THE VILLAGE had an inn with thirteen rooms, running water, and a bath for general use, two boarding houses, a post office, two dark provisions stores, an open-air vegetable stand, a meat market, a bakery, a fish store, a milk store, a drygoods store, and a newsstand which sold soap flakes, toilet paper, stamps, Italian cigarettes, matches, and the provincial edition of the Nazione of Florence, supplemented for the summer trade by the Corriere della Sera, La Stampa, and Il Giorno. There was a pay telephone in a booth at the inn, and this posto pubblico was the only telephone in Porto Quaglia, except for the doctor’s, so they said. Telegrams came down by bicycle from the hill town of Acquafredda, where there was a telegraph office, a municipio, and a police station. There was only one frigidaire, they said, in Porto Quaglia, not counting the one in the inn, and one bathroom with hot water. There was no cream to be bought in the dairy store, and the milk had to be boiled. The dentist drove over from Sarzana, the nearest market town, to pull teeth in the patient’s parlor or kitchen, and in summer he brought along his bathing suit, to get double value from the trip: there were cabine to rent at the public beach, and a small bar selling coffee, Campari soda, gelati in paper cups, bottled fruit juice, and vermouth. In short, the village was poor. The villagers spoke an ugly Italian and many of them had lost most of their teeth. The older women wore dark-blue dotted cotton house dresses and had hair of that peculiar iron gray found among poor Italians and suggestive of rust and mold.
It was a fishing village, un petit hameau de pêcheurs, un piccolo villaggio di pescatori. That was how those who went there for their vacations found themselves describing it to their hairdressers, manicurists, pedicurists, concierges, postmen, train and air companions en route from London, Rome, Paris, Milan. True or false?
True because Porto Quaglia was in fact populated by fishermen whose thin brown nets like hair nets were spread out to dry in the sun behind the whitewashed houses, and there was no other industry in the village except for the desultory transport of marble from the nearby mountains above Carrara, which was carried out in boats and barges equipped with giant cranes, grappling hooks, pulleys, and winches that appeared to spend the whole month of August toiling to dump five or six blocks of gray stone on the waterfront and then reload them in a Sisyphean labor. Porto Quaglia’s little harbor had once had a fleet of sailing vessels that carried marble from Carrara as far as Marseille, but then Carrara had built its own harbor at Marina di Carrara, and the sons of the Porto Quaglia mariners became barmen on the United States and Italian Lines. At any rate, Porto Quaglia today was simply a fishing village, and yet to say so to your manicurist or your B.B.C. producer was a lie.
Partly because the words “hameau de pêcheurs,” et cetera, implied something colorful—a picturesque fishing fleet heavy with dragging nets like dark bridal veils; orange sails, red sails, yellow sails, marked with crescents and suns; bright-blue boats with an eye painted on the prow pulled up on the beach; old men mending their gear. A few old men did occasionally mend their gear but not where they could be observed; there were no sails except the white ones of small pleasure boats; and it was rare to see a fishing trawler, even on the horizon. The prized local catch was muggine—a special kind of white mullet, they said, that lived only in the tidal reaches of the bamboo-fringed River Quaglia, on which the village bordered. Yet muggine was hardly ever to be found in pescheria, which sold chiefly sole and red mullet that were suspected of coming from somewhere else along the coast. Fishing, such as it was, was practiced secretively as a rule. At night sometimes you would hear a lone rowboat push off from a wooden landing, then the plash of oars or the sound of an outboard motor. In the dead stillness of noon, you would see a man or a boy standing in a rowboat casting a white furled hand net into the river with a beautiful circling, swooping motion; this net was called “the hawk” and it struck into the glassy green water like a gauzy bird of prey. But often the man proved to be the doctor from Carrara in white duck trousers, who had learned the hawk in middle age; he was the “other” doctor, married into the local hill gentry, and had a tennis court, a telephone, a frigidaire, and at least one bath with hot water, which were never counted in the inventory, probably because he was not counted, out of courtesy to the indigenous doctor, who had a monopoly on the sick of Porto Quaglia. The boy in the rowboat with the net was always the same boy; he cast it again and again without catching anything, giving a tranced sense of time suspended like the black cranes groping for the gray marble.
Yet the fact that Porto Quaglia did not conform to a touristic image of a fishing village was not exactly the reason for the feeling that the description was false. Had it looked like Collioure or Concarneau or Chioggia or Provincetown, there still would have been something wrong—indeed wronger. The inauthenticity of the description lay in the describers. That is, if a native of Porto Quaglia described his home as a fishing village, he would be telling the truth, but in the mouth of, say, a Milanese publisher these words became horribly fraudulent. To a local fisherman Porto Quaglia was self-evidently a fishing village, but to a Milanese publisher it was “un piccolo villaggio di pescatori.” Those quotation marks, which sprang up around the words quite without the publisher’s volition, were the source of all the trouble.
Similarly with the word “unspoiled.” It was true that Porto Quaglia was not yet spoiled, comparatively speaking, yet only a very unaware summer visitor, perhaps an Englishwoman, would try saying this to a native, whose whole interest lay in having it spoiled as fast as possible. There is something suspect in a laudatory remark that cannot be made in the presence of those being lauded. “Unspoiled,” moreover, had grown those quotation marks as the old women in Porto Quaglia grew tufts of iron-gray whiskers. But how else would you describe Porto Quaglia, without going into detail, except as a fishing village on the Ligurian coast that had not yet been completely spoiled by tourists?
This was the first slight embarrassment for the kind of person who came to Porto Quaglia—the difficulty of stating, in brief form, where he was going without making it sound like the kind of place that would attract someone quite different from himself—say, an editress of Vogue or another Milanese publisher. It was no solution to reply “I’m going to Porto Quaglia,” for this led to “Where is Porto Quaglia?” and “Should I know about it?,” all of which ended in a description of P. Q. as a simple fishing village on the Ligurian coast.
The only remedy, it was decided at lunch at the Buonsantis’ (he was a tall bald Italian employed at UNESCO in Paris; she was small and French and translated philosophic and economic texts), would be for Porto Quaglia to be “put on the map,” like Portofino or Portovenere or Port Said. But if your concierge or your hairdresser already knew about Porto Quaglia, so that the mere name produced a ready-made description like a pop-up toaster, then the reason for going there would have vanished. The reason for going there was that nobody knew about it. But of course everybody wants to go to a place no one knows about (except those in the know), though for varying motives, which is why the words “simple fishing village” have been as abused as a pinewoods in which there is now a Camping. Those who, like the Buonsantis and their guests, had been attracted to Porto Quaglia by the absence of yachts, luxury hotels, motorboats, water skiers, skin divers, golf, casinos, shops, cocktail lounges, night clubs, sports cars, and other amenities were refugees from a banal summer life, but it was impossible, they agreed, to escape from a cliché of action without being stamped with a cliché of speech, like an exit permit. The world will allow you to go to Porto Quaglia as long as it has Porto Quaglia’s “number.”
Fifteen people, the usual complement, were eating lunch at a long table under a trellis covered with trumpet vines in the Buonsantis’ garden, which looked out onto the main street and the river, where a few masts of small boats could be seen. The garden contained a flagged terrace of varicolored marbles, a grape arbor, a sour-cherry tree, some trampled lawn, two large ornamental palms, and two Christmas trees, symmetrically planted. There was also a “fantasy” table, made of stone in the shape of a large mushroom and surrounded by little painted stone toadstools. On the balcony rail of the apartment above, facing the river, hung some striped towels and damp bathing suits. In the green midday shimmer the luncheon party, which was still peeling figs and drinking wine, resembled a scene by Renoir, the more so because they were speaking French. French was the prevailing language among the summer people at Porto Quaglia, who were known to the natives as “i francesi,” whatever their nationality. Today the group included Mme. Buonsanti’s father, the two Buonsanti children, a French engineer, his wife—a child psychologist—and their three children, a Roman editor and his wife, a Livornese professor of history on loan to Columbia University, and an American journalist and his wife, who were staying at the inn. Three bicycles, a surf mattress, and a rubber boat leaned against the wall of the house, and some beach chairs were sprawled near the table; the double doors were open into the principal room of the Buonsantis’ apartment, where a great many straw hats were piled on top of the sideboard and a chessboard was set up for play on the glass-covered dining table. More “French” kept arriving and pulling up chairs. The women and girls were wearing summer cotton dresses, and the men striped jerseys with khaki shorts or long blue or white canvas trousers. They were still discussing what to call Porto Quaglia.
