and did the sums from the table in his head and felt sweat start under his arms. They were doing forty-two kilometers an hour along a coast road in a beautiful car past a beach full of people, and nothing had ever frightened him more.

They found the first tube at the bottom of a hill by a bus stop, two black hoses across the road under a scatter of pine needles and a marshal in an orange vest on a folding chair eating a peach. The Alfa went over it, *thup-thup*, and the son's thumb came down on the watch before he told it to.

"Point oh four early," he said.

"Early," said his father.

"Four hundredths."

"Early is a kind of lie," said his father mildly, and turned up the hill.

---

The road went round the island the long way, the way the regulations had laid it out, and every section had its own speed, and the tubes were where Matilde Russo had put them.

There was one in Serrara on a hairpin above the sea. There was one in the chestnut woods below Buonopane, where the light came down through the leaves in coins and the son lost the tube in the dapple and found it by the cable. There was one in the main street of Barano, where a wedding was coming out of the town hall in a cloud of rice and an old man in a dark suit stepped into the road to wave them through with his hat, and his father braked for him, and the son had to make up a full second in two hundred meters, and did.

"Behind one point one. Push. Push. One point oh. Point eight. Hold. Point five. More. Point two."

*Thup-thup.*

"Point oh one late."

His father said nothing. His hands moved on the thin wooden rim. The son saw the back of his neck, shining with sweat in the heat, and the muscle in his jaw, and understood for the first time that his father, who had driven sideways along cliffs in the dark, who had raced in a dozen countries and won, was finding this hard. Not the driving. The obedience. Holding a speed he had not chosen to the hundredth of a kilometer an hour while a voice beside him said *more* and *less* and *hold* in a tone that did not ask.

At the end of the fourth section, at a control in a lay-by above the sea where they had four minutes to wait, his father switched off the engine, and sat back, and closed his eyes.

"How am I doing?" the son said.

"You're doing very well."

"I meant you."

His father opened one eye.

"I'm being driven," he said. "First time ever. By you." He closed the eye again. "It's very good for me. I'm told."

---

The middle of the day was the hardest. The road climbed through Fontana at the very top of the island, where the air was thin and sweet with broom and there were clouds below them on the seaward side, and then came down the other flank toward the north coast on hairpins so close together that from above the road looked like a dropped ribbon.

The average speed for that section was thirty-one. Every hairpin came at them and his father took it gently, a little brake, turn, a breath of gas, the son calling the gaps, and on the twelfth hairpin a bus came up the other way and filled the whole road.

His father stopped.

The bus driver stopped.

They looked at each other through two windshields, a meter apart, in the heat. The bus driver lifted both hands off his wheel in a gesture the son had seen every man on the island make at least once a day, palms up, *what can you do*, and began, slowly, to reverse up the hill, the bus whining, its passengers turning in their seats to look down at the little gray-blue car with the 8 on its door.

The son watched his orange watch running. Eleven seconds. Fourteen. Twenty.

"Behind twenty-two," he said, when the bus had backed into a gap in a wall and they were through. His voice was not steady. "Twenty-two seconds. On a thirty-one section. There's no way. There isn't enough road."

"Is there a tube before the end?"

"I don't know. Maybe."

"Then give me the speed," his father said quietly. "Not the one in the table. The one that gets us back on time by the bottom. You know how. Work it out."

The son looked at the table. He looked at the distance left in the route book. He looked at the steel watch in his hand, running, and the sums went through his head, and came out.

"Thirty-five point two," he said. "For one point six kilometers. Then back to thirty-one."

His father gave him thirty-five point two.

The Alfa went down the last hairpins faster than it had gone all day, tires squealing softly on the hot tarmac, the engine singing higher, the stone walls close. The son called the gap every hundred meters, steady now: *eighteen, fourteen, nine, five, two, on, now thirty-one, hold*. And at the bottom, on the last bend before the sea, beside a café with blue tables, there were two black hoses across the road and a marshal on a folding chair.

*Thup-thup.*

His thumb came down on the steel watch.

He stared at it.

Then he looked at the orange one, to be sure, and then at the one on his wrist.

"Tube nine," he said. "Zero."

His father's eyes stayed on the tarmac. He drove on toward the sea at thirty-one kilometers an hour, exactly, in the sun.

"Zero?"

"Zero point zero zero. On the nose."

His father nodded, once. The son saw his hands loosen on the wheel, just slightly.

The son opened the notebook on top of the board and wrote it down: *Tube nine. 0.00. Dada's watch.* And then, because his hand needed something to do, he ringed the number twice, the pencil going round on its own until the paper nearly tore.

---

At the finish, under the tower, at a quarter to four, the board was chalked by Matilde Russo herself on a blackboard propped against the tower wall, in penalty points, lowest first.

