He wakes up and sees love in the sunlight, in his candy heart. Eats fresh fig and yogurt with honey, catches oysters in the cold sea. He has lived in the same small village his whole life, hardly leaving Italy, never leaving Europe. The open windows in his old home face the East, and he rises with the sun each morning, keeping the same routine. By noon he meets with his woman and she tells him of her day, carrying their plump pink child in her lap. She thanks him for the oysters, and he shells them for her grudgingly, never complaining about the sores on his fingers, the wrinkles the saltwater would gather in his hands. When he was younger, a boy, his dog would rush to the seaside before him, jumping into the corals and rough waves. The roar of the sea would mask his yapping, his fur swaying like algae in the smaller tide pools. The dog would work hard, panting while carrying the oysters in his teeth. Every sea slug he would gently nose aside, and every day they would end the hunt by the seashore, eroded rocks digging harshly into their legs. He would tell the dog, “thank you, good boy.” And he would consider the shape of the oysters, the barnacles on the shell, the slimy outside and their cores. He would take his short fingernails, his calloused, suntanned hands, and grasp either side of the shell, pulling futilely, straining his joints against the trap. His hands would sting, his heart would waste its palpitations on the inside of his chest, knocking at the bones. He would want to go home, but first. There was the task at hand, dumbly grappling at the shell, and when he finally pried it apart, after hitting it against the stones a few times, after his shoulders began aching dully, he would feed the inner sludge to the dog.
The last time his dog ran off, he was still a young man, lithe and able to search for many hours. He stopped his oyster hunting to canvas the town, walking over uneven cobblestones and through orange groves, stopping by butcher shop dumpsters and the small, touristy cafes that offered water to animals. Eventually, when he missed his routines enough to return to them, however preoccupied, he went to the old rocks where they would swim together, cutting their hands or paws on the rough shores. There, he found a pile of oysters, all broken open and shining with pearls. When he found the dog, his snout a gentle gray, his body tired and unmovable, he was overcome with the sensation that something was happening, that everything was happening at once.
He is gray now, growing unmoveable. He has not hunted in a long while. He sleeps with an old pistol in his bedside drawer, a mother of pearl handle, and has not seen the woman since the child was plump and pink. Now, the child is slight, a feather of a thing, olive colored. They both live abroad, far across the sea he has never cared to traverse. In a letter to the woman, which he sends every week but which never garners a response, he writes: “tell me about you. Does the child go to school? What do you think of music now? Write back.” And erases “I remember when you used to dance. It was easy for you. I hated the hard work of beginning, but the end was not so easy either. I would rather give it up. To you, who would take it, who would simply hold it, do no more. Don’t write back.” He loved roughly back then, all snarled and quiet. A repayment.
When he returns home from the post office, he is distracted suddenly by the woman’s bedside table. The air smells of fish and rain, the vetiver incense that sticks to the floorboards, the ground stone of mosaic tiles she used to make. Pulling open the drawer, he is met with an old receipt, some handkerchiefs, and the rolling sound of a pink pearl. It slowly glides against the wood. His hands are too big to grasp the thing, too swollen from the waterweight of age. Still, his eyes, their cataracts, reflect its surface.
He holds the woman in his mind, the arguments they would fail to address, his silent washing of the dishes, the wrongness of his silence. He thinks of his dog, and those trips it would take in its later years, straying further and further from the house. He remembers the last time he saw her, her words something like, “even when I leave you I can’t get rid of you. You were always in the center of my mind, it’s no good, it’s no good, Pietro.” And his work, all that hard work, ruined by his inability to offer a warm hand instead of a cool one, his lack of rhythm, all his slow thoughts.
He did not like to think about the past, but he found that his mind was so behind the present. Everything that happened to him got fuzzier the closer it occurred. There was only the hard, calcified core of him. All else was lost to routine, regret. She was never eating at the memories, she was so elegantly precise. Everything she did had a sense of intrinsic, conspicuous nature.
Last December, in the South of Spain, his closest friends were married. They were travelers, the husband childhood friends with Pietro, the wife drawn to the enigma of Pietro’s friends and woman, always more storied than he. His woman did not attend. He heard that she was in America, opening a new gallery, and halfway through the reception, after all the greetings and frustrations and apologies, he left for a smoke, the sky bright with stars.
When he was young, he would paint, still in that meandering way. There was something about the building of little successes that felt more impressive than everything else he did, from his unceasing walks to the books he was meant to read. In the later years of school that he attended, he was found vandalizing a trash can and subsequently arrested. That episode ceased the spell he was under. Never his reverence for artists. She was one that was so sharp with her colors and shapes, never out of place, always picking the right canvas. She was right about everything but him.
He wished for the naivety of newness, the same unthinking reactions to life that she executed with ease. Outside, he happened upon a boy, shabbily dressed, laying a tile against the outside of the church. He was not supposed to be there. Pietro, unsure and foggy, simply lit the cigarette, letting the smoke obscure his surroundings. His hands gripped the filter so tightly it squeezed closed. In a way he presented himself to the boy, shuffling quietly, waiting to be spoken to. The boy continued with his work. Blearily, he saw various tiles on the ground, a swan fountain made of mosaic, the shiny cobalt blue of glass. He could not speak or think of what to say.
The doors to the church opened, from the side of his eye he saw the child. It had been a few years since he’d last seen her in person. She was beautiful, glowing, nearly two decades old. She spoke to him in hushed tones, bummed a cigarette, the cherry glowing in the dark like a shining pearl. It was the reception now, and though they had been around each other for hours only hurried greetings had been spoken between them. Almost strangers caught in the current like two separate schools of fish come together.
“I was like him, once,” Pietro said. “It was easy to leave behind because it felt all wrong, making my own decisions. Like the work was shameful. Better to sleep, to eat, to do the difficult work of living. What’s in the joy of celebration but ignorance?”
He could tell that she knew he was wrong. Her eyes pinned him to the artwork, to the quiet slopping of the concrete glue against the wall.
“It’s not so difficult to swallow your passions,” he said. “It’s enough to do everything for someone else.”
“But you didn’t do everything for mom,” his child said. “You just did all the hard stuff. You’re only talking about half of the equation. That’s why she couldn’t stand it anymore.”
The boy picked up the tile, fixing it steadily against the wall. He stood and moved back from the piece, examining its whole. Pietro turned to face his daughter through a veil of smoke. Inside he could hear clapping, the after-effect of a toast.
“What else is there for her?” He was whispering now, his eyes red and stinging. “What else does she need from anyone but to do the hard stuff?”
The boy sighed and returned to the mural. He began to pry the latest tile off, struggling against the drying concrete glue. He braced his shoulder and foot against the wall. Pietro stubbed out his cigarette, turned away from his daughter, and walked towards the boy. They were only a few steps apart, their bodies illuminated under a bright flashlight laying in the grass.
“Mind if I help?”
The boy chuckled gratefully, and, as though he had paid no heed to the nearby conversation, said “sure, I’ll take it.”
And Pietro gripped the corner of the tile with the tips of his fingers, his knuckles sinking into the glue. His joints tensed, and he flicked off the tile, catching it in his other hand. The concrete glue shimmered with bits of mineral, millions of tiny pearls in the light.