Over The Horizon

Chapter V

I spend a night without sleep and without dreams. When I wake up I don't look at the clock, I go straight to the window and when I open it I see with convoluted happiness the most beautiful dawn of my twenty-three years of life.
The sky, I see, is a perfect expanse painted with the most beautiful colors. Beyond the last houses of the village rests a calm and peacefully boundless sea.
I remember how my father always blathered something every time he stopped to look at the landscape that from the window he had in front of his eyes like a great treasure. He even repeated it to me and at every hour of the day: "Never forget this sight, never. Look closely, look at what you have in front of you. This is how things are not forgotten, simply, you just look at them as if it was the last time or the hundredth time. Landscapes like this, my darling, do not exist in any other corner of the world."

My father didn't have a degree, he wasn't a scholar or an intellectual, and he didn't know how to do many things. Precisely for this reason he knew how to appreciate everything that surrounded him in silence in the sky, in the sea, in the longest rivers and beyond the mountains. This is how we all should behave in front of nature.

I stand still for a while, staring at the sky of my childhood. I close my eyes; nostalgia assails me, I am invaded up to my neck. I then decide to go out wearing only a light white dress and walk a little.

It is still early, the streets are almost deserted. Early risers like me exchange a good morning and the more polite ones lift their hats with their hands. I answer with a shy nod, an imperceptible greeting.

Within ten minutes I am in front of the docks. I continue a little longer and approach the beach. At that point of my walk I take off my shoes and sink my feet into the sand to reach the shore with a few steps.
The water immediately feels cold.

It's by looking at the sea in which I am immersed up to my ankles that I see a sailboat anchored just beyond the buoy of five hundred meters from the shore. (*1) For a second time I feel that magical amazement filling my heart.
Pilar is the one resting in the calm of such a quiet morning. It's my dad's old boat who shows herself in front of the whole town, she, beautiful, imperturbable. I wonder if her captain is still sleeping; my doubts cease as soon as I see a small silhouette popping out of the cabin.
I barely recognize his traits, it's him.

The indifference I felt during the previous day towards him that was linked to the emotion of being in front of a good part of my past, suddenly vanishes in the speed with which a dead body sinks into the deepest ocean. It's an unintelligible feeling. Thus, the lucidity of that moment leads me to see that man for the first time. And it is when his figure seems to notice me that I look beyond that image of myself that from afar admires the most adventurous of sailors. It is in that instant that I feel even more invaded by the melancholy of a reality, of a boat, of a life... which are no longer mine.

I stare at him. He also looks at me, kidnapped by a woman he barely sees. I no longer perceive time, I do not feel anything. My heart no longer beats.
We are there with those minutes that alone or together, separated or united, we ignore.

To bring us back to reality is the siren of a ship that suddenly announces its departure with a roar coming from the nearby port.
It's that sound that divides our gaze.

In my today, in the present of these memories and scriptures, in a time after my twenty-third summer, I remember that moment on the beach as the dawn of my first, true meeting with the sailor of the Tyrrhenian Sea.

I will never know if in that moment he really recognized me, if he was really looking at me or what else. It is a mystery that I never wanted to reveal to myself, even when I would have had, some time later, the greatest of occasions. I have always refused, I have always taken a step back into the darkness of the unknown. I have avoided looking for an answer.
I do not know if it was an absence of necessity or the fear of disappointment, I never thought about it.
In the end, I never asked.