*1. N. 8. 41.* *2. Bertola / Bertola (Lancia Fulvia). 47.* *3. Weiss / Weiss (Porsche 356). 63.*

Franca Bertola came over to the Alfa with an ice cream in each hand and gave one to the son and kept one.

"Six points," she said. "Ezio says your bus was worth eleven of them and you made it back in the hairpins. He says nobody makes it back in the hairpins." She turned to the son. "He says it was his tables."

"It was his tables," said the son.

"Don't tell him that. He will be impossible." She ate some of her ice cream. "Tomorrow is the speed stage. It counts for nothing. A separate cup for the boys who think they are young. The Coppa is decided." She nodded at the blackboard. "Unless you do something stupid."

"I'll try not to."

"Your father," said Franca, "is the kind of man who does something stupid on purpose when it matters. I can see it in how he parks." She went away along the seafront, eating her ice cream, and the son turned to his father, sitting on the low wall under the tower with his eyes closed and his face turned up to the sun.

---

The lawyer telephoned at eight in the evening, while they were eating fried anchovies in paper on the seafront.

The son saw his father take the call and walk away from the crowd along the harbor wall to listen. He saw his father stand very still. Then he saw him turn and look along the coast, south, in the direction of Pietrafumo, where the cliffs were going rose and gold in the long evening light, and the sea below them had gone flat.

Not calm. Flat. Like oil on a plate. Not a ripple on it from the harbor wall to the horizon, and the smoke of a ship far out going straight up into the sky.

His father came back.

"The president of the court signed the decree at six," he said. "The demolition is suspended until Wednesday's hearing. Anyone who touches those doors before then breaks a court order." He sat down and picked up a fried anchovy and looked at it. "The lawyer has sent it to the town hall, the contractor and Lucerna's lawyers. And the carabinieri at Forio."

"So it's done?"

"So Monday is done." His father ate the anchovy. "Wednesday is the film. And the only people who can stop the film now are the people who want it to stop existing before a judge looks at it."

He kept his face toward the water when he said it. He was looking at the sea, at its perfect, glassy, unbroken stillness, as if it were a road he had driven once a long time ago and had not much liked.

Bonaccia

Kept private.

*I went into a sea cave this evening with a cookie tin full of nothing and left it on a ledge where a man with a long lens could watch me do it. The air at the back of the cave was heavy and sweet and lay along the rock like water in a bowl, and I came out with a headache and the taste of coins in my mouth. An old man had told my son that afternoon what the cave does on a night with no wind. Every child on that beach knows it, and so does a boatman whose father fished out of Lacco. He will wait for the land wind before he goes in, and a man waiting all night under the point is not on the steps. That is all I want from him. I am writing this down here and nowhere else. I will not write anything about tonight. Tonight I am going to sit on a rock and watch the sea not move.*

---

The speed stage ran at nine on Sunday morning on the coast road from Citara to the crossroads above Panza, four kilometers, closed for an hour, with half the island on its walls.

It counted for nothing. Franca Bertola had said so, and Matilde Russo had said so, chalking the starting order on her blackboard. The Coppa del Tufo had been decided on Saturday at the bottom of a mountain by a boy with three stopwatches. Sunday was for the men who thought they were young.

The son, on the Alfa's passenger seat with his helmet on and no board on his knees, looked at his father on the line and saw a man who did not think he was young at all, and was going to drive anyway.

The flag dropped.

The little engine went up from its burble to a hard, high howl the son had not heard it make all Saturday, and the Alfa went off the line in a squeal of rear tires, and Citara's umbrellas went past in a blur. Up off the beach in a long left-hand sweep along the cliff, flat, the narrow tires drifting toward the outside wall; then a right-hand bend over a crest that dropped away beyond, and his father braked hard and late, the nose diving, and turned in, and the tail stepped out a hand's width and came back, and the sea filled the windshield, blue, enormous, absolutely flat.

No one called numbers. There were no numbers. There was the road coming at them between walls of green-gray stone and prickly pear, and his father's hands, and the engine.

Through Panza the walls were lined three deep. The son saw the grocer's go by, Rosaria on the step with a dish towel over her shoulder waving it like a flag, and a woman with a baby, and children on a balcony, and a dog barking so hard it fell off a doorstep. Up the last climb to the crossroads in second gear with the engine screaming at the top of its voice and the steering wheel juddering in his father's hands, and the beam, and the flag.

Three minutes, fifty-two seconds.

The Porsche from Munich, driven by a man of about forty who was very definitely young, did it in three minutes, forty-nine.

His father switched off the engine at the crossroads and stayed in his seat, hands on the wheel, the hot metal ticking all round them and the smell of brakes, and began, very quietly, to laugh.

"What?" said the son.

