Pietro Salt

Your name is Pietro. Eat something.

A fisherman who turns to salt at every high tide and is restored at the low, with the memory of only one tide at a time. The village pins notes to his coat.

Code: VN-042
Kind: transformed
Where it is met: water
Scale: human
Leaves you with: loneliness

What it looks like, and what it does

A man on a stone jetty at dawn. His coat pinned all over with paper notes. Skin white and crystalline at the shoulders. At his feet a drying ring of salt in the shape of a seated figure. A thermos of tea.

Rises at low water. Reads his coat. Walks the harbour, greets everyone as a stranger, and goes back to the jetty before the tide.

What is known

Pietro Salt of Cala Mare was washed from his boat in 1971 and walked out of the sea at low water the next dawn. He has done so on every tide since.

At high water he stands on the jetty and becomes a pillar of salt, and the sea takes some. At low water he stands up again, thinner. He remembers only the present tide. The village leaves him notes: “Your name is Pietro. You are loved. Eat something.”

What it can do

Reforms himself from salt at every low tide
Carries the village's notes unspoiled through the water

Where it stops

Loses a little of himself to the sea each high water
Cannot remember beyond the present tide

An encounter

Moretti pinned a new note to his coat every morning for thirty years. The oldest she remembers read “You were a good fisherman.” The one she pinned last week read, “Your name is Pietro.” He thanked her, and asked, politely, whether she knew who he was.

Concetta Moretti, postmistress, The jetty at Cala Mare, Dawn, low water

What is established, and what is only said

established: Fifty-three years of tide logs match the times of his transformation to within a minute.
rumor: That the villagers have agreed never to tell him how long it has been.
interpretation: He may be writing to himself across the tide, the only way he can.

Still unresolved

The notes found on his coat in the morning are, more and more often, in his own handwriting. No one has seen him write them.

Where it has been recorded

Cala Mare (confirmed) — Recorded by Concetta Moretti, postmistress.

Stories about it

Eat Something Before the Tide Turns (Grotesque encounter, 4 min) — At dawn on the Cantor's Shoal jetty a mussel-picker meets a man who comes back out of the tide every day, and who remembers only this one.

Connected entities

Magdalena Prue — Both are given back by the tide in pieces. Both are looked after by people who know their routine better than they do.
Slack Water — Both are fixed to the turn of a tide. Pietro rises with it. Slack Water lies down at the moment it holds still.