Beyond the steamed-up windows the storm breaks over the port. The water rushes down, hurling itself on the paving stones. It cascades off the awnings and runs in brown rivers along the gutters. Walking home, we are soaked to the skin, but later, standing on our balcony, we watch branches of lightning illuminate the tossing surface of the sea, jagged paths of electricity that struggle briefly to find some route into the earth, and in their failure brilliantly expend themselves and are extinguished.
The children have made two friends: we go out to breakfast on the hotel terrace to discover that they have affianced themselves to the daughters of an American millionaire with a pockmarked face and small blue eyes that look wearily at something over your shoulder. The Americans are at the Miramare for a fortnight, and our children are the first playmates they have found since their arrival a week earlier. The mother comes across to look us over. She is tall, powerfully built, with a slouching, cowboyish gait; but she is strangely pale and flaccid-looking. She too has a weary, offhand demeanor: she stands beside her husband and the two of them tell us about their tour of Europe, reeling off a list of countries and capital cities with a striking lack of animation, so that Paris and Prague seem to deflate a little before our eyes. We are still struggling to digest the notion of two whole weeks at the Grand Hotel Miramare. What strange, inexplicable luxury! The sun is shining once more: the other guests have come out for breakfast on the terrace. There are one or two bejeweled old ladies with tiny, fretful dogs, but otherwise they do not compose a particular type. They are all different, and they are all rich. The American woman does display a minor inconsistency: unlike the others, her clothes look as though she has worn them at least once before.
The children want to go to the beach club — their new friends have told them all about it. Apparently, the hotel has a private beach, directly below. This is where the Americans have been spending their days. The two sets of children cling onto one another, as though we might attempt to tear them asunder. The Americans have been on the road almost as long as we have, far from the society of other English-speaking children, and all four girls have the hunger of émigrés for the forsaken world, the world of friendship. It is as though they have encountered fellow citizens from the homeland, the old country. Girls their own age! A whole familiar, vanished way of life is suddenly present to them once more, with its particular references and language and atmosphere. They want to speak it, this language; they want to reminisce; they want to go to the beach club.
The Americans ask when we are leaving. Earlier, the man at the desk told us gravely that we were free to stay all day and make use of every hotel facility, but this offering does not satisfy the Americans. I watch them weigh it up, the day and its profits: they had been planning to go to Portofino for lunch. It is not a sound investment, their relationship with us. There are no long-term dividends. They are disappointed, almost angry. Our stock has no value: a measly day is all it’s worth. The father is inclined to jettison us straightaway. He wants to go to Portofino, as agreed. Instantly his daughters are distraught, almost tearfuclass="underline" they have a white, strained look about them that causes my own children to fall silent and gaze at them anxiously. The mother speaks. She is unemotionaclass="underline" she seems to stand in great desolate prairies of neutrality. She says that they will go to Portofino later, at four o’clock. Until then, the girls are free to be at the beach club. At four o’clock she will expect them to come without being told. She herself is going to go and lie down. She goes, and we are left with the father. There is only one thing for it: we offer to take charge of the children, and return them to the hotel at four. He nods curtly. He has got a good deal after all. Desire has been swabbed away from him: spongelike, we have absorbed the embarrassment of the whole situation. He walks slowly back to his table and picks up his copy of the Herald Tribune.
At the beach club there is a marine trampoline, riding out on the waves. The sea is ebullient, after the storm. All day the children swim out, and are dashed deliriously back onto the beach. They bounce madly on the trampoline. They have funny conversations, which I overhear in fragments from behind the cover of my book. The Americans have a friend in England called Sophie. Do we know her? I hear my daughter talking about her best friend Milly. Do they know Milly? She’s so nice.
Later I hear the American girls talking about their mother. She’s really sick, the older one says. I sit up: I want to explain to my daughters what that means. I want them to be kind. They are sitting in a row on the shoreline in their swimming costumes. Sometimes a wave comes up and foams at their feet. They are tossing pebbles into the water. I buy them an ice cream. I leave them be.
THE LAST SUPPER
At Ventimiglia, near the French border, we turn off the coast road and drive up into the hills. We are looking for somewhere to pitch Tiziana’s tent. It is six o’clock, still hot. The countryside is a little ragged, scarred here and there with enterprise, and with the formlessness of frontier places where the feeling of identity comes in unpredictable surges and then frays again, like an unraveling hem. The road goes up and up. We pass parked lorries and derelict roadside restaurants, travel through villages that cling along the verges and then peter out. The irresolute green vista resumes hesitantly, after each pause. We reach Dolceacqua and the broad brown Nervia River. There is a feeling here of civilization and abandonment, of something dead that was once alive: the ruined castle on its hill, the ancient arc of the great stone bridge, the tall, narrow, ravaged-looking terraces. Everywhere there are vineyards, modernized, bristling with signs. We stop and ask the way to the campsite, and are directed on ahead.
At last the campsite appears, a modest roadside place in its obscurity of low hills, where nonetheless there are people, established in their dusty pitches beneath the trees as though they had lived there all their lives. There are some mobile homes, where washing hangs on lines and television sets flicker through the windows. There are Dutch tents and German tents and tiny podlike tents with bicycles parked outside. There is a little bar and a café, and next to that a small rectangular swimming pool. The sky is overcast and gray: the dingy pool is full of children, whose parents sit in white plastic chairs on the concrete tiles. It is slightly desolate, this arrangement, though everyone seems to accept it. The countryside extends indifferently around; the sky is moody overhead; the parents lie torpid in their chairs, or rouse themselves to sudden, startling fits of activity, plunging heavily in and hurling their offspring shrieking across the water. Shortly after we arrive, everyone abandons the swimming pool and returns to their tents. It is no longer hot, but we will swim in any case. In the traffic jams of Ventimiglia, where we crawled through the dusty, constricted streets of the città vecchia behind giant lorries bound for Nice and Marseilles, the sun was cruel and adversarial, faintly humiliating: it was a form of oppression, from which swimming offered the only possibility of liberation. But we could find no road down to the sea at Ventimiglia, and in the end the heat passed, undefied. We defy it now, in retrospect, circulating around the cloudy water where children’s blow-up toys drift, forgotten, across the surface beneath the gray sky. Desire and satisfaction have become uncoupled. There will be no consummation tonight. There will be no resolution, no declaration of the day’s victory, no enshrining of its significance. We have reentered the other reality. We have returned to the ordinary, unexamined experience of life.