Marta ci vede

One o’clock, hot silence, heat wave. Thoughts like flies on a wet day.

While parking in the shade of the pines, I realize that I went as far as the sea. How long have I not been here? Maybe since the last time I took Marta with us.

The pines exhale the smell of heated resin, of needles crushed under rubber slippers, of dust. If she were here, Marta would drink the air with her nostrils like a filly, tilt her head to the side to listen, touch the bark of the trees, laugh if the resin glued her fingers, hug the trunk to understand its age. “This is really so old”, she would say, “I feel the energy of it. Trees are living and ancient creatures. “

Like two years ago, in Sicily. She was sweating in the sun as we visited the Valley of the Temples. I read the explanations of the guidebook and she listened, absorbed, enraptured.

“It’s absurd, what the fuck is it for”, I thought, but she was beaming as she spread her arms and stretched out on the ruins of the capital, to grasp its breadth, the roughness of the tuff. “It’s amazing what they were able to do in those days.”

She smiled at me behind her big black sunglasses. I photographed her because she was the one who asked me, and in the meantime I thought that she would never see those photos, she would not have known that her nose was red, that her chest was covered with freckles, that ice cream had stained her shirt.

She is always so excited about everything.

I walk up the driveway to the hot, crowded beach, squeeze my eyes in the flickering heat. I hardly see the sea, beyond the rows of umbrellas, but there is the smell of brackish, tanning, ice lollies, shoes abandoned in the sun.

I close my eyes, I try to feel things the way she feels them, but sadness closes my throat. If I were an insect, I think, I would see the world through multi-faceted eyes. It wouldn’t be the world I know.

I undress. Black panty can look like a swimsuit, and I don’t care anyway. I walk a long time before the water reaches my chest. In the strenuous steps towards the open sea, I see my father making clams with a large sieve, and my mother in a swimsuit, feet wide and strong, proud shoulders. I feel alone, as I have never been, alone with all the responsibilities.

I dive in, the water makes me shiver, I stroke towards nowhere, I swim until the lifeguard starts whistling to call me back.

I am desperate, there is nothing I want to do, nothing I love, nothing I want.

“It’s depression, Gianfranco”, Roberto told me, who is a doctor and also my friend. “Being next to a blind wife is difficult, I understand that. Now I’ll prescribe you some pills, but stay strong.“

“Damn it, Roberto. I don’t need drugs. I’m not depressed. “

Roberto shook his head. “Think of Marta, Gianfranco. She has been blind for twelve years, since the day of the accident, but I have never met someone with a greater desire to live. She loves you, don’t forget that.“

Marta loves me. I’m lucky. I was driving that evening.

I can no longer get up in the morning and I would like to drown in this water.

Marta is blind. No it is not true. Martha sees in another way, she sees with the heart, with the soul, with the senses. She sees more than me, she sees everything that I no longer know how to see. She sees the good in life that I have lost.

I turn and go back to shore so fast that it wears me out, until my feet touch the sand full of holes, eddies, burning weever fish again. Full of living things.

I get dressed without even drying myself.

Who knows, maybe, on the way back I will stop at the pharmacy.