The Beach (3 page)

Now that Clelia had left, I asked Doro if he had made peace again. As I spoke, I thought to myself: "What they need is a son," but I had never brought the subject up with Doro, not even as a joke. And Doro said: "You can only make peace if you've made war. What kind of war have you ever seen me make?" At first I kept still. For all our openness, Clelia had never been a subject to discuss. I was about to say that one could, for instance, make war by catching a train and escaping, but I hesitated, and just then Clelia called me.

"What's Doro's mood?" she asked through the closed door.

"Fine," I said.

"Sure?"

Clelia came to the door, still fixing her hair. She looked for me in the shadow where I was waiting for her.

"What, you're friends and you don't know that when Doro doesn't rise when I tease him it means he's bored, fed up?"

Then I began on her. "Haven't you two made up yet?"

Clelia drew back to the bedroom and fell silent. Then she reappeared quickly, saying: "Why don't you turn on the light?" She took my arm and we crossed the room together in shadow. As we were about to emerge on the lighted landing, she gripped my arm and whispered: "I'm desperate. I wish Doro could be with you a lot because you're friends. I know you're good for him and distract him..."

I tried to stop and say something.

"... No, we haven't quarreled," Clelia added quickly. "He isn't even jealous. He doesn't even dislike me. It's only that he's become someone else. We can't make peace because we haven't fought. Do you understand? But don't say anything."

That night, in Guido's car as usual, we arrived at a spot high over the sea at the end of a winding road that swarmed with bathers. There was a small orchestra and a few people dancing. But the charm of the place lay in the small tables with shaded lamps scattered around in niches of the rock, looking sheerly down on the water. Flowers and aromatic plants added their scent to a breeze off the sea. Way below, along the shore, one could make out a tiny rim of lights.

I did my best to be alone with Clelia, but without success. First it was Doro, then Guido, then one of her female friends, who showed up one by one but kept changing partners so often that no real conversation was possible. Clelia was always busy. Finally I caught her and said: "I dance, too, you know," to her mild surprise, and took her off under the pines away from the floor. "Let's sit down," I said, "and you can tell me the whole story."

I tried to get her to explain why she didn't have it out with Doro. One has to bring things to a head, I told her, the way one shakes a watch to get it started again. I refused to believe that a woman like her couldn't with a simple tone of her voice bring to his senses a man who, after all, was only behaving like a boy.

"But Doro
is
open with me," Clelia said. "He even told me about the serenade to Rosina. Was it fun?"

I think I blushed, but more from irritation than embarrassment.

"And I am open, too," Clelia continued, smiling. She sounded sulky. "Our friend Guido tells me, in fact, that my fault is to be open with everybody; I never give anyone the illusion of having a private secret with him alone. Sweeties! But that's how I'm made. It's why I fell for Doro..."

Here she stopped and gave me a swift glance. "Do you find me improper?" I said nothing. I was bothered. Clelia fell silent, then resumed: "You see that I am right. But I
am
improper... like Doro. That's why we are fond of each other."

"Well then, peace ... What's all the fuss about?"

Clelia groaned in that childish way of hers.

"See, you're like all the others. But don't you understand that we can't quarrel? We love each other. If I could hate him the way I hate myself, then of course I would abuse him. But neither of us deserves it. See?"

"No."

Clelia fell silent again. We listened to the shuffling on the dance floor, the orchestra stopping and someone starting to sing.

"What advice did your Guido give you?" I asked in the same tone as before.

Clelia shrugged her shoulders. "Selfish advice. He's making love to me."

"For instance? To have a secret from Doro?"

"To make him jealous," Clelia said, embarrassed. "That fool. He doesn't realize that Doro would leave me alone and suffer in silence."

At this point, one of Clelia's female friends arrived, looking for her, calling her and laughing. I stayed by myself on the stone bench. I was finding my usual perverse pleasure in keeping apart, knowing that a few steps away in the light someone else was moving around, laughing and dancing. Nor did I lack for something to reflect upon. I lit my pipe and smoked it through. Then I got up and circled among the tables until I met Doro. "Let's have a drink at the bar," I suggested.

"Just to have things straight," I began when we were alone. "May I tell your wife that to avoid a beating we had to run off the next morning?"

We stood there laughing, and Doro answered with the shadow of a snicker. "Did she ask you that?"

"No, I'm asking you."

"Go ahead. Tell her anything you like."

"But aren't you fighting?"

Doro raised his glass and stared at me thoughtfully. "No," he said quietly.

"Well, why is it then that every so often Clelia looks at you with that scared, doglike expression? She has the look of a woman who's been beaten up. Have you been beating her?"

Just then Clelia's voice reached us. She was walking across the dance floor with a man. "Drunks..." We saw her waving at us. Doro followed her with his eyes, vaguely nodding until she was hidden again by her partner's back.

"As you can see for yourself, she's happy," he said quietly. "Why should I beat her? We get on better than a lot of people. She's never tried to anger me. We even agree about amusements, which is the hardest thing."

"I know you get on well." I stopped short.

Doro said nothing. He looked at his glass with a depressed air, lowered his head, held the glass away, then emptied it quickly, half turning around as if to clear his throat.

"The trouble is," he said brusquely, getting up, "we trust each other too much. One of us says certain things just to make the other happy."

Clelia and Guido were approaching us among the tables.

"Does that apply to me?" I asked.

"To you, too," Doro muttered.

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."