It is Paolo’s ancestral home that we are staying in. Once it was quiet here, on a hilltop above the sea, but now the house is impacted in the vertical tundra of development that covers the whole northern coast of the peninsula. It is not particularly ugly, this modern geology. It is just that in its fundamental properties it has the qualities of an anxiety dream. Paolo shows us the family chapel, a light, whitewashed little room on the first floor whose windows look out on the rooftops and the community football pitch. There is a plaster statue of the red-cheeked Virgin, and spindly wooden chairs in rows, facing the altar. He shows us the dining room and the suite of drawing rooms, with their gold brocade sofas and family portraits and great ceramic urns standing in the shadows. The shutters are closed against the sun. The marble floors are silent underfoot. It is like a museum, except that the present moment is checked at the front door. The world does not flow around these objects: instead there is Paolo, attenuated and leather-skinned, faintly saturnine, with his small, polished, bony head like the head on a Roman coin. Paolo’s wife comes in. She is a Veronese madonna, yellow-haired, decked in gold, rather excitable, who moves rapidly in a shoal of little dogs. She tells us that they have just had a grand wedding here. It was their daughter who was married. Things are a little chaotic, a little mad. The house is upside down. She asks how long we are staying, and what we have been doing: she shudders at the mention of Pompeii. She herself is from the north. She doesn’t like it here, in this cacophonous dust bowl under the volcano. Most of the time she and Paolo live in Rome.
In the evening we take the bus along the coast. The sun is going down, and the sky flames with pink. The sea is soft and silent, with a milk-white sheen. An eerie calmness settles on the belle époque villas on their promontories of rust-colored rock when the light leaves their faces. They take on strange, savage shapes, with their plumes of palm trees and dilapidated balustrades. A drift of lights heaps itself around the bay. Over the water we can see Naples, smoking like a mound of embers. The cone of the volcano is dark, effaced, as though these lights were rivers of lava it had discharged itself. We get off the bus and walk down through a dank staircase in the rock, all the way down through the cliff until we come out far below, beside the water. There is a tiny beach, and a jetty. There is nobody here. We take off our clothes and jump off the jetty into the water. The water is warm, silky: it seems not to wet us but to coat us with its milky sheen. It is a relief, at last, to swim, but the water withholds something from us. It has the same impenetrable quality as everything else, a feeling of mystery, almost of secrecy, as though it were not fully present to us. It is half violated, this beautiful bay with its rubbish-strewn water and shroud of polluted air. It is like a violated woman who refuses to give up her secret.
We walk back up through the cliff and sit down in the restaurant at the top. It has a round terrace that abuts the precipice. Gulls land on the balustrade and look sharply at the tourists through the dusk. There are English people here, middle-aged men and women with brick-red skin who say please and thank you in their native tongue, for it is easier to be transported to the Bay of Naples than to form the sounds that compose the word grazie. The men sit silently with their pints of lager, their beefy red arms folded across their chests. The women are silent too. They hold their handbags on their laps and take tiny sips from their glasses of sherry. They seem to disapprove of something, in their neat blouses and skirts, their rigid helmets of hair. They look down on the violated woman succumbing to her trance of night. In their way they have a deep secrecy of their own. Is it their own bodies they disapprove of, for being transported here? At least their minds remain theirs, refusing to say buongiorno and grazie. What are their bodies, that they can just be lifted out of one place and set down in another? Where will they find themselves next? The waiters are exquisitely gentle with these people. They refill the pint glasses at the merest nod. They straighten the nearby tables and chairs so that the deracinated bodies will not be buffeted or bruised. They like them: I have been told this by Italians, how much they like the English. They don’t care what language the please and thank you come in. Apparently most Italians never say thank you at all. The word is like a pearl, falling from those reticent English lips. It is clear that the waiters will stop at nothing to prize out as many of them as they can.
The next day we go down to the harbor at Sorrento, to take the boat to Capri. But there is no boat to Capri: the boatmen are on strike. We pace about the harbor fretfully, conferring. The town lies above in its fortress of rock. It is full of big, brassy hotels and souvenir shops and red-skinned tourists. Beyond it lies the green headland and beyond that the sea. I had wanted to go to Capri: I had decided on it as the turning point in our travels, the gold coin at the bottom of the pool that I needed to grasp to be released. It had seemed important to me, to touch it, to grasp it. How else could I understand our experiences unless I gave them a shape, an arc? Standing in the hot, crowded harbor, I feel my artistry being unpicked. I feel my conception faltering, breaking up. I feel the question forming itself, the question that has not yet been asked, that I meant never to be asked again: What are we doing here?
A man approaches. He tells us that there is a boat, a single boat that will take us around the headland to Positano, on the Amalfi coast. I do not particularly want to go to Positano. I want to go to Capri. I want to see the Carthusian monastery, and Tiberius’s villa. I want to go to an island, from where I can look back on the last three months and make the decisive stroke that will complete them. It will be no good, going to Positano. It will be artificial. It will not be satisfying. It will ruin everything with its artificiality, its lack of truth. Nevertheless, we get on the boat. There is, after all, nowhere else to go. We have come to the end. I will not go back up to Sorrento and stare through the windows of souvenir shops beneath the hammering sun. It is preferable to be on the water, in limbo, chugging around the headland to get to the other side. From Positano we can take a bus back over the middle to Paolo’s. It will be a little circle. It will be tourism for halfwits, for imbeciles.
The boat trip takes an hour. We watch the green-tufted headland; we watch the sea. We see Capri, dimly, through the polluted haze. Now and then huge speedboats roar by, or skirmish in their own foam. Positano comes into view, and steadily advances across the bobbing water. Its pink and white houses climb steeply up the hillside in the sun. The shore is full of bodies. They lie, basking like lizards. They watch our approach through their countless pairs of sunglasses. The whole spectacle seems to move up and down, though it is the boat that moves. But the town seems unhinged, unfixed. It seems like a figment of someone’s imagination.
We get off. The children fling away their shoes and run onto the dark, gritty sand. Then they turn round and run straight back, alarmed. The sand is so hot it has burned their feet. And it seems we must pay to be on the beach. It is fifteen euros each. We stand at the fence and look into the ranks of loungers and parasols where the community basks inscrutable behind its sunglasses. The heat is infernal; the torpid water rolls noiselessly on the shore. We have been trapped, cornered. The boat chugs away across the water; far above the road scribbles among the hilltops. We are seized suddenly by bravado: we pay the money and establish ourselves in the front row, among the millionaires and divas and the honeymooning couples. We flick up our parasol; we buy lemon ices in tall glasses; we don our sunglasses and examine our neighbors with unconscionable thoroughness.