The Beach (2 page)

The bricklayer led us to his house. He told us to keep quiet so as not to wake the women and his father. He left us on the threshing floor in front of the big dark openings of the hayloft, in a streak of shadow from a haystack, and showed up again in a few minutes with two black bottles under his arm, laughing like an idiot. Taking the dog with us, we all lurched down the field behind the house and sat on the edge of a ditch. We had to drink from the bottle, something that bothered the young man with the necktie,- but Ginio said with a laugh: "All right, you s.o.b.'s... drink," and we all drank.

"Here we can sing," Ginio said, clearing his throat. He let go with a solo, his voice filling the valley. The dog couldn't contain himself any longer: other dogs answered from far and near, and ours also kept up his barking. Doro laughed in a large, happy voice, took another swig, and joined in Ginio's song. The two of them together soon silenced the dogs, which was at least enough to make me realize the song was melancholy, with much lingering on the lowest notes and words oddly gentle in that rough dialect. It may well be that the moon and the wine played their part in making them seem so. What I am sure of is the joy, the sudden happiness I felt as I stretched out my hand to touch Doro's shoulder. I felt a catch in my breath, and suddenly loved him because we had come back together after such a long time.

That other character—a certain Biagio, it turned out—every so often yowled a note, a phrase, and then dropped his head and picked up the conversation with me where he had left it. I explained to him that I was not from Genoa and that my work was paid by the state because of my university degree. Then he told me he wanted to get married but wanted to do it up brown, and to do it up brown one needed Doro's luck, who at Genoa had picked up both a wife and an agency. The word "agency" gives me the creeps,- I lost patience and said sharply: "But do you know Doro's wife?... If you don't, keep your mouth shut."

It's when I talk like that to people that I know I'm over thirty. I thought about this a while, that night, while Doro and the bricklayer started on their army stories. The bottle came around to me, after lime-stained Ginio had wiped the mouth with the palm of his hand, and I took a long pull, the better to relieve in wine the feelings I couldn't relieve in song.

"Yes, sir, excuse me," Ginio said as he took the bottle back, "but if you come back next year I'll be married and we'll crack one in my house."

"Do you always let your father order you around?" Doro said.

"It's not me who lets, it's he who orders."

"He's been ordering you around for thirty years now. Hasn't he broken his neck yet?"

"It would be easier for you to break his," said the type with the necktie, laughing nervously.

"And what does he say about Orsolina? Will he let you marry her?"

"I don't know yet," Ginio said, drawing back from the ditch and squirming on the ground like an eel. "If he doesn't, so much the better," he grumbled, two yards away. That little man as white as a baker, who did monkeyshines and used the familiar
tu
with Doro —I remember him every time I see the moon. Later I made Clelia laugh heartily when I described him. She laughed in that charming way of hers and said: "What a boy Doro is! He will never change."

But I didn't tell Clelia what happened afterward. Ginio and Doro started another song and this time we all bawled it out. It ended with a furious voice from the farmhouse yelling to shut up. In the sudden quiet Biagio shouted back some insolence and took the song up again defiantly. Doro began again too, when Ginio jumped to his feet. "No," he stammered, "he recognized me. It's my father." But Biagio didn't give a damn. Ginio and Doro had to jump him to stop his mouth. We were still swaying and sliding around on the same spot of grass when Doro had an idea. "The Murette sisters," he said to Ginio. "We can't sing here, but they used to sing once. Let's go see Rosa." And he set off right away, while the Biagio character grabbed my arm and whispered in a panic: "Oh, my God. That's where the
brigadiere
lives." The situation looked bad, but I caught up with Doro and pulled him back. "Don't mix wine and women, Doro," I shouted. "Remember we're supposed to be gentlemen."

But Ginio came up in a determined manner, admitted that the three girls must have put on weight, still, we weren't going for that but only to sing a little, and suppose they
are
fat, what the hell? a woman should be well-rounded. He yanked and hauled at Doro, saying: "Rosa will remember, you'll see." We were on the main road under the moon, all milling excitedly around Doro, who was strangely undecided.

Rosa won, because Biagio said nastily: "Can't you see they won't want you because you're filthy with lime?", at which point he got a punch in the face that sent him stumbling to the ground three yards away. He then disappeared as if by magic and we heard him calling out in the silence of the moon: "Thanks, engineer. Ginio's father will hear about this."

