The Beach (7 page)

We passed some very uncomplimentary remarks about Guido on the beach that evening. The most spiteful were the girls, who had been counting on a ride. Berti, established now and circulating among us, seemed the only one who didn't care. I heard him saying to Ginetta that after all you came to the seaside to swim and not to go around looking at tourist attractions.

"Well, now," I said to him, sitting down nearby on the sand, "you're not thinking any more about readings?"

"Certainly I am," he replied.

"Even with these girls around?"

He gave me a black look. "I?" he said. Sitting there against the rock, he seemed really annoyed. Yet, not long before, he had been standing up to them all in the most condescending, detached manner.

"You're not going to tell me that you dislike us too. After all, you came here to see us."

Berti smiled. Ginetta passed in front of us, fixing her bathing cap before going in. From where I was sitting, as I watched her loping along in the act of covering one ear, she seemed very tall, more than a woman. Berti looked down at his knees and muttered: "They bother me. Who can understand them—girls?"

Doro loomed over us, about to throw himself on the sand. "This is the student," I told him. I introduced them. They knelt up and shook hands.

Then Doro began chatting with me inconsequentially, in one of those brusque, bizarre moods we used to have as students. It was clear that Berti was out of it. One part of me was listening to Doro, the other keeping an eye on my young friend.

Suddenly Berti asked point-blank: "Engineer, will you be staying here long?"

Doro looked through us and didn't answer. Berti waited, blushing right through his tan. After a long pause, I said that I was leaving at the end of August. But Doro remained implacably silent. All three of us looked out to sea, where Ginetta was just going in and Clelia unexpectedly emerging. We watched her approach and I couldn't decide whether to smile. She made a grimace; her foot had slipped on the shingle.

"Come now, the sea is yours," she called out to us, waving, and made for the umbrella. Doro got up. "How about a short walk?" he said. I got up, hardly noticing Berti, who was still gazing at the horizon with a stoic air.

Later, fresh and rested, we were gathered around the umbrella, Clelia smoking a cigarette, I my pipe.

"Who knows where Berti has gone?" I said. Doro didn't move. Stretched between us, he looked up at the sky. "You are real friends," Clelia said. "You're inseparable."

"I make a screen for his loves," I said. "There's a woman who otherwise would be jealous."

Clelia loved this kind of talk and I had to relate the whole business, including our conversation in the trattoria. Doro said nothing; he went on staring into space.

9

The next time I saw Berti he was sitting moodily in the trattoria. He had obviously entered for lack of something better to do. He told me he wanted to visit me in the afternoon so that we could read something together.

"Don't you like girls any more?" I asked.

"Which ones? I hate them," he answered.

"You don't mean to say it's the engineer's company you're after?"

He asked me if Doro were really my friend. I said yes, he was, he and his wife were the dearest friends I had.

"His wife?"

He didn't realize that Clelia was Doro's wife. His eyes gleamed.

"Really?" he repeated and lowered his eyes with that impassive and irritated air that was his way of being serious. "What did you think?" I murmured. "That she was a ballerina?"

Berti crumpled the tablecloth and heard me out. Then he raised two bright, ingenuous eyes, his boy eyes, and asked once more if he could come up to my room that afternoon.

"Nobody will break in on us?" he asked, evidently thinking of Clelia.

"What's this?" I asked. "You hate women and blush just thinking about them?"

Berti made some idiotic reply and we fell silent. Finally we got up. He was taciturn along the street, but he answered with increasing animation, like a person talking at random to ease his mind of some great thought. I stopped a moment under the olive tree to speak to the landlady. He waited for me at the foot of the stairs, eyeing and caressing the smooth stone which formed the balustrade,- a half-tender, half-disdainful smile on his lips. "Come up," I said, rejoining him.

When we were inside, he went to the window, leaned his back against the wall, and watched me pace around the room.

"Professor, I am happy," he burst out unexpectedly. I had turned my back to rinse out my mouth.

I asked him why and he replied with a wave of the hand, as if to say: "That's how it is."

