In the meeting room, which was already crowded, I looked for Paul. I didn’t see him anywhere.
“Is this okay?” Teo asked, gesturing at two chairs about halfway down the aisle.
“Let’s save an extra seat,” I suggested. “In case Paul comes.”
Teo might have stiffened ever so slightly at the request, but he did as I’d asked.
“Are Luca and Bruno already here?” I asked once we were settled.
“I don’t think so,” he said as he shifted to look behind us, but then he saw Bruno across the room and waved.
Soon the lights dimmed, and the organizers took the floor. There was an elderly man whom I assumed was in charge, and he welcomed everyone, then thanked La Maddalena’s City Council and a host of other supporters for making the event possible.
The plenary speaker turned out to be a man named Luigi Pacchetti. He was a professor at the University of Sassari and an expert on seagrass meadows, and he had been invited to give a talk on the sudden disappearance ofPosidonia oceanic. I didn’t know anything about these underwater meadows, except what I’d seen when I’d gone diving for nacchere, but I was excited by how much of the talk I understood. Pacchetti argued thatthese watery meadows, capable of sustaining entire ecosystems, had begun to shrink in the early twentieth century, due in part to the use of dredges by sponge collectors. In the sixties, it was the shrimpers and their new bottom trawlers that wreaked havoc on the delicate grass. And now, said Pacchetti, what few beds of seagrass remained were being degraded by chemical and radioactive contamination. “With the seagrass goes the algae. And with the algae goes everything else.”
I had begun taking notes, mainly lists of Italian words I didn’t know. Words likedegrado, traslocazione, andresilienza termica. Teo was looking over my shoulder, so occasionally, he’d whisper a definition into my ear or tell me I needed an accent. When I stole glances at his notebook, however, I couldn’t read a word. I suppose he was using shorthand. He seemed to realize this was no fun because soon he was drawing me little pictures. A sponge and a sea urchin and, at one point, a line drawing of me aboard theAlessandra. He captioned that one in small block print:EILEEN ARCHER SI TUFFA PER PRENDERE LE NACCHERE.
Maybe a half hour into Pacchetti’s talk, I heard the door swing open and turned to see Paul slip into the room. I waved to him, but he must not have seen me because he took a seat in the last row, near the door. Pacchetti continued to talk about the plight of the Mediterranean’s seafloor, but now I found it impossible to pay attention. I kept wondering if Paul had noticed me and, more importantly, if he had noticed Teo.
I decided I had nothing to hide. I had told Paul I was planning on attending the conference, and it was natural that I might run into Teo—a journalist—at said conference. So, finally, I forced myself to turn around in my seat and wait, patiently, until I’d caught Paul’s eye. He raised his eyebrows at me, and I gestured for him to join me, even though I knew he wouldn’t—not with the program underway.
“Paul’s here,” I whispered to Teo.
“Oh, good,” he said, but he didn’t have me fooled for a single second.
98.
I REINTRODUCED PAUL TO TEOduring the break. The men were civil to each other, but I could tell Paul was uncomfortable and still confused as to why I was at the conference at all.
Luca’s talk was crowded, but we nabbed seats near the back of the room. It was Paul, then me, then Teo, all in a row, and we did our best to keep the conversation going. Teo asked Paul about the Golden State Warriors, who were doing so well in the NBA Finals that even Europeans had started paying attention, and Paul asked Teo what he knew about a string of bank robberies in Rome. While I was grateful to them both for trying, the whole thing was so painful that I began to regret coming to the conference at all.
But then Luca approached the lectern, and a hush fell over the room. I could tell he was nervous; there was more shuffling of papers than was technically necessary, and he kept pushing his glasses up on his nose, even though I was pretty sure that they were as far as they could go. He was looking out at the audience with this panicked expression, as if waiting for us to tell him it was time to begin, and finally, Bruno gave him an encouraging nod from the front row, and he cleared his throat and squeaked out a “Buongiorno.” By the time he’d begun to list his collaborators, he had found his footing.
Luca gave a brief overview of the problem—nuclear-powered submarines moored in the middle of a population center—without coming across as political or judgmental. It was like the subs were orcas or giant squid, creatures that couldn’t be controlled. He ran through the testing CNEN had completed, starting in the fall of 1972 and continuing through to the summer of 1974, when I had helped them collect and compound the nacchere that would—with any luck—give them some clue as to the radioactivity of the water. “At the end of the summer, we got the very good news that a preliminary environmental survey had been funded, which meantthat we could devote the fall to studying the island’s meteorological and ecological characteristics.”
I understood much of what Luca was saying, and when I didn’t understand something, I was sitting next to not one but two willing translators. “He’s doing good, right?” I said to Teo or Paul or both.
Luca put a black-and-white map of La Maddalena on the overhead projector and ran through the results of the team’s Rhodamine B tests. In total, the team had come up with about a dozen testing sites, which were marked with little X’s. He explained that when they had returned to the island in January to collect samples as part of their biannual testing program, they’d used these new—more effective—testing sites.
Luca put another transparency on the projector. This one featured a table that listed the new testing sites and the corresponding amounts of cobalt-60 and manganese-54 that had been discovered at each location. All the sites within the vicinity of Santo Stefano Bay were registering high.
I could feel Paul tense.
Teo had opened his notebook to the same page he’d been doodling on at the plenary session and began to copy down the numbers on the screen. He wrote furiously and was so consumed with the task at hand, I don’t think he noticed that the line drawing of me in my bathing suit was still sitting there at the top of the page. But Paul noticed, and I got a sick feeling in my stomach as I watched him read the caption.
99.
LUCA WAS WRAPPING THINGS UP,talking about how more study was needed—of the effects of cobalt-60 and manganese-54 on the environment over time, and of other radioactive pollutants that might be in the water but going undetected because the team didn’t know what to test for.
When Luca was finished, so many hands shot into the air that Bruno jumped to his feet to help facilitate the Q&A. People wanted to know if the U.S. Navy was aware of these numbers and, if so, what they were going to do about them. Luca was nothing if not diplomatic. “I am a scientist, so my job is to gather and make sense of the data. It’s the job of the politicians in this room to decide what to do with that data.”
Someone near the back of the room shouted that they should shove the data up Uncle Sam’s ass, and the whole room erupted in applause.
At one point, Paul raised his hand, but it took Bruno a long time to call on him. When he finally did, Paul seemed flustered, or maybe pissed off. He made a point of introducing himself in Italian with not just his name but his rank and his role on theGilmore, then got around to asking his question: “Is it not true that every single one of these numbers is below the minimum threshold value?”
Teo gave me the tiniest shoulder nudge. It was like he was saying,See, I told you he’d say that.
Luca was calm and measured in his response. He agreed that this was the case, then made the argument that if the presence of these radionuclides was the result of a series of small leaks and not some catastrophic event, we could expect the pollutants to continue building up over time. “What is under the minimum threshold value now may be over the threshold in a few short years.”
