There was no planned order to our days, for I was no longer expected to be teaching Peter anything, though we talked, as before, about what we were reading. We passed the Norse sagas back and forth—though there was some aspect of them that Peter seemed to hold to himself like a secret, a high card—and their characters and events recurred in our conversation. Alan stayed up in his room on the telephone part of the day. Joseph was preoccupied with the garden routine, raking the paths, clearing dead leaves from the beds, trimming and pruning. He answered our questions but did not go on talking. Alan had brought a small yellow inflatable boat, military surplus, which Joseph inflated and presented to Peter and me. He showed us where he thought it should be kept: in a closed cupboard along the side of the garden toolshed. Beside the cupboard there was a stone cupola like a miniature tower, with a door in it opening to the top of a corkscrew flight of stairs. They led down through their stony smells to another door, padlocked, at the foot of the cliff. That was our way out onto the rocks of the shore, to go swimming.
And that was where we went shortly after breakfast that first morning: Peter and Andrew and Dorothy and I, though Dorothy sunburned with the slightest exposure, and stayed only for a minute before going back to the room. The rocky ledge above the waves led along at the foot of the cliffs, under the garden walls of villas on the top, and out to the end of the cape, and around it. Some of the rocks were the size of elephants. The flashing green-blue water was transparent. We could see every stone and piece of coral and seaweed on the bottom, ten, twenty, forty feet down. We dove off the rocks into another sunlight.
When we came back Alan was standing on the terrace outside the dining room with a tall, slender, dapper man of about Alan’s own age, who looked at once elegant and a little seedy. Alan introduced him as Georges Fratacci. As we stood talking before I followed the others upstairs to change, I was told that Georges was an architect, currently underemployed and working on entries for an architectural competition, and that he was a tenant of Alan’s, or a guest of Alan’s, or some combination of those that was never stated clearly. He and his wife and daughters were living in the modest, yellow, vaguely neoclassical house across the road from the villa, which also belonged to Alan. We could see its roof from our bathroom window. Georges had a fine-boned, lean, handsome face, set off with a trim Ronald Coleman moustache. He was wearing a pale linen suit, slightly rumpled, and a tie, and two-toned shoes, white with brown wingtips.
He had no English at all, though he had done architectural work, he said, for the American embassy. He alluded to architectural designs on which, apparently, he and Alan had worked together. He spoke to me proudly of being a Corsican. Alan had told him that I wanted to be a writer, a poet, and to Georges that was a clear recommendation. We were both artists. He was staying for lunch, where he would expand upon that theme.
André served us lunch on the terrace, and in the afternoon Alan drove us into Nice. On the way he and Georges pointed out the sights, telling us the names of the villa owners on the cape, and talking of the owner of the hotel and café, the Voile d’Or, beside the small harbor. They pointed out the other café, on the place, run by a couple they both knew. The wife, as they told it, had come from the demimonde in Toulon or Marseilles, where she had once run an advertisement in the evening newspaper, ending with the phrase “every discretion, near the railroad station.” Everyone liked her. Now she was pregnant and the café regulars were looking forward to being honorary uncles and aunts.
We retraced the winding street to where we had turned off the main road the night before, and made our way along the corniche lined with bicycle traffic, two and three bicycles abreast, with no intention of getting out of the way of cars and trucks, and then down the steep switchbacks into Nice, our first glimpse of a Mediterranean city, of metropolitan France, of the architecture and civilization of Provence. The traffic was negligible in comparison with what was soon to come, but it was all strange, composed of old cars, wagons and carts, unfamiliar shapes, and so it seemed that there was a lot of it revolving around the white-gauntleted policemen standing at the centers of the principal places, blowing whistles. Behind them rose the plain, inherited symmetry of the facades, the sand-colored limestone and harmonious proportions, the rows of shutters—jalousies—pale gray or gray-blue or gray-green, reflecting the southern sunlight that had filled the days of the later troubadours and of Dante and Cavalcanti and Petrarch.
Alan had a few routine matters to take care of, calling at his bank and the insurance office. Georges, meanwhile, led us past the big stores and into back streets and older sections of Nice, with overhanging upper stories and tables set outside small cafés in the shade, covered with socca—onion and black olive pie. Peter was absorbed by displays of French fishing harpoons, reels, and snorkeling gear. I knew so little that when we came to shoe stores with stacks of rope-soled shoes outside I supposed that the rope soles were a heritage of the shortages of the war years. Georges found us a bookstore. I pounced on the poems of Supervielle and the essays of Camus, an unknown volume of Gide, Valéry’s Monsieur Teste. (French paperbacks cost little then. They represented a spirit of publishing in which books could be produced cheaply in small editions, according to considerations not hypnotized by the hope of profit. Paperback publishing in the States was still confined to “dime novels.”) Alan would raise his eyebrows, of course, when he saw them.
He met us and took us all to lunch in a restaurant on a side street, a place that he had known, he said, all his life. Georges explained the Mediterranean specialties on the menu. We were all celebrating an arrival, only superficially aware of how different the occasion must have been for each of us. To Andrew, who knew no French at all and next to nothing about France, it must have seemed very strange. Dorothy and I welcomed it with blanket and determined approval. Alan, I suppose, was trying to sort out his own plans for the summer and decide how they might include all or any of the four of us. I could see that I was meant to play an important part in his decisions, watching over the activities of Peter and Andrew, making sure they were happily occupied. I scarcely considered that our situation was virtually as new to Alan as it was to the rest of us, and it would be a while before I tried to guess what combination of liberality and loyalties, affections, hopes, and heaven knows what else, had prompted and shaped his idea for the summer.