And now there’s a mosquito in the room. The whine of warm, warm nights. The stickiness of the sheets. But the sheets are your only defence. Then the rumble of a train in the distance, the clonking of the prostatic cripple upstairs crutch-bound for the bathroom, and always, in between, the treble whirr of the crickets, insistent, an acoustic pressure so constant you’re not aware of it until for the miracle of a few seconds it stops. Then starts again. I have no difficulty, as it turns out, being up and about before the dawn…
My father-in-law has a lovely way of announcing himself when he thinks he’s waking you, or surprising you. He appears at a window and says, ‘Whey! Whey, Tim! Whey, ragazzi!’ where ‘whey’ is as much a whistle as a word, somehow both soothing and urgent. He’s got his trilby on to protect his baldness and a light jacket. In his Old Dog shorts he flaunts an air of down-market safari.
Kids in their clothes then and off. They’re dead, of course. They barely know what’s happening. Outside, the savannah is flopping with frogs. I would never have imagined. Never seen one during the day. Nonno remarks that he made this trip several times when he was a kid. And he took Rita and the boys, too. People used to light bonfires then, up on the hill. Before there were any houses there. Before there were any bathing stations. Though he doesn’t know why. He can’t imagine what any of it’s got to do with Giovanni Battista. So often it’s difficult to know whether a celebration was instituted for a saint, or merely became associated with his day. In any event, the important thing is that even after the motive has been forgotten, the celebration goes on.
We walk down Luigi Cadorna, taking advantage of the white circles not to fall into the potholes. There’s a puddle round the crazy woman’s Seicento. Nonno is concerned that the buckets of water she tosses will cause mould on the stucco. Enjoying a few hours of relative cool, the husky dog sees fit to bark at us. Which finally wakes the children up.
‘Porco Giuda!’ Michele says, rubbing his eyes.
Enough, I tell him severely. Really, that’s enough. Say that again and I’ll, I’ll… I can’t think of anything.
‘You’re just jealous because Italia won,’ he tells me smugly. He always says Italia even when he’s speaking English.
I can already see myself refusing all future requests for loans.
Stefi then asks who Giovanni Battista was. He was the one, Michele announces, who said Jesus was God, only he wasn’t really. He wasn’t God.
Stefi, despite being glad to skip the ora di religione, protests that he was. Still relatively fresh from the scuola materna, and stories of Christ’s tears collected in phials and crucifixes that protect you from evil, Stefi is a determined believer. They begin a fierce, was — wasn’t argument relative to the deity of Christ.
‘He was not God. How could a man be God?’
At ten past four in the morning!
I interrupt to remark that Giovanni Battista had his head cut off.
‘Betrayed by a dancing woman,’ Nonno says, shaking an Old Dog head.
But the children lose interest now when a car roars down the seafront road flying a great tricolour from the window.
‘Alè! Evviva!’ Michele shouts. There’s the echo of another Alè! ‘Grande Italia!’ Michele shouts.
‘Santa patata, Miccko,’ I protest, ‘they only beat Nigeria two — one after extra time.’
‘Capperi!’ Nonno says, ‘What we need now is a cappuccino and a brioche.’
Capperi (capers) is a word I shall have to get used to using, a nice harmless expletive you can pull out in front of the children, but not as silly as Santa patata.
‘Avanti popolo,’ Stefi says when we get to the beach. ‘Alla riscossa!’ To arms! As if this were D-Day or something and us approaching from the sea.
We walk down through the Delfino Verde. It’s a bit nearer than the Medusa. Four-twenty a.m. Away from the street lights you realise the night is hardly dark at alclass="underline" there’s a soft glow amongst the folded deck chairs, drooping sunshades; the sand is faintly luminous and uncannily cold when it sifts into your sandals. The children feel the awe of a familiar place at an unfamiliar time, they learn that the beach isn’t always la stessa spiaggia, or not at dawn; as sometimes there is ice on the hot road, fog on the sunny coast, a reverse side to everything. There’ll come the day when Roberto Baggio doesn’t score at the last minute, when whoever it is stops writing graffiti about Amalia.
Then we almost run into two people in their sleeping bags. The blonde, blonde hair of northerners. I shush the kids. Nonno remarks that he has more respect for these travellers than for his own boys, always off on luxury holidays at their father’s expense. Or back to Mamma to be served hand and foot. But I know he loves it when the boys come home.
Here we are then at the sea’s edge. The water isn’t even lapping. There’s just a steady sheen in the growing light and beyond that the etched black of the rocks. Out at sea, the flash of a beacon makes time intermittent, slows it down, stretches it out. On, off. On, off. There isn’t a breath of wind. I hope we didn’t come too early.
We stand and wait. Far from being the packed scene of Nonno’s childhood, there is almost no one on the beach and certainly no bonfires up on the hills. About a hundred yards down from us a family of five have opened the deck chairs in the first row of sunshades and arranged themselves to face the horizon. Further down still, a group of adolescents are sitting in a circle. Probably they never went to bed. They’re quiet, talking in whispers. For a moment I’m reminded of those situations where you arrive at a remote bus stop and can’t decide from the size of the queue whether the bus is due any minute or not for another hour or so. Perhaps the people are not even waiting for your bus at all. Perhaps the adolescents don’t know this is the day you watch the sun rise. They finish all their nights sitting in a circle on the beach. Then there’s a clatter from behind us, and it’s the woman who runs the Delfino Verde raising the shutter to her bar. Amazingly, the bar is going to open. With relief I reflect that you can rely on a shopkeeper to know when things are going to happen.
Michele has stripped to his bathing costume and is dancing by the water’s edge. That never ending dilemma. Do you deter kids, or let them do as vitality prompts? Do they have to be strictly civilised or are they innately more civilised than us? Understand how the grain of a people curls around this knotty question and you have their culture in one. Am I getting more and more indecisive because I am falling between the stools of two cultures? I’m not English any more, but I still can’t worship Baggio… Or is it just age?
‘Wait till you’ve seen the sun rise,’ I tell him. ‘That’s what we’re here for. Then you can go in for just a minute. But no cold shower.’
‘Where’s Nonno gone?’ Stefi enquires.
Indeed, where has Nonno gone? I swivel round. No sign. Has the sea taken him? Its very stillness gives the water a mysterious feel. But Nonno, as I’ve said before, is famous for his unannounced arrivals and departures.
Then, in just a few minutes, the dawn. The sky suddenly brightens and lifts itself from the sea. Lines sharpen. Not least the horizon. Colours are found. The prosaic floods in like a tide. Already, I want to slow it down: sand beige, sunshades green-and-yellow, the red moscone pulled up on the shore. Same old beach. Without reaching out a single rosy finger to warn us, the sun rims the distance between two breakwaters.