His legs leave a lot to be desired. He looks around exhausted and for the lack of something better at hand he opts for taking refuge inside the car. Door left open, half of his body discarded outside, the other lump propped up against the frame of the wound-down window. Yes, one could call it a sweltering day, the last time he checked it had crossed the thirty-seven-degree mark, but his wasn’t exactly the soul of someone untouched by the spicy mood of the Med summer. Besides, the place he’d been calling home for almost forty years now could be seen from where he stands on a less hazy day – And it’s not as if the summer there had been known for its refreshing breezes or mid-afternoon soothing drizzle. That much he keeps reminding himself, although his lungs, his heart and all the other underperforming organs he carries around insist on a different opinion.

 

Oblivious to his misery and crammed around the headland looms the cocky silhouette of Castelsardo. In a not-so-distant past it used to stand as the guidepost for their holidays, a heartening greeting of sorts. They would drive down to the place year in year out for those longed-for two weeks in Lu Bagnu. The kids couldn’t get enough of it, and perhaps because of that, or just on account of the fact that they wouldn’t count themselves the audacious type, they never sensed that urge other folks do of going on a quest for experiences and pastures new. It became a bit of a ritual, and one he got particularly fond of. The problem was that she was adamant and had made it crystal clear that that was to continue, regardless. Why on earth should they stop coming?

 

When did the contempt start? Wrong – long before that. It was perhaps one of those viruses people carry with them, dormant, cloistered in their cells over all these decades, one she didn’t care to notice until it got activated. She watches him a few yards down the road as he takes refuge inside the car. Another asthma attack by the looks of it. She feels drained and a woebegone aura begins to creep up. At first she didn’t spot them – inconsequential, if she had to choose a word, ultimately just a timid bunch of faded roses, not new, though not yet altogether withered. No trace of religious paraphernalia nor of the grotesque photos and by-the-bend-on-the-road elegies that have a tendency to haunt places of a similar nature. Over a year now, just. The roses attesting to it.

 

The moribund roses lay on a stone wall and stand between her and a stripe of anaemic Mediterranean Sea. At the other end of it, shielded by a veil of unpolarised UV mist, would be Corsica, visibility permitting. That she shouldn’t have gone to the trouble of coming all this way just to prove a point is a waxing self-evident axiom about which she nurtures little doubt. Yet, she wouldn’t cave in, how could she? His listlessness, the utter ineptitude for life he fosters, the ailing numbness. She wouldn’t.

 

She sits for a moment and starts plucking absent-minded petals from the melancholy bunch. She studies him. A still life. A seventeenth-century Dutch still life of a stout hare keeps recurring as she surveys the scope of his state of torpor. Not a lot happening there. Not a lot happening ever. The same vapid impotence then, when he refused to get out of the car, already mired in the ether he had been living in ever since. She’d been badly hurt and felt haplessly disoriented and in real pain. Aches and pains though were old mates she’d learnt to hang around with. It was the stench of loneliness that knocked her hard. She’d been projected against the window-screen the very instant he reached for the brake pedal in a fit of dread and panic. After the ensuing mayhem, all went out of focus as both cars’ headlights colluded to a point in the void. She hauled herself off the car as well as she could and staggered towards the other vehicle. As far as she could assess in the semi-darkness, the damage was far more limited than it had felt. Inside, though, besides the uncanny silence, she could also fathom the dimly lit figure of the old man who had used the occasion to give up on breathing.

 

What she recalls vividly is coming back to their vehicle and the contempt being there already. His pathetic self wouldn’t budge, terror-sodden, and it took her quite a while to dislodge him from his seat. The useless figure did nothing but sob for the rest of the journey until eventually they’d reached the ferry in Santa Teresa. And not much since.