THE SEA CHILD

THE SEA CHILD

The boy dived and caught in his teeth the lobster. He jammed the sharp claws with his hands, to avoid any reaction, and threw a fatal bite to the abdomen of the crustacean. Even this day, the meal was assured.

He had fallen from a ship, maybe... but he was not drowned, he was not dead, nor hunger, nor thirst. Sharks and storms had spared him. The stream had moved slowly along with all the objects left in the ocean, up to that vast expanse of floating debris. A sort of continent of the future, dominated by plastics, wood and anything that is lighter than salt water. Long waves, coming from far away, brought there everything that could float. Trees laden with coconuts, uprooted by storms, away from coral reefs, but also whole houses, uprooted by the tsunami a few years back, along the coasts of Asia. If he had time to study a few more years, the child could be called "Archimedia" his new home.

He lived in a situation comparable to the primeval Eden. He did not lack anything, nor food, nor the sun, nor the air to breathe, in a world without strong winds, which was never hit by rains or storms. He had never met predators larger or smarter than him. He had fed all the products of the sea and had received in return only a pinch or a few bites. He was moving from a huge raft of polystyrene to a tank, still half full of oil. During days and nights, the gentle movement of the waves lulled him, as in a harbour. Never a surf, never a sharply move, to disrupt his sleep or meditation. The child was moving in the midst of the expanse of floating trash, random, to look for food, but also driven by natural curiosity of his kind. Its earthly origins pushed him towards the densest objects in the middle of the large island, formed in the ocean by a circular stream.

The world of the boy changed. After years of living with the plastic, he had discovered the wreckage of wood. Gradually, he penetrated the vortex in the wide ocean, full of waste and wreckage of all kinds, and headed for the central eye. Towards the centre, in fact, the vortex of floating debris was more solid, thicker and more ancient. Plastic was now quite rare. Most of the objects floating in the inner circle were made by wood: fragments of ancient shipwrecks, pieces of furniture, poles and trees torn by storms to the mainland. Among the wooden pieces, tanks and hollow objects were floating, made of metal, which floated due to their shape. The hulls of ancient ships were now transformed into farms for algae and molluscs. The inextricable mass of wreckage resembled a huge raft, always still under the sun and the starry night sky. At different levels, in the depths, galleys and bilges populated by giant octopus and colonies of crabs, ready to spring at the slightest movement, but easy prey for our agile and experienced boy.

The young boy enjoyed a lot, exploring shipwrecks. In the cockpit of a junk, he stopped to admire long strips of tissue paper, finely painted in watercolour. Time and the elements had saved them, perhaps for centuries. Their splendour appeared intact. The boy was not a collector, he could not rob riches to accumulate "at home". Rather, all that was there was part of his property, really belonged to him, and he had no need to remove those paintings or to take them elsewhere. He continued his journey, and he saw - at a certain distance - the top bunk of a European ship, towering over a cluster of mangroves, torn from tropical banks. Sliced lazy sails hung from the trees, standing and motionless in the clear air. It was hard to reach the vessel. The tangle of branches and roots, above and below the water, prevented the movement and housed all kind of aquatic fauna. The boy was not hurried and walked slowly, enjoying here and there the varied food that the location offered him. After several different sunrises and sunsets, he came alongside. The side of the ship was smooth and rounded, impossible to climb. Some hawsers, ripped, hung along the sides, but none of them reached the surface of the water. After a long search, the boy saw the tree bowsprit, broken by some accident, hanging folded with its own rigging, at some distance from the prow. He managed to reach the top of the tree, clinging to the ropes, and finally, span after span, he climbed up on that stump, swinging dangerously under his weight and seeming to fall on scrap and on the bushes that surrounded the ship.

For years the boy had lost contact with his home world. That ship, however, stimulated in him a sort of shuffling, as if the ancestral memories did their way through the trash of the ocean. He managed to climb on the bow of the ship and explored the whole, with a new curiosity. He came to the high poop deck, which still contained the metal instruments for navigation. The discovery of a telescope was a miracle for him, when he endorsed the eye to the lens and saw the world as larger... it seemed to touch even the junk, on which he had gone a week earlier. The strange designs of nautical charts, on the walls, did not tell him anything.

Suddenly, though, with a little cry of surprise, the boy found some pictures and illustrated books. A man in uniform of a naval officer, then the face of a woman. With the palm of his hand, the boy terse a glossy surface and peeked his own face, in what was once a mirror. He compared his image with those painted in the pictures, as if looking for a likeness...

He took one of the books, well arranged on wooden shelves, and opened it. He tried to spell out the letters and printed words, picking up distant memories.

In the following period (some months, or years?) the guy took that ship as his home and that quarterdeck as his lair, at least during the day. He could not, in fact, sleep in a closed room. The innate curiosity, however, had gained the upper hand and led him to pry into every corner of the enclosed space, drawing him towards books and other items. Some of those publications in print shown depicting landscapes and buildings, and people moving in different scenarios.

He had built up a rope ladder, which allowed him to get off and climb along the sides of the ship to go to obtain food and to explore the parent element, the sea that had rocked him, fed and brought up.

From a few days the young man had darkened, too many thoughts buzzing through his mind. First of all, he did no more recognise himself in the mirror, in which he gazed almost every morning. The face that appeared was a covering of unknown hairs, he seemed to see another. In addition, the figures he saw in the books, in the cabin of the ship, were instilling in him lot of doubts and fantasies.

