The Significant Other
Throwing a fully grown man overboard is about as difficult as it sounds, depending on who you are. If you’re anything like me in stature, you can imagine the effort; a shove and shuffle, a bit of good luck, gravity helping like she sometimes does in good faith, the wind in the right direction, and a well placed elbow.
I had been sitting at the ferry port, waiting for it to come in. Warm water from a plastic bottle I bought two weeks ago, almost sweet on my chapped lips. Camera charging from a plug point in the corner. I looked over the week in pixels, and rested on a video of Saint Lucie, fizzing at me in high definition on the screen. Beyond the window, the untethered white-bread cliffs of Bonifacio cast a blinding glow onto the Mediterranean. In the distance, Sardinia.
The waiting room was empty - peak season had long ended - and it wouldn’t be until boarding when I’d realise that the ‘2’ on my ticket signified the amount of passengers on the ferry I was treading.
Solo - just - io? me? - I would say.
Solo - just - voi - you - due - two - the clerk would reply, without looking up.
The vending machine sighed for attention. The white cast of sea salt on the perspex dividers between the cars and the ticket office gleamed onto my skin, and I let it. I finished my water and looked out at the rest of it outside. Bright and slow and ambling. Unthreatening. Swimmable.
Une - one - heure - hour - sur - on - l’eau - the water - the ticket officer said. C’est - it’s - beau - beautiful, he added, punching a seed- shaped piece of paper from my receipt, and ushering me to the foot passenger ramp, alone.
It has been a ritual of mine to visit catholic churches abroad for as long as I have been lucky enough to visit them. The golden gild and grandiose nature of them pull the magpie in me, and I lean into the doors, chest first, every time. There’s something beautiful in the act of blessing oneself before Mary or Jesus. Of kneeling at the foot of a shrine. Of lighting a candle with a long match or tapered piece of beeswax. Of wishing to a lover at the corner of a building that can only rightfully be compared to a fallen star incarnate in stone. *
At the height of Bonifacio, two or three days earlier than my departure, I found Saint Lucie, who offered me her two blue eyes from the belly of her silver platter. The ceilings were high, the air was light, and the dust swallowed my footsteps graciously in the church as I tread toward her. I was a ghost there, as were the rest of us, and it was implicit between the dead and the living - as it always is in these spaces - that noise was not to be made, until —
it says online that she - elle - removed - retira ses yeux - her eyes - pour décourager - to discourage - un prétendant insistant - a persistent suitor - qui les admirait - who admired them, he says, raising his eyebrows at me, showing me the information on his excessively large phone. I did not know him.
I feigned a language barrier, lowered my eyes to Saint Lucie, and left.
Demanding and self-assured, he walked into the port waiting room like it was a stage built in the round.
English? / Yeah / Sardinia / One ticket earlier / Collection
He was expecting perception. Sweating with anticipation and rehearsed confidence. I knew, by the sound of his shoes, that this man wanted to be looked at.
I prayed to Saint Lucie on my screen this time, and lowered my eyes as she taught me.
His pair of clean, rubber plimsoles asserted themselves into the upper- middle part of my peripheral vision, where Saint Lucie’s halo would hum, if she were to be sitting here instead of me, charging her camera, waiting for a ferry.
Hey! You going to Sardinia too? he asked me.
I didn’t look up.
On the ferry, the chairs were welded into groups of six, opposite other groups of six chairs, welded together, in a pale blue steel paint evocative of the waves beneath the boat itself. Three vertical walking routes divided each seating section, and three horizontal walking routes divided the three vertical walking routes, too. This, to my fingers and rough numeracy, added to seventy two chairs on the lower deck.
I walked up the metal stairs and counted the same chairs, in the same layout, on the upper deck. Seventy two chairs, too. Not as wet. Not as clean though.
Along the edge of the boat, twelve wooden benches framed the outer corner, and unlike the blue of the metal chairs, the wood was peeling and waterlogged.
On the upper deck, there were eight of these benches, in the same wood. Not as wet. Not as clean. Not as waterlogged.
The back of the ferry was almost identical to the front, besides the lack of benches. In their place were orange life-raft capsules, emergency inflatable rings and the occasional gas cylinder, attached to a locked wheel-base trolley cart, on a steady stand in self-important steel - unpainted this time.
I chose my seat - lower deck, back of the boat, middle aisle, closest to the water - and rested my bag on the floor. Its cotton shell immediately absorbed the puddle it was placed into. Rain water, or sea water, it didn’t matter to me. I looked at the sky, and to Sardinia.
One hour on the water. It’s beautiful.
The moon was full and clean in the pink sky, and the boat tread gently through it. We barely swayed, too.
Then plimsoles sat on the chair opposite me - his legs suspended between my row of chairs and his - and looked.
I have been on larger ferries since; the fifteen hour journey from Sardinia to Spain a week later serves as a good example, with its five restaurants, spa and swimming pool. But small ferries still make enough noise as they confidently plod through the water. Had I had my eyes closed and been a bystander enjoying the subtle spray of the journey and the slight hum of the moon, the pink sky and the momentum — I wouldn’t have differentiated between the splash of his body hitting the water, and the sound of the boat travelling through the Mediterranean sea.
Solo io - just me, I uttered to myself, and walked back to my seat, alone.
* the catholic church is flawed and I do not believe in the catholic faith. I do, however, love the campy set-design.