“You French are so frightfully analytical,” said an English labor lawyer, who was opposed to what he called “blood sports” and had appeared at the end of lunch, in cleated shoes and with a sweater tied round his hips, to take the Buonsanti children on a mountain hike. “My wife and I don’t find it at all embarrassing to say we’re going to a fishing village. I mean, why not face facts?” He then translated his remarks into French.
“If you faced facts,” said the Roman editor tartly, “you would say you were going to a summer resort.”
“Une petite station balnéaire,” agreed Mme. Buonsanti, laughing.
“Plage modeste,” added her husband.
Everyone laughed, thinking of the dusty town beach where none of the “francesi” swam except when the sea was rough and a boat could not land at the White Rock or Raven Point or one of the many coves and grottoes farther up the coast. One reason that Porto Quaglia remained “unspoiled” was that the snobbish casual tourist saw only the plage modeste at the end of the village and immediately turned his Alfa Romeo around and shot off to Lerici or Forte dei Marmi. To sit in the café outside the inn and watch this happen while eating an ice-cream cone was one of the children’s amusements on dull mornings when the boats had not yet come to take them bathing and the family outboard motor was “en panne.”
The White Rock was the chief lure and secret beauty of Porto Quaglia. Parties of bathers were taken there every morning by the fishermen in little yawls with inboard motors; informal excursions ran several times before noon from the pier in front of the inn, and regular passengers were picked up at the rickety little wooden landings along the river, off the single main street. Starting at ten o’clock, cries began to ring out from the bank as the fishing boats with little triangular colored flags in their rigging were sighted. “Pierino!” “Paolo!” “Romeo!” “Venga, venga!” Or “Wait, wait! I am coming. Aspetti! Wait for me, Pierino!” Or “Jean, où est Jean? Où est le matelas?” “Irene, have you got the basket?” “My glasses! I forgot my glasses!” “Carlo! Dov’ è il tuo cappello?” “Dov’ è Michel? Où est Marc?” “Son già partiti? Con Romeo?” With thermos bottles of cold water, baskets of cheese and fruit, baskets and bags of bathing equipment, with surf mattresses, pails and shovels, yellow and red and white and blue inflated tubes, beach umbrellas, nets containing books and newspapers, the boats were finally packed and headed for the White Rock. Fifteen minutes later, the landing was accomplished, the older children swimming to shore and returning like a school of fish to hover alongside and seize the bags and baskets as they were lifted over the bow and offer a hand to the women in their dresses and beach gowns as they climbed down the unsteady ladder, while the men, having leapt to shore, formed a human chain along which the younger children were passed. Nearly every day someone or something fell overboard in the excitement of landing: a straw hat, a book, a pair of glasses, shoes, a middle-aged newcomer—or all of these together in one parcel. This had happened yesterday morning to the whiskered American journalist, thought by the children to resemble Uncle Sam, and François, the twelve-year-old Buonsanti boy, had jubilantly taken a picture of it with his new camera.
Starting at one o’clock, the boats reappeared at the White Rock, at Raven Point, at the various scogli and small pebbly beaches, to bring the bathers back for lunch. Naturally, irritations sprang up from time to time between the boatmen or between the boatmen and the passengers, who would complain that Romeo or Paolo had forgotten them and taken a party of new people in preference. But those who were left behind on the jetty would always appear at Rocca Bianca, rowed by an old man or a little boy, and some came in the old man’s rowboat by preference, disapproving of the motor sailboats and the oil they spread on the water. Some of the young people came by threes and fours in rowboats rented for the summer or given them for Christmas or a birthday, and one family had an outboard motor. Sometimes the older children, in pairs or accompanied by François in his rowboat, would swim back to Porto Quaglia and arrive late and panting for lunch, or they would walk back in a party over the marble cliffs, though this was considered dangerous by their parents.
The White Rock was really a mass of rocks and cliffs of pure milk-white marble that formed a towering point jutting into the sea. Above it, on a steep mountain flank, grew ilex and pine and wild olive trees. The water around it was a pale green and exceptionally clear. If you swam way out beyond your depth you could still look down to the white marble shelving that extended along the sea floor like a vast bath for sea horses or Tritons. Along the shore it formed deep caves. The sea at this point was seldom quiet and gave the impression of washing itself, like laundry, by beating against the rock and rinsing itself as it ran in and out of the cool caves. Blue-green and violet marbles were not uncommon along this stretch of coast, but white was freakish; it was as though a vein of sculptor’s marble had escaped from its mountain prison miles off in the Apuan Alps and raced underground to burst into the sea in a great release of energy, so that this marine spot was like an inchoate museum or temple or workshop haunted by glistening forebodings or polished memories of statuary—nymphs and dolphins and Venuses rising from the spray. For some reason, doubtless connected with the marble, the water here and in the nearby coves was cooler than is usual in the Mediterranean, and there were no jellyfish.
Farther along, at the beach called Raven Point and at the lonely beach called Judgment Day by the summer people, because it looked like the scene of a Tintoretto “Last Judgment,” there were mussels and purple sea urchins clinging to the dark rocks. The children collected them; the men opened them with pocket knives, and the bathers shared them at midday, along with the cheese, figs, grapes, pears, peaches brought in the individual baskets, to stave off hunger, before Pierino or Romeo or Paolo came to take everyone home for a two-o’clock lunch. Like a backdrop to this watery, summery scene bobbing with small craft and bright swimming tubes, the Carrara mountains came into view as the boats rounded into Porto Quaglia’s harbor—pale brown, like canvas, in the blue distance, patched with what appeared to be snow fields, streaked with crevasses and awesome glaciers, all made of white marble—a realm of Titans, Michelangelo Land. In the intermediate distance, in the green-forested hills above the Quaglia, were belfried Tuscan hill towns that caught the gold of the afternoon sun in their medieval clocks, towers, and ramparts. It was like an illustrated history lesson: the children’s eyes travelled thoughtfully from the remote white fissures of the quarries, which had been opened in Roman times, down to picture-book Castelnuovo, where Dante had stayed, down to the stone artillery nests, so near you could almost touch them, that the Germans had made in the last war.
Except on Sundays, when trippers came from Sarzana and Acquafredda, the “French” usually had the White Rock to themselves, and the strangers, principally English, who from time to time “discovered” Rocca Bianca while staying at the inn or in a pensione, were adopted by the “French,” offered fruit and cheese, the loan of a child’s pail or surf mattress, invited to play chess in the evenings or join in political discussions in the café outside the inn. The English, henceforth known as “francesi” to the boatmen and shopkeepers, reciprocated with ice creams, lifts to Sarzana or Marina di Massa for shopping, invitations to drive to Lucca or Pisa. Sometimes, when the “French” went to Raven Point or Judgment Day, a smart motorboat with water skis would come whizzing up from Lerici, disgorging Roman writers, society women, publishers, who were staying at the Hotel Doria or the Hotel Byron or the Hotel Shelley e delle Palme. A different world, as different as the blue Lerici waters from the green waters of Porto Quaglia, a world of palms, villas, and esplanades, but this world too was accommodated. Joint dinners were arranged at a mountain inn known for its prosciutto and sheep cheese or else in the port of Lerici, where the guests would eat spaghetti alle vongole or plates of datteri, those brown polished date-shaped mussels that grew only on the soft stone of Portovenere, where they were said to burrow holes like cliff swallows. Or the Roman writers and publishers would come to dinner at the inn at Porto Quaglia, telephoning ahead of time to the posto pubblico to order muggine ai ferri and to recommend that the waiters wear jackets. But the boy waiters in the inn at Porto Quaglia did not have jackets; the only smartening up they could do was to roll down their shirtsleeves and take the pencil from behind their ear. “Un piccolo villaggio di pescatori,” the host at dinner would explain to the troop he had brought with him, bestowing a tender, fatherly smile on the café where the “French” were playing chess as if nothing had happened.