"I enjoyed that," said his father. "I'd forgotten."

---

The prize-giving was at noon under the tower, on the blue carpet, with the brass band from Lacco and a photographer and Leandro Fusco in a white linen jacket with the cup in both hands.

His father did not go up.

He had said so on Saturday night, and on Sunday morning he simply stayed sitting on the low wall in the shade with his cap pulled down, and when Matilde Russo called *Numero otto* into the microphone, the son walked up the steps onto the carpet alone.

Fusco smiled at him. It was a very good smile. He held out the cup, a silver bowl on a stand with the pale blue lamp engraved on its side and ribbons of the same blue tied to its handles.

"The navigator," Fusco said, in English, for the microphone. "The young man who brought the old woman's films from America." He did not lower the cup. He held it out between them, his hands on one handle, the son's on the other, for the photographer, smiling. "I hope she enjoys her holiday. The island is so beautiful in July." The flash went. Fusco let go of the cup. "Tell her to be careful on the steps."

The son took the cup down off the carpet and walked across the seafront with it to where his father was sitting on the wall, and put it down beside him on the stone.

His father looked at it, and at the son's face.

"He said to tell Mrs. Iacono to be careful on the steps."

"Yes," said his father. "He would."

---

The son carried the cup down the two hundred and twelve steps at three in the afternoon and gave it to Assunta Iacono, who was sitting on a crate in the shade of the blue door with the handbag on her knees, and she considered it, and him, and said something in dialect that made Rosaria laugh, and then she gave it to Tore, who turned it this way and that and studied the lamp engraved on its side, and the blue ribbons, and passed it to Ciro with a short remark, and Ciro took it into the cellar.

"He said it will be good for bait," said Rosaria. "For the octopus. They like shiny things."

The son sat down on the sand beside the old man's crate.

The heat in the cove was enormous. It came down from the cliff and up from the sand and lay over everything like a hand. The sea was glass. There was not a breath of wind, not the smallest wrinkle anywhere on the water from the black rocks to the horizon, and the boats at their moorings beyond the fence did not move at all, and their reflections hung under them exactly, upside down, every color sharp, every letter of every name readable in the water. The steam at the waterline, which on other days the breeze took away, stood up from the sand in thin white threads and did not lean.

Tore was looking at the sea, his hands still for once on the net in his lap.

He said something. Slowly, to the water. Then again.

"*Quanno 'o mare sta 'mbonaccia,*" said Rosaria, beside the son, very quietly, "*'a Vocca nun sciata.*" She glanced at the son. "When the sea is in dead calm, the Mouth does not breathe. The cave under the point. Every child here knows it. On a still night you never go in. The air from under the island comes up through the floor of the cave and lies there, like water, and with no wind to take it out, it stays. My grandfather lost a dog in there. A goat, once. When I was a girl a German boy went in on an air mattress on a night like this and his friends pulled him out by the feet." She shrugged. "In the morning the wind comes off the land and the cave breathes out, and it is fine. It is only the still nights."

The son kept still. Into his notebook went the proverb, in Rosaria's spelling, and the translation, and the weather. *No wind at all. Sea like a mirror. 94 in the shade.*

When he raised his head, his father was a little way along the beach, by the gap in the fence, looking at the point.

---

At seven in the evening, when the shadow of the cliff had come out across the water and the light on the sea was gold, the son saw his father push Tore's boat down the rollers into the water, alone, and row it out of the cove.

He rowed the way he did everything, without hurry, the oars going in clean and coming out clean, and the boat slid across the flat gold water and round the eastern arm of rock toward the point, and the son, standing at the waterline, saw that he had a towel-wrapped bundle on the thwart in front of him, square, about the size of a cookie tin.

The son looked up at the cliff.

At the top, on the far side of the point, at the end of a track where people from Panza parked to look at the sunset, there was a gray car, and a man standing beside it with something long and dark held to his face.

The son looked back at the boat. It had reached the point. Under the point, at the waterline, there was a black opening in the tufa, wider than a door and twice as high, with the flat water going into it and the gold light going a little way in after it and then stopping. His father shipped the oars and let the boat drift into the dark, slowly, until the son could not see it any more.

He did not come out for four minutes. The son counted them on his grandfather's watch.

Then the boat slid out of the black mouth into the gold light, and his father took up the oars again and rowed back, and there was nothing on the thwart in front of him.

When the boat grounded on the sand his father got out and pulled it up onto its rollers himself, and stood for a moment with one hand on its gunwale, and the son saw that his face was pale under the brown, and that he was breathing carefully, through his nose.

