There are many ways to keep a record of the rotation of the planets. For us that live in the Earth, rotation has acquired the label of Time, with capital “T” because thanks to this abstraction we can make historical sense of our lives. Due to such historical anxiety, I prefer to think about the months, and not only the years, that Tessa and I have been walking next to each other: thirty-nine months together and one exact year since a female minister declared us married under the sun of a hidden slice of forest in Pennsylvania, a place that in our cartographic memory we call The Creek. A year ago, our lives were like the youth from Rimbaud’s poem: a feast of work and future possibilities, not only because we were attempting to write the final word of our doctoral dissertations, or because we had the tortuous mission to find a job in a professional field where friendships, nepotism, and individual protectorates bring better results than intelligence and academic credentials, but also because the future seemed still an uncovered possibility. We knew that we wanted to rotate together in the world, despite that the future did not have a precise harbour for us. By the time I met Tessa, I had already assumed that one’s harbour is something like a feeling of prodigious uncertainty combined with the eagerness to not let the world and its people tame the ocean waving inside ourselves: a harbour implies also the possibility to move away and become a foreigner of oneself, because the heart of an explorer or immigrant is made of horizons and unbearable distances. Before meeting Tessa, I also knew that my freedom depended on how vehemently I was eater to fight for it, for that has been the only inheritance I have received from my parents: the conviction of being free in a world of servants and tyranical individuals. Only thanks to that conviction, I had dared to ask Tessa (barely knowing her but already enthralled by her own way to seek her freedom in a society enslaved to the idea of modernity and secured retirement plans) to go with me to Gdanks, in Poland, to see the Baltic Sea, or thanks to that conviction we had also gone to the end of the world in Valparaíso, Chile, where Tessa had been about to expire under the poisonous influence of a giant clam that she’d eaten in Viña del Mar. My entire youth has been an exploration or an immigration in search of instants of all sorts: once a person becomes enchanted by the infinite and multichromatic worlds that emerge from living in an instant, that person can no longer be the same again (the very idea of “sameness” seems like a foreign and undesirable kingdom to those possessed by the inner light of the supreme instant: the felicitá raggiunta).
II
Traveling 5000 miles away from High Point, North Carolina, can take you, for instance, to Buenos Aires, in Argentina, or to Honolulu, or to Moscow… In our case, traveling five-thousand miles from High Point took us to the Aegadian Islands, a few miles west from Marsala, in southwest Sicily. We are this far from our provisional home in North Carolina because Tessa and I are both explorers and because we are commemorating a year since a female minister declared us married according to the laws of Pennsylvania (the rotation of the stars could not care less about those laws). We are leaving early in the morning our apartment in Via Paolo Perez, in Mazara del Vallo, to catch the train to Marsala. In Marsala we rent a small boat to a guy about Tessa’s age named Francesco, who inside a blue tent near the port administers with his father the rental of the eight boats that they own. They are so friendly, and are amazed by the fact to get American visitors in Marsala (remember that not only 5000 miles separate North Carolina from southwest Sicily, but traveling from continental Italy to Sicily can be quite a slow process due to the outdated transportation means that connect Sicilians among themselves). Francesco tells us that on a Sunday most of the boats around Marsala had been already rented to local families that want to spend the day around the island of Favignana, but such is his eagerness to be a welcoming host that he offers to rent us his personal boat. Neither Tessa nor I have ever driven a boat in the open sea, but after a brief exchange of instructions and the good humor of Francesco (who says that he is also a disc jockey and the night before he barely slept because he was the captain of the music in some club of Marsala), he decides to let us go to the Aegedian Islands on our own.
The open sea deserves respect. Not only the strength of the ocean moves beyond the power of imagination, but out there, far away from the Earth, the feeling of uncertainty and abandonment drips in the back of the head as a constant but enchanting melody.