Doro and Ginio had already started up again, and I with them. I couldn't make up my mind what to say. If I had second thoughts, it was only that this dirty bricklayer would shame me in front of Doro in the intensity of their common memories, which they ran through excitedly as they approached the village. They talked at random, and that rough dialect was enough to restore to Doro the true flavor of his life, of the wine, flesh, and joy in which he had been born. I felt cut off, helpless. I took Doro's arm and joined them, grumbling. After all, I had drunk the same wine.

What we did under those windows was rash. I realized that Biagio must have hid himself in some corner of the little square and said so to Doro, who ignored it. Laughing and grinning like an idiot, Ginio led off by knocking at the worm-eaten door, under the moon. We were talking in stage whispers, amused and half cocked. But nobody answered; the windows stayed shut. Then Doro began to cough; then Ginio collected pebbles and began throwing them up,- then we argued because I said he was going to crack the windows; then Doro finally let himself go with a terrible howl, bestial, like country drunks at the end of a song. All the silences of the moon seemed to shudder. Various distant dogs from who knows what courtyards joined in hideously.

Doors slammed and shutters creaked. Ginio started singing, something like the earlier song, but Doro's voice soon joined in and blanketed his. Someone was shouting from the other side of the square; a light glimmered at a window. A chorus of curses and threats had just begun when the bricklayer threw himself against the door, raining kicks and thumps with his fists. Doro grabbed my shoulders and pulled me into the belt of shadow from a nearby house.

"Let's see if they douse him with a washbasin," he whispered hoarsely, laughing. "I want to see him drenched like a goose."

A dog howled from very close by. I began to feel ashamed. Then we were silent. Even Ginio, who was holding one bare foot in his hands and hopping around on the cobblestones. When we shut up, so did the voices from the windows. The light disappeared. Only the intermittent barking kept on. It was then we heard a shutter up above being carefully creaked open.

Ginio squatted in the shadow between us. "They've opened," he breathed in my face. I pushed him away, remembering he was dusted with lime. "Go on, introduce yourself," Doro told him dryly. Ginio shouted from the darkness, peering up. I felt his cold, rough neck under my hand. "Let's sing," he said to Doro. Doro ignored him and gave a low whistle as if he were calling a dog. They were chattering among themselves up there.

"Come on," said Doro, "introduce yourself," and shoved him out into the moonlight.

Ginio, lurching into the light, kept laughing and raised his arm as if to ward off some missile. All was quiet at the window. His trousers began falling, tangled a foot, and nearly toppled him. He stumbled and sat down.

"Rosina, O Rosina." He stretched his mouth but choked back his voice. "Do you know who it is?"

A low laugh came from topside, then suddenly stopped.

Ginio went back to playing the eel, this time on hard ground. Pushing with his hands, he wriggled back toward the edge of the shadow. Doro was now standing, ready to give him a kick. But Ginio jumped out quickly, shouting meantime: "It's Doro, Doro of the Ca Rosse, come back from Genoa to see you all." He seemed out of his mind.

There was a movement above and a creak of lighted windows being opened. Then a heavy thump from behind the door, swinging it out, splitting the moonlight that soaked it. Ginio, nailed to the spot in the middle of his dance, was two steps from the doorway. A thickset man in shirtsleeves had appeared.

Just at that moment a harsh, insolent voice sounded from the bottom of the square—the voice of that Biagio. "Marina, don't open,- they're drunk as beasts." Exclamations and scufflings came from the window. I could vaguely see waving arms.

But already the man and Ginio had collided on the stairs and were crashing around, panting like mad dogs. The man had black trousers with red piping. Doro, who was gripping my shoulder, let go suddenly and joined the fight. He kicked out at random, trying to find an opening, circling around. Then he quit and stood under the window. "Are you Rosina or Marina?" he said, looking up. No reply. "Are you Rosina or Marina?" he yelled, his foot on the doorstep.

A crash followed; something had fallen, a vase of flowers as we discovered later. Doro jumped back, still looking up to where at least two women were fussing around. "We didn't do it on purpose," said a sharp-voiced woman in exasperation. "Did we hurt you?"

"Who is speaking?" Doro shouted.

"I'm Marina," a softer, rather caressing voice answered. "Are you hurt?"

At that point I left the shadow, too, to speak my piece. Ginio and that other man had broken apart and were circling each other, grunting and fanning the air. But suddenly the carabiniere jumped over to the door, pulled Doro away, and shoved him back. The women upstairs squealed.

