Another Sunday of cleaning the apartment, hanging laundry that won't fully dry because it's a constant 52 degrees and damp. The rainiest winter anyone can remember. But it's Sardegna and the lemon trees and orange trees are bursting. Palm trees permanently fixed against the bluest sky I have ever seen. Today there is sun and I decide, suddenly: I'm going to the sea. I haven't been since late summer. Ten minutes on the bus — Quartucciu through Quartu Sant'Elena to Poetto. Cagliari city beach, as clean and perfect as any beach I've been to in Europe, and the one the locals mock as second rate. A tourist trifle.
The ride through Quartu Sant'Elena: the chaos and beauty of it, the way Quartu looks like Cartagena because of the shared Spanish colonial grandmother — the dusty rose and terracotta walls, cracked and scribbled with decades of graffiti, the improvised commerce, the noise, the broken asphalt and sidewalks choked with life. Then the bus crosses the long causeway that bridges the city to the coast, and the light suddenly changes — water spreading out on both sides. To the left, Molentargius: a vast inland lagoon, marshes thick with birds, home to the flamingos that have become the city's unlikely symbol. To the right, the first glimpse of the Gulf of Angels. Then off the bus and across the road to the beach. Pristine. The Devil's Saddle rising above it, Quartu hugging the far shore.
Umbrella in the sand. Headphones on the whole way — Madman Across the Water, Elton John, the whole album. Then sitting. Headphones off. The sound of actual life washing over instead. I try to understand what a seagull is doing and why it's sideyeing me like a pigeon. And then I realize that it's not a seagull. It's a pigeon.
The sea is calm and turquoise and constant. I think of the summer and just floating and coming up and seeing Pearl under her umbrella reading. We spent a week coming here and doing nothing but read and float in this impossibly clear, gentle water. We also destroyed the restaurant once a day, like Katmai bears during the tramezzini run.
Somewhere in here my mother calls, as she does on Sunday. She tells me how far offshore my brother was today. She always has him a little farther out than last time — as if his mythos is proportional to his distance from shore. My brother is a fisherman in Maine. Big guy. Good fighter. Takes me out when I'm there and enjoys laughing at me when the smile freezes on my face, teeth chattering, and I huddle in the bow hiding from the blast of cold while he steers the thing like he's driving his cart onto the 18th hole with a five-shot lead. My mom has him thirty miles out today. Does she want him lost at sea?
That sea and this sea are not the same sea. My brother would say the Gulf of Angels is bathwater.
Last week he had me send him a picture of a lobster from the Cagliari market.
"That's a shrimp!" he said.
I had to take a second look—was it a shrimp? I wasn't sure anymore.