4
When I came to the sea, I was afraid I might have to spend whole days with hordes of strangers, shaking hands and passing compliments and making conversation—a regular labor of Sisyphus. Instead, except for our inevitable evenings with friends, Clelia and Doro lived reasonably calm lives. Every evening I had dinner with them at the villa, and their friends didn't arrive until after dark. Our little trio was gay enough. However much the three of us had to disguise our worries, we discussed many things quite freely and openly.
I soon began to have some little adventures of my own to tell— gossip of the trattoria where I had lunch, peculiar episodes and stranger conjectures that a sloppy seaside existence seems to encourage. That voice I had heard ringing through the window bars the first evening I went upstairs—the next morning I made its owner's acquaintance. A sunburned young man passed me on the beach, gave me a polite wave of the hand, and passed on. I recognized him as soon as he had passed. None other than one of my students of the year before. One fine day he had passed up his usual lesson in my study and never showed up again. That very morning I was baking in the sun when a black and vigorous body plumped down on the sand next to me; the same boy again. He showed his teeth in a smile and asked if I were on vacation. I answered without raising my head: I happened to be a good distance from my friends' umbrella and had hoped to be alone. He explained to me, quite simply, that he had come by mere chance and liked it here. He didn't mention the lesson business. I was irritated enough to tell him that the evening before I had heard his family quarreling. He smiled again and said it was impossible because his family wasn't there. But he admitted he was living in a street with an olive tree. As he got up to go, he spoke of friends who were waiting for him. That evening I looked into the ground floor—a pungent smell of frying—and saw children, a woman with her head wrapped in a handkerchief, an unmade bed and a stove. When they noticed me, I asked about him, and the woman—my landlady— came to the door and, jabbering away, thanked heaven I knew her tenant because she rued the day she had taken him in and wanted to write to his family—such nice people, who had sent their son to the beach to give him a good time—and only the evening before he had brought a woman into his room. "There are some things ..." she said. "He's not eighteen yet."
I told Clelia and Doro this incident and described the visit Berti paid me the morning after, when he met me at the top of the stairs, held out his hand, and said: "Seeing that now I know where you live, it's better to be friends."
"That fellow will be asking for your room next, you'll see," Doro said.
Encouraged by Clelia's attention, I went on. I explained that Berti's brass was merely timidity become aggressive in self-defense. I said that the year before, before disappearing and probably squandering the money he was supposed to spend in lessons, that boy showed signs of being in awe of me and gave an embarrassed nod when he saw me. What happens to everyone had happened to him,- the truth was masquerading as its opposite. Like those sensitive spirits who pretend to be tough. I envied him, I said, because, being still a boy, he could still delude himself about his real nature.
"I think," said Clelia, "that I ought to be a closed, diffident, perverse character myself."
Doro smiled to himself. "Doro doesn't believe it," I said, "but he's the same; when he plays gruff is when he wants to cry."
The maid, who was changing the plates, stopped to listen, blushed, and hurried off. I went on. "He's been like that since he was a boy. I remember him. He was one of those people who are offended if you ask them how they feel."
"If all this were true, how easy it would be to understand people," Clelia said.
These conversations stopped after dinner when the others arrived. Guido came as usual—if he left his car, it was only to play cards; some older women, some girls, an occasional husband—in other words, the Genoese circle. It was no surprise to me that more than three people make a crowd, that nothing more could be said that was worth the effort. I almost preferred the nights we took the car and drove along the coast looking for fresh air. Sometimes, on some belvedere, when the others were dancing, I could get in a few words with Doro or Clelia. Or exchange some serious nonsense with one of the older women. Then all I needed to feel alive again was a glass of wine or a breeze off the sea.