Even that afternoon we did no reading. He began telling me how every so often he felt an urge to work, a mania, a need to do something; not so much to study as to have some responsible position, some real work to give himself up to, day and night, so as to become a man like the rest of us, like me. "Well, work then," I told him. "You're young. I wish I were in your place." Then he said he didn't see why people made so much of being young; he would rather be thirty—it would be so much time gained—the intervening years were stupid.

"But all years are stupid. It's only when they're over that they become interesting."

No, Berti said, he couldn't really find anything interesting in his fifteen, in his seventeen years; he was glad they were behind him.

I told him the good thing about his age was that the foolishnesses didn't count, for the very reason that displeased him, because he was still considered a boy.

He looked at me with a smile.

"Then the things I do aren't foolish?"

"It depends," I said. "If you annoy the wives of my friends, it will certainly be a piece of foolishness as well as a discourtesy."

"I don't bother anyone," he protested.

"That remains to be seen."

He confessed in the course of our talk that he had stupidly assumed that the lady was my friend's mistress and that to learn she was his wife instead had pleased him, because it made him furious that women, just because they were women, should offer themselves to the first comer. "There are days when the world and life itself seem like one big cathouse."

At that moment a shrill voice I recognized interrupted him, an exasperated woman. It rose from the street, talking back to our landlady. We looked at each other. Berti fell silent and lowered his eyes. I knew it was the woman of the beach, his mistress in a manner of speaking. Berti stayed put.

The landlady said: "He's not here; I know nothing about it." The woman shrilled back, declaring that nobody ever showed
her
such lack of respect—it would take more than holy water to rinse the landlady's mouth out, she proclaimed.

When they had shut up as someone walked by, I waited for Berti to speak, but he was looking off into space, glum and distracted.

As he went off, I told him to behave so that these things wouldn't happen. I cut our meeting short and closed the door.

He didn't show up at the rocks that evening. Guido did, mopping sweat off his face. Clelia teased him by asking when we would be going dancing on the hill again.

"Do you hear that?" he said to Doro. "Your wife wants to dance."

"Not me," Doro said.

Clelia was telling me about a small loggia in her uncle's old palazzo that she had just thought of that evening and wanted to see once again. Guido listened for a while, then said that I was just the man to appreciate those voices from the past.

Clelia smiled, taken aback, and replied that we all were awaiting our news of the present from him. We looked at Guido, who winked—for my benefit, I imagine—and said to Clelia that at least she should tell us about something interesting: her first ball, for instance—a woman's first ball is always full of surprises.

"No, no," said Clelia. "We want to hear about
your
first ball. Or maybe about the last, yesterday evening."

Doro got up and said, "Take it easy. I'm going swimming."

"Exactly," I said. "People are always talking about the first balls of young girls. What about those of little boys? What happens to future Guidos the first time they embrace a girl?"

"There isn't any first time," Clelia said. "The future Guidos don't begin at a given date. They've been at it even before they were born."

We kept it up like this until Doro returned. Clelia enjoyed aggressive jokes like that, adding, unless I am mistaken, a teasing
sous-entendu,
a touch of malice that Guido sometimes missed. Or rather he had an air of being too preoccupied to notice it. But the mock-angry pleasure he took in the game made me smile.

I said: "You seem like husband and wife."

"Clod!" said Clelia.

"What else can you do but joke with a woman like Clelia?" Guido said.

"There's only one man you can't joke with," I said in my turn.

"Naturally," Clelia agreed.

Doro turned around and flung himself on the sand in the sun's last rays. After a while Guido got up and said he was going to the bar. He walked off among the poles of closed umbrellas, threading his way through the coming and going of the evening beach. Some distance away, Ginetta and her young friends were noisily greeting an arriving boat. The three of us were quiet; I listened to the thud of the waves and the muted cries.

"Do you know, Clelia," I said finally, "that after seeing you my student decided to change his life?"

Doro raised his head. Clelia opened her eyes in amazement.

"He has chucked that lover of his and damns all women. It's an infallible sign."

