The binoculars, a Fujinon 7×50 of the same model that the Italian Guardia Costiera had used since 2003, hung from Ferruccio's neck even when they served no purpose, even when the sea was so flat there was nothing to look at, because the weight of the binoculars around his neck (a weight that whoever does not carry it cannot tell apart from the weight of a scarf but that whoever has carried it for nine years feels the way one feels one's own heartbeat, without thinking, except when it stops) had become the weight of the work itself, the thing that held him on the patrol boat during the calm shifts when the Canale di Sicilia was nothing but a grey slab moving from south to north carrying with the current what floated, what no longer floated, what had been something before entering the water. After nine years Ferruccio could distinguish through the binoculars an empty life jacket from a full one, reading the difference in the way they moved: the empty one swayed with the waves following the surface the way a cork follows it, without weight of its own; the full one stayed fixed at the point where the weight of the body held it, motionless amid the motion, like a stone that does not roll. That difference, visible at six hundred metres only if the light was right, if the sun was low, if the water had that colour between grey and silver that the morning gives the Canale before eight, was the difference between an object the sea carried wherever it wanted and a person the sea could not carry because the body weighed more than the current.

His wife, who taught mathematics in Lampedusa, had stopped asking him how the shift had gone not because she did not care (she cared in the way one cares who lives with a person who comes home every evening carrying something he does not say), but because the answer, when Ferruccio still answered, was always the same: a number, or rather three numbers, the people found alive, the people found dead, the people not found, which were the shift as the shift was those three numbers, without remainder, without comment, without the narration that his wife perhaps would have wanted to hear, the narration that turns numbers into something one can bring to bed without the bed becoming the sea. After nine years the numbers, had he added them up (which Ferruccio did not do, because adding up would have meant looking through the binoculars backwards, looking at everything together instead of one at a time, the everything together that cannot be borne while the one at a time can), would have produced a figure Ferruccio did not want to know in the same measure in which he did not want to replace the binoculars that had a scratch on the left lens, a thin scratch in the shape of an arc, there for three years, since the day they had fallen on the deck of the patrol boat during a night recovery south of Lampedusa: the scratch, which shifted the focal point by one millimetre to the left, did not prevent seeing, it only forced an adjustment of the gesture, one millimetre, every time, without thinking, to which Ferruccio had grown accustomed the way one grows accustomed to a door that does not close properly, the way one grows accustomed to a bed that creaks, the way one grows accustomed to everything that is broken in a way that does not kill.

The call, on April 10, came at six fourteen: a rubber dinghy departed from Libya with an estimated number between eighty and ninety people that had not responded to the satellite phone for eleven hours, last known position seventy-three miles south of Lampedusa, seventy-three miles that for a patrol boat at twenty-eight knots were little more than two hours but that for a rubber dinghy, which is not a boat, has no keel, has no reserve engine, which is only compressed air inside a rubber tube that at force three bends, fills with water that enters without leaving, sinks under the weight of what it was meant to keep afloat, were the distance that separates floating from not floating. Nearly one thousand people had died in the Mediterranean since the beginning of the year, a number that sat in a report on the commander's desk, a report Ferruccio did not read because reports have graphs, maps, routes, percentages, all things the binoculars do not show: the binoculars show life jackets that sway, life jackets that do not sway, the difference between the two.

At nine forty-two, when Ferruccio saw something two hundred metres to the southwest and raised the binoculars to his eyes (the left lens with its diagonal scratch, the field of vision cut at the point where the thing floated), shifting one millimetre to the left as he always did, what he saw was an orange life jacket swaying with the waves, empty; then at fifty metres a second, empty; then at a hundred metres a third that did not sway, full, fixed at the point where the weight of the body held it. He lowered the binoculars. He called out the coordinates. The patrol boat turned. The sea around held other life jackets scattered, orange, some empty, some full (the full ones that were the work, the empty ones that were the people without a life jacket when the dinghy had folded, the people in the water with nothing between their body and the sea), those people the binoculars did not find because the binoculars see what floats, what does not float is beneath the surface, beneath the surface the binoculars do not reach.