by Anthony De Sa
EXCERPT
THERE IS NOTHING he can do. He is lifted high into the air by the engorged swells that roll, break and crash upon themselves. His dory is smashed, the jetsam scattered: pieces of white jagged wood afloat, tangled in knotted rope, nothing much to grab hold of before the ocean’s swell lifts him higher, only to drop him into its turbulent waters, rolling him in the dizzying current. Again, he pierces the surface, the biting cold filling his gasping lungs as he coughs and sputters. It is the moment he needs. He reaches into his sweater and draws out the crucifix, which glistens in the moon’s light. He twirls it between puckered fingers, places it in his mouth—between his clicking teeth, feels its weight and shape cushioned on his tongue, closes his trembling blue lips and allows himself to let go, to sink beneath the foaming surface into the dark molasses sea.
Big Lips. Are you here?
The Portuguese call it saudade: a longing for something so indefinite as to be indefinable. Love affairs, miseries of life, the way things were, people already dead, those who left and the ocean that tossed them on the shores of a different land—all things born of the soul that can only be felt.
Manuel Antonio Rebelo was born from this passion. He grew up with his father’s tales, a man who held two things most sacred, God and cod—bacalhau, and not always in that particular order. His father’s words formed vivid pictures of grizzled brave fishermen and whale hunters who left their families for months to fish the great waters off Terra Nova, the new land. The visions of wailing mothers shrouded in black, the confused wives—the pregnant ones feeling alone, the others glad for the respite from pregnancy—all spun in his mind. And then there were the scoured children, waving in their Sunday white finery, shining like scattered popcorn as they watched their fathers' ascent onto magnificent ships. Manuel saw the men in his dreams with their torn and calloused hands, faces worn, dark and toughened by the salted mist. As a boy he would sit by the cliffs for hours, dangling his bare feet over the side of the hundred foot drop to the shore, kicking the rock with his pink heels, placing his hands over his eyes to shield the sunlight, already yearning for the fading figures of the White Fleet.