On the beach in the daytime it was another story. People talk with an odd caution when they are half naked; words no longer sound the same. When they stop talking, the very silence seems to contain ambiguities. Clelia, stretched on a rock, had an ecstatic way of enjoying the sun. Offering herself to the sky, she seemed to sink into the rock, answering with faint murmurs, a sigh, a twitch of her knee or elbow, whatever might be said to her by the nearest person. I soon realized that Clelia really didn't hear anything when she was stretched out like that. Doro understood and never spoke to her at all. He sat on his towel, hugging his knees, gloomy and restless. He never sprawled like Clelia. If he ever tried, before long he was twisting around, turning on his stomach or sitting up again.
But we were never alone. The whole beach swarmed and babbled. So Clelia preferred the rocks to the common sand, the hard and slippery stone. Now and then she would get up, shake out her hair, dazed and laughing, would ask us what we had been talking about, would look around to see who was there. Someone might be leaving the water, someone else trying it with his toes. Guido in his wrapper of white toweling was always turning up with new acquaintances and dropping them at the foot of the beach umbrella. And then he would climb to the rock, tease Clelia, and never go in swimming.
The best time was the afternoon or sunset when the warmth or color of the sea persuaded the most reluctant to take a dip or walk along the beach. Then we were almost alone, or there was just Guido talking cheerfully. Doro, who found a dark distraction in his painting, sometimes planted his easel on the rock and drew boats, umbrellas, streaks of color, happy enough to watch us from above and overhear our gossip. Once in a while, one of the group would appear in a boat, carefully beach it, and call out to us. In the silences that followed, we would listen to the slapping of the waves among the stones.
Friend Guido was always saying that this wave rustle was Clelia's vice, her secret, her unfaithfulness to all of us.
"I don't think so," Clelia said. "I listen to it when I'm naked and stretched out. I don't care who sees us."
"Who knows?" Guido said. "Who knows what conversations a woman like that carries on with the waves? I can imagine what you say, you and the sea, when you're in each other's arms."
Doro's seascapes—he finished two in those few days—were done in pale, fuzzy colors, almost as though the very violence of the sun and air, dazzling and deafening, had muted his strokes. Someone had climbed up behind Doro, followed his hand, and given him advice. He didn't reply. Once he told me that one amuses oneself the best one can. I tried to tell him that he wasn't painting from life because the sea was a good deal more beautiful than his pictures; it was enough just to look at it. In his place and with the talent he had, I would have done portraits; it's satisfying to guess at people's natures. Doro laughed and said that when the season was over he would close his paintbox and think no more about it.
We were joking about this one evening and strolling with Doro to a cafe for aperitifs when friend Guido observed in that crafty tone of his that nobody would have said that under the hard, dynamic shell of a man of the world there slumbered in Doro the soul of an artist. "Slumbers is right," Doro answered, careless and happy. "What doesn't slumber under the shells of us all? One just needs courage to uncover it and be oneself. Or at least to discuss it. There isn't enough discussion in the world."
"Out with it," I told him. "What have you discovered?"
"I've discovered nothing. But do you remember how much we talked when we were boys? We talked just for the fun of it. We knew very well it was only talk, but still we enjoyed it."
"Doro, Doro," I said. "You're getting old. You should leave these things to those children you don't have."
Then Guido burst out laughing, a pleasant laugh that screwed up his eyes. He put his hand on Doro's shoulder and held himself up, laughing. Incredulously, we looked at the half-bald head and hard eyes of a handsome man on vacation.
"Something is slumbering in Guido, too," Doro said. "Sometimes he laughs like a half-wit."
Later I noticed that Guido laughed this way only among men.
That evening, after we had left Doro and Clelia at the gate of their villa, we dropped the car at the hotel and took a short walk together. Following the shore, we talked about our friends, almost against our wills. Guido explained Doro's trip and his unexpected return, making fun of the restless artist. Curious how Doro had succeeded in convincing everyone of the seriousness of his game. Our little circle was even talking about encouraging him to show his work and make of his art something one might call a profession. "But of course," Clelia chimed in later, "that's what I always tell him myself."
