We’re switching things up this February! Here is an excerpt from a novel I’ve written. It’s historical, set in Renaissance Italy; the rest I believe stands on its own. Read on….
He first saw it when he was no more than eight years old: the endless water enveloping the horizon, blue upon turquoise upon cerulean upon indigo. He did not have all the names for blue then, he did not have the words to encompass its vastness. For a long time people thought that the earth was flat, surrounded by its enormity: the circling sea, dripping off into the cosmos in tumbling waterfalls. Foolish, one might say, for any natural philosopher can tell you the world is round, but perhaps this simplicity reveals a greater truth, for the Florentines say that when the soul departs its body it enters the great sea. When he was a child, hearing this, he imagined that bodies were secretly removed from their graves and taken down to this place, Livorno, cast out into the blue on blue, doubtless in the secrecy of the dark. No, his grandmother told him laughing, where do you get such ideas?
It is not our bodies that enter the sea, but our souls, she explained to him. They sat together on the tawny sand, building a fortress out of the tiny granules he later speculated were made from stones that had ground down over millennia. His grandfather had business in the town, and so the two of them had come out here with a picnic, he and his grandmother Lucia, the happiest combination of two that he would ever know. The way she looked at him made him understand that she heard every word he spoke, and when they were together he could tell her anything. If anyone else happened to be present, this was not the case; only alone could he share his innermost thoughts with her. This was why he had gathered the courage to ask her about the bodies in the sea.
Now he understood that he had been wrong. It was not literal bodies entering the sea right here beneath the Livorno Hills; no, his grandmother explained, it was our souls swimming out into a sea that was not the sea.
He did not understand.
“Think of it like nighttime,” she said, “as if you are being cast out into a sky full of stars. Think of it like a dream, but more vivid than any dream. The sea is not water; it is everything we cannot see. It is words we don’t have, sounds we can’t hear.” A pause. “At least,” she added, “not usually.”
“It is like being born back into the water of our mother’s womb,” she said, “except this birthing canal takes us back to the holy mother.”
When he was a child, he understood that his grandmother’s views on such matters differed from the priest at Santa Croce, the place where he had been baptized and where the whole family trod to obediently on Sundays. But because he was a child, he did not think much about the difference; of course his grandmother knew better than the priest—she was his nonna. He was a preoccupied child, and just that—a child. It was not until Lucia died that he realized he should have asked her how she knew these things, and what it had meant to her to tell him.
The sun sweltered in the sky. They had eaten their bread and built their fortress. His grandmother stood up. They occupied a sheltered cove, with only the bees rustling through the rue above their heads and gulls carving up the cloudless sky. No ships, no human beings, marred the waves that flooded endlessly against the shore.
“Come on,” she said. “Don’t you want to go in?”
How to navigate the wobbling thread of terror and excitement? He had only lately realized that the sea was, in fact, not the repository of his imagined nightmares but instead existed as itself: the sea. He was beginning to learn that there were at least three kinds of sea: the real one, the imagined (which could be recreated upon board or canvas), and the one that exists beyond us and to which we return when we leave our bodies.
They had already shed their shoes and now, on the edge of the water, set aside their clothes. The breeze scrubbed him clean all over.
“You don’t have to go all the way in,” she told him, and held out her hand.
The first rush of water over his toes made him gasp. This wasn’t like the river at home, with its small secrets and (his grandmother told him) the little orb-like beings which watched over it. The sea had a knowingness, a cold dark depth, that he felt even in the smallest spray of water.
He wanted to understand it. His heart was pounding from fear, from anticipation. Clutching his grandmother’s hand, he stepped up to his knees, his thighs, his hips, his ribs. They both shrieked at the cold. She reminded him that she’d already taught him how to swim, that he had no need to be afraid. She said, “Fear is the brother of curiosity.”
He let go of her hand, and let the sea pull him in.