text: FAT BOY When we got to the beach that Saturday, the sun was still weak and a man was drowning. My mother made me wear rubber sandals; the little dirt road that led to the beach was paved with broken glass. There was tall grass on both sides, taller than I was, with dragonflies buzzing above it. I asked my mother where the glass came from and she said, “Bottles. Bums come here during the night. They get drunk and break the empty bottles.” At first, nobody noticed he was drowning. He was deep in the sea, waving his arms, desperate for help, but his family - a large family - waved back at him and laughed. They didn’t know. Not too many people were swimming; the water was cold. My mother said I could take off my sandals now, and she spread out a big striped towel over the warm sand. We sat on it. She took an apple out of a canvas bag that she had packed with food, beach toys, and some money from the coffee can where she kept her waitress tips. I didn’t feel like eating. The sun was beginning to burn through the filter of clouds. We looked at the sea again, and now the man’s head was a little dark spot lost in the hugeness of blue where only boats and seagulls are allowed to go. It sank for a long time, and then it rose again. His family was standing up quiet and tense, beginning to understand. Two of them broke away from the group and ran to the sea. I looked at my mother, chewing her apple and shading her eyes with the palm of her hand, and asked if she though he would die. She shrugged. We watched the trail of foam left by the two rescuers, and the water splashing around their bodies as they swam fast toward the drowning man. They stopped for a moment and faced each other, letting their bodies float. Then they began to swim in circles and dive, and before long they were swimming back with effort, pulling something heavy behind them. The rest of the family waited inside the shallow water, waves breaking against their chests, spraying salt in their frightened faces. We saw them pull a man with blue skin out of the water. Quietly, the procession made its way to the sand, where they lay down the dead body, covered it with a striped towel just like ours, and sat in a circle around it. It took a long time for an ambulance to come and take the dead man away. And then it took a long time to leave, because its tires got stuck in the soft sand and the whole family had to push it. Finally, they all walked out of the beach with small, confused steps. I asked my mother why hadn’t any of them cried, and she said, “ Because they’re Asian, and the Asians are different from us.” A tall man, who had been watching it all, came walking toward us. He had the thick tanned skin of someone who had spent his whole life at the beach; it was hard to picture him wearing anything else other than trunks. “Sad thing,” he said, and my mother agreed. He sat beside her, but not too close, and told her that he had seen a lot of drownings on that beach. She said that it was her first time. And soon they were telling each other all about their lives, my mother talking about me as if I weren’t even there, saying how hard it was to take care of a child without the help of a husband, how much she wished I’d grow up soon, and how lonely she had been, for the longest time. He invited her for a swim. She accepted, but warned him that she wouldn’t go deeper than her waist: “I don’t want to drown like that man.” They both laughed, and he said with authority, “Don’t worry, I’ll save you.” He did have the body of a swimmer and the slippery skin of a fish. My mother opened her bag and took out my beach toys. “Look what I brought you,” she said, as if I the toys were a big surprise, maybe trying to show him what a good mother she was. Then she told me to stay where I was, while she went for a swim with her new friend. I didn’t feel like playing, but I started digging a hole. I watched them laugh and run to the sea, their bodies forming long and comical shadows on the sand. The clouds had scattered and the sun was high. Here and there, people were closing umbrellas, folding chairs and shaking towels, getting ready to leave for lunch. I took some bread from the bag and ate it with cheese. Then I ate the whole loaf and finished up the cheese, even though I wasn’t hungry. My mother and her friend were giggling and splashing water on each other. When they came back from the sea , he had his arm around her shoulders. They sat down, breathless and shiny, and smoked cigarettes. My mother turned around and looked at me a little surprised, as if she had forgotten of my existence. She smiled and rubbed her cold dripping arm against my back, making me shiver. The man spoke to me for the first time; he said that it was a nice hole, the one I was digging. They seemed so happy. My mother said that the sun and the sea always gave her an appetite. He admitted that he was hungry, too. She winked at him and pointed at the bag, proud of her womanly competence. But when her hands found only crumbs in the bottom of the bag, she became very upset. “You always eat too much,” she said. “That’s why they call you ‘fat boy’ at school.” She said other things, too, but I couldn’t understand her because the seagulls were screaming, and it sounded like their screams came out of my mother’s mouth. The man said it didn’t matter; he could get some oysters for them at the oyster stand. My mother said that she had never tried an oyster in her life, that she thought oysters were disgusting, and that I was the one who should be punished, not her. I kept digging my hole as if it were serious work, avoiding to look at them. My mother’s bad mood kept her quiet for a long time, until the man finally found a way to amuse her: he took my pail and covered her legs with sand, leaving only her toes sticking out; every time she moved them, they burst out laughing. “Let’s go for ice cream,” he said. She pulled her legs carefully out of the sand, leaving two neat tunnels. They were gone for a long time. The beach filled up again, this time with people who looked like they had eaten lunch and taken showers. A