The torn clothes soaked in rain and sea, the grazes on the arms and legs, the bruises that don't hurt yet because the shipwreck has just happened and the adrenaline is hiding everything, or almost everything.
But this mum and dad don't even see the shore.
Their eyes are trained to review the survivors, to lift the cloths that cover the cavaderi and to pray that their children aren't underneath.
"I'm not here, not even there," he says.
"Maybe I'm in the ambulance", she hopes without ceasing to search in that hell that has fallen to the ground only to be torn apart by cries of pain.
The research has to deal with the guilt feelings of two parents who made the decision to leave Afghanistan to improve their living conditions, because that was no longer life.
The journey was long, the Balkan route in the middle of winter, the dangers of the landscape, the cold, hunger.
The fear was a lot.
They had evaluated everything and even taken into account their own death, not that of their children.
Yet there are only them on the beach, both just over 40 years old, and the Red Cross takes them to Cara Sant'Anna.
This woman and this man, who are a mom and a dad and nothing else at the time, are offered to wear clean, warm clothes.
They're shaking and it's not from the cold, it's from the fear of never seeing their children again.
They incessantly ask the operators for news of the survivors, they describe their children to the cultural mediators.
Then comes a phone call: "Your boys are hospitalized but they are not in serious condition. They are fine and alive".
The couple begins to cry in an embrace that seemed endless, they laugh, caress each other, kneel down and pray, looking up to heaven and thanking him.
"It was an indescribable emotion - says Chiara Nigro, Restoring family links operator of the Italian Red Cross - there was a lot of physicality and happiness, a man and a woman truly united. They felt that they were safe and that they could afford to express their emotions. Now our task will come, for them and for the other survivors, to channel their fears in a non-destructive way and to have an approach with the individual and not just with the family".
But unfortunately the stories of the shipwreck do not all have a happy ending.
Like that of the unnamed girl, identified with the cold initials Kr14f9, "the most dramatic and moving symbol of the immense tragedy of Steccato di Cutro which weighs like a boulder on the conscience of all Europe - said the mayor of Catanzaro Nicola Fiorita - I will allow myself to ask the competent authorities, the mayor, the Prefecture of Crotone and the judiciary for permission to bury Kr14f9 in the Catanzaro cemetery. And we will also try to give her a name: we will call her Angelita, like the little girl that the allied soldiers in 1944 they found on the beach of Anzio, alone and in tears and with four shells in her hand, as a famous song dedicated to her recited".