"Headache," said his father, before the son could ask. "The air at the back is bad already. It's going to be a very still night." He let go of the boat. "Nobody goes in there before the land wind. Capuano's father fished out of Lacco; he knows the saying as well as anyone on this beach. If he wants the tin he'll wait for morning out on the water, and while he waits he isn't on Rosaria's steps." "Go up to Rosaria's. Have dinner with the family. Stay there. Make sure Mrs. Iacono stays there too, with her handbag."

"Where will you be?"

His father looked at the point, and the flat gold sea, and the gray car at the top of the cliff, which was leaving now, slowly, its headlights coming on.

"Sitting on a rock," he said.

---

The son did not sleep.

He sat all night at the window over Rosaria's shop, looking at a strip of black glass between two houses with the stars lying on it. There were no lamp boats out. Ciro had said at dinner that nobody went out on a night like this.

At ten past one he saw something on the black water below the point. A shape, low, without lights, moving slowly toward the cliff. It made a small white seam on the glass behind it, which closed up again almost at once. Then the cliff took it, and there was nothing.

He watched the place where it had gone.

He watched it until three. Nothing came out.

At a quarter past four, as the sky over the mainland began to gray, he felt the curtain beside his face stir. Very slightly. Then again. A breath of air, cool, off the mountain behind the village, coming down through the vineyards toward the sea. On the black glass below, a long dark wrinkle ran out from the shore, and another, and the stars lying on the water broke up and shivered.

The land was breathing out.

He took out his notebook in the gray light and wrote, under the date, only the weather. *Wind off the land, 4:15. First wind since Saturday.* He did not write anything else.

The Line of Boats

For anyone who asks.

*People like to ask me for the most frightening thing I have seen in a race, and they want a crash. I told them about a line of small wooden boats instead, which is not a race at all, and which I watched from the bottom of a cliff one morning on an island off Naples. Twenty-six boats, bow to stern, across the mouth of a cove, not moving, with old men standing up in them. It frightened me because nothing I know how to do would have moved it. I had not seen anything so strong in a long time.*

---

The barge came out of Forio at six on Monday morning anyway.

From the top of the steps the son watched it come: a flat gray barge pushed by a tug, a yellow excavator chained on its deck and four men in hard hats sitting on its tracks smoking, coming out past Forio's harbor wall into a sea wrinkled at last by the land wind, and turning south toward Pietrafumo at a walking pace.

"The decree is with the contractor since Saturday night," said the Maestro. "By email. By fax. By registered letter."

"Then why is it coming?"

"Because the man on the tug has not read his email," said Rosaria, "and the man who pays the man on the tug has not answered his telephone since yesterday afternoon." She took her phone out and pressed one name and held it up. "Ciro. *Mo'.*"

Now.

---

They came from everywhere: eleven from Sant'Angelo and the coves below Serrara, painted every color, outboards putting; eight bigger lamp boats from Forio with men standing in their sterns; and the seven of Pietrafumo, pushed down off their rollers by every pair of hands on the sand, with Tore's *Assunta* in the middle, her new patch pale under the blue, and Tore standing in her stern, sculling.

They did not shout. Nobody gave an order the son could hear. The boats came in from both sides and met in the middle of the cove's mouth, between the black arms of rock, and turned, and lay alongside each other, bow to stern, bow to stern, in a single line from one arm of rock to the other, and men passed ropes across from boat to boat and made them fast, and the line became one thing. Twenty-six boats. The son counted twice. In each boat one man or two, standing.

On the beach behind them, the women came out of the cellars and sat down.

They sat in the doorways of the eleven cellars on chairs and crates, with their backs against the painted doors: Rosaria at the blue door with her father's net in her lap, old women carried down from Panza at dawn, children on the rocks, the Maestro at the foot of the steps with the drum on his knee, not playing.

And on a kitchen chair before the blue door, under the four white numbers in the stone, with her good shoes on and her handbag on her knees, Assunta Iacono.

Rocco stood behind her chair with his arms folded.

Eight waited at the foot of the steps, by the fence, hands in his pockets, doing nothing at all.

---

The barge came round the western rocks at a quarter to seven and stopped.

It stopped because there was nowhere to go. The line of boats lay across the mouth of the cove in front of it from rock to rock, rocking gently on the chop, and in every boat a man stood looking at the barge, and nobody moved, and nobody said anything.

The tug's engine dropped to an idle. The men on the excavator's tracks stood up. One of them, a heavyset man in a white hard hat with a clipboard, came forward to the barge's blunt bow and shouted something across the water, in dialect, angry, and pointed at the cliff with the clipboard.

No one in the boats answered.

He shouted again.

In the middle of the line, Tore Mennella, eighty-eight, standing in the stern of a boat named for his sister with one hand on his oar, took off his woolen cap. He held it against his chest and simply looked at the man on the barge, for a long time, across twenty meters of blue water, as he had studied the son that first morning, from his crate, before he had decided anything.