"Bunk!" Guido said that evening.
"But Doro is fooling," I said.
Guido shut up for a while—he was wearing sandals and we shuffled along like a couple of monks. Then he stopped and declared sharply: "I know those two. I know what they are doing and what they want. But I don't know why Doro paints pictures."
"What's the harm in it? It distracts him."
What was wrong was that like all artists Doro was not satisfying his wife. "Meaning?" It meant that all this nervous brainwork was weakening his potency, the reason why all painters suffer periods of tremendous depression.
"Not sculptors?"
"All of them," Guido grumbled, "all those idiots who force their brains and don't know when to stop."
We were standing in front of the hotel. I asked him what kind of life, then, ought one to lead. "A healthy life," he said. "Work but not slavery. Have a good time, eat and talk. Above all, have a good time."
He stood in front of me, hands behind his back, swaying from side to side. His shirt, open and pulled back, gave him the air of a wise adolescent who knows the whole story, of a forty-year-old who has stayed adolescent out of sheer laziness. "You've got to understand life," he added, narrowing his eyes with an uneasy expression, "understand it when you're young."
5
Clelia had told me that every morning Doro escaped and went swimming in the milky sea of dawn. That was why he lazed behind his easel until noon. Sometimes she went along too, she said, but not tomorrow because tonight she was too sleepy. I promised Doro to keep him company and on that particular night I happened not to sleep. I got up with the first light and walked the cool and empty streets down to the still damp beach. I had to stop and watch the golden sunlight picking out and setting on fire the little trees along the mountain ridge, but as soon as I had sat down I saw a head coming ashore in the still water and then there emerged the dark, dripping figure of my young friend, the boy.
Naturally he came up to speak to me, rubbing his short, lean body dry with a towel. I looked out to sea, trying to discover Doro.
"How is it you're alone?" I asked.
He didn't reply—he was absorbed in drying off. When he finished, he sat down a short distance away, with his back to the water. I swung around sideways to watch the mountain burning with gold. Berti poked around with his fingertips in a little bundle, took out one cigarette, and lit it. Then he excused himself for having only one.
I said I was amazed to find him up so early. Berti gestured vaguely and asked me if I were waiting for somebody. I told him that by the sea one didn't wait for people. Then Berti slid down on his stomach, propped himself on his elbows, and looked at me while he smoked.
He told me he was disgusted with the carnival air the beach took on in the sun—all those babies, umbrellas, nurses, families. For his part, he would prohibit it. So I asked him why he came to the sea; he could stay in the city, where there weren't any umbrellas.
"The sun will come up soon," he said, twisting to look at the mountain.
We were quiet for a while in the almost complete silence.
"Are you staying long?" he asked me. I told him I didn't know, and looked out to sea again. A black spot began to appear. Berti also looked out and said: "It's your friend. He was on the buoy when I first came down. How well he swims! Do you swim?"
After a short while he threw away his cigarette and got up. "Will you be at home today?" he said. "I want to talk to you."
"You can just as well talk here," I said, raising my eyes.
"But you're expecting people."
I told him not to play the fool. What was the trouble, lessons?
Then Berti sat up and contemplated his knees. He began to talk like someone being cross-examined, stumbling every so often. The gist was that he was bored; he had no company and would be very, very happy to talk to me, to read some book together—no, not lessons—but just to read the way I sometimes had at school, explaining and discussing, telling them a lot of things he knew he didn't know.
I squinted at him coolly but interested. Berti was one of those boys who go to school because they are sent, who watch your mouth as you talk and pop their eyes at you vacantly. Now, bronzed and naked, he clasped his knees and smiled restlessly. Who knows, it occurred to me, perhaps these types are the most wide awake.