There was no fear that these Romans would “discover” Porto Quaglia, for they believed they already knew it, like the inside of their pocket. Still, word was getting around, as Mike, the American journalist, was saying to Hélène Buonsanti, lowering his voice slightly, as though passing on a piece of confidential information.
“Qu’est-ce qu’il dit, maman?” said Laure, the fourteen-year-old Buonsanti girl alertly. All the children were on the qui vive for any threat to their summer home, and they understood by instinct when it was being talked about, even in a foreign tongue.
Mme. Buonsanti’s father, Dr. Bernheim, shook his gray head and checked his granddaughter with his eyes, which were generally half closed, as if inattentive, like the ear of a confessor. His lids now dropped again, and his hand cradled his chin, but the tilt of his head betrayed the fact that he was following closely what the American said.
“Yep,” continued Mike, “the word’s getting around, I’m afraid, Hélène.” He coughed and moved his chair closer to his little hostess, still talking under his breath, but since he was in the habit of raising his voice when speaking English to a foreigner, the effect was of an arresting stage whisper. Everyone at the table turned to listen. “I read about it in New York,” he shouted, sotto-voce. “Last winter. In Harper’s Bazaar. A highbrow fashion magazine. They said Porto Quaglia was where the French left-wing intellectuals went for the summer.”
“How stupid!” said Hélène Buonsanti coldly. “The French left-wing intellectuals! Ecoute, Arturo. Figure-toi.”
“Mais c’est vrai, maman!” said Laure. “C’est vrai, maman,” said François, grinning. “C’est vrai, n’est-ce pas, Catherine?” He turned his bright, demure black eyes to the engineer’s oldest daughter, who was fifteen and humorless.
“Tais-toi, François!” flashed his mother. The children made fun of spectacled Catherine, because in her lycée she had organized a circle of Filles des Obscurs Intellectuels de Gauche. “C’est dégoutant,” Hélène burst out, banging her fist on the table.
“Why does it make her so mad?” demanded Mike, of the table at large. “Why does it make your daughter so mad?” he added, shouting at the doctor.
Hélène calmed herself. “It is the same as ‘fishing village,’ ” she explained in her slow English. “It is true when the children say that we here are intellectuals of the left. But if someone says it in a fashion magazine it is a silly lie.”
Arturo Buonsanti was laughing. “Mais c’est merveilleux!” he cried. “Eh, Hélène? Next summer when your hairdresser asks you where you are going for your vacation, you can answer that naturally you are going where the French intellectuals of the left go.”
“Et les juifs, et les juifs, papa!” chanted Laure, jumping up from her place and putting her arms around her father’s neck. A few days before, someone had noticed that the greater part of the summer people were either Jewish, half Jewish, a quarter Jewish, or, like Arturo Buonsanti, married to someone Jewish. This trouvaille still enchanted the children, like a meadow full of four-leaf clovers. “Pauvre papa,” murmured Laure, hugging him. “Tu n’es pas juif; mais moi, je le suis!”
Arturo Buonsanti was chuckling. “Modeste station balnéaire, très frequentée par les juifs.”
“Oh, I say,” protested the British lawyer, “that would be liable to misinterpretation, wouldn’t it?”
“Gives the wrong picture, I agree,” said Mike. “Sort of a Miami Beach.” He laughed nervously. Both he and the Englishman were embarrassed by the children’s freedom with the “racial” topic, which their parents seemed positively to encourage, like premature talk about sex. Mike, in particular, had an uneasy notion that he was being led on by this permissive atmosphere into making what might sound (to Jews) like an anti-Semitic remark. The other day at the café, for instance, they had teased him without mercy because he had refused to believe that everyone present was Jewish. “But you don’t look Jewish, any of you.”
“Il cherche le nez,” François had murmured, watching the American stare at each face in turn.
“Hey!” Mike had retorted. “Vous avez tort, mon garçon. J’aime les juifs. I’m not Jewish, but my wife is. Aren’t you, darling?” The children had burst into giggles. They loved to tease Mike, because he was good-humored, said “vous” to them, and was exactly like their idea of an American. Even Catherine had asked him gravely whether all Americans ate with their feet on the table—she had seen it in the films. So that now, when Catherine and her cronies passed him eating breakfast at the café, he would quickly put his feet on the table and, for good measure, his spoon in his coffee cup, to the amazement of the waiters, whom he tried to include in the joke with a series of broad winks. The result of this charade was that Elisabeth, another American, who lived above the Buonsantis, was asked by the innkeeper whether all Americans ate with their feet on the table.
Mike’s wife failed to find the story amusing. She was irritated by these nonchalant and observant children, whom she had overheard chiming “Don’t you think so, darling?” in what she uncomfortably recognized as her husband’s voice. It was obvious, she told Mike, that these European children had been indoctrinated with anti-Americanism. Their good manners offended her too—always “Bonjour, Monsieur,” “Bonjour, Madame,” instead of “Hi, Mike,” “Hi, Irene,” the way she was used to in America. She was touchy about being American and touchy about being Jewish. She had a rather large nose, which she was touchy about too. “That little boy,” she said, “was making fun of my beak.” She could speak quite coarsely when she wished to. “ ‘Il cherche le nez.’ ”
Mike shook his head. “No, no,” he said. “He was riding me. As a matter of fact, honey, when he caught me I was looking for the nose. I have to admit it.”
Irene resented Porto Quaglia. She was sorry she had ever saved that clipping from Harper’s Bazaar. It was not a real fishing village; there were no real intellectuals, like Sartre or Françoise Sagan; there was nothing to buy; and though they had been here only a short time, she was pressing Mike to go to Ischia. “I like it here,” Mike kept repeating, but Irene’s dissatisfaction was slowly convincing him; like an echo, he too began to criticize the pensione at the inn: spaghetti twice a day and fish with too many bones in it.
“Vous n’aimez pas la nourriture italienne,” Hélène Buonsanti said kindly to Irene. She meant, Irene retorted, that Americans only liked steak and fried potatoes. “Mais non,” Hélène protested, determined to make peace. “Le steak et les frites sont tout à fait français.”
Mike interposed that no one liked Italian cooking better than he and Irene, but why couldn’t they get real filet of sole at the inn? “Without bones,” he emphasized. Hélène had had her cook fillet the soles for lunch, over the objections of Arturo, who said that they would be flavorless. Mike was a popular figure, and everyone saw regretfully what was happening. To please his wife, he would soon have to leave Porto Quaglia, and he was foxily seeking a reason for leaving without regrets. Yet no one at the table was prepared for the undercurrent of antagonism that had made itself felt, like a sudden cold tug, just now, at the end of lunch, when he began playing with the notion that Porto Quaglia’s days were numbered. “Yes, Hélène,” he went on easily, “it’s just a question of time, I’m afraid. Une question de temps. Irene and I went exploring this morning. We got a boy to row us across to that big beach on the other side of the river.”
A look of understanding passed along the table. “Lo spiaggione,” whispered a pretty girl to a young architect from Turin. “Parla dello spiaggione.” “La grande plage, grand-papa,” said Laure to Dr. Bernheim. “Oui, mon enfant. J’ai compris,” said the doctor, nodding sadly.
“Quelle horreur!” said Mike. “Wasn’t it, darling? Ruinée, eh, Arturo? Kaput!”