On the beach, the Maestro lifted his hand and brought it down on the drum. Once.

The sound went off the cliff and came back, and went again.

Then he struck it again, slowly, the dragging step, one-two, one-two, and on the second beat, from the doorways of the cellars, the women began to sing.

It was the two lines. *Tira, tira, 'a rezza è chiena.* They sang them low, sitting in their doorways, not loud, in the same slow time as the drum, over and over, the way the women on the film had sung them with their heads going back on the beat; and in the boats the men did not sing but began, very slightly, to sway with the swell, all together, so that the whole line of twenty-six boats rose and fell across the mouth of the cove like one long animal breathing.

The man on the barge lowered his clipboard.

---

The carabinieri came at five past seven in a gray launch from Forio with a blue light turning on its roof, and with them, in the bow, in her straw hat, holding a plastic folder over her head against the spray, came the lawyer.

The launch went round the end of the line of boats, slowly, the carabiniere at the wheel lifting a hand to the fishermen, and came alongside the barge. The lawyer stood up. She took a sheet of paper out of the folder and read from it, in Italian, in a clear flat voice that carried across the water to the beach, for about a minute. The son caught the words *Tribunale*, *sospensione*, *decreto*, and the date, Saturday's. Then she handed the paper up to the man with the clipboard.

He read it twice, then turned round and said something to the man on the tug.

The tug's engine changed its note.

The barge began, very slowly, to back away.

Nobody on the beach cheered. The son noticed that, and later wrote it down and underlined it. The women went on singing the two lines, quietly, until the barge had turned and was going north again past the western rocks with the excavator's yellow arm against the sky; and then the Maestro stopped the drum, and the singing stopped, and in the silence the son heard the small waves on the sand and the steam hissing faintly where they drew back, and a single child on the rocks, who could not help it, clapping.

In the line of boats, Tore Mennella put his cap back on.

---

At half past seven a fisherman from Sant'Angelo, coming round from the west to join a line of boats that was already breaking up, called on his radio that there was a gray rubber boat adrift a mile off the cape, the Punta Imperatore, with a big black outboard tilted up and nobody in it, turning slowly in the land wind.

The son heard it on the radio in Ciro's lamp boat, when they brought it in. He saw Ciro hear it too, and look at Rosaria on the beach, and say nothing.

By noon the island knew that Leandro Fusco had not been seen since Sunday afternoon, when he left the hotel at Lacco in his own car, alone, and that Renzo Capuano had not been seen since about the same hour. The gray car was found that evening in the parking lot of the marina at Forio, where Capuano kept the rubber boat, locked, with a pair of binoculars on the seat. The coast guard searched the sea off the cape for two days and found nothing more.

People on the island said many things that week. They said Fusco had gone to Milan to meet the men who paid for everything, and that Milan had not been pleased. They said he had gone to Capri. They said a yacht had been seen. Nobody said anything about the Mouth. Nobody from Pietrafumo went near the Mouth in July anyway. They never had.

---

On Wednesday at ten, in a high room in Naples with tall windows and a marble floor, a judge of the regional administrative court watched sixteen minutes of film on the court's own machine with the blinds drawn, from the ship to the white end of the fourth reel, without speaking once.

The tin had been carried into the room in a large black handbag by a woman of ninety-one in a navy dress and good shoes, who had put the sealed bag on the table in front of the judge herself and then sat down on the front bench with her hands folded on the empty handbag and her brother beside her in a jacket and tie and his woolen cap in his hands. Lucerna's lawyers, two men in gray suits, did not ask to examine the originals. They asked for an adjournment. The judge did not give one.

The suspension was confirmed that afternoon, until the court decided the case itself, which the lawyer said might be a year, or three. The cellars would stand while it did. The same afternoon a prosecutor in Naples opened a file on a framed letter with nine signatures, one of them without a fish, and on a man in a regional office who had signed a beach over to a company in a single morning; and on Thursday a press release came out of Milan, three lines long, announcing that Lucerna's board had suspended the Pietrafumo project pending a review, with gratitude to Signor Fusco for his years of service.

On Friday, at nine in the morning, the engineer from the town hall came down the two hundred and twelve steps with a screwdriver in his shirt pocket, and went along the cellars one by one, and took his own notices off the eleven doors.

The Sand Oven

Kept private.

*They searched the sea off the cape for two days. I watched the boats from the top of the steps. I have nothing to write about it that I would want anyone to read, including myself in ten years. I will write only this: I did not go into the cave on Sunday night, or near it, and I did not touch the boat they came in. I showed a man something that was not there, in a place every fisherman on this coast knows not to enter until the land wind comes, so that he would spend the night waiting on the water instead of on an old woman's steps. He did not wait. I chose the night to keep him busy until morning, and I will carry what he chose instead. My father says a man should be able to say the whole of a thing in two sentences. That was four.*

---

The fence came down on Saturday.

