Petrova

Clambering into the bus like the other visitors, I plonk myself down at a window seat and look out at the tourists grasping onto their hats and shading scarves as they rush ahead of me to the bus that will wind its way down the Italian coast through all the little towns and villages. But the only village I am interested in is Petrova, where my father is buried.

I open my wallet to see the photos I brought with me from home in Sydney. There is one taken of my mother from her last birthday, smiling brightly at the camera, and I remember how different she seemed before I had left for the airport just over a day ago.
“Marina, I honestly don’t understand why you suddenly feel the need to go all the way to Italy!” she exclaimed, throwing her hands above her head in frustration.
“I want to see dad’s grave, mum. I told you that,” I replied, packing my clothes into my duffle bag, trying to keep my voice calm in the face of her exasperation. “I want to see where he came from, why he always talked about it.”
“But this,” she said, gesturing within the confines of my bedroom walls, “is your home. You’re Australian, Marina. You belong here.”
“Yes, I do belong here. Yes, I am Australian. But,” I compromised, a tense edge entering into my voice, “I am Italian, too, just like dad. I need to see that side of my heritage.”

My thoughts return to the here and now, the stifling bus, filled with the odd noises we humans make when we are taken out of our comfort zone and land in a foreign place. As the bus fills with people, I smile at one barefoot man who silently takes the seat next to me. As I continue to study the photo, it falls to the floor. Before I can reach down for it, the man next to me picks it and when he hands me the photo I notice that the skin of our hands is the same warm olive colour.

As I step out of the roaring bus and onto the dry, cracking dirt road, the way ahead spins down a tumultuous slope along the coast to a calm beach lined with sand and tall, rickety buildings, teetering as if about to topple into the Mediterranean. My thongs hardly protect my feet from the foreign dust and dirt that’s found its way between my toes and under the balls of my feet. The sun blazes down over the flat rooves covering the shops and the houses made from bricks, the same buildings as those in the yellowing photo of my father when he was my age. Walking down the tortuous street, the chatter of the Italians, a familiar sound but a foreign language, fades away against the quiet hush of the waves. The smell of fish and the saltwater reminds me of my childhood back home in Australia and the days I spent with my father as he fished.

*****

The little tin dingy swayed from even the smallest of waves. I stretched out my arms, gripping onto the sides of the boat so tightly, afraid that I was going to fall out or that it would tip over, that my fingertips turned white with the pressure. But my father was always calm out in the vastness of the ocean, despite the eerie silence of anything but the water swashing around the metal vessel. He smiled and laughed at my expression of fear and my absurd rigidity in a landscape he only ever saw as seraphic, sublime. He knew it was not the waves themselves that I was afraid of, but rather their effortless attempts to sweep me out into the sea and my fear that I would be unable to save myself or to find my way home. That idea terrified me the most.

The next day when we were leaving home to go fishing, my father stopped me. He handed me a folded piece of paper, worn with age and creased so thoroughly that it felt like worn leather between my little fingers. He said, “Marina, I know how it frightens you the idea of being lost in the ocean, so always keep this safe in your pockets.” He unfolded the creased paper to reveal a stained old map. “It shows you my fishing village back home, in Italy, so that even if you were swept by the sea, to the other side of the world, you would not be lost at all.” He smiled at me with his eyes wrinkling on the sides, much like the grooves of the map, and after briefly inspecting the worn paper’s markings, I folded it up and hid it deep in my oversized raincoat’s pocket before taking his hand and swinging it in time with my footsteps it as we walked to the beach.

*****

I feel the weathered paper in my shorts’ pocket as I wander across the little wharf, listening to the waves slosh around the little boats tied to the wharf. One vessel that catches my eye is a dull silver dingy, much like my father’s, with a elderly man trying to carry buckets of fish from within the hull onto the flat surface of the wharf. His skin is darker than mine, and his aged muscled arms struggle to lift the buckets over the rim of the boat.

“Lascia che ti aiuti, signore,” I call, rushing over to his boat, offering my hand out to place the bucket onto the wharf.
“Thank you,” he replies breathlessly in a thick Italian accent. Is my Italian really that terrible that he knows I’m foreign, I wonder. He seems to notice my pause. “Are you Australian?” he asks.
“Yes,” I smile. “I only know a little Italian.”
Deep wrinkles emerge on his weathered face as he smiles back. “My friend lived in Australia for a while. His wife’s Australian accent was hard to miss when she tried to speak his language,” he laughed to himself.
This fishing hamlet is so small, so intimate a community, that I wonder if the man he is talking about is my father. I ask embarrassedly, “Was this man Roberto Amphitros?” and he stops tending to his buckets.
“Yes,” he says, suprised. He searches my face, his brows furrowing. “I should have realised. You look like him, except your eyes and hair are too light.”
“People always say that,” I smiled. “Marina, ” I tell him, offering my hand.
“His daughter, Marina, of course!” he exclaims, shaking my hand in both of his. “Antonello Palestrina. He never stopped talking about you.”
“Or you,” I say, thinking of how he could spend countless hours talking about his youth in Petrova, and the friends and family he’d left behind, not that he ever said it like that. “Signore Palestrina, do you know where I could find my father’s grave?”
“Antonello,” he corrects humbly. “I’ll take you there.”

*****

Most of the gravestones are unreadable under the weeds entwined over the dark grey rock. It takes me a few moments to uncover the correct gravestone that reads the familiar name, Roberto Amphitros. I pull out the photograph of my youthful father as I sit silently in front of the stone, my knees sinking into the damp soil. I place the photo in front of his gravestone and remove the map from the pocket of my shorts. The paper is worn so thin that the fibres holding it together begin to fall apart in my hands, like a crumbling rock. A few loose pieces are lifted by the wind and fly over the fence of the dry Italian field and down into the waves below. I close my hands over the rest, and push a layer of dirt from in front of my father’s gravestone, placing the pieces of the map in the hole, and recovering it with the soil of his hometown.

The tranquil sound of the waves and the gentle breeze is calming. I finally understand why my father had returned to Petrova so many years ago. It was not because he didn’t love my mother or me: it was because he was raised here, his roots were here, and this place had always been a part of him, like it is a part of me. I kicked off my thongs and wriggled my toes into the dark soil, almost feeling my roots delving into the ground beneath me.

I closed my eyes, feeling the wind brush against my arms and legs, and finally breathed out.