‘There’s nothing wrong with nets,’ Michele insists, ‘the fishing boats use nets.’ ‘Yes, but at least they risk their lives,’ I say, ‘going out to sea all night.’ I explain the words on the monument. Maria, piscoriae tuere filios. ‘They go way out to sea, and if there’s a storm maybe they don’t come back.’ Michele is decidedly unimpressed. As with our experience at I Laghetti, it’s the sure catch he dreams of, the certainty of success. Like those thousands of Italian hunters who shoot at pheasants released ten minutes earlier from a farm. Or the old hands at the gravel pits, using forbidden spinners. Or the football experts who rejoice when the other team’s star is injured and absent. No Tom Sawyer, Michele sees little virtue in doing things the hard way…
Umidità
What are you up to now?’ We’re almost back at the Medusa when we run into Zia Paola and her daughter taking a walk. Still living at home, Fulvia is one of those Italian girls whose boyfriends have been saving up to marry for a decade and more. She is thirty-two, but, arm in arm with her mother, looks twenty-five. The radio will tell you that nearly forty percent of Italian thirty-year-olds still live with their parents.
‘A last swim,’ I explain. I have the bag and the swimming stuff strapped to the back of the bike.
‘You really shouldn’t,’ she says, kind and worried. And adds, ‘Troppa umidità.’
Too much humidity? To go swimming! Here is one of those wonderful moments where I simply don’t understand, while the children do. It’s not that I can’t grasp the meaning of the words. Nobody could speak more clearly than Zia Paola. It’s their applicability that eludes me. How can it be too humid to swim? I don’t know. I smile and wish mother and daughter a pleasant passeggiata.
Walking down to our sunshade, Stefi explains. ‘She means the air is so damp we will catch cold when we come out of the water.’
I hadn’t noticed, but the late afternoon, early evening, is not so blue as it was. Six-thirty. The slanting sun has found a grey haze in the sky, the breeze has dropped, the air is indeed slightly moist, limp. But the temperature is definitely still up in the thirties…
Is this obsession with imagined hazards just a way of showing love?
From her inevitably supine position at the sunshade two rows behind ours, the jukebox mother is telling her boy and somebody else’s child that they can’t go in the water because they ate so late. She speaks with her eyes closed but the voice is firm. She told them not to eat late, but they wouldn’t hear of it. They kept playing. Well, now they can’t go in the water. They would drown.
How late did they eat, I wonder. And how much? And why are they still at the beach if they can’t go in the sea? The older child runs around whooping and kicking sand over everybody. The mother ignores him, adjusting a silk scarf drawn tight round her thighs. He is perfectly free to misbehave, but not to risk his health.
Then I notice that my own children are speaking to each other in much the same way. Stefi says, ‘Michele, you’ll have to take your towel down near the water so you can put it round your shoulders as soon as you get out.’ ‘Don’t forget your flip-flops, Stefi,’ Michele replies, ‘or you’ll hurt your little feet on the shells.’ It’s asphyxiating. And so endearing.
‘Michele, you’ve forgotten to put your suncream on,’ Stefi is saying. At six years old! Having just explained to me about the humidity!
We change. There’s the old shout of Cocco! and the clanking of a bucket, but we don’t buy. Coconut would be heavy on our stomachs before a swim. Wouldn’t it? The way to the sea is thick with the back and forth of tamburello, and some men in their forties and fifties are playing out tonight’s big football match, as I remember doing as a boy. ‘Albertini to Signori, Signori to Baggio, beats one, beats two, gol!!!!!’
‘No, it went over the post,’ the tubby white Nigerian keeper objects. The post is a green Benetton sweater with fluorescent document pouch for greater definition. The men argue like children about whether it was a goal or not…
In the water, a fashionable mother is taking advantage of that honey-look low light spreads to make photographs of her lovely daughter. The girl, perhaps eight or nine, is on a silly inflatable boat with some kind of pedal-paddling affair at the end. Quite unnecessarily she is wearing a bikini top, and she lounges back on the boat voluptuously, hands behind her curly head in a pose television has taught her. The mother crouches in the water with her automatic focus camera, seeking exactly the right shot to frame for some living room shelf in Milan or Turin. But the current drags the boat away. ‘Pedal!’ the mother shouts. ‘Try and keep it where it is.’ The girl complains that turning the pedals brings up the seaweed that drifts and laps about in the shallow water. The seaweed is scummy. She won’t touch the seaweed! So mother, who has a la-di-da Milan accent, has to come and drag the boat herself and turn it round to have it in the exact right relation to the sun. Then she fusses about her own shadow falling in the picture. Aim, frame… too late. The boat has drifted again. The girl refuses to pedal. She seems to be mocking a mother willing to make so many sacrifices for that photo to show off to friends. Perhaps rightly so. The hell with photographing one’s children. And it goes on and on and on until finally the snap is snapped, and mother brings the pink and white boat safely to shore so that the little lady will not have to put her feet in amongst the seaweed. Then with a great sigh she slumps into a deck chair and lights a super-slim cigarette.
Why do I secretly hope that picture won’t come out?
We splash towards the rocks, past the sign announcing LIMITE DELLE ACQUE SICURE, into the adventure of three or four feet. The children have invented a game called bruco marino, sea caterpillar. This involves Papà lying on his belly on the bottom of the sea while they ride or stamp on his back. As he worms caterpillar-like amongst the crabs, he can just vaguely catch through the tepid water the song they have invented to accompany their ride. ‘Il bruco marino, ha perso il codino, ha perso il culino, non riesce a cagar.’ The which, translated, will seem even more mindless than in Italian, lacking rhyme and diminutives: The sea caterpillar has lost his little tail, has lost his little bottom, he can’t poo.
I prefer not to speculate on whether, since I am the caterpillar, there isn’t some awful Freudian significance behind this, or some reference to the whole problem of Italian anality. I plough on, underwater, allowed up for breath every forty seconds or so, until, emerging much farther out than I had meant, we are all witness to a scene that is conclusion and climax, as it were, to one whole aspect of the holiday. The children’s discovery of… well…
Or let’s put it this way: on this, the last day — for as I said all days are one here, and this the last as much as the first — on this last day of our holiday, the mystery of the bagnino and his girl, always together but never quite touching, is finally resolved, and in such a way that seems quite deliberately a show for us, an education for the children.
Moravia would have loved it.