The host, who resembled a sage because of his prematurely bald head, knitted his brows and agreed. “J’ai raison, eh?” said Mike, looking around him. No one dissented. Until the previous year they had been in the habit of going across the Quaglia and walking half a mile down a path through a thicket of bamboo to lo spiaggione—a big wild sandy beach on the other side, on the open Mediterranean, where there were rollers to ride and where the children could build sand castles. This had been a regular alternate to the White Rock. But the tide of humanity coming up the coast from Viareggio, with its flotsam of night clubs, cheap hotels, neon-lit seafood restaurants, had finally overtaken Punta Sabbia, as the settlement across the river was called, and a Camping that had been planted there two years ago was literally the last straw. The grande plage was now covered with straw huts, bamboo huts, loose straw, tents, candy wrappers, ice-cream cartons, rusty cans, broken bottles, old automobile tires, watermelon rinds, not to mention the lengthening row of cabine and rented umbrellas; to reach the water in many places it was necessary to pick one’s way through refuse and human bodies as in a game of stepping stones. The advent of the campers, moreover, had created a serious sanitary problem, and the refuse had bred flies and mosquitoes. This summer only the children had been across to the big beach; the grownups did not speak of it any more, as if it were someone who had died in a horrible way or lived on upstairs in a special room like an insane relation in the last century. The grande plage, which had been an essential feature of the Porto Quaglia agenda, like the yearly boat trip to Portovenere or the climb up Monte Morello, was steadfastly ignored. No one cared even to remember the indignant meetings of the summer before last, when they had tried to save lo spiaggione: the open letter to the mayor of Acquafredda protesting the sanitary conditions on the other side of the river, the manifesto to the Belle Arti at La Spezia calling attention to the despoilment of the bamboo and the pineta, the photographs of Before and After they had sent to Il Mondo and Italia Nostra. The ruin of the spiaggione was accepted, and there were those who, last summer, had claimed to see a virtue in the necessity, pointing out that what had happened on the other side would be a lesson to the elements in Porto Quaglia that wanted to see it “developed.” Mass tourism, they declared, could not be stopped; the hope was to divert it, and Punta Sabbia ought to be welcomed as a human garbage dump, where all the undesirables collected in one place, without any compulsion being exercised but according to a kind of natural zoning law. This summer, though, these arguments, once half persuasive, had been put away regretfully, like last year’s faded bathing suits and rusted bathing caps; they did not seem to fit any more.
“Mais c’est tout à fait différent!” said the Roman editor sharply, breaking the gloomy silence that had fallen on the table. “The spiaggione is sand, good for pitching tents. Here we are on rock and stones.”
“ ‘It can’t happen here,’ eh?” said Mike.
“But, Francesco, what about the new Camping at the bivio?” gently put in the editor’s wife. This was a very small Camping, of only a few tents, at the fork two miles away where the road from Sarzana divided, the main branch going south toward Carrara and a long spur following the river to Porto Quaglia, where it ended.
“It is at the bivio,” her husband said impatiently. “They do not come here to swim; they go to Punta Sabbia.” And he went on to reiterate his theory that Porto Quaglia could not be “developed” because it was not on a through road. “People looking for pleasure don’t like to be at a dead end. They are afraid of being bottled up. They are restless. Everyone today is restless—especially the Italians.” This theory, which he had been propounding for five years with increasing conviction, served as usual to pacify the doubters; his disgust with the tendency of modern life, familiar to readers of his editorials, made him all the more credible as a forecaster—an optimist they would not have relied on. In the same way, the whole community, including the children, trusted him as a weather prophet because he distrusted the weather.
Just then, down the marble walk under the grape arbor, came the Irish poet Frank O’Hare. He was a big pale deep-chested man with a fringe of gray hair, the night owl of Porto Quaglia; he rented a house from a fisherman, never swam or sunned, and was seldom seen in daylight, though he was generally dressed only in bathing trunks, as he was now. To see him saunter down the walk in broad afternoon was a sign of trouble, as though an evening bat had flitted across the palm trees; if he came by day, it was to “have a word” with Dr. Bernheim, and everyone now jumped to the conclusion that his pregnant wife or one of his five children must be “under the weather” again. But he wore a large smile and carried a chessboard. “I’ve come for a game with Arturo,” he explained, shaking hands all around and accepting a glass of whiskey, which Hélène had run into the house to procure. O’Hare was the chess champion of Porto Quaglia—a title he held from having beaten Hélène’s father three out of five at the end of the previous summer. This was only his second year at Porto Quaglia; he spoke no French and hardly a word of Italian, but he was extremely sociable and knew all the gossip of the village, which he picked up at the “pub” over a glass of beer (he did not drink wine) and from his private sources among the fishermen and maids. “Have ye heard the news?” he said now, and at once everyone guessed that this was the reason for his visit. “The Germans have discovered Porto Quaglia.”
A long cry of dismay went up in the garden. O’Hare raised a hand to hush it. This morning, he went on, folding his arms, he had gone into Sarzana to get some medicine for Sean, whose foot was infected again (“I’d like a word with you later, if I may, Doctor.” “Papa—” “Oui, ma fille, j’ai compris”), and while he was there he had stopped in at the travel agency, where they sold the bus tickets, to pass the time of day. There he had found a young German pair inquiring for a purse the girl had left on a bus from La Spezia; the long and short of it was that he had acted as translator for them (the boy had a little English) and had asked them, by the bye, what they were doing in Sarzana. They told him that a tourist bureau in Frankfurt had recommended Porto Quaglia.
“Oh, là là!” said Arturo Buonsanti. “Oh, là là!” said the engineer. “Oh, là là!” cried all the children.
“Qu’est-ce qui se passe?” called a woman’s voice with an American accent from the balcony above.
“C’est les Allemands, Elisabeth!” shouted the children. “Ils sont à Sarzana. Ils ont découvert Porto Quaglia.” A shriek answered.
The Buonsantis’ cook, Anna, rushed out from the kitchen. “Cosa, signora? Cosa?”
“I tedeschi, Anna,” said Hélène. “Son arrivati qui.”
Anna shielded her eyes and peered out to the street, along the green tunnel of the arbor. “Dove? Dove sono, professore?” She turned to Arturo. “All’ albergo?”
Arturo reassured her. “Non è vero, Anna. Almeno è un po’ esagerato.” But he too, behind his smile, was very much taken aback. “Oh, là là!” he repeated to himself.
Down the outside staircase trooped the families who rented the second-story apartments—Mme. Brée, wakened from her after-lunch nap, was wearing a frilly cotton dressing gown, and her children’s hair was tousled. Fat Margherita from the house next door, who took boarders, appeared in a parting of the hedge; from the house behind, young Dr. Livio, from Rome, came buttoning his white shirt. Little Anne, the engineer’s youngest, hopped on a bicycle to go tell her friend Suzanne down the street. O’Hare stood clasping an oar and embroidering the tale for the group clustered around him while Hélène and Elisabeth, the American, acted as interpreters.
“You’d think it was an air-raid alarm,” said Mike, guffawing.
“They were here in these hills,” replied the professor of history, chidingly. He nodded his head at the green hills behind the house. “In ’44. Fighting the Partisans, who were hiding in the woods on Monte Morello. Anna remembers.”
“That was a tragedy,” said the Roman editor. “This is farce.”
Mike’s wife interrupted. “Those people in Sarzana—were they West Germans or East Germans?” “West, of course,” said the editor irritably. “They are from Frankfurt.” “I don’t think we should be prejudiced against the West Germans,” declared Irene in a virtuous tone.
“I quite agree,” said the British lawyer. “I bear no prejudice against the present generation of Germans—West or East. I loathe prejudice of any kind. As I loathe blood sports. That’s the thing I hold against your lamented compatriot, Hemingway—” “Sh-h-h,” Mike said to him. “I want to hear this.”
“They won’t be coming here after all,” O’Hare was saying. “They’ll wait for the purse to turn up and then go on to Pisa.”
The lawyer frowned suspiciously, hearing a note of mischief in the poet’s bland tone. “What did you tell them about Porto Quaglia?”
