The Beach (4 page)

"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."

"I'm not saying anything," I muttered.

That Ginetta was a handsome girl. She walked vigorously and had a habit of tossing back her hair like a mane. She was about to say something when Doro cut her short.

"Is Umberto coming this year?"

"Bachelors are hypocrites," she replied.

"Oh, I don't know," he said.

"You're getting the best of both worlds, Ginetta, marrying a bachelor who is already leaving you alone. What will he do to you next?"

Half serious, Ginetta gazed in front of her and tossed her head.

"It's quite usual for a husband to have been a bachelor first," I observed quietly. "One has to begin somewhere."

But Ginetta was discussing Umberto. She told us that he wrote that at night the hyenas howled like babies who refuse to go off to sleep. Darling Ginetta, he told her, if our children make so much noise I'll go sleep in a hotel. Then he told her that the chief difference between the desert and civilization was that in the first you couldn't shut your eyes because of the noise.

"What an idiot!" Ginetta laughed. "We're always joking."

Ginetta's chatter and the way the road twisted among the pines, allowing frequent glimpses of the sea, made me cheerful and light-headed. It seemed as if the sea, way off below, were drawing us on. Even Doro swung along more freely. Evening came almost at once.

"Poor Mara," Ginetta said. "When will she be able to swim?"

That evening we found the umbrella deserted and the beach already empty. We went into the water, Ginetta and I, and swam side by side as if racing, not daring to part company in the silence of the empty sea. We returned without a word, and I could see between my strokes the pine-covered hillside we had descended a short while before. We reached shallow water,- Ginetta emerged gleaming like a fish and went to her bathhouse. Doro threw away the cigarette he had been smoking while he waited.

We walked together up to the villa. Clelia had already gone. At dinner that evening I learned that Mara had returned to Sestri with Guido and that we would be alone without a car for several days. The news pleased me, because I loved to spend the nights in peaceful conversation.

"That fool," Clelia said. "She might have waited for the end of the season before breaking her collarbone."

"Ginetta says that we men are the egotists," Doro observed.

"Do you like Ginetta?" Clelia asked me.

"She's a very healthy girl," I said. "Why? Is there something else?"

"Oh, nothing. Doro maintains that I looked like her when I was a girl."

I ventured the opinion that all girls look alike. One had to see them as women to tell them apart.

Clelia shrugged her shoulders. "I wonder how you judge me?" she murmured.

"I lack the necessary evidence," I said. "Only Doro could judge you properly."

Doro surprised us by joking about it, saying that a man in love has lost the use of his eyes, that his judgment doesn't count. The way he talked, he sounded like Guido. I stared at him in amazement. The best of it was that Clelia ignored us and merely shrugged her shoulders again, grumbling that we were all the same.

"What's the matter?" I said with a laugh.

Nothing was the matter, and Clelia began to complain in a small voice that it was like listening to some old fossil talking, that just to think of her girlhood, her childhood rather, when she was a schoolgirl and went to her first dance and put on her first long stockings, made her shudder. Doro listened abstractedly, barely smiling. "I was an overanxious child," Clelia said gloomily. "I kept thinking that if tomorrow Papa should suddenly lose his money and if the kitchen should burn down, we wouldn't have enough to eat. I made a little cache of nuts and dried figs in the garden and waited for disaster so that I could offer Papa my provisions. I would have said to Papa and Mama: 'Don't despair. Clelia thinks of everything. You've punished her, but now forgive her and never do it again.' What a fool I was!"