We jump back in the car and reenter the traffic jam. It is dusk now, and the streets of Santa Margherita are full of people. They sit in the cafés with beautiful exquisite drinks, and walk freely out along the harbor in the sea breezes and rose-colored light. We gaze at them, parched and disconsolate. We have no choice but to go forward: the road back is paralyzed. We crawl out of the harbor and along the coast. It takes twenty minutes to go a hundred meters. The sea softly rises and falls beside us, pink and blue; far out on the water, a boat catches the last gold of the sun on its ivory sail. We shuffle on, impacted in our metal box. In front of us the road curves round out of sight: we strain impatiently to see what will be there. At last, tortuously, it discloses itself, a wooded bay, with a great white edifice standing above the water in a sweep of green lawns. It is so white, so sparkling: it is like the palace of some fabulous neurasthenic billionaire. A driveway rises to the porticoed entrance, and at the end of the driveway there is a magnificent pair of gates, with a brass plaque reading Grand Hotel Miramare. A man in a cap and white uniform is standing by the gates. We look at him, and he looks at us. He smiles, and gives a slight bow. As if of its own volition the car leaves the road, slewing right, barging through the traffic, past the brass plaque and up through the gates into the perfumed chirruping gardens, where it pauses to allow the uniformed man to lay his white-gloved hand gently on the rim of the filthy window. He is sure there will be a room available. When we are ready he will take our car to the hotel car park. If we indicate what luggage we require for the night, the porters will take it directly from the car to our room.
He wishes us a most pleasant evening at the Grand Hotel Miramare.
The porters handle our noxious bags with rigorous politeness. No one looks at our feet, our clothes, our hair. The man at the desk offers us a suite: it is all he has left. We ask if he couldn’t possibly find us something cheaper. No, no, he says, this suite is positively the only room free in the hotel tonight. He considers its freeness, there in front of us: perhaps, after all, this suite is something unwanted, passed over, like a woman past her prime. And here we are, late in the day, a match. It is past seven o’clock in the evening. As the suite remains unwanted, he will give it to us half price.
Our suite has a balcony facing the sea. In the white-tiled bathroom with its gold-plated taps we confer. We examine our luck, the snowy towels and bathrobes, the slippers with the hotel’s name stitched across the toe, the miniature gold-capped bottles of bubble bath. We lie on the firm, enormous beds. Beneath our balcony, in the garden, there is a swimming pool. It is surrounded by lawns, and beyond them, the sea. We run downstairs and jump in, in the last light. There have been so many arrivals, so many cycles of desire and satisfaction, mounting and mounting through hours of chaos and uncertainty, building like a wave and then breaking, foaming with completion. Here is another: the empty oval of water that lies in the thick gray and violet dusk, the deserted lawns falling into darkness, the pale, quiet sea. A gardener in uniform moves among the shrubberies with their hedges and ornamental trees. Their forms are sculptural, abstract, hewn from big blocks of shadow. The man is indistinct, moving among the shadowy forms. He is less clear, less substantial than they. We jump into the water. It is salty, and dark in its depths. We break its membrane: we send furrows and folds traveling across its surface. The light has nearly gone. The children swim away into darkness. They leave a wake behind them, a path of ripples that is a kind of memory of themselves, a record etched in the water. Their small heads make two round, black, dense shapes in the distances of the pool. Behind them the path erases itself: this is how they will live, advancing themselves through the yielding, unremembering world, holding their heads upright above the surface. It is half terrible, that they should have to support the mystery of their own selves, just as a work of art must support its own mystery and bear its own fate, however beautiful and beloved it is. For it seems so relentless to me there in the water, the erasing, the dissolving, the rubbing out of each minute by the next. Almost, it is unbearable. It strikes me that the glory of art is the glory of survival, for survival is an inhuman property. It is an attribute of mountains and objects, of the worthless toys in the children’s bedroom at home that will outlive us all. That which is human decays and disappears: only in art does the quality of humanity favor survival. Only in art is a record kept of an instant, that the next instant doesn’t erase.
The sky is steadily filling with cloud: it moves over the peninsula in a body, vast, like a dark glacier. For a while it builds around the bay, forming great cliffs at its edges that are gilded with paleness by the moon. Then the moon is engulfed and the cloud spreads out over the water. We get out and run back upstairs in our towels. Waiters are setting out dishes of nuts and olives in the hotel bar; the restaurant has lit its chandeliers, which blaze above the waiting tables. We dart up the grand marble staircase and along a corridor as wide as a boulevard to our room. But we meet no other guests; there is no one to shock with our attire, our dripping hair. And later, when we come down again, the blazing restaurant is still empty; the olives still sit mounded in their dishes. We do not intend to eat in the restaurant: a leather-bound menu on a gold plinth beside the door discloses the prices. But we stand there nonetheless, gazing through the doorway at the spectacle of its deserted grandeur, its inexplicable readiness, with its sparkling silver and crystal, its thick white napkins folded into pyramids, its tablecloths and fancy-backed chairs, for an event that seems to hover just beyond the boundary of perception. It is as though a delegation of ghosts is expected, or as though the notion of wealth itself is tonight to be honored and served, by the proud waiters who move among the tables making minute adjustments to the position of a glass or a fork.
Outside a warm wind is blowing. The sea is a field of dark inflections; the boats rock sleepily on their moorings. We walk along the road, into Santa Margherita, and find a table at a packed little place by the port, where the heat and laughter and the smells of cooking, the deep wooden shelves of beautiful wines, the baskets of rough bread, the old padrone in his stained apron, the faded color photographs of Italian landscapes, the glass cases of lemon tart and tiramisù, seem to distill all our manifold experiences into themselves; to become representative, even of things that bear no resemblance to them. Here are our travels, transitory but alive; here, again, is the reality, the moment that breaks and foams. We will not always live like this. We are going home, to work, to settle down, to send the children to school. Later, their teacher is discomposed by their lack of familiarity with the conventions of the classroom. They have forgotten their maths, or perhaps it is merely that they have forgotten their place among their peers. They have forgotten how to live anywhere but at the center of experience. Everything that now seems so real will soon be suspended; soon, the other reality will be unwrapped and reassembled. They are so different, these two realities. The first is the reality of the moment, of the sky as it looks tonight over Santa Margherita, of the spaghetti alle vongole and the satirical face of the padrone and the eczematic reproduction of Leonardo’s Last Supper that hangs in a cheap gilded frame beside our table. And the other: what is the other?