O’Hare grinned. “Well, I painted the picture a bit black, you might say. They asked about the bathing, and of course I was bound to tell them that I’d been here a month and hadn’t had a bathe yet. Not so much as a sunbathe.” A gleeful laugh rang out. The Irishman’s white torso and limbs were not a testimonial to Porto Quaglia as a summer resort, and the others began to joke about posting him at the bivio as a deterrent, like a quarantine sign.
“Very funny,” said the editor tartly. “It would be very amusing no doubt to see O’Hare turning back the Huns. A Ste.-Geneviève at the gates of Paris—perhaps our poet can be canonized. But it is not a joke, what he has told us. Porto Quaglia is on a tourist map of Italy published in Germany as a vacation guide!”
The poet nodded. “I saw it. With my own two eyes. Porto Quaglia is there, big as life, with a star.”
“But how?” cried the pretty girl, who was the daughter of the history professor. “It is not even on the Esso map. How did the Germans find out about it?”
“They have their ways,” said her father darkly, at which everyone burst out laughing.
“Ils ont leurs espions!” cried the children delightedly.
And now it was remembered that a pair of fat middle-aged blond strangers had been seen one day the previous summer on the marble rocks at Rocca Bianca, but though they had been heard to speak German, they had been given the benefit of the doubt, for they might have been refugees. And only a few weeks before, Anna the cook had brought the news that Germans had been reported in the new Camping at the bivio. But two possible Germans on the rocks, two more in a Camping had not been seen as significant; now these isolated cases suddenly “made sense,” like the first seemingly unrelated deaths in what would prove to be the outbreak of an epidemic. There had always (that is, for several years) been Germans across the river, which the poet had one night fancifully compared to the Rhine, with the Germans on one side and the French on the other. But now, it seemed, scouts had crossed the frontier, and an invasion was beginning against which Porto Quaglia was defenseless. The French would be mowed down as by a Panzer division. The local inconveniences that had protected Porto Quaglia from prosperous Italians and Americans would make no difference to the Germans, who never seemed to take baths while travelling and were not particular about iced drinks. Porto Quaglia, in fact, would yield without a murmur to the German soul, which vacationed with quotation marks in its rucksack ready to fasten around “ein kleines Fischerdorf.”
“Ja, ja, wunderschön!” savagely mimicked François in his cracking voice, hoarse as a crow’s from the onset of puberty.
The grownups nodded. They agreed that it was just a question of time till the dread signs “Zimmer” would be posted outside the homes of the simple fisherfolk of Porto Quaglia. “Zimmer und Frühstück,” “Lebensmittel”—they had seen these signs move up the coast, as though the Angel of Death had passed by marking the villages, one by one, for liquidation.
Mike’s wife spoke up. “I think you’re setting your kids a very bad example. You should teach them to judge Germans as individuals.” Hélène whirled around. “Do they come here as individuals or as a mass? With a map from headquarters like an army? Do you meet German tourists as individuals or in busloads?”
“Écoute, Hélène,” chided her husband. “Frank vient de rencontrer deux individus à Sarzana.”
“The first swallows, though,” observed O’Hare. “We’ve got them in Killarney—all the old Nazi boyos. The new landed gentry. Hitler’s chief of protocol. They’ve closed off the beaches to the Irish poor.”
“Tu vois?” exclaimed Hélène.
“Franchement, je les déteste,” said the engineer’s wife calmly. “If Germans come here, I will not come back.”
“Do you mean that seriously?” asked Mike. “You mean if one German comes here you won’t come back? Supposing Mayor Brandt comes here next year for his vacation?”
“Soyez sérieux, Mike,” interposed Arturo. “Mayor Brandt is not the question. Vous le savez bien. Nous parlons du touriste moyen. The ordinary tourist.”
“Let them go to Pisa!” burst out Hélène. “Let them go to Florence! Là il y a l’histoire, les monuments! L’histoire, les monuments appartiennent à tout le monde. To everybody. Mais Porto Quaglia nous appartient à nous.”
“So it belongs to you. How interesting,” said the British lawyer in a courtroom manner. “I should think it belonged to the fishing people.”
“It belongs to the fishing people first,” said Hélène. “Next it belongs to us.” “By what right?” said the lawyer. “By the right of use,” said Hélène. “Is that not a right in English law? We have been coming here now for ten years; our children have grown up here. We have rights here; we belong here. Why should Germans come and push us aside? As they do always in queues. I have seen them in Paris. Because I am small, they try to push me aside.”
“You should see them in Killarney,” eagerly put in the poet, and everyone began to recount some personal experience of German effrontery.
The lawyer raised his voice. “And if the fishing people want their trade? Will you forbid Pierino or Romeo to take them to Rocca Bianca? Perhaps you’d like to institute some racial laws here to prevent that?” “Hear, hear!” said Irene.
Hélène raised her small tanned face anxiously to her tall husband. “Aide-moi, Arturo.”
“Il a raison, Hélène,” Arturo said mildly. “Sur le plan légal.”
“Hell,” said Mike suddenly. “Can’t Hélène say what she thinks about German tourists without being attacked as a racist? I’m on her side. Lafayette, we are here!” He laughed at his own weak joke to break the tension.
Spots of color appeared in the Englishman’s cheeks; he and Mike were not congenial, having already had disputes about prizefights and the execution of Caryl Chessman. “And what about the Americans?” he said to Hélène in a trembling voice. “Personally, if we must speak in these terms, I prefer the Germans to the Americans.”
“No!” said Hélène, with violence. “The Americans do not come where they are not wanted. They are more sensitive, even the worst. They go where there are other Americans. To Harry’s Bar.”
“What they do as tourists doesn’t interest me,” retorted the lawyer. “Unlike you, Mme. Buonsanti, I try to think politically. On that level, I can assure you, the Americans are not wanted in Europe. I can’t speak for the keepers of public houses, but I can promise you that the English people don’t want the sensitive Americans with their nuclear toys. Nor the Scots, nor the French, nor the Italians, nor even the Germans—if their governments consulted them. ‘Go home, Yankee,’ is what the Europeans really feel. Try talking to the fishing people here. If your American friends”—he glanced around him—“were sensitive, they’d clear out. No wonder the Germans are welcomed by the plain folk. At least there are no German military bases outside Germany!”
Irene was the first to speak. “You can thank the Americans for that!” “I prefer to thank the Russians,” said the lawyer.
“You are so rude,” said Hélène, wheeling on him, “that I would think you were probably a German. You look like a German.” Her blazing eyes surveyed his mountain-climbing costume. “I do not believe you are an Englishman.”
“Ma fille,” said her father warningly. “Calme-toi.” And he rose, small and peaceable in his open-throated tan sports shirt, to put his arm around her and lead her to a chair. As he did so, they all saw the blue tattoo, like a laundry mark, on his plump sunburned forearm: his number at Auschwitz. Everyone drew a sharp breath. Nearly all of them had at least glimpsed it before—on the White Rock, while the doctor lay sunning, at table, during a chess session. But generally they tried not to look at it, even the smaller children, out of courtesy to the doctor, as if it were a deformity, and the doctor himself made this easier by his habitual meditative posture, chin sunk, arms folded on his lap. Now they stared at the number, at the lawyer, at Hélène.
“Here,” said the Irish poet suddenly to the children, reaching into the pocket of his bathing trunks. “Go get yourselves ice creams.” He treated children to ice creams with the same absent abandon that he treated or tried to treat grownups to drinks. “Have a whiskey” or “Have an ice cream” was his customary greeting, according to age. But the children this time refused to budge; instead, the lawyer turned, picked up his stick, and marched down the walk without speaking.
At once Hélène was remorseful. “J’ai trop bu à déjeuner,” she confessed.
O’Hare and Arturo began to play chess at one end of the table, while the doctor watched; he had learned the game in Auschwitz. The children lingered round the table, as if feeling cheated at the way the discussion had been terminated by the unexpected appearance of Dr. Bernheim’s “number,” like a card produced from his sleeve. Everyone was silent, pursuing his own train of thought.