All around the square, windows opened again; there was a cross fire of hard, angry voices. The man had shut the door and one could hear him slamming down the wooden bar behind. A rosary of insults and complaints cascaded around us, dominated by the sharp voice of the first of the two women. I heard—and this is what finally sobered me—Doro's name running from window to window. Ginio set up a new storm of shouting and kicking the door. From windows around the square, apples and other hard projectiles—peach stones perhaps—began to rain down, and then, when Doro was seizing hold of Ginio and pulling him away, a flash from the window and a great explosion that silenced everybody.

3

The first evening, walking along the seashore with Clelia, I told her what I could about Doro's exploit, which wasn't much. Still, the extravagance of the thing brought a grudging smile. "What egotists," she said. "And me bored down here. Why didn't you take me with you?"

Seeing us arrive the afternoon after our escapade, Clelia showed no sign of surprise. I had not seen her for more than two years. We met her on the stairs of the villa, she in her shorts, sunburned and chestnut-haired. She held out her hand to me with a confident smile, her eyes under the tan showing brighter and harder than when I last saw her. Right away she began to discuss what we were going to do the next day. Just to please me, she postponed her descent to the beach. I jokingly pointed out how sleepy Doro was and left them alone to make their explanations. That first evening I went looking for a room and found it in a secluded back alley, with a window that gave on a big, twisted olive tree unaccountably growing up from among the cobbles. Many times afterward, coming home alone, I found myself contemplating that tree, which is perhaps what I remember best from the whole summer. Seen from below, it was knotty and bare, but made a solid, silvery mass of dry, paperlike leaves. It gave me the sensation of being in the country, an unknown country; often I sniffed to see if perhaps it might smell of salt. It has always seemed peculiar to me that on the outer rim of the coast, between land and ocean, flowers and trees should grow and good fresh water should run.

A steep, angular stone stairway led up the outside of the house to my room. Underneath, on the ground floor, every so often, while I was washing or shaving, an uproar of discordant voices broke out, one of them a woman's. I couldn't quite make out if they were cheerful or angry. I looked through the window grating on my way down, but it was too dark by then to see in. Only when I was a good distance away did one of the voices gain the upper hand, a fresh, strong voice I couldn't quite identify but which I'd heard already. I was about to go back and clear up the mystery when it occurred to me that, after all, we were neighbors and one always meets one's neighbors too soon in any case.

"Doro is in the woods," Clelia said that evening as we walked along the beach. "He's painting the sea." She turned as she walked, widening her eyes a little. "The sea is worth it. You watch it too."

We looked at the sea, and then I told her I couldn't understand why she was bored. Clelia said, laughing: "Tell me again about that little man under the moon. What was it he shouted? I was also looking at the moon the other night."

"Probably he was making faces. Just four drunks weren't enough to make the woman laugh."

"Were you drunk?"

"Evidently."

"What boys!" Clelia said.

Ginio's night became a joke between the two of us; all I had to do was allude to the little white man and his monkeyshines for Clelia to brighten up and laugh. But when that night I told her that Ginio was not a little bald old man but a contemporary of Doro's, she looked alarmed. "Why didn't you tell me? Now you've spoiled everything. Was he a peasant?"

"A bricklayer's assistant, to be precise."

Clelia sighed. "After all," I told her, "you had seen that place, too. You can picture it. If Doro had been born two doors up, you might be Ginio's wife right now."

"What a horrible idea!" Clelia said, smiling.

That night, after we had dined on the balcony, while Doro was stretched in the armchair smoking and silent and Clelia had gone to dress for the evening, my mind kept going over our previous conversation. A certain Guido had been mentioned, a forty-year-old colleague of Doro's and a bachelor, whom I'd already met at Genoa and found again on the beach in Clelia's circle. He was one of her friends and it came out that he had been with them on that auto trip when they had passed through Doro's village. Clelia, without being asked, and stirred by a fit of malice, told the whole story of that expedition, speaking with the air of answering a question I hadn't asked. They were coming home from some trip to the mountains,- the friend Guido was at the wheel and Doro had remarked: "Did you know that I was born in those hills thirty years ago?" Then all of them, Clelia most of all, had pestered Guido until he agreed to take them up there. It had been a crazy business,- they had to warn the following car of the delay and it never did keep up with them. They waited for it more than an hour at the crossroads. Night was falling when it finally caught up; having eaten as best they could in the village, they had to wind through mysterious little roads not on the map and cross so many hills it was nearly dawn when the cars rejoined on the Genoa road. Doro sat next to Guido to point out the places, and nobody managed to sleep. A real madness.