We have a tent. It is Tiziana’s: she lent it to us. Before we left to go south, she erected it for us on the grassy slope of her garden, beside the wooden hut. It is a small tent, dome-shaped, faded blue on the outside, with a faded pink interior. The bleached colours are intimate: it is Tiziana’s use that has faded them. We all get inside, while Tiziana’s huge black dogs lie down on the hot grass at the flap. It is like sitting in a shell, or a teacup. The brilliant afternoon disappears: the tent is filled with a diffuse, rose-coloured light, and the unbodied sounds of outside, of the dogs panting softly in the heat. Tiziana strokes the worn material, recalling her travels. She has been happy in this tent. She has taken it with her everywhere. She wishes to bequeath it to us, this frail shelter that can simply be unfolded and become a place, as familiar as a room, then cease to exist again. She doesn’t like the thought of it ceasing to exist. We promise to send it when we get back to England, but Tiziana shrugs. She doesn’t think she’ll be camping any time soon, dug in as she is on Jim’s doorstep, awaiting an opportunity to strike.
It is July, and the summer lies heavy on the landscape; the heat extends everywhere, across night and day, unbroken. We pick up the car in Arezzo and drive to the coast, past the port of Piombino with its ships and steel foundries and boats to Elba, out across the deserted countryside of the headland, and north to remote Populonia and the Gulf of Baratti. The light is dry, ancient, on the earth-coloured shoreline. The sea is a sheet of glitter. The tufted green headland, the grassy dunes with their crescent of pine trees, the brown-hillocked mystery of the Etruscan necropolis that stands beside the water, the fortified village on its hill above the bay: it is like a secret fold in the earth, inviolate. We pitch Tiziana’s tent in a big, dry glade with straw-coloured fields all around its perimeter, a kilometre from the sea. The pine needles and brown, brittle eucalyptus leaves are soft underfoot. We tie a length of rope between two trees as a washing line. We spread a sheet on the floor of the tent to sleep on. There is a shower block, and a little cafe that sells cappuccino and cornetti for a euro.
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 pine wood 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 second-hand 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 machine-like complexity of our life at home, the desire for escape that was its dark emission? A warm wind soughs through the pine wood 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 coloured, 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 pine woods. The sun begins to dip; slowly light leaves the bay. The sea is milky, thick, mineral-coloured. Evening approaches, a blue-grey 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, trance-like. 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, reorganising their pots and pans. They do not relinquish their grip on time. They are standing up for civilisation. 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 any more, 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. Afterwards 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 economise. 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 non-stop to Dieppe. I make pillows for the children out of folded-up clothes. They put on their pyjamas 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 on to 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-coloured 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 pine woods, but here there are sea urchins, blood-coloured, 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 scrutinise 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.
The children are nervous. They do not want to jump. The sea urchins frighten them. They have an instinctive terror of nacreous bodies that wait, unseen, in the water; of stings administered silently and without warning. It has taken them so long to establish that the world is predictable, that its elements are fixed, that its properties inter-relate reliably: they will not easily forget their fear of the unknown.
I take a few steps back, and then run forward and hurl myself into the water. It was easy: I am in the deep part, swimming with the fish in regions of exquisite turquoise coolness. I tread water and look back to shore. Ophelia is having none of it. She has withdrawn from the waterside, and is sitting on a rock with her chin in her hands. But Hamlet is tempted. She stands on the brink, in an agony of indecision. She is a daredevil: she cannot bear to feel afraid, and so she is inexorably drawn to do the things she fears the most. I admire her for this trait, which I conspicuously lack, but I have failed to understand its significance, which is that she experiences more than the common portion of terror, not less. She is more frightened than Ophelia of jumping into the water, and for this reason she will force herself to do it, while Ophelia sits calmly on her rock. Her father tells her not to try: he thinks it is too dangerous after all. It was easy enough jumping in, but it is unclear how we are going to get out. But it is too late; Hamlet comes flying through the air, her fists clenched into balls at her sides, and thuds into the water beside me. She springs up again, victorious. For a while we swim around, but there is nowhere to put our feet. The water is deep here. I begin to see the difficulty. We swim towards the rocks and through the crystalline water Hamlet sees the sea urchins, plump and glossy as blood clots, as if through a magnifying glass. The game is up: there in the water she flings her arms around my neck and sticks there like a limpet. She is heavy and I thrash about, trying to stay afloat. I ask her to let go and she shrieks and tightens her grip. On her rock, Ophelia begins to cry. I realise that one way or another I am going to have to get us out. I reach the rocks with Hamlet around my neck. Ophelia’s crying is getting on my nerves. There is only one way back to the shore, which is to clamber up the shelving rock among the sea urchins. From a distance the rock looks smooth but close up it is chaotic and sharp. I cut my hands and feet, and so does Hamlet. We stagger out into the dry afternoon with its high white sun. Hamlet and Ophelia cry uncontrollably. I am angry. I don’t know why, but I am angrier than I have ever been. I shout at them while blood runs down my legs. There are one or two Italians nearby, sunning themselves on the rocks. They look at us in consternation. They look at me. They know that the whole thing was entirely my fault. I am ashamed. I try to stop shouting but I can’t. I can’t.