After about twenty minutes with Tessa behing the rudder, we distinguish three of the five Aegedian Islands: Favignana, Marettimo, and Levanzo. Invisible navy blue roads guide the dozens of boats of all sizes through the Tyrrhenian Sea. On the top of a rocky hill of Favignana, the Castle of S. Caterina gleams like a dull promontory of chiseled stone: the castle was built around the XIX century and it exhibits Saracen and Normand influences. We head towards the west side of Favignana, taking a lonely lighthouse as our destination point. After about an hour cabotagging around the island, we settle right in front of Cala Rossa, deemed as one of the most beautiful beaches of Italy. The scene of the turquois, aquamarine, and navy blue pristine waters battling against the polished walls of excavated rock is indeed a memorable one. A couple of boats around us have thrown their anchors to park in front of the solitude and solace of Cala Rossa, so I do the same, observing how the silver anchor meanders towards the bottom of the sea: from the proa of the boat, I can see spear-like seaweeds emerging from the rocks like those spoken words depicted on The Florentine Codex.
I am a good swimmer, for I have embraced the currents of so many oceans, under the sun and under the moon, even in the treacherous waves of Veracruz I managed to get lost in the horizon and get back to the shore breathless but alive. After a brief meditation, already absorbed by the colors of the water, I dive into the blue, a contact first cold and firm that eventually dissolves into a velvety fluorescence of pelagic intensities. I float around, and with the goggles on I swim downwards attempting to touch the bottom. On the boat, Tessa quietly chews a panino facing towards the rocky walls: I can see her back and the massive currents pushing me away from her… I take a long and profound breathe and then I spring, practicing my best front crawl, towards the boat, but after a couple of minutes, getting close to exhaustion, I realize that the boat is beyong my natatorium experience and physical strength: the current is too strong and the open sea suddenly seems an infinite bed of solitude. I devote myself to floating and getting oxygene to my lungs, thinking that if I rest a little bit I could swim towards the rocky walls of Cala Rossa. Before heading towards the wall, I shout, without denoting my incipient dispair, “Tessa!,” keeping my composture afloat, but suddenly feeling exhausted… Now I think that drowning in a place called Cala Rossa, in the Aegedian Islands, would’ve been the kind of death that my twenty-year old self would’ve accepted. Once in Michoacán, a man had shot with a machine gun towards me and other young guys walking by the side of a starry road; I was eighteen years of age and that was the first time I saw death running towards my eyes. But suddenly adrift in the Tyrrhenian Sea, floating away from Tessa, contemplating the Cala Rossa and learning that the open sea does not understand about mercy and forgiveness, there surrounded by an all-embracing orchestra of tones of blue, I recognize that the “felicità raggiunta” that I had been seeking my entire life is, after all, that very moment when one realizes that love is not about enduring time with someone else: “living together” requires patience and a deep sense of duty, but love cannot be measured by time, I do not think so, love is that very instant when one decides to swim or float or die only towards one single point... For that reason when I submerge myself under the aquamarine currents, thinking about the possibility of letting go and quitting all my absurd and mundane battles (after all Cala Rossa is indeed a perfect tombstone), when I open my eyes underwater, glimpsing a beautiful and deformed oasis of mysterious shapes and chromatic intentions, I only think about Tessa and that it is only for her that I have made it to this point of my life, it is for her that without knowing it I have searched with the anxiety of a shipwreck survivor in as many continents, in as many countries and oceans and forests and cities and books and nights for the “felicità raggiunta” that in that very moment alone underwater belongs only to Tessa, the captain behind the rudder of my boat, the only harbour that I can think about when the currents are stronger than my arms and inside my head everything starts to acquire the blue tones of Cala Rossa.
III
I was eventually saved by another boat and the wise generosity of a family of fishermen. Later that day, I also swam among tiny jellyfish in the waters of the Arch of Ulysses (Cala Redonda), and before dusk Tessa and I went back home together to Mazara del Vallo, and next July we hope to celebrate our 40th month next to each other.
Medusas del Arco de Ulises
Favignana in less than two minutes
My translation from the Italian of "Felicità raggiunta," in Ossi di seppia (1925), by Eugenio Montale:
I have found happiness for you,
walking on the cutting edge of a knife.
You are a gleaming wave in front of our eyes,
adrift, like ice breaking in the heart;
for those who love you most cannot feel you.
If you dive into spirits invaded
with sadness to brighten them,
the morning turns sweet and troubled
like the nests hidden on the heighths.
But nothing will remedy the cry of the child
whose balloon flies away among the roofs.