Two young men from Lucerna came round the point in a work boat at ten with bolt cutters and a pallet, and nobody on the beach said a word to them. They cut the mesh from the posts, rocked the posts out of the sand, folded the white banners with the pale blue lamp, and loaded it all. Tore mended his net and watched them the whole time. When they had finished, the younger of the two, a boy of about twenty with a sunburned neck, stood a moment where the fence had been, looking at the old man, then said something quickly in dialect and went down to the boat.

"He said his grandfather had the green door," said Rosaria. "Until 1974. When they went to Germany."

That night, in the cellars, the women painted the stones.

---

On the first Sunday of July, at six in the morning, the whole beach smelled of wet clay and garlic and woodsmoke, and by seven there were two hundred people on the sand.

The son had stopped trying to count. They came down the steps from Panza in a slow talking line, carrying clay pots wrapped in cloths, folding chairs, babies, a guitar, a wheel of pecorino in a net bag on a man's back. They came by sea from Forio and Sant'Angelo in the boats that had lain across the cove's mouth on Monday. Two came all the way from Brooklyn, sisters in their sixties in identical sun hats who had seen the date on the families' calendar and bought tickets, and stood below the last step looking at the doors with their hands over their mouths until Rosaria came and took them by the arms.

Along the waterline, where the fence had been, the women were on their knees.

Each family had its place. The son watched them find them. A woman would walk along the hot strip barefoot, slowly, with her eyes half closed, the way Tore had walked it with him on the first morning, and stop, and put her palm flat on the sand, and move a little to the left, and stop again, and then kneel and begin to dig with both hands, and when the hole was as deep as her forearm she would take the pot from whoever was carrying it and lower it in and pack the sand round it and over it, hot, damp, smoking faintly, and set on top a stone painted with her door's color. Green. Brick red. Yellow. The marker stones went along the waterline in a row like beads.

At the place near the eastern end where the heat came up in a band no wider than a doorway, Rosaria knelt with a pot of beans.

Assunta stood beside her.

She had taken off her shoes again. She stood in the hot band with her bare feet in the sand and the handbag, empty now of everything but a comb and a handkerchief and her glasses, on her arm. Rosaria dug the hole. When it was deep enough she looked up at her aunt, and Assunta looked down at the hole for a long time, and at the clay pot of beans in Rosaria's hands, and said something.

"She says it was her mother's place," Rosaria said, to the son, without looking round. "Her mother's, then hers. She left, so it went to my mother. Then to me." Rosaria held the pot out. "She says she put beans here the year she was seventeen and her mother told her she had buried them crooked."

Assunta took the pot. She knelt, at ninety-one, slowly, in the sand, with one hand on her niece's shoulder, and lowered the pot into the hole, and pressed the sand down round it with the flat of her hand, and Rosaria put the blue stone on top.

Assunta stayed kneeling for a moment, with her palm flat on the sand over the pot.

"*È storto,*" said Rosaria, very gently. It's crooked.

Her aunt hit her on the arm.

---

At eleven the men hauled the net.

It was the old net, the *sciabbeca*, the long beach seine kept in the back of the green cellar since it was last hauled in 2009 and mended all week. Two boats had paid it out in a great half-circle into the cove, and now both ends were on the beach on two long ropes, and on each rope a line of men, fishermen and boys and a lawyer in a straw hat and a big sunburned man in a Dodgers cap, and at the back of the eastern line a man in a canvas shirt whose son had never once seen him take hold of anything he did not mean to finish.

The Maestro sat on his crate at the top of the sand and set the drum on his knee.

He struck it. The dragging step. One-two. And the two lines of men leaned back on their ropes and took one step backward up the beach, and planted their feet, and leaned, and took another.

Behind them, on the sand, the women stood in a row, and began to sing.

*Tira, tira, 'a rezza è chiena,* *'o mare dà, e 'o mare mena.*

The son stood beside the last woman with his recorder, which he had asked about that morning, and been told by Rosaria, by the Maestro, by Tore and by Assunta herself, one after another, *yes*.

The women sang the two lines three times. Then they stopped, the way they always stopped, at the place where the middle verse should go, and the drum went on alone, one-two, one-two, and the men on the ropes went on stepping backward up the sand in silence, and the net came on slowly through the water with its floats bobbing.

Assunta Iacono, last in the row, in her navy dress, with her bare feet in the sand, opened her mouth.

Her voice was thin and old and cracked at the top, and it carried to the cliff and came back. She sang it once, slowly, in the drum's time, two lines that nobody on that beach under the age of eighty had ever heard.