"Thanks," Clelia murmured.

Doro lay back again. "Considering that Doro is present," I went on, "I can tell you. The boy's in love with you."

Clelia smiled without moving. "I'm sorry for that woman... Isn't there anything I can do?"

I smiled.

"When you think of all those hungry girls," Clelia said, "it's a nuisance."

"Why then?" I said. "He is happy. He's happier than we are. You should see him caressing trees.. . He's drunk with it."

"If it takes him like that..." Clelia said.

Doro turned over on the sand. "Oh, cut it out..." he said.

We told him to keep quiet because he had nothing to do with it. Clelia looked down awhile without speaking. "But is it really true?" she asked suddenly.

I laughed and reassured her. "What does that fool see in me?" she asked. She looked at me suspiciously. "You're all fools," she said.

I repeated that my student was happy and that was good enough; I wouldn't mind being a fool on those terms.

Clelia smiled and said: "That's true. It reminds me of when I stayed in the loggia and instead of studying I threw twists of paper down at the necks of passers-by. Once a man looked up and scared me to death. He wanted to know what I had written to him. It was a Latin composition."

Doro laughed, stretched out with his face in the sand.

"And that man was Guido," I said.

Clelia stared at me. What did I have against Guido, she asked. I stuck to my guns. "I know him," I said.

"Guido doesn't do those things," Clelia said. "Guido respects women."

10

Somewhat hesitatingly Guido invited me to go up there one evening in the car. "Nina will be there. Sure you won't mind?" He glanced at Berti, who had been dawdling a few steps behind to let me talk, then looked questioningly at me. I asked him to bring Berti along, a young lad of spirit who could dance, which was more than I could say for myself. Guido frowned and said: "Of course." Then I introduced them.

It was an evening of silences. Berti had expected to find Clelia and instead had to dance with Nina, who looked him up and down and lost her tongue in the process. The rest of us sat silently at the table watching the couples. It was not that Guido wanted to get rid of Nina; the remarks he dropped seemed to me only his way of letting off steam. "I've reached the age, professor, when I can't change my way of life, but if Nina wants to have some fun, see new places, new company to distract her, I would look favorably on the idea."

"You've only to tell her."

"No," Guido said. "She feels lonely. You understand; a man has friends, relationships to keep up. He can't always give her all his time."

"Wouldn't a frank explanation do the trick?" I suggested.

"With other women, but not with her. She's a friend, an old friend, you see... a demanding woman, do I make myself clear?"

Then Nina had a few dances with him; Berti smoked cigarettes at the table, glancing around. He asked me if the woman was Guido's wife.

"Not she," I told him. "She belongs to the world you dream about. Who are you looking for?"

"No one."

"My friends aren't coming. When this woman is here, they stay away."

That night under the stairway by the olive tree I asked him if Nina had appealed to him, and seeing his smirk I said that he would have done Guido a great favor if he had amused her for a while. "But if he is tired of her, why doesn't he chuck her?" Berti said.

"Try and ask him," I said.

Berti did not ask him, but instead, the evening after, having discovered that we would be going up to dance with Clelia and Guido, he went up on foot—I don't know if he had eaten or not. We saw him threading down among the tables to a seat in the back. He had a soft drink in front of him and threw a cigarette away. But he didn't move.

Ginetta didn't happen to be in the party. Now that I seemed to be able to read his mind, I realized that he had expected Ginetta to be there to lead off the dance with. Guido, very much rejuvenated by his evening of freedom, was looking around, pleased with himself. He waved vaguely in Berti's direction. Berti got up and came over. Being a coward, I stared at the floor. "How is the signora?" Berti asked.

Clelia broke the embarrassment with an irrepressible burst of laughter. Then Guido answered: "We are all very well," in a tone of voice and with a large wave of the hand that made us all smile, except Berti, who blushed. He stood there looking at us until I, squinting at Clelia, couldn't resist saying: "This is the famous Berti." Doro made him a bored sign to sit down, grumbling: "Stick with us."