Like so many summers before it, we’re in Southern Italy visiting my paternal grandfather. We are here to splash around, get fat, speak English, ignore. This one is different though; my grandfather is too old now to rent the beach house—let alone descend the marble staircase to greet us—and this is the first one without Zia Lucetta, my dad’s only aunt and the last of my grandfather’s eight siblings to die. Now he is really alone, and our hopes of another careless summer evaporate under a cruel Salento sky.
We stay in his cramped apartment, five cots in a room, one for each member of my family. The lighting is fluorescent and unforgiving, and the AC leaves one room frigid and the rest sweltering. We dip back and forth between them like Roman bathers. Every wall is covered in ghosts, slanted and undusted, hungry and still; I shiver through another hallway of bug-eyed boys I’m told were my father, and demure women I’m told were my grandmother. Someone tells stories about them in a language I do not understand.
During the peak hours of heat, by some logic I cannot comprehend, we go outside. My grandfather, frail and still in his underwear, waves goodbye from the top of the stairs. My adult siblings and I cram into the back of a rental car and punch seat belts into each other’s sweaty, bikini’d butts and squawk at our dad to turn the temperature down and the radio up. At the beach we wait for him to rent us an umbrella and beds in his native tongue, while we eat rustici and Nutella cornetti that dribble down our chests, and wash it down with lemon sodas, sticky and so sweet. We are too old for this. My father is already in the water with the rest, but he returns and makes it clear that my dryness is unacceptable. He asks what I’m doing if not swimming, but little does he know I am watching him.
He closes his eyes more often and has more spots on his face and more rolls on his stomach than I remember. I think of his father too, who talks slower, hangs his head, and spends the day in bed all the time now, leaving the apartment just once a week to graze the frozen engraved faces of the dead—a Sunday errand that stretches longer each summer. I cannot help but think that one day my dad will be the same and I will be the child raising my voice to his failing ears, begging him: exercise, listen to the doctor, rage against the dying of the light. I know that this is my fate as well, that my body will break down every day until it is broken completely, against the futile behest of some helpless offspring.
My body buzzes. The sun pulls my skin out in every direction. I ache for a stranger. I remember that this is the coldest summer of the rest of my life, and so I dive into the Mediterranean. ▲