small girl let go of her father’s hand and came running to see the hole I was digging; she had a huge swelling in the back of her head. She asked me why I was making a hole. I said I didn’t know. Her father approached me, as if he owed me an explanation, and said that the swelling came from an operation she had had as a baby; the girl and her twin sister had been born connected by their heads. Only this one had survived. She kept looking inside the hole, untouched by her father’s words, and then she lost interest in it and ran after a dog. The afternoon went by quickly. The sun lost its fire and allowed a gentle wind to cool down our red bodies, the sea changed from blue to dark green, our shadows stretched as far as the rocks at the end of the beach, the seagulls retreated to the islands, and my mother didn’t talk to me for the rest of the day. When the sky began to darken, we collected our things and walked to the food stand. The sand was soft and still warm. My mother bought them beers in tall red plastic cups. They were thirsty and drank them quickly. My mother paid for another round, even though her friend had complained that the beer was warm. I sat on the boardwalk and watched them drink until their movements slowed down and their voices melted. By the time they ran out of money, the beach was dark and deserted. A pack of stray dogs had appeared out of nowhere, attracted by overflowing trash cans. Most of them were in terrible shape, some with limbs, ears, or tails missing, others with big patches of bare skin and maggot-infested wounds. I could tell one was blind; a white veil covered its eyes. They snarled at each other constantly, fighting over food and females. The place now belonged to them. My mother asked her friend where he lived, and he told her that right now he didn’t live anywhere; he had lost his job and had been staying with a friend. But on that same morning, they had had a fight - he didn’t explain the reason, and my mother didn’t ask. After the fight, his friend had apologized and even begged him to stay, but he felt very offended and declined the offer. He had no intention of going back; as far as he was concerned, the friendship was over. He had left his belongings in a locker at the train station and gone to the beach to calm down - the episode had left him very tense and upset. His plan was to relax at the beach for a couple of hours and then look for a room somewhere, but the beautiful day and the nice company had made him forget all about it. My mother listened to the story with exaggerated interest, and as soon as he became silent she said, “You won’t find a room at this time.” I stared at her furiously, knowing what was coming. We both knew it was wrong; we were painfully aware of our own vulnerability. But she avoided my angry eyes like a stubborn child and continued: “You can stay with us, just for the night.” He refused her offer weakly, but she insisted. With obviously false embarrassment that even I as a child could notice, but my mother chose to ignore, he looked down and thanked her. And down the dark street we went, my cheeks burning with resentment, my mother and her friend walking ahead of me, a short walk that seemed to take hours, with all the stopping and the kissing, the drunken laugh, the stumbling and the falling. When at last we arrived, my mother got rid of me as quickly as she could: she tucked me in bed securely, kissed me mechanically with a sour breath, switched the lights off, and closed the door. I could hear her rushed steps going back to the living room where he waited for her, half-asleep in the sofa. In my dark room, I let the weight of the day push my head deep into the pillow, and surrendered to the blessing of unconsciousness. \- Early morning sunlight leaked through the holes and cracks of the window shades, projecting irregular shapes of light against the walls and the furniture. My mother stood alone in the middle of the living room, amid faint vapors of alcohol and tobacco. “Where is he?” I said. She turned to me and her bloodshot eyes were the heartbreaking answer. I could hear a fly trapped between the windows and the shades. She walked to the kitchen area and began to cook breakfast, but today there was no music under the beating of the eggs and the whistle of the kettle. I looked at the window ledge and couldn’t find the radio in its usual place, nor anywhere else. Cabinet doors were open. Drawers had been pulled out and turned upside down. Intuitively, my eyes searched for the coffee can where my mother kept her tip money; there was only an empty space on the shelf, like a missing tooth, where the can should have been. It stood, open and empty, inside the sink. My mother had made no effort to hide the situation from me. It was her way of admitting her mistake and seeking penitence. I didn’t say a word, knowing that her shame couldn’t be deepened any further. When breakfast was over, she faked a smile and said, “So, it’s another beautiful day. Shall we go to the beach?” I didn’t feel like it, but even if I had been dying of the most terrible disease, I wouldn’t have declined her offer. So to the beach we went, me flapping my sandals over the broken glass and the dog shit, her bending under the weight of the canvas bag, and when we arrived I saw that my hole hadn’t been washed away by the tide, nor filled up by the wind: it was just as I had left it. My mother lay down the striped towel right next to it. I thought about tomorrow, Monday, when I would go back to school, and my mother to work, so we should make the most of our Sunday together. Yet, I couldn’t think of anything else to do but dig that hole deeper and deeper, and the bigger it got, the more children came by to marvel at the darkness of its bottom. And all Sunday I worked on it, and it turned out to be so wide and deep that anyone, even a fat boy like me, could easily get inside it and disappear forever. As for my mother, she spent the day watching the sea - not really lost in thought: attentive - as if something hideous and truthful could emerge from its depths at any moment.