*Chi parte cu 'a varca, torna cu 'o viento,* *chi parte cu 'a nave, se porta 'a rena dinto.*

Then she sang it again, louder, and on the second time the Maestro's voice came in under hers, unsteady, finding it, and then Tore's, from the line of men on the rope, rough as shingle in a backwash, and then, from somewhere in the row of women, two old voices from Panza who had perhaps heard it once as girls from a long way off; and when it came round to the old two lines again, the whole beach sang them, the women and the men on the ropes and the children on the rocks and the sisters from Brooklyn who did not know a single word.

The son did not translate it until that night, with Rosaria, at the long table in the cellar. *Who leaves in a small boat comes back with the wind. Who leaves on a ship carries the sand inside her.*

The net came in. It was full of small silver fish, and three octopuses, and a great deal of weed, and an old boot, which Tore held up over his head to enormous applause.

---

They dug up their dinners at four, when the shadow of the cliff touched the water.

The son, digging beside Rosaria with his hands in the hot damp sand over the blue stone, found the lid of the pot and the flour-paste seal round it, cracked and baked brown, and lifted it out, and out of the sand rose a smell like a kitchen door opening: beans, and garlic, and bay, and oil, and something underneath, smoky and mineral, that Rosaria said was the island.

They were cooked. Assunta tasted them from a spoon, and nodded, and said they were crooked.

They ate on the sand, everyone, two hundred people, from clay pots and paper plates and the lids of coolers, until dark. The Maestro played. The sisters from Brooklyn danced with Ciro. Rosaria's tablet stood in its case on a crate by the blue door with a page open on it that she had made in June, for her aunt's homecoming, on which, since then, cousins in San Pedro and Brooklyn and Buenos Aires and Düsseldorf had left messages, eighty-one of them, and every now and then someone stopped in front of it and read one aloud and everyone near it laughed or went quiet. Behind the page, if you touched it, was the family tree Terry had joined to theirs in May, the San Pedro branch and the Pietrafumo branch grown together at a single name.

At nine, when the lamps were lit, the son saw Assunta beckon to him from her chair.

She had his recorder in her hand. She had taken it off the crate where he had left it. She held it out to him and said something.

"She wants to leave something for Terry," Rosaria said. "Her granddaughter. On the family page. To open later."

"When?"

Rosaria asked. The old woman answered without hesitating.

"When the court decides. For good. When the doors are safe and the paper says so." Rosaria listened. "If she is not here to hear it decided, Terry opens it then. If she is, she will tell Terry herself, and Terry can open it anyway and laugh at her."

The son set it up the way he had set it up for a woman in a bakery in Chicago the September before: so that it would wait until someone the old woman chose said it was time. She chose Rosaria. Then she held the recorder close to her mouth, in her two hands, and turned away from all of them, toward the sea and the black point and the lights of the lamp boats going out, and spoke into it for four minutes in the island's own speech, and gave it back to him, and closed her eyes.

A Word to Bring Home

For anyone who asks.

*My wife asked me to bring her a word this time. Not seeds, not a photograph. A word that someone actually says, and that I would have to be able to say properly in front of my mother. I have brought home trophies I do not remember winning and cars I could not keep. I have never worked so hard to carry anything as I worked to carry three syllables across an ocean in an old woman's voice, and say them at a kitchen table without being laughed at. I was laughed at. It was worth it.*

---

The cards were found on Monday morning, after the sand.

Nobody saw them put there. Tore found the first one at five, when he went to open the blue door. It was lying on the tufa floor just inside, where it had been pushed under the door in the night: a white card, blank but for one unbroken stroke of black ink that looped, crossed itself, looped again and closed. He picked it up and looked at it for some time in the gray light, standing in his doorway in his undershirt. He tucked it into his shirt pocket beside his pension book and went in to get his net.

There were ten more, under ten more doors, and family by family they were found as people came down the steps that morning, each lying on the cool stone floor just inside the threshold.

There were others. One in the slot of the Maestro's drum, between two of the little tin cymbals, so that when he struck it on Monday evening it made a sound he had never heard it make and he stopped and looked and found it. One in Gaetano Buono's paint box, under the eyelash brush. One on the desk of the head of the technical office in the town hall at Forio, under a stapler, which the engineer found when he came back to work on Tuesday, and put in the drawer, and did not mention to anyone, and took out again at the end of the day to look at.

The son chose one. He took it on Monday afternoon to the harbor at Forio, where the Lucerna work boat was tied up with its pallet of rolled fence still on its deck, and gave it, without a word, to a sunburned boy of twenty whose grandfather had once had the green door.

