Il certificato di verginità
I plunge into the water, followed by the children. It’s around nine o’clock. The sea is shallow, tepid, motionless. Yet most bathers turn back, or just walk the shallows parallel with the shore: grandmothers with straw hats and sunglasses, fat men deep in conversation. In the first stretch of water, the older boys play games of volleyball or tamburello. Almost nobody ventures out of their depth.
I encourage my own children to swim. I have mock fights with them. I persuade them to paddle out to the rocky breakwater and even to dive on the other side, in the open sea, where nobody goes. In doing so I am constantly aware of obeying a different cultural programming, of not being relaxed enough. Other parents just like to stand in the warm shallows, admiring their own brown skins glistening in the sun and water, ignoring their children, enjoying the mill of people near the shore.
And if someone does swim seriously, it is a boy. None of the girls seem to swim. The girls stand at wading depth and make a gesture I don’t remember seeing in England. In up to their thighs, they lift handfuls of water and let it dribble down over their bodies. They repeat the gesture perhaps three or four times. You imagine they’re getting acclimatized, ready for the plunge, but just when you think they’re going to plunge, they turn round and wade out again. Watching them, realising the motions are habitual, I’m reminded of something I once translated, about a mythical girl called Iphimedeia. She had fallen in love with Poseidon and would often walk along the beach, go down into the sea, raise the water from the waves and let it flow down over her body. It was a gesture of love, of seduction. And it worked. Finally, Poseidon emerged from the water, wrapped himself round her and promptly generated two children. After which Iphimedeia no doubt became just another of the young mothers on the beach. ‘Do you want a banana, Benedetta? Come on, you need some fruit after your pizzetta. Don’t throw sand. Don’t bother your little sister. No, you can’t go in the water till ten o’clock. You haven’t digested yet. And you need some cream on your tummy, you’re burning, can’t you feel you’re burning?’
Iphimedeia, the Medusa, the eternal return, the sharpness of figures against the light, like stark silhouettes on Greek vases, it seems one always has half a sense of myth by the Mediterranean, the land’s edge is also the edge of a timeless world of Latin archetypes.
Though I’m always lapsing back into my practical workaday Anglo-Saxon mentality. Having crawled exhausted out of the sea, I’m now toiling over a huge round sandcastle in several tiers with moat and perimeter wall and secret tunnels and dungeons. It’s a very English-looking thing. The kids join in. They love it, as I loved to do this with my own father and mother. So do other people’s kids. A tiny Patrizia helps Stefi find shells for the battlements. Somebody’s little Marcello is running back and forth with a bucket for water for the moat. Eventually, to my surprise a small crowd forms by the water’s edge to admire the flying buttresses, the crenellated walls. We’ve got it up to about three feet now. It’s a pretty big castle. People break off their strolls to stand and stare. Endeavour of this magnitude has considerable curiosity value here.
Later, back at the sunshade, we find Aunt Paola. Since we’re not in Pescara for long this year, she is letting us share her sunshade, a gesture almost as generous as letting somebody share your bathroom. And given that my father- and mother-in-law are away for a few days, she is eager to help me and, like all the Baldassarre family, to offer advice. After all, it’s a generally acknowledged truth in Italy that a man can’t be expected to look after children on his own for more than a couple of hours.
Zia Paola is old, white-haired, slightly hunched, discreet, gracious. Her voice is pleasantly low and gravelly. And the first thing she says is not to buy mozzarella on a Monday. It would be a mistake to buy mozzarella on a Monday because they might well have been keeping it in the shop over the weekend, and in this heat…
Also, I should be very careful about salad. She can tell me a place where I can get good fresh tomatoes and lettuces at a cheap price.
She speaks for some time and in great detail about shopping and menus. Rather than myself, it is the children who join in, already better at discussing food than I am: they explain how Mamma dresses the salad, which pasta they like best. Stefi is particularly eager. She always drinks some of Daddy’s wine, she says.
Paola promises she will bring me some local wine a friend makes. Then she warns me that I mustn’t use the towel after laying it in the sand. One can catch skin irritations in this way. God only knows what funguses there are in the sand. I shall have to wash it now and leave it to dry in direct sunlight. And on second thoughts, perhaps it would be better not to give the children mozzarella at all in this weather, not even if I buy it fresh on Tuesdays or Wednesdays, since in this kind of heat those things tend to ferment in the stomach.
Paola has been so kind I feel I must return the favour somehow, and seeing that she talks so constantly about food, I invite her to a restaurant. Perhaps tomorrow. With her daughter. But she declines the offer. She is too fastidiosa, she says. There are too many things she doesn’t like or can’t eat. Stefi says she feels exactly the same way. The little girl nods very sagely, damp hair falling over her eyes. For example, she doesn’t like runner beans, and Michele doesn’t like peas… ‘You never know,’ Paola is saying, ‘in a restaurant, how long the food has been in the freezer, whether they’ve washed their hands or not, what they’ve put in it to make it look nice. Eating out is so unhealthy.’ I decide I’d better not tell her that I am about to take the kids up to the terrace bar for their much-loved antipasto of pizzetta and Coca Cola.
For this is what the routine now demands: shower, aperitivo, antipasto, computer games, home.
I can’t recall the presence of showers on English beaches, but in today’s anal post-peasant Italy it is unthinkable that one should be in contact with something organic like seawater without then taking a thorough shower to clean off. More practically, there is the problem that salt on the skin can be very unpleasant when the temperature is up in the high thirties.
Here, then, is the only part of my children’s beach experience that involves something approaching heroism. As I said, the Medusa’s showers are cold, and what’s more, powerful. Either they’re off or they’re full on, drenching you with a pounding delivery of freezing water. Yet everybody seems to love it. People queue up by the four showers between terrace and bathing huts. They stand under the cold water and shriek. The children dance and scream. Then, after only a minute, perhaps even less, of intense cold on burning skin, they’re out already, laughing and shivering their way into bathrobes. It’s as if all that excitement of contact with the elements, that thrill of endurance, hardship, all those qualities our English parents hoped we would thrive on as children, were condensed here into a few shockingly icy seconds, the better to enjoy the sensual pressure of the sun afterwards, the splendid sense of well-being brought on by bright light and colour and abundant food.