By this time Doro's head had almost reached the shore. Berti got up suddenly and said: "Goodbye." Other bathers were beginning to circulate among the bathhouses and I had the impression that Berti was chasing a skirt that had disappeared behind these cabins. But here was Doro coming out of the water, head down as if climbing a slope, smooth and dripping, his head glistening under the cap that made him look quite professional. He stopped and stood swaying in front of me, panting hard. His lungs were still heaving under his ribs from the swimming. Irresistibly I thought of Guido, and our conversation of the previous night. I must have smiled vaguely because Doro, pulling off his cap, said: "What's up?"
"Nothing," I replied. "I was thinking of that fine fellow Guido who is getting fat. Great thing not to be married!"
"If he took an hour's swim every morning, he'd become a new man," Doro said and fell to his knees on the sand.
At noon in the trattoria Berti showed up again looking for me. He paused among the tables with his jacket on his shoulders over a dark blue sports shirt. I beckoned him over. Grabbing a chair from one of the tables, he came over, but my look must have embarrassed him because he stopped, his jacket slipped to the floor, he reached for it and dropped the chair. I told him to sit down.
This time he offered me a cigarette and began immediately to talk. I lit my pipe without answering. I let him say whatever he wanted. He told me that for family reasons he had had to stop studying but had not yet found a job—and now that he'd stopped studying and seeing me he understood that studying, not like a schoolboy but on his own, was a smart thing to do. He said he envied me and had known for some time that I wasn't merely a teacher but also a good man. He had many things to discuss with me.
"For instance?" I said.
For instance, he replied, why didn't they talk things over with the teacher at school and perhaps even take walks with him? Was it really necessary to waste one's time because a few dumb clucks keep holding up the class?
"In fact, you wanted so much to study that school wasn't enough for you and you took lessons."
Berti smiled and said that was another matter.
"And I'm sorry to hear," I went on, "that your parents are not millionaires. Why do you make them spend money on private lessons?"
He smiled again, in a way that had something feminine about it and also contemptuous. It's women who answer like that. Some woman had taught him the trick, I thought.
Berti kept me company part of the way back—I was going on an expedition with Clelia's friends that day—and told me again that he understood very well that I had come to the sea for a rest and that he had no intention of forcing me to give him lessons, but at least he hoped I might tolerate his company and might exchange a few words
with him sometime on the beach. This time I was the one to give him a womanly smirk. Leaving him in the middle of the road, I said: "By all means, if you are really alone."
That day's trip—we were all packed into Guido's car—had a sorry outcome. One of the women, a certain Mara, a relative of Guido's, slipped on a rock while she was gathering blackberries, and broke a collarbone. We had climbed along our usual mountain road beyond the night spot, beyond the last little scattered houses, among pines and red cliffs, to the level place where I had seen the sun breaking out the morning before. When we carried the poor girl to the road, it was plain that we couldn't all get in the car. A very worried Guido wanted to stretch the groaning Mara out on the cushions. There was still room for Clelia and two other women, who grinned back at Doro and me; so it ended with the two of us walking back on foot. A couple of hundred yards along, we saw the second of the two girls sitting on a heap of gravel.
Doro wound up our conversation in a hurry: "This is what it means to live in a crowd of women."
They had obliged the other girl to get out to make more room for Mara, who might really have broken her back for the fuss she made. It fell to her because she was the only girl in the bunch. "We others aren't women," she grumbled. "Mara has had her fun for this year. They are taking her back to Genoa." She gave us sidelong looks as she walked. Doro smiled her a welcoming smile. They talked about Mara, about how her husband was going to take it, a man so energetic that he left his office at Sestri only on Sundays. "He'll be happy his wife had an accident," Doro said. "Finally he'll get to spend a summer with her."
The girl—her name was Ginetta—laughed spitefully. "Do you think so?" she said, fixing us with her gray eyes. "I know that men like to have their wives a good way off. They're egotists."
Doro laughed. "What wisdom, Ginetta! I'll bet that right now Mara is thinking of something else." Then he looked at me. "It takes boys or bachelors to make remarks like that."
The Beach Page 3