*
We roam in the soughing pine woods. We lie by the water, talking. We peer at the Etruscan tombs, following dusty paths through fields of dry grass. There is the Tomb of the Chariots and the Tomb of the Attic Vases and the Tomb of the Funereal Couches. There are dome-shaped tombs like dirt-coloured igloos in the grass. We stare at them but we do not understand them: they are the core, the impenetrable kernel of this land’s mystery.
For four nights we sleep in the tent on its dry, rustling carpet of leaves. The children sleep deeply, soundlessly. We lie close together. In the darkness there is no perspective. It is like being held in the palm of a hand.
All day and all night I am half-asleep and half-awake. I am thinking about the future, though these thoughts are wordless and indistinct. They are like running water, a single entity. They pour towards an edge, a precipice, and tumble over the side. I do not want to go home. More precisely, I don’t know how to go home. My consciousness runs swiftly, smoothly towards this edge and then tumbles over, a cataract. I need to find a path down out of these months in Italy. They stand behind us like mountains. To have climbed them, to have known their paths and peaks: in certain lights it has seemed that these are the dimensions of life itself, but lying in the tent I know this isn’t so. Life could become flat again, ordinary again. It is desire that is big and grand and treacherous; desire, not life. I remember the Apuan mountains, their abysses, their glinting white fastnesses of rock: we will pass them on the road home and look up from the flatlands at their awful faces. We will remember that we were once there. But we will pass them. We will stay on the road.
A big group of Italian teenagers arrives, and they pitch their tents around ours in a circle. They giggle and shriek and sing English pop songs all night. Our clothes are filthy; there is nowhere to sit, except on the ground. Our hair is matted and our tent is full of ants. We wake up on the fifth day and realise that we want to leave Baratti. We pack up the car, and follow this slender thread of desire north.
*
On the road outside La Spezia, the telephone rings. I have made some money: a South Korean publisher has bought the rights to one of my books, for a handsome sum. We cheer the South Koreans, zig-zagging madly across both lanes of the N1. It is late afternoon, thirty-nine degrees, the sky grey and turbid and pregnant-looking. We turn off at Rapallo, looking for campsites. The road is dense with traffic. We crawl into town and out the other side, and follow the road down the Portofino peninsula. It does not seem likely that we will find a campsite along this road: the hills rise in steep green terraces to the right, and to the left plunge straight down to the sea. On the other side, back towards Rapallo, the cars have come to a standstill. The sky is clear here, and the sun is hot. A few people are getting out, to sit in the shade by the side of the road and wait. The rest keep their engines running and their tinted windows tight shut. Their forms can be glimpsed in the dark, air-conditioned interiors: they are like nocturnal animals, carved out of shadow, with strange glimmering accents embedded in their eyes and jewellery. There are some very expensive cars in the traffic jam. This is the rich Portofino crowd, whose giant yachts we see later in the harbour, dwarfing the narrow sunset-coloured terraces. But the peninsula is beautiful, as lush and romantic as a Giorgione landscape, with its faded pink palazzi, its villas sunk in the trees, its road winding above the water. The cars form a little packed rope of anxiety, weaving through the loveliness of a dream.
It is past six o’clock and the children are hot and fretful. The dust of Baratti is everywhere, in our clothes and hair, caked in our nails. There is no turning back: the road the other way is at a standstill. We are being forced along the peninsula like something being digested. We inch towards Santa Margherita, and when we get there we abandon the car and walk in search of a hotel. The cheap hotels are full. The expensive hotels are full too. We try the ugly hotels: I feel sure that in Italy the ugly hotels will always have space. Up a backstreet I find a hotel that is situated in the middle of a concrete multi-storey car park. The receptionist is sitting in a glass box in a grey-carpeted foyer, from where long, low-ceilinged grey corridors with rows of identical doors extend out to every side. Through the foyer window, five or six feet away, I can see cars going up and down the concrete ramps of the car park: that is the only view. No other human being is visible, except for the receptionist in her box. She wears a red uniform, like an air hostess. She speaks to me through a grille. She tells me that the hotel is completely full.
We jump back in the car and re-enter the traffic jam. It is dusk now, and the streets of Santa Margherita are full of people. They sit in the cafes with exquisite drinks, and walk freely out along the harbour in the sea breezes and rose-coloured light. We gaze at them, parched and disconsolate. We have no choice but to go forward: the road back is paralysed. We crawl out of the harbour and along the coast. It takes twenty minutes to go a hundred metres. 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 grey 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 travelling 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 favour 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 honoured 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 apacked 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 colour photographs of Italian landscapes, the glass cases of lemon tart and tiramisu, seem to distil 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 centre 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 Margarita, 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?
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 demeanour: 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 bejewelled 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 on to 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 straight away. He wants to go to Portofino, as agreed. Instantly his daughters are distraught, almost tearful: 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 unemotional: 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: sponge-like, 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 on to 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.