“Tu l’as fait exprès, Maurice,” Arturo declared suddenly to his father-in-law, looking up from the board with a chuckle. “He did it on purpose, O’Hare.”
“What?” said the poet.
“Showing his number. To help his daughter.”
The old man indicated a chess move with a silent finger. “Peut-être,” he said imperturbably.
“You know, maman,” exclaimed Laure, raising her head, “I think you were right. I think he is a German.”
“Mais oui, mais oui!” shouted François, his eyes sparkling. “Maman a parfaitement raison!” And the little boy assured them that the Englishman had paled when the word “spy” was mentioned. “C’est lui, j’en suis sûr, qui a dénoncé Porto Quaglia aux Allemands. Il a pâli, comme ça.” He gave a wild start, shuddered, and tried to make his small brown face blanch. The other children watched this performance agog. The adults, impressed for a minute by the boy’s conviction, quickly regained their balance. “Mais non, mais non!” they cried soothingly.
“It’s just that he doesn’t like Americans, François,” Mike explained. “You can understand that, can’t you?” And he made a funny face. “He thinks they eat with their atom bombs on the table.”
“What are you trying to cover up?” demanded Irene. “François is old enough to know that that man’s a Communist!”
The “French” protruded their lower lips and doubtfully shrugged their brows; Arturo glanced up from the chessboard. “Je ne crois pas,” he said soberly.
“La Voix de la Raison a parlé,” announced the editor, clapping his friend on the shoulder.
“Mais en tout cas ce n’est pas une injure,” mildly pursued Arturo. And the others began to argue as to whether it was an insult to call a person a Communist.
“Anyway, he’s not a Communist, honey,” said Mike, intervening. “It’s not that simple. He’s an overexcited unilateral disarmer.” “But why should that make him pro-German?” someone demanded. “Mais il n’était pas pro-Allemand,” objected someone else.
The Irishman had been concentrating on the chessboard, ignoring the conversation. He captured a rook with his knight. “I’ll tell ye what it is,” he said abruptly, tilting back in his chair. “This fellow is a German who passed for English during the war years in England to keep on the good side of his neighbors. Get him to show ye his passport. I’ll wager he was born in Hamburg.”
“C’est plutôt un juif Allemand qui s’est fait Anglais,” murmured the doctor. “Mais tu es fou, papa!” cried Hélène.
“Favole!” said the editor. “You are telling each other fairy stories. The truth is simple. This Englishman would like to be unprejudiced, but he is not, unfortunately. Hélène would like to be prejudiced, but she is not, fortunately.” He rose to leave. “Meanwhile,” he added, with a grimace, “the real Germans are advancing.” Mike and Irene rose too.
Irene approached Hélène. “I’m sorry I attacked you about the Germans coming here. I forgot about your father.”
Hélène started to reply hotly, “Ce n’est pas à cause de mon père,” but then she gave it up, realizing that she could not explain in English to Irene what she felt toward these new Germans, and that if she were able to explain it in French, Irene would not understand, “Merci,” she said simply, instead.
The summer, after this, was not the same. The only immediate consequence was that for a few days Hélène and the English lawyer stopped speaking when they met. But Hélène would not allow this to continue, for it would have ended in the creation of factions. There had never been factions in Porto Quaglia, and Hélène, therefore, when the time came, invited the lawyer and his family as usual to François’ birthday party—the great social event of the season, for which cakes were baked in Parma and sent over the mountains by bus. The English accepted, and the quarrel was patched up.
The party was just like the parties of other years, except that it was too much like them—too defiant of change. The littlest girls dressed up in costumes representing, this year, the great sirens—the Queen of Sheba, Cleopatra, the Lorelei, Brigitte Bardot—and were made up by one of the painters; François shinned up a palm tree; everyone came, old and young, maids and nurses. As usual, the first goodbyes of the season were said, for François’ party was in the middle of August—after that, traditionally, the first departures took place. Yet the fact was these gay promises—“See you next year,” “All’ anno prossimo,” “À bientôt”—were tinged this year with uncertainty, wan like the flickering light of the Chinese lanterns hung from the trumpet vines and fir trees. Everyone looked at everyone else, wondering which would be the defector, which family would send postcards next year with “auguri” for François and love to everyone from Provence or Elba.
From the day of O’Hare’s discovery, the “French” had been living in a state of apprehension, which they tried not to show to each other. The blue buses that came nearly every hour from Sarzana and La Spezia were covertly watched, and no one went into Sarzana without casting a supervisory glance over the main square, to note what strangers were about. At the sound of an unfamiliar horn along the road, walkers would stop to listen anxiously, expecting a big German tourist bus to appear around the next curve. The yearly expedition to Portovenere, which included a swim from the boat in a blue grotto and lunch outdoors on an island under a tree with a swing, was repeatedly postponed on various excuses, as though the “French” were afraid to leave Porto Quaglia unguarded, lest they come back and find it violated. None of these actions was planned; no one watched on purpose stationed in the café. It was just that now automatically even the chess players glanced up at the sound of a car or a bus braking, whereas before nobody had paid any attention unless waiting for a friend or a package. The effect of the alert was most noticeable on the children, who roamed about the village in bands, were reluctant to go blackberrying on Monte Morello, and swam in expeditionary forces beyond Raven Point to reconnoitre the coves and grottoes. As if enlisted by this esprit de corps, Mike and his wife had stayed on.
The only person not privately on the watch for Germans was their herald, O’Hare, who again was invisible in the daytime and was said to be writing a verse play on Marlowe and the School of Night. And at night peace returned to Porto Quaglia. Just before dusk the old ladies, mothers of the Italians among the “French,” appeared on the road, walking with sticks, in pairs or leaning on the arm of a servant or a daughter-in-law. The emergence of le mamme, white-haired, talcum-dusted, woolly-shawled, like soft, powdery moths heading for the café, was the sign that traffic had stilled and Porto Quaglia was safe for the night; the buses had stopped running, and few cars passed. Across the river, the last rays of the sun, already hidden from the village behind Monte Morello, touched the windows of the golden hill towns, which sparkled and beaconed like fireflies or as though they had been turned into quartz or mica embedded in the green hills. After this, O’Hare, the owl, cruised into the café.
At night Mamma Nature took possession of Porto Quaglia. After supper the children thronged up and down the waterfront picking out the stars, which seemed very near and bright. Sometimes the poet would join them in front of the café and teach them the English names—a game that caused much laughter, incredulity, and wonder. To think that what little Anne’s star book called the Great She Bear was known as the Big Dipper to the English, and La Chaise was Cassiopeia’s Chair.
“There’s Orion’s Belt, Frankie,” O’Hare would say to François.
“Ah oui, c’est Le Bâton de Jacob.”
“Jacob’s Rod, is it?”
“Mais non, c’est Les Trois Rois!”
“Mais si,” Catherine would speak up. “Le Bâton de Jacob et Les Trois Rois sont la même constellation, n’est-ce pas, Monsieur O’Hare?”
“Here’s a good one,” the poet would interject. “Do ye know what the English call Sirius? Orion’s Hound.” This pleased the children in the same way as penetrating the foreign disguises of the pieces on their fathers’ chessboard: was it true, they would ask the poet, that the English called the fou the “bishop”? And the Italians called him “l’alfiere.” The chessboard had its own constellations, said the Irishman, and the fixed moves of the pieces were like the fixed courses of the stars; it was a very old game—as old as the hills.
When the children had gone to bed, the moonlit village was still, except for the faint sound of dance music coming from across the river, from the restaurant Il Pilota, near the house of Romeo, the boatman. The honky-tonk sound floating across the river seemed bathed in frontier innocence, and the menace of Punta Sabbia, just beyond, was reduced to the melody of an old jazz tune. In former years the “French” would have themselves rowed across on a Friday or a Saturday to dance, but now no one went, not even the young people, but the music still continued, as old as the hills itself, as if nothing had changed.
