The children are agog at the size of it. It’s huge. And the colour. Not unlike that of my eyes right now. ‘Il sole,’ Stefi breathes, ‘red as a peperone!’ She gazes. She likes to be mesmerised, likes a moment to be what it should be, as if her determined awe could create a magic in the sun, the way candles in churches make a god, and theatrical embraces a mother-in-law. Further along the beach the adolescents cheer. There is even the sound of an Alé, alé!, as if the great red ball now half clear of the water had been kicked there with terrible precision by you know who. Then, more miraculously still, Nonno reappears with a bag full of croissants. ‘Bello,’ he says with his mouth full.
Following the example of other spectators, the children rush into the water. For a few moments they bathe in a dazzle of red as the sun rolls a regal carpet across the water. Their bodies shine in the horizontal rays. They have that wonderful enamel you can only mix with young skin and water and bright light. Then already the sun’s too bright to look at, and hence in a curious way not there any more, dissolved in an everyday glare that kindles traffic noises along the seafront road and finds an overnight litter of cans and wrappers that the bagnino will have to clear. Immediately, the children lose interest and rush out shivering for their croissants. Michele rudely demands to know which is the biggest. Then it’s up the beach to the bar for the ceremony of the cappuccino, the more familiar rituals of Italian life.
‘Maybe Lucia will be born when we get home,’ Michele says. And Stefi immediately replies, ‘I can’t wait to kiss her.’
‘Madness,’ Nonno says, thinking of the mouths that have to be fed, the bodies clothed, the coddling and spoiling and pampering, and then again the debts paid, the apartments bought, the enquiries about the will.
‘No better place to grow up than Italy,’ I tease him.
Spooning foam into his mouth like a big baby, the crumbs of a second brioche on his lips, my father-in-law is quick to correct me: ‘No better place,’ he says, ‘not to grow up!