The pine trees in the dunes have umbrella-shaped tops with dark, spur-like branches: their trunks are as thick and tall and fantastical as giants’ legs. Pliny, from his naval vessel in the Bay of Naples, observed that the cloud given off by Vesuvius at its eruption was precisely the shape of an umbrella pine. These trees are ubiquitous in Italy: it is strange that the volcano should mirror their shape, as though a country could have a family of forms, just as it has a distinct language and race of people. The floor of the pinewood is soft and springy: it is undulating, mounded, primitive in appearance. There are people here. They walk soundlessly through the shade with its intricate stencils of light. They tread the narrow paths down to the beach and the sea. The water beats and heaves softly beyond the screen of trees. We follow a path that winds among the giant trunks. We are barefoot, brown-skinned, unburdened. The children carry their swimming towels in a roll under the arm. We have water, and a small secondhand hardback edition of Shakespeare’s plays. We have a home six feet wide made of faded blue cloth, and a washing line. There seems to be no need for anything else. The bay is so warm, so soft, so simple: it releases us from need, like sleep. Is it better to sleep than to need? What was its purpose, all that need, the machinelike complexity of our life at home, the desire for escape that was its dark emission? A warm wind soughs through the pinewood and stirs the high-up branches of the trees. In the distance we can see the humped brown shapes of the Etruscan tombs. Then we come out into the blinding light of the beach, the sand strewn with matted foliage, the water rolling in its frill of surf. The countryside is rough, carefree, running down to the edge of the sand. There are people dotted about. They seem small, indistinct, both vague and multifarious, like forms etched by centuries of tides.
Our copy of Shakespeare has illustrations. They are highly colored, artificial, like stills from an old Hollywood movie. There is a drawing of Julius Caesar in his toga and laurel wreath, craggy and superstitious-looking, his eyes sliding to the side. There is Hamlet, black-clad and thin as a spider, with fair foppish hair. They are realities become characters become realities again. I brought the book to the beach with the intention of reading it myself, but the others want to read it too. The children do not run to the rolling water, nor play in the earthy sand. Instead they sit one on either side of me, their mouths by my ears, trying to see over my shoulder. They want to know about Shakespeare. They want to know the plot of Othello, of Antony and Cleopatra. They point to things and ask what they mean. Every time I turn the page, they complain. After a while I surrender and read aloud. I read them Hamlet’s soliloquies and Antony’s love speeches and Macbeth’s unsettling remarks on the death of his wife. I do all three witches in different voices. I do The Tempest, explaining as I go along.
The afternoon passes. A man comes up the beach selling slabs of frozen pineapple. Later he comes back again, selling lemon granite. People come and go through the heat haze, in and out of the silent pinewoods. The sun begins to dip; slowly light leaves the bay. The sea is milky, thick, mineral-colored. Evening approaches, a blue-gray aura that stands on the hills and fields, as though it has risen from the earth. The tombs cast shadows across the grass. The sun sinks, bloodying the sky. It leaves behind it a feeling of weightlessness, of consciousness desisting. Everything is still, trancelike. The water laps faintly at the shore. There are no lights around the bay; the human day is barely marked. A month might have passed, or a century. We roll up our towels and return to our tent. There are other tents in our glade; people are rinsing out their swimming costumes, heating things on little stoves, reorganizing their pots and pans. They do not relinquish their grip on time. They are standing up for civilization. In the tent next door there is a young German couple, fair and big-boned, who have prepared a hot meal for themselves and are sitting eating it at their folding table, where the glasses and cutlery and pepper pot have been nicely laid out. The girl serves the food to the boy, who sits upright and expectant in his chair. They are so young and yet so proper: I don’t know whether to admire them or feel concerned on their behalf. How rigid and upright they are, how thoroughly disciplined, in this wild bay with its fields of ancient tombs, its giant primeval trees, its centuries that pass in an afternoon. They haven’t turned up here with a volume of Shakespeare, a sheet, and a two-man tent that must somehow accommodate four. They have inflatable mattresses, which I watch the boy pump up after supper.
The children are playing Hamlet. One of them is Ophelia; the other is the prince. They have wrapped themselves in swimming towels tied at the shoulder, like togas. Come here Ophelia! commands the prince. Ophelia declines. I don’t like you anymore, she says. Hamlet says that he’s going to tell his mother. Fine, says Ophelia, disgustedly. Later Ophelia is discovered lying flat on her back in the pine needles. Help! she says, I can’t swim! Hamlet is beside himself. He claws the floor of the glade in despair. Afterward he decorates her recumbent form with dead eucalyptus leaves.
We go to a little restaurant in the dark fields near the bay, where they give us frito misto in paper cones and Greco di Tufo wine, pale and chilled as an icicle. We walk on the beach in the spectral silver light of the sea. We cram into Tiziana’s tent. It isn’t so bad. Its insubstantiality is strangely gratifying, for it makes manifest our determination to economize. The pitch costs fifteen euros a night. Our boat back to England is booked for nine days hence. I wonder whether we could stay here until the day before, and then drive nonstop to Dieppe. I make pillows for the children out of folded-up clothes. They put on their pajamas in the dark. It is so hot that they don’t want any covers. We have no torch: there will be no reading. Instead I tell them the story of Twelfth Night.
The next day we walk to the end of the bay, where there is a little settlement of low white cottages, and a jetty with a handful of fishing boats tethered along its side. In the shallows, a group of old women sit playing cards. Their chairs and card table stand in six inches of water, and they swirl their veined, swollen feet abstractedly in the clear sea while they play. The waves are just ripples here, long, fine curves of silver that peal soundlessly one after another onto the sand, but sometimes a bigger wave comes, and the women lift up their skirts and laugh.
We walk past the cottages and along a path that leads around the rocks at the head of the bay. The rocks are flat and white: the sea is turquoise-colored here, and so clear that the bottom of the deep, shelving white valley of rock with its darting fish and fine, fern-like plants can be seen from the edge. The water in the bay is warm, and brown with leaves and matted balls of needles from the pinewoods, but here there are sea urchins, blood-colored, like rubies on the white rocks. The underwater valley looks as cool and mysterious as if it were made of glass. Sunlight hangs in liquid shapes above its crenellated ledges. It is hot, out here on the headland. There is nothing here. There is no shade. We scrutinize the rocks where they meet the water, trying to establish a way in. We would have to jump, right over the sea urchins that encrust the shore and into the deeper section, where the fish move far below, winding through clear columns of shadow and light.