In the daytime this illusion could not be maintained. The sighting of the Germans in Sarzana had served to call attention to a fact that had been half escaping notice: the White Rock was filling up with bathers. Each day there were new ones. Arriving in their boats, the “French” would discern dark figures, tiny in the distance in the white glare of the cliff, which made them look like people in an overexposed photograph; disembarking, the “French” would often find their places preempted: Dr. Bernheim’s special shady corner under an overhanging cliff, François’ lookout post on the highest rock, Hélène’s hollow. Another umbrella would be standing in the crevice where the engineer’s wife had always planted hers; in the cave where they were in the habit of changing they would find a fat man asleep or a couple embracing. Romeo, Pierino, and Paolo were continually chugging back and forth with strangers aboard whom they deposited—strangers from no one knew where, since they were not staying at the inn or at either of the two boarding houses. And as if this were not enough, new motorboats and even small cruisers began appearing from the other direction and discharging passengers.
All these people, materializing seemingly from thin air, behaved as if they belonged here, as if they had “always” been coming to the White Rock, which they treated in cursory fashion, like a row of cabine with showers. They did not exclaim over the beauty of the spot but at once put on diving masks and flippers and began to swim. Or launched their children in tubes and themselves on surf mattresses. Or slung cameras round their necks and started photographing—“action” shots of a group splashing each other in the water. This matter-of-fact behavior and the way they ignored the “French,” who outnumbered them, gave the August mornings the quality of a dream sequence. It was as if the “French” collectively had become invisible; the others crossed by them, climbed over them, talked past them, as if they were not there at all in reality but were only figments of their own imagination. If they spoke, they felt they would be inaudible, like someone trying to shout in a dream, and in fact they became remarkably silent. Only their eyes spoke. Some of the strangers, who for the most part were extremely ugly, brought food with them and ate lunch at midday, scattering grape skins and peach pits and salami rind and crusts of bread on the marble and throwing empty Chinotto bottles into the sea. Large horseflies appeared on the White Rock. On the green water there was an iridescent film of gasoline.
These strangers varied from day to day, but they did not have a marked individuality; rather, they seemed a species whose children, summoned in raucous authoritarian voices, were all named “Umberto” or “Massimo.” “They will go away after Ferragosto,” the editor prophesied, but the fifteenth of August passed and the shriek “Umberto!” “Massimo!” was still heard on the White Rock like the perpetual crying of gulls.
And one day, at last, Germans came; Romeo had brought them from the Camping at Punta Sabbia. First there were two, then four, then a whole boatload, many of them middle-aged—the men old enough to have been in the S.S. or, to judge them more charitably, to have manned those very pillboxes just around the point that had cowed the area with their artillery till the Americans took Viareggio. Yet now that they were here, in the too too solid flesh, the “French” banished these memories, just as they tried not to look at the number on Dr. Bernheim’s arm. In actuality, the Germans from the Camping, it was admitted, were no worse than the invaders who had preceded them; the invaders were all “Germans,” in the sense of a foreign species with the power of rapid multiplication, as the invaded were all “French.”
But as if to illustrate the complexity of the subject, Irene was accosted one morning toward the end of the month by an Italian crone, the grandmother of some Umberto or Massimo and their little sister (never summoned) Marisa or Silvana. “Sprechen Sie Deutsch?” said the old woman, seizing Irene by the skirt of her beach gown as she tried to pass on the rocks. And when Irene refused angrily to answer her, she continued to gabble at her in German, eager, no doubt, said the editor, to renew conversations she had enjoyed in the old times with the Nazis. Soon afterward Hélène had a similar wounding experience in the post office when she went to buy stamps. “Francobolli, per favore,” she said, pushing her postcards through the window and starting to make a remark about the weather.
“Per la Germania?” interrupted the employee. “Deutschland?”
Hélène was outraged. The woman had not even troubled to look at the postcards. Or at her. They were for France, Hélène pointed out. She was not German; she was the Signora Buonsanti. But the employee, who was new, it seemed, did not recognize her. “Cento lire,” she said, counting out stamps for the postcards and handing them back for Hélène to lick.
“Après dix ans c’est un peu fort,” declared Hélène, seating herself with a thump in the café.
Arturo gave his genial laugh. “Comme c’est beau!” he said. “Per loro adesso siamo tutti quanti tedeschi.”
Seriously, put in the professor’s pretty daughter, this must mean that there were Germans actually in the village.
O’Hare got up from a chess game at the next table. “Haven’t you heard?” he said. “They’re at the Pensione La Perla. Have a whiskey.”
The following morning, the Germans from La Perla were in the boat that came to fetch the group from the Buonsantis’ landing. The “French” behaved politely, helping the Germans land their equipment as they helped everyone else, and the English lawyer, already sunning, was particularly assiduous in holding the boat’s painter to steady it for the fat women’s descent. But Laure, usually coöperative, refused to lend a hand.
“Mais qu’est-ce que tu as, ma petite?” chided her father. Laure would not reply and sat stubbornly at the water’s edge, brooding and casting dark looks at the Englishman, who was chatting in German with the newcomers. Finally, when the others were in swimming, she explained.
In the boat she had seen the Germans staring pointedly at the number on Dr. Bernheim’s arm. And to bear her out, that morning they all noticed still other Germans, from the Camping, eying the number too, passing and repassing the old man as he sat reading a volume of Stendhal, and actually stopping to get a better view. If Dr. Bernheim was aware of this, he gave no definite sign, but after his second dip he moved his place farther along the rocks, and before the boats came he asked François to row him back—he had taken too much sun.
“Mais c’est inouï!” burst out Hélène, when her father was gone. “Que mon père ne puisse pas se montrer en public, à cause des Allemands! C’est eux qui auraient dû se cacher!”
No one could say she exaggerated; it was the Germans, not her father, who had something to be ashamed of, but it was the Germans who were making it impossible for him to appear in public. Because of the Germans ought he to wear a long-sleeved shirt? Or Covermark, as Mike sarcastically proposed?
This was the turning point. The next day, despite the children’s protests, the “French” set out for Judgment Day Beach. The White Rock had been abandoned to the enemy.
Judgment Day Beach, like Raven Point, though pleasant for an excursion was not really a substitute for the White Rock. It was a pebbly beach, and the sharp stones hurt the tender feet of the younger children, who were not quite consoled by the stone collections made for them. Moreover, there was no shade—no protective cliffs, no cool caves. The small children sat in their straw hats in a row and demanded to know when Romeo was coming back for them. This was another difficulty. On calm days the boatmen did not like to go to Judgment Day; it was farther than the White Rock, but the price per head, fixed early in the summer, was the same. The advantage to the boatmen was that it was easier to land there, but when the sea was quiet this did not matter, and the boatmen, with the trade they now had, did not care to make the longer trip simply for the “francesi.” Hence, every morning Pierino or Paolo or Romeo, pretending not to have understood the wishes of the “French,” would try to take them to the Rocca Bianca, as if as a matter of course.
“No, Paolo, niente Rocca Bianca,” some strong will among the passengers would have to interpose. “C’è troppa gente. All’altra spiaggia.” Paolo, muttering, would yield, and they would sail past the marble rocks, as though past a siren, watching the British lawyer and his wife, who had declined to join in the exodus (they had met some lovely couples among the new folk at Rocca Bianca), wave to them cheerily from the marshmallowy cliffs. The boatmen showed their dissatisfaction by arriving late to pick up the “francesi” at lunchtime, with the excuse that they had first to pick up the various parties at the White Rock. Sometimes it was three o’clock before the boats returned to Porto Quaglia, and as they neared the landing, the Buonsantis would see tall Anna standing there, her hand shading her eyes, waiting to make sure they were aboard before putting on the spaghetti. Lunch, with a spoiled roast, would be served at three-fifteen. Those who were in pensione at the inn would find the day’s specialty “finito” or sitting in tepid grease. Anna was cross; the waiters in the inn were cross; the lesser family cooks up and down the main street were cross. The “French” were being punished by the boatmen, and this punishment, like some Biblical malediction, spread over the whole village.
