It was an image that he was hopeful wouldn’t stick. The face hopelessly gone. There had never been signs of aspiring to a pretty face, and the most recent years, if anything, had only added a considerable amount of damage to it. But from what’s there to be seen, not even the outline of it is recognisable anymore. All that’s left is a messy tangle of seaweed, mud and stains of all kinds plastered all over her. It’s the eyes he’s after and cannot catch sight of, the hazy-green eyes she’d wielded to survey with little or no mirth whatsoever the drossy shreds her life had turned into. But it is her alright, the red coral anklet she wears on the right ankle, like the ones he’d seen sold wholesale at every other doorway through old Alghero’s squeezed streets, as good a tag as any other they might use afterwards. And her silver trainers. Trainer, to be precise, just the one, the other probably still resting on the mired marina floor. The only relics that in a sort of obstinate way stayed behind to assert that, though forsaken, forlorn, blurred, numb, or any other adjective one might come up with to evoke fleetingness, under those layers of sludge and rubbish the pair of despondent jade eyes would still be lying there.

 

There’s a different image he likes better. At first it was the yogurt that caught his attention. In tandem with the tension and significance of crucial moments there is oftentimes this nonsensical ability to focus on the smallest, pettiest of details. So, the yogurt. Knee on the ground, red coral anklet, silver Nike Air, wobbly cigarette between the set of precociously decayed teeth. As on a silent tableau, the pinkish yogurt patiently transported by means of a lazy, torpid, rather uncooperative spoon, from an anachronistic glass jar into the aloof child’s mouth. A child made of thick glasses, of a dishevelled short-cropped lifeless heap of brownish hair and a pair of atrophied legs discarded on a disproportionate wheelchair that looked bent on sucking up the shrunken body and making it vanish from the scene at any instant. For a tiny moment she might have noticed him and somewhere in between the glasses and the nose emerged what ought to pass for a smile. Then she loses interest and is back scuffling against the yogurt spoons routine. It’s an image of serenity and restraint.

 

The following image won’t do as well. It’s one of words. They talked. He did the talking. From her side of the table she was quick to give up on words and any trace of resolve she might had brought with her, just a greenish defiance hanging in her gaze, though he wasn’t even convinced that had been the case. He’d injected an awkward dosage of lightness into the flow of words in an effort to mitigate the harshness it dragged in tow. To no avail, as he knew beforehand. She simply kept holding her stare after she’d stopped seeing him.

 

It wasn’t a big crowd that tentatively rallied amongst the carabinieri and firefighters’ hubbub. And the same way it rallied it also dispersed to give way to the ambulance that left to dawdle along the seafront. Then whatever fuss there was it died down swiftly and without that much of a complaint. Time for him to move away and head towards the old citadel walls. As he now walks and pushes the wheelchair, now and then she swivels her head around to face him from beyond those ominous glasses and flaunt the outline of that only smile she knew. As far as he’s concerned, he’ll definitely hold the yogurt image.