Now, in the half-light of the consulting room, there is something more. I didn’t see it until this moment, on the shelf with the CD player: the photograph of a child who is still a boy but growing out of boyhood, mussed hair and delicate features, goggles pushed up on his forehead and laughing so hard his eyes squint, with dabs of sand on his nose and in the black hair falling over his forehead.
TO THE WEST, THE BEACH stretched toward the white blur of houses in the town, mist blending the whitewashed walls and the sand into a single sunlit dazzle. Only with the first light of day, or at sunset, did colors show clearly and the forms of things come into focus. To the east, an abrupt hill covered with wild growth stood out sharply above the sea, framing the bay. In the setting sun the windows of expensive homes glittered half hidden in the dark green of hedges and palm trees, enclaves surrounded by high white walls interrupted by the strong purple of bougainvillea. We were told that multimillionaires, primarily German, spent their summers in those houses. At the foot of the cliff, on a large rock that became an island when the tide was in, was a concrete bunker that stood like a mineral cancer on the landscape, as resistant to the assault of the sea as the rock onto which it had been fused. For the boy it was an adventure to hold his father’s strong hand, climb up to the bunker, and through a corridor with a sand floor reach an interior room illuminated by the dusty, slanting ray of sunlight that fell through the narrow embrasure cut into the concrete, where guards could keep watch with their binoculars and rest the muzzles of their machine guns. On a cloudless morning, through the slit, you could see the coastline of Africa in great detail. The father took delight in explaining everything to his son, observing his concentration, pleased by his interest, the courteous and attentive way he listened. In 1943 the Allies defeated the Germans and Italians in North Africa and began preparing for the invasion of southern Europe. Look how close they would have been had they wanted to land on this beach instead of in Sicily; imagine the poor Spanish soldiers cooped up in this bunker, waiting for the American warships to appear.
They started back after the tide began to rise. Small, translucent fish fled between their feet as they splashed through the clean water. They walked along a smooth outcropping of rock that was slippery with seaweed or else covered by a dark, spongy moss that was soft beneath their feet. A wave retreated and left behind a pool in which tiny creatures worked busily, and father and son knelt to watch them more closely. The immediacy of human action shifts to the inconceivable slowness of natural history. Primary organisms dragging themselves from the sea to the land, teeming in pools, in the dense fertile ooze of salt marshes, armoring themselves in order to survive, developing valves and shells over millions of years, feet and pincers that leave a faint trail in the sand, a trail no more fleeting, though, than the marks our footsteps leave, our lives, the father thinks with no drama or melancholy, a fortyish man walking along a beach holding his son’s hand in a state of perfect and tranquil happiness, of gratitude, of mysterious harmony with the world, on one of those long early-July afternoons when the heat is not yet overwhelming and summer is still a perfect gift for a child.
The boy let go of his father’s hand to dive into the waves, and the father veered away from the shore and walked through warmer sand toward his wife, of whom he also has a photograph in the darkened consulting room: wide smile, fine lips always red with lipstick, even that afternoon at the beach, sunglasses like the ones film stars wore in the forties. I liked to think she watched us from a distance, the boy and me, easy to pick out on the beach that was nearly empty at that hour but still warm and bright, a time when there are already puddles of shadow in the footprints and on the sides of the dunes: the two of us kneeling, heads together, observing something in a brilliant sheet of water left by a retreating wave, then walking hand in hand along the shore, the pale, thin man and the plump, dark boy with the embers of a setting sun glistening on his wet skin and rolls of a little boy’s tummy showing above the elastic of his bathing suit. The two so different, separated by more than thirty years, and yet astonishingly alike in some expressions, in the complicity of their gait and their lowered heads, although the boy resembles his mother more, not only in skin tone, but also in the way he laughs, in the strength of his chin, in his hands, in the unruly hair curling in the damp sea air.
There is a salty taste on her lips and a more carnal feel to her kisses when I caress her beneath the slightly damp cloth of her bikini during the siesta, behind the drawn curtains. Her breasts and lower torso are white against her dark tan. I put my hand on the fuzz between her thighs and am reminded of the damp moss along the shore that my toes sank into until they touched the smooth rock. We couple slowly, desire building with the gradual tide, then our two bodies are used and exhausted by love, mutually fondled, gleaming in the shadow.
As a young man he’d believed like a religious fanatic in the prestige of suffering and failure, in the vision of alcohol, and the romanticism of adultery. Now he could conceive of no deeper passion than what he felt for his wife and son, a love that enfolded the three of them like a magnetic field. Shared fluids, chromosomes mixed in one cell, the recently fertilized egg, the saliva exchanged and digested, saliva and vaginal secretions, saliva and semen sometimes glistening on her lips, dissolved into the nutritive current of her blood, mixed odors and sweat impregnating skin and air and the sheets they lay on, sated, asleep, while from beyond the drawn curtains came the splashing and cries of the children in the hotel swimming pool, and, farther still, if one listened carefully, the powerful roar of the sea, the wind lashing the tops of the palm trees.
WILD PALMS WAS THE TITLE of the novel his wife had been reading on the train and had carried to the beach in her large straw beach bag. He often asked her to tell him about the novels she was reading, and those summaries, along with a few movies, also chosen by her, satisfied his appetite for fiction. To him reality seemed so complex, inexhaustible, labyrinthine, that he didn’t see the need to waste time and intelligence on invention, unless it was filtered through his wife’s narrating or endowed with the ancient simplicity of fairy tales. In art he was moved only by forms in which something of the harmonic unity and functional efficiency of nature shone through. The ruins of Greek temples in the south of Italy or of the spas of Rome awakened in him an emotion identical to what he felt in the huge forests he had visited in New England and Canada. In a classic column, a great fallen capital, he found a correspondence with the sacred majesty of a tree, or with the precise symmetry of a seashell. He showed his son the spiral of a small shell and then, in a book on astronomy, the identical spiral of a galaxy. He led him to the bathroom and showed him the spiral the water made as it flowed down the drain of the sink. He caught a gleam of intelligence in his son’s dark eyes, which had the same color and oblique slant as his mother’s, and identical to hers in expressing, without pretense, wonder or disappointment, happiness or sadness.