Only the old man with the rowboat and his grandson remained faithful to the “French,” but it was a long row to Judgment Day, and the boat could not go back and forth many times in a morning. Soon another old man, with Garibaldi mustaches and an ancient dinghy, turned up at the pier; then a third, an octogenarian with a rakishly worn sailor’s cap, a cheroot, and a leaky outboard motor. But this created further bad blood with the “regular” boatmen, who would sometimes decline to take a group they had seen patronizing the old men and the boy. In short, the balance of Nature at Porto Quaglia was upset. Some days it would happen that most of the “French” did not go to swim at all. After a family dispute, the sulking children would take their bathing suits and walk down to the plage modeste at the end of the village, while their parents sat at home fuming and declaring that they might as well be in Paris, Rome, or London. One morning the Brées and the Livios quietly crossed to Punta Sabbia—on the theory that the “Germans” encamped there had all gone to the Rocca Bianca. But this attempted “castling,” as Arturo Buonsanti called it, did not work out either. The position was deadlocked: the “French,” having surrendered Rocca Bianca, refused to be returned there under duress; the boatmen continued to lay siege to them by the device of marooning them at Judgment Day Beach. The Milanese publisher took to going late and bringing a cold lunch; Elisabeth, the American, brought steaks one day for twenty and cooked them on the beach. But the absence of shade at Judgment Day, as well as the absence of wood, discouraged these solutions.
By September, the “French” were talking of buying outboard motors for the children’s rowboats; the engineer went to look at a sailboat that was for sale across the river. “Make yourselves independent of the boatmen,” Mike counselled. But if every family had a boat, what then? Who was to promise them that next year the “Germans” would not push on to Judgment Day?
“You could sell them your boats,” said Mike shrewdly, waggling his beard. But the “French” were cold to this idea and cold to the idea of acquiring shore property—another notion Mike broached. Though he was receiving cables telling him to get back to work from his editor nearly every day (with a two-hundred-lire delivery charge), he lingered, feeling it his duty as an American to exercise his ingenuity on a problem that the “French” by themselves could not solve.
“Why don’t you get together and buy the Rocca Bianca?” he said to Hélène one morning as they were swimming. Far off to the right, they could see the white point jutting into the sea; from here it was evident that the marble there had once been quarried—slices had been taken off. This in fact was what had suddenly given him the idea.
“It is public property,” said Hélène. “The shore belongs to the comune.”
“Are you sure?” he said. “If the shore belongs to the comune, how come all the bathing establishments are across the river?”
“They are concessions. Leased from the comune by business interests.” But the Belle Arti, Hélène went on, would not permit anybody to lease a landmark like the White Rock. And they would be right.
She and Mike began to argue heatedly. He bet her that by bribery or influence the “French” could lease the White Rock and post it with “No Trespassing” signs. “Supposing you all got together”—he counted—“there must be at least twelve families of you, and some pretty important people, by Italian standards. You could fix the Belle Arti and the mayor—” “No,” said Hélène.
“What do you mean ‘no’? Assuming you could, for the sake of argument—” “No,” said Hélène.
Mike took a few short exasperated strokes toward shore. Then he turned back. “I’ll bet you,” he said patiently, “that within ten years—no, five—somebody buys that whole cliff, leases the Rocca Bianca for ninety years, and builds a hotel. With a bar and a terrace.”
“And dressing rooms cut into the rock,” concurred Hélène. “And showers and toilets for signore and signori. And a night club over the water—why not? They would make a road and sell off plots of land for villas and villini. After that, a shopping center. It will happen. You are right. Arturo pense la même chose.”
Mike’s jaw dropped. He swallowed water. “Well, then,” he said, spluttering, “if you see it coming so clearly, why don’t you get in there first?” “Preventive war,” commented Hélène.
Mike ignored this. “Between you, you could raise the money for the necessary bribes.”
“It would not be cheap.”
Mike floated. “You’d buy the land above of course, too. You’d have to, to protect yourselves. And if you had the land, you’d build—the whole group of you. Why pay rent in Porto Quaglia? Say twelve houses.” He narrowed his eyes, thinking. “You could build twelve houses in those trees if you kept them inconspicuous. In good taste. Blending with the landscape. Leaving green areas. You’d form a syndicate—incorporate. Get a good modern architect from Milan. Use native building materials.”
“C’est-à-dire le marbre,” said Hélène.
“Why, yes!” Mike ejaculated. “Yes. Come to think of it, you’d have a free marble supply. That’d be something to leave Laure and François. A marble house. How about it, Hélène?” If he could have nudged her in the water, he would have done so. “Don’t laugh. I’m serious. They laughed at Columbus. How about it?”
“Non, merci,” she answered, striking out for shore. “What do you mean, ‘non, merci’?” he called after her.
Hélène swung around in the water. Seeing the American’s plaintive expression, she was angry. “J’ai dit non,” she said. “Mon père n’a pas été cinq ans à Auschwitz pour devenir propriétaire d’une villa en marbre sur la côte ligurienne.” “I can’t understand you,” yelled Mike. “You’re talking too fast.” “I said my father has not spent five years in Auschwitz to become the owner of a marble villa in Italy.”
“I don’t see the connection,” called Mike.
“We are plain people,” shouted Hélène. “What do you call it—wandering Jews.”
Mike reflected for a minute. “I don’t get it,” he said. “Are you against owning property?”
“Yes,” shouted Hélène, though this was not the truth—she was against being the kind of person who would preempt a natural marvel like some common piece of shore property, but she did not know how to express this in English, least of all to Mike, whose relentless American logic made it impossible, she said to herself, to have a reasonable conversation with him. Moreover, she had never known how to answer the insane argument that one ought to do something bad because if one did not someone else would do it instead. She struck out for shore again.
“You French have no vision!” Mike’s voice roared after her indignantly. He backstroked a few moments, to cool off, not sure himself whether he had been joking about the marble villas and she had taken him seriously, in which case he would have a right to feel injured, or whether he had been serious and would have a right to feel injured at not having been taken seriously enough.
On the shingle they found another argument going on—one party asserting that the source of beauty was in Nature and the other claiming that Nature was simply a sentimental name for tradition, the way things had “always” been. A fishing boat, Elisabeth had said, belonged to Nature, while a smart motorboat did not. But Arturo begged to differ. A fishing boat on the horizon appeared to be a part of Nature because it had “always” been there, like the sun in the sky, or the mountains, or the stars. But the stars in fact had changed; the Pole Star of the ancients was no longer the Pole Star of today. A horse or a pair of oxen in a field were viewed as a part of Nature, but when there were no horses or oxen there would be another Nature, and a tractor, to Laure’s children, would be an intrinsic part of it. For that, said the painter, you would need a new Millet; it was the artists who decided what was Nature and what was not. Why then, said Elisabeth, could you paint a good picture of a carriage, while an Alfa Romeo could “sit” only for advertisements? What about a plastic dish, said a woman’s voice. The engineer said there was no inherent reason that plastics should be uglier than marble; it was a question of good design. No, said the editor; plastics offered no resistance to the manufacturer, which made them inferior to marble. “Inherently,” he added tartly, skipping a stone across the water.
The discussion veered to the White Rock. It had not “always” been there, said Mike. “Si!” objected Hélène.
“No,” said Mike. “Some acquisitive group around Dante’s time must have formed a corporation to exploit the marble there. Originally, the whole point must have been green, covered with trees, like the rest of these slopes. Then somebody struck marble. The White Rock is the end result of man’s tampering with Nature. If he’d left Nature alone, there’d be no White Rock.”
“Il justifie le capitalisme,” observed Laure in her still childish voice.
“Il justifie le progrès,” said François sombrely, with a malign look at the American. “Et tu es contre le progrès?” asked his father, smiling. “Mais naturellement,” retorted François. “Moi aussi,” said Laure. “Moi non,” said Catherine.
“Regard-moi ça, papa!” bitterly exclaimed Hélène. “Mes enfants sont devenus conservateurs, