Before the shore

He was about to dive in but had second thoughts. That was not the right thing to do. He hadn’t worked in the police for a couple of years now but he always remembered the minimum instructions: never act alone unless absolutely necessary; never touch the corpse before the survey or a specific authorisation to do so; first make contact, give the location and await instructions. As far as he knew, they also applied at sea. They answered him immediately. Sauro explained the reason for the call, gave his name and gave the coordinates to reach him. He did not feel the need to specify that he had also been in the police. The officer on duty made a diligent note, recommended not touching anything and just waiting, they would arrive as soon as possible.
The man was in a prone position, his head almost fully immersed in the water. His life jacket was unbuttoned, floating, forming an orange stain that somewhat covered his body. From the vest’s loop protruded his left arm, clinging to his bib in a seemingly meaningless gesture, or perhaps the grand and desperate one of clinging to his remaining life.
Even though it was calm, the sea acted differently on the floating body than in other places where Sauro had seen corpses: streets in the city centre, unpaved lanes, shops where a robber had barricaded himself in, dungeons with too many branches, even a hole covered with leaves and earth lying on a frame of branches tacked up as best he could. They had always been places more or less in tune with the drama of a violent death, but all of them, so to speak, were firmer than that water massaging the inert body. As he thought about this, Saurus looked again carefully. The high sun complicated his task, with the light that seemed to bounce off the liquid surface, but he concentrated his vision to collect and mentally catalogue as many details as he could.
He looked around again. Apart from that man, everything was as it always was: the coastline protected by artificial reefs, the uninterrupted row of buildings, in the distance the refinery and then the port of Ancona, before Monte Cònero. Not far from the coast, in front of Falconara Marittima, the profile of the sea was broken by the low, black outline of the platform with its double berth for oil tankers. Sauro had learnt that the platform was called an ‘island’ but to him it rather reminded him of a spider, with that broad base supported by the columns stuck into the sea.
As he scratched his forearm he thought back to how the day had gone. That morning he had been among the first to go out on the boat. He was not always like that. The day before he had been among the last and other days he had not gone out at all. Since he had left the service it was no longer a necessary caution, but the habit of not being in the habit had stuck with him. He had headed off aimlessly, unaware of the appointment that fate had set for him. The weather had kept its promises, the sun was already high enough. The sea had been calm since dawn, the wind barely a breath that had not been enough to make him switch off the engine and then hoist the sail. The clouds, few in number, seemed to line the coast. Beyond was Croatia. With his boat it would almost have been an adventure, but who knows.
But how long did it take them to arrive? Time to think about it and he immediately smiled, finding himself impatient. Knowing how to wait is a valuable talent, an older colleague had told him one day. A great truth, he had told himself many times during his years of service. Could it be that he was already beginning to forget it? Meanwhile, the man floated, supported by his lifejacket. The invisible play of the surface currents made the corpse occasionally move an arm or a foot, calmly, like a bather on some August Sunday. Sauro wondered where that body would have ended up if it had not crossed his course. Offshore? On the shore? The shore was far away, the sea so big … Go figure.
Livorna was also rocking lazily. When he had bought her, the boat was dry and named Mary II, but Sauro had immediately decided to change her name. His first thought was Livorno, the city where he was born, then he realised that he would have liked to keep a female soul in Mary II and so he had decided on Livorna. The clerk at the boat registry, in an unprofessional manner, had tried to dissuade him: the name of the boat is never changed, doing so brings bad luck, it is contrary to the unwritten laws of seamanship. That last mention of unwritten laws was the decisive argument, but in the opposite direction to what the employee was hoping for. Sauro, after graduating from law school, had spent almost thirty years enforcing those writings, the ones that are there for all to see without subterfuge, innuendo or unspoken. Of course, he was not so naive as to ignore that not all laws are clear or perfectly consistent with each other. However, and with conviction, he had always maintained that even the imperfection of a written rule is transparent and that what is imperfect can be perfected. What remains under the surface, on the other hand, only creates problems.
Of all those thoughts, and the inner sigh that accompanied them, the register clerk had no inkling. Nor, for that matter, could he imagine why Sauro had already decided that he and the boat would go to Fano to start another life there. Renaming the boat would have been the first clear sign of the separation between a before and an after. And so, amidst the grumbling of the clerk, it was Livorna.
Sauro also scratched his other arm. It was happening to him more and more often. He had tried a couple of ointments taken at the pharmacy counter but to no avail. Sooner or later, if not to a dermatologist, he had to decide to at least go to his doctor. Making an appointment, the very idea made him snort. That morning, with good weather forecast, he had thought that maybe he would stay out all day. It was especially that ‘maybe’ that had put him in a good mood. He was free to make and unmake his plans now, and he liked that.