The world known by the young man was limited to a stretch of sea, covered with floating debris, in a state of eternal calm. It was a kind of aquatic paradise, where he was the only human being, from a time that could not be determined. Distant memories and reminders, in nightly dreams, suggested him that there was another world. Now, in the images on the paper he saw fragments of other realities. One of those images did not want to go out of his head. It was the figure of a gorgeous girl, portrayed against a background of snow-capped mountains. She returned bully in his dreams and made him feel strange excitement, and he fantasised to meet this being, he felt she had really to exist, somewhere in the world.

Where could be that view so different, without the waves of the sea, without the huge expanses of plastic and flotsam, with the skyline of jagged snow-capped peaks? The young man felt that world would be far outside of his reach. He felt, however, for the first time, the urge to aim towards a specific goal, beyond the small daily horizon. Since that day, his efforts focused on solving a single problem. He wanted to explore a world different from this one and he sensed the need to push the ship, now adopted as his own houseboat, in any direction, outside the zone of eternal calm.

Love and madness can everything. The young man applied himself to the search for a means of transport. He tried to swim away to sea, from the big island of floating garbage, but he had to yield to the immensity of the sea. The dead calm made it impossible to rely on winds or stream to get away. We do not know how he did it, but in the end he somehow managed. Perhaps his diplomatic skills allowed him to communicate with dolphins, whales and sperm whales. Certainly his perseverance, and the will power that only a human being is able to have when pursuing its fixation, aided to pursue his aim. The fact is that, on a day of sun and calm (but every day, every month of the year, there were sunny and without wind), the young man climbed on the back of a sperm whale, ready to take him on his journey to other worlds. As the only kit for the trip, he had procured a bag, a sort of pocket to put on his shoulder, and he had placed there with every care the picture of that wonderful girl.

Thanks to the enormous whale, the young man left the island of waste. You would have to watch his games with his friend, to see him proceeding faster at the water, sitting on the back of the sperm whale. Even at times the two, with a mysterious language for us, exchanged their emotions or set off in perfect harmony, to hunt large bands of fish that made up their daily food. They proceeded a full season in the direction of the rising sun. The young man knew the clouds of heaven, he encountered some storm and felt the strange sensation of air passing fast on the skin and water coming down from heaven. One day, finally, a long dark stripe loomed on the horizon. Something had changed, the air smells and flavours of the sea. The young man broke away from the sperm whale and swam rapidly towards that new horizon again. An instinctive impulse told him he had to go alone.

The waves were stretching rhythmically on the long sunny beach. Our protagonist, used to behave in the ocean, had no difficulty in finding a suitable place for landing and for the first time, though he could dig back into memory, he put his feet on dry land.

Dust, thorns in the feet, insects, the rustling of the wind on the sand and in the bushes, crabs that peeped from their holes in the beach and ran, very fast, as in a dance... such a collection of new perceptions left stunned our traveller. He had become a beautiful and handsome young man, invigorate by marine life and tanned by the sun. The first hair was covering his face. Above all, he was determined to go forward in that unknown world, to continue his research. The new environment was transforming his way of life. Nevertheless, he tried to not stray too far from the sea, which was offering him security and guaranteed survival.

The sea child walked the beach for months, travelled all coasts in search of the girl, he jealously guarded the portrait, in a small bag now worn by use, the sun, sand and winds. He shouted, as he knew and could, to attract the attention of his fellow men, but no one answered. Only cicadas echoed to his impassioned appeals, on sunny days, and crickets in the night. Some rare howl in the distance made him sense the existence of other life forms. Finally, after months of wandering, he came to what must have been the city. Now the skeletons of skyscrapers stood, dismal, amid huge piles of garbage. Anything that had been metal was now eroded by salt weather. In the waters of the bay and the ancient harbour large amounts of floating plastic debris, the only eternal matter, lasting, on which mankind had left permanent traces of their existence.

The young survivor did not know what had happened in that place, where probably millions of men had spent his life running out of breath from one street to another, up and down the huge buildings, whose skeletons were bristling against the sky as gloomy biers. There was no more trace of all these men, their fears, their hopes and ambitions. Somehow they were gone away, devoured by their own waste. Communities of mice and cockroaches had proliferated in the ruins and it would be very dangerous to venture inside.

The young traveller realised that his exploration would not have been good. Some trick of the life had wanted to make him the last surviving member of his species. He walked slowly along the breakwater of the harbour. On the one side, the bay was full of floating debris reminded the world of his childhood down in the happy oasis, in the middle of the ocean. On the other hand, the waves were crashing on the reef. At the mouth of the harbour, the waves and the stream would pick up flotsam most suitable and they made their way, like the tail of a comet, to a distant point of the horizon.

At that moment, the young man knew that what remained to be done. He reached the end of the pier, near the ruins of the lighthouse that had indicated the route to mariners of other eras. He waited for a piece of plastic, a bit bigger, a little stronger and more comfortable than others, sailing from the harbour, in the stream. At that moment, with an agile and elegant dip, he rushed into the vortex of the moving water. He played for a few minutes in the waves gurgling around, as if to celebrate his decision. Then he clung to the wreckage that had spotted and began his return trip. He knew with certainty that - one day or the other - the long trail of floating debris would take him home, to the island of eternal calm, in which he had spent his best years, as a child happy and carefree.