Agostino said nothing in reply and ran barefoot down the stone steps of the staircase. Behind him, he heard the door to her bedroom closing softly.
He raced down the stairs, slipped on his sandals in the entryway, opened the door, and went out into the street. He was immediately struck by a wall of torrid air, the silent ardor of the scorching August sun. At one end of the street, the sea glittered, motionless, beneath the distant, tremulous air. At the opposite end the red tree trunks of the pine grove tilted beneath the sultry green mass of their rounded foliage.
He hesitated, wondering whether it would be easier to go to the Vespucci beach along the water or through the pine grove. He decided on the beach because, although the sun beat down more heavily there, at least he wouldn’t risk walking by it without noticing. He traveled the full length of the street to where it merged with the seashore, then he started to walk quickly, staying close to the walls.
He didn’t realize it, but what attracted him to Vespucci, besides the company of the boys, was their brutal mocking of his mother and her alleged lovers. He could sense that his former affection was turning into an entirely different sentiment, both objective and cruel, and he felt he should seek out and cultivate the boys’ heavy-handed irony for the simple fact that it had hastened this change. He couldn’t say why he wanted so much to stop loving his mother, why he hated her love. Perhaps it was his resentment at being deceived and at having believed her to be so different from what she really was. Perhaps, since he couldn’t love her without difficulty and insult, he preferred not to love her at all and to see her instead as merely a woman. He instinctively tried to free himself once and for all from the burden and shame of his former innocent, betrayed affection, which he now saw as little more than naïveté and foolishness. This was why the same cruel attraction that had made him stop and stare at his mother’s back a few minutes earlier was now compelling him to seek out the brutal and humiliating company of the boys. Wasn’t their irreverent talk — like his glimpse of her nudity — a way to destroy the filial condition he now found so repellent? A bitter pill that would either kill or cure him.
When he came within sight of Vespucci, he slowed his pace. Although his heart was beating rapidly and he was almost out of breath, he assumed an attitude of indifference. Saro was sitting under the tarp as usual, at his wobbly table with a flask of wine, a glass, and a bowl with the remains of a fish stew. No one else seemed to be around. Or rather, as he approached the tarp, he discovered, dark against the whiteness of the sand, little Homs, the black boy.
Saro didn’t seem to be paying much attention to Homs. He was smoking a cigarette, lost in thought, a tattered old straw hat pulled over his eyes. “Where is everybody?” Agostino asked in a disappointed voice.
Saro looked up at him, regarded him for a moment, and said, “They all went to Rio.” Rio was a deserted location up the coast, a few kilometers away, where a stream flowed into the sea between the sand and a canebrake.
“Oh,” said Agostino, disappointed, “they went to Rio? What did they go there for?”
Homs replied, “They went to have lunch,” and made an expressive gesture, bringing his hand to his mouth. But Saro shook his head and said, “You kids won’t be happy till someone shoots you in the pants.” The lunch was clearly a pretext to go steal fruit from the fields, at least as far as Agostino could tell.
“I didn’t go,” the black boy replied in a fawning voice, as if to ingratiate himself with Saro.
“You didn’t go because they didn’t want you,” said Saro calmly.
The black boy protested, squirming in the sand. “No, I didn’t go because I wanted to stay with you, Saro.”
He had a smarmy, singsong voice. Saro said to him contemptuously, “Who gave you the right to call me by my first name, boy? We’re not brothers, you know.”
“No, we’re not brothers,” answered Homs, unperturbed. Indeed, he seemed jubilant, as if he were deeply pleased by the observation.
“So keep in your place,” Saro concluded. Then he turned to Agostino. “They went to steal fruit and corn. That’s their lunch.”
“Are they coming back?” Agostino asked impatiently.
Saro said nothing. He looked at Agostino and seemed to be mulling something over. “They won’t be back for a while,” he replied slowly, “not before evening. But if we want, we can join them.”
“How?”
“By boat,” said Saro.
“Yes, let’s take the boat,” cried the black boy. Eager to go, he got up and stood next to Saro, but the man ignored him completely. “I’ve got a sailboat. In half an hour, more or less, we can be in Rio, if the wind is good.”
“All right, let’s go,” said Agostino cheerfully. “But if they’re in the fields, how are we going to find them?”
“Don’t worry,” said Saro, standing up and adjusting the black sash around his waist, “we’ll find them.” He turned toward Homs, who was peering at him anxiously, and added, “And you, boy, help me carry the sail and the mast.”
“Right away, boss, right away,” the black boy said jubilantly, following Saro into the shack.
Left to himself, Agostino stood up and looked around. The mistral wind had picked up, and the rippled sea was now a purplish blue. In a dust cloud of sun and sand, the shoreline between the sea and the grove appeared deserted as far as the eye could see. Agostino didn’t know where Rio was, and with infatuated eyes he traced the capricious line of the solitary beach with all its points and bays. Where was Rio? Maybe over where the fury of the sun blurred sky, sea, and sand into a single widening haze? He was immensely attracted by the trip, and nothing in the world could make him miss it.
He was shaken from these reflections by the voices of the two coming out of the shack. Saro had a bundle of ropes and sails in one arm and a flask in the other. Behind him came the black boy, brandishing the green-and-white mast like a spear. “Off we go,” said Saro, heading down the beach without a glance at Agostino. He seemed to be in an unusual hurry, Agostino didn’t know why. He also noticed that his repellent flared nostrils seemed redder and more inflamed, as if the web of capillaries was suddenly swollen with thicker and brighter blood. “Off we go, off we go,” sang the black boy in Saro’s wake, the mast under his arm, improvising a kind of dance on the sand. Saro was ahead of him, almost to the cabins, so the black boy slowed down, waiting for Agostino to catch up. When he did, the black boy made a complicit gesture. Surprised, Agostino stopped.
“Listen up,” said the black boy in a familiar tone, “I need to talk with Saro about some things, so do me a favor— don’t come. Get lost.”
“Why?” asked Agostino, surprised.
“I just told you, because I need to talk to Saro, just the two of us,” the other boy said impatiently, stomping his foot.
“But I have to go to Rio,” Agostino replied.
“You can go another time.”
“No, I can’t.”
The black boy looked at him. In his blank eyes and oily, quivering nostrils, Agostino sensed an anxious passion that repelled him. “Listen here, Pisa,” he said, “if you don’t come, I’ll give you something you’ve never seen before.” He let the mast slip from his hands and dug into his pockets, pulling out a slingshot made from a pine twig and two rubber bands tied together. “Nice, huh?” the black boy said, showing it to him.