And one more was found in September, on Ninth Street, in San Pedro, in the lining of a large black handbag, by a woman of ninety-one who had stayed on the island until the end of the summer and come home on her own, and who was looking for her glasses. She sat with it a while at her kitchen table. Then she put it in the cookie tin with the windmill on its lid, which was empty now, the reels being in Naples in the court's keeping until the case was decided, and put the tin back in the hall closet where it had always lived.

---

They left on Tuesday.

Rocco went home on the same day, with a cooler bag of tomatoes he would not be allowed through customs with and a photograph on his phone of the last letter of his mother's name painted on a bow in his own hand. His mother was not going with him. She would stay until the figs, she said, in Rosaria's spare room, and go down the steps every morning with her brother, and teach the Maestro the four hundred words he did not have. Rocco said she could not climb two hundred and twelve steps every morning at ninety-one. She said she had climbed them in 1958 with a suitcase and nobody had helped her then either.

The Alfa went back the way it had come. Before dawn on the dock at Pozzuoli, in the orange light and the smell of sulfur and fish, a man in a dark sweater was leaning against a low trailer, smoking. He dropped the cigarette when he saw them, and walked round the car once, and stopped by the passenger door, where there was a long shallow crease in the gray-blue paint from a stone wall on a hairpin above Barano that the son still did not remember touching.

He ran his thumb along it.

"*Bene,*" he said. Good. And drove it onto the trailer, and away north.

---

The son took out the recorder on the plane, over the Atlantic, at night, and played it to his father.

It was the last thing on it. Not the song, not the four minutes in dialect for Terry. Something from Sunday evening, at the end of the sand, when the lamps were lit and the son had gone to Assunta's chair and asked her, carefully, through Rosaria, whether she would say a word for a woman in California who had asked her husband to bring one home.

On the recording, the old woman considered it. The son could hear the waves, and the drum somewhere far off, and children.

Then she said it, once, slowly, close to the microphone, the way she would have said it to a child learning.

*Bonaccia.*

And then a sentence after it, in dialect, and Rosaria's voice, laughing, translating: *She says it means the sea when it is flat, when there is no wind. She says it is a good word and a dangerous one, and your wife should say it softly, like a secret, and never on a boat.*

His father listened to it four times.

Then he said it. The son winced.

"Again," said the son.

His father said it again.

"It's the double C. You're saying it like *bona-kia*. It's softer. Like there's a breath in the middle."

His father turned to the window and the black Atlantic.

"Again," he said, and played the recording, and the old woman's voice said it, in the dark cabin, over the sea.

---

It was a Thursday, late in the afternoon, when the truck turned in off the coast road and climbed toward the family house, with a long gray wall of fog standing out over the sea and the field gold and the porch in shadow.

His father was not at the mailbox. He was on the porch steps, with the lieutenant across his knees, and his mother was beside him with a bowl of something in her lap, and both of them watched the truck come up the lane without getting up.

The son's mother was out by the bluff, among the roses. In front of the roses, in the poor sandy ground, a row of small low plants stood up out of the dirt, gray-green and stubborn, leaning away from the wind.

Eight got out. He went to the porch first, because that was the order things were done in. He stood on the step below his parents.

His mother studied his face, as she always had.

"Are you being kind to people?" she said.

"I'm trying."

"Trying." She went back to the bowl. "Your father says you called him from a beach."

"Once."

"He says you called to be told something you already knew." She snapped a bean. "That is what fathers are for. Go and see your wife. She has been practicing something. She will not tell me what."

His father said nothing at all. When Eight bent to pass him on the step, the old man reached up and pressed his son's wrist once, hard, and let go.

---

His wife was cutting dead heads off the roses. She straightened when he came across the field and pushed her hair back with the cuff of her glove.

"Well?" she said.

He had practiced it on the plane, and in the truck, and once in the hangar while Ruiz pretended not to listen. He faced her in the wind off the Pacific, which was not calm, which was never calm, which had no word in any language he knew for what it had never been.

He said it.

His wife stared at him. Then she put her head back and laughed, out loud, so that the son, halfway across the field with the bags, stopped to look.

"That's terrible," she said. "Say it again."

He said it again. A little better.

"What does it mean?"

"The sea when there's no wind. When it's flat as glass." He looked out at the long gray swell coming in under the fog and breaking on the rocks below the bluff, the way it always had and always would. "An old woman said it's a good word and a dangerous one. She said you should say it softly. Like a secret. And never on a boat."

His wife took off her gloves. She looked at the sea, too. Then she said it, once, softly, and nearly had it the first time, the breath in the middle and all.

"Like that?"

"Like that," he said.

Behind them, on the porch, the son set the bags down by the door and found his grandfather looking at the open notebook he had set on the rail while he went back for the bags, at a number on a page ringed twice in pencil, hard enough to scar the page. The old man looked at it for a while. He did not ask. He only nodded, as if a sum had come out the way he expected, and looked back at the sea.