On the night of August 10, 2023, Michela Murgia left us at the age of 51. A successful writer from Cabrarese (she won the Campiello Prize for "Accabadora" in 2010), essayist, television host, and a refined intellectual capable of sparking powerful and divisive debates, she died. On the second anniversary of her passing, in homage to her, we publish the delightful (so to speak) story "The Lobster," written for L'Unione Sarda and published by our newspaper on August 22, 2010. The short story later appeared, in a minimally edited version, in the anthology "Piciocas. Storia di ex bambine nell'Isola che c'è" (Piciocas. Story of former girls on the Island that exists) in 2012, published by Caracò. It was then reprinted in "Ricordatemi come vi pare" (Remember Me as You Like) in 2024, published by Mondadori. This year, it is among the key stories in the volume "Anna della pioggia" (Anna of the Rain), published by Einaudi and edited by Alessandro Giammei.

"Did they give you the lobster?"
"Don't worry, it's already there."
When I asked him this question, the disaster that was supposed to befall us hadn't yet occurred. Giacomo Contu was the son of a fish wholesaler, and at the mid-August snacks his mother fed him large quantities of food, not like us, who gave us fried eggplant parmigiana as light as a block of sandstone and sometimes half a chicken alla griva with myrtle stolen from the municipal hedges in Piazza Azuni. That's why we loved Giacomo Contu's mother. That mid-August holiday they even lent him a florin, but that bonus didn't change anything for us: there was room in front only for him and his rookie Nenna Manca, and the truck was an impassable chemical zone: Dad brought us crates of fish to sell in Tiesi, and the smell had possessed the fiberglass like a demon, wafting out in such intense wafts you'd have thought he'd used eel-flavored magic tree on purpose. We would therefore have done the climbs of the Santu Lussurgiu mountains on a scooter, without regrets.
Santu Lussurgiu, yes.
That's where we went, because the sea in '99 had really pissed us off, because if you're born and raised with your feet in the water, at a certain point you start dreaming of the jungle, the prairie, snow-capped peaks, the rainforest—anywhere, as long as there's no sand. Sand was the stuff of mainland tourists, who in those years were actually making scientific plans to furnish their home aquariums with quartz from Is Arutas. Adults filled buckets and had their children carry them, playing dumb. The mayor had sworn war on them with a draconian ordinance: not only was sand not to be taken, but it became "mandatory to access the coast in flip-flops and to shake the grains off your clothing thoroughly before leaving the beach. Individual checks were required." It must be said that, apart from a few lascivious figures who started purposely weighing down their boxers with quartz in the hope of a personal search, most people actually stopped.
Be that as it may, in '99 that was no longer our battle. On the beachfront, we had all already given our all, and we had on our resumes at least half a dozen traditional Cabras Ferragosto celebrations at Mari Ermi, the kind with shared tents with verandas, generators for the refrigerators, and barbecues for roasting mullet, cleverly constructed from old washing machine drums stolen in the winter from the neighbor's dumpster, out of foresight. Everyone back then hoped the neighbor's washing machine would break down.
When August 15th arrived, Cabras got serious.
Thousands of people occupied the beach for a week, and nothing was left to chance. That's why, at twenty, even the most unlucky of Cabrarese, raised in that harsh school, was a veteran of beach survival, a graduate in charcoal lighting with a master's degree in digging to keep watermelon cool, a chosen lookout to ensure the tide didn't wash away the beers, and a top manager of the toilet among the dwarf palms, where no one beats the Mediterranean scrub for privacy. We were aware of being the bearers of this precious knowledge, passed down to us by generations of Cabrarese before us, and all symbolically encapsulated in that lobster, our revered totem animal.
That's why they'd delivered it to us religiously wrapped in aluminum foil like a large steel nugget, and Andrea Cutri had proudly tucked it under the seat of his scooter, setting himself up as its protector and guardian. It was frozen, and this, when we reached the mountain, would give us just enough time to set up a bivouac to roast it: then we could call ourselves at home even among the wild animals of Montiferru that had been announced to us. Rumor had it that on the land where we intended to camp there were wild, rust-colored cows called Red Ox, which were just beginning to be mentioned at barbecues. They hated the people of Campidano and would have attacked us in herds if we invaded their territory; Nenna's mother, a native of Lussurgese by birth and married in Cabras, had told us this, and the fact that she owned both the land and the cows that infested it didn't arouse our suspicions. We were young and from Cabrarese, we only knew the tricks of the mullets.
Before leaving, we stopped by the parish hall to grab two tools from the craft kit we used to make the nativity scene at Christmas. We placed them under the scooter seats, and it wasn't easy to fit them among the yogurt, sausages, fruit, bread, and lobster. Then we went to the mountain, set up our tents, swam in a freezing stream, explored the area with steak knives brandished in both hands in case a herd of cattle came running toward us, and for days everything seemed very wild and dangerous. None of us ever noticed we hadn't eaten the lobster. I swear it wasn't intentional, we just forgot, because life there was so beautiful that it didn't take a crustacean to improve it.
Who could have imagined that the lobster would meanwhile be rotting, forgotten, on a table in the parish hall, a forty-degree heat indoors for two weeks? The beast decomposed at a leisurely pace. First it turned sour, then it corroded the domopak and its own shell, soaked the wooden table, stained the tiles, stinked up the parish hall, leaked out of the scuttlebutt windows in the hallway, and its pestilential odor would have wafted all the way outside, had everyone not been in Mari Ermi roasting mullet in the washing machines.
The barefoot runners, however, noticed when they had to enter the parish hall ten days before the feast to organize the San Salvatore race. Those good fathers of the family thought it was a cat locked inside, decomposed by the heat after a desperate death from hunger and thirst. We, of course, pretended to identify the nonexistent feline, while we used every chemical means to remove the lobster acid from the floor and table.
I lived eleven years with this horrible secret inside me.
You will understand if I waited until the tenth year of the statute of limitations to say this.
Michela Murgia

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