The Silence of the Wave by Gianrico Carofiglio Page B

what’s up and what’s down. You don’t have any control over your movements or over your own body.”
    “As if the rules of space were suspended?”
    “Yes, that’s it exactly. As if the rules of space were suspended.” Roberto repeated the words slowly.
    “And how do you get out of it?”
    “You have to wait for it to pass.”
    “Precisely. It’s the same thing. Sometimes, if the wave is particularly big, if the fall has been violent, I assume some help can come in useful.”
    “Yes. But I always pulled through by myself. Even if it was hard sometimes.”
    “Do you think you’d have been able to do that with any wave?”
    “No, you’re right. There are cases where you can’t pull through without a helping hand. And sometimes you drown anyway, even if there’s somebody to help. It happened once to a boy I knew.”
    “Sometimes it happens, yes. Unfortunately and despite the efforts of whoever’s trying to help.”
    “Anyway, it’s just like you said. You have to surrender to the wave, when it comes, without getting in a panic. After a few seconds, almost always, the world returns to its place.”
    “Do you want to tell me a bit about surfing? You told me you started with your father.”
    “Yes.”
    “Any good?”
    “Me or him?”
    “Both of you.”
    Roberto felt as if he’d been caught off balance, asif all at once he’d lost his footing. The words did not come at first, and he moved his hands as if searching for some kind of support.
    “My father … was good. Old school, but very good. He’d surfed with some of the best, people who’d ridden really big waves, in Hawaii, at Waimea Bay on the North Shore.”
    Roberto broke off abruptly.
    “Obviously, these names won’t mean anything to you.”
    The doctor made a gesture with his hand as if to say: it doesn’t matter.
    “What about you? Were you good?”
    “I got by.”
    “Is that the most accurate description?
I got by
?”
    Roberto looked at him.
    “I was good. In fact I was very good, I might even have been better than my father if I hadn’t stopped.”
    The doctor smiled. A real bittersweet smile, as if they were two friends chatting over a beer and one of them had remembered something nice that united them, one of the reasons they could say they were friends.
    “I once read a novel that featured surfing, and I remember a sentence that struck me. It went something like: ‘It’s one thing to wait for the wave, and quite another to get up on the surfboard when it comes.’”
    “Whoever wrote that sentence knew what he was talking about. When you’re there you realize that allthe rest is bullshit. I’m sorry, doctor, but bullshit’s the only word for it. You have a feeling of truth, I don’t know how to put this, the sense that everything is … brought into focus. A feeling of beauty, of totality, of being one with everything else. When the wave carries you, you feel you’re
part
of it, if you understand what I mean, you feel that everything finally has a meaning. And when you’re on certain waves—which are like mountains of water, actual mountains—you don’t care about anything. You just want to find out what you’re made of. Nothing matters except being up there. And there’s a perfect harmony, in those seconds when you’re there, a balance between the sea and the sky, almost still, while you slide very fast between the water and the air, and the roar. You pass through the middle of the wave, exactly equidistant from those opposites.”
    Roberto broke off, stunned at how the memories had come out and had transformed themselves into a story.
    “Do you believe in God, doctor?”
    The doctor looked at him with a hint of surprise on his face. He took a while to answer.
    “Do I believe in God? Have you ever heard of Blaise Pascal?”
    “No.”
    “Pascal was a seventeenth-century French philosopher. A philosopher and a great mathematician. He’s famous, among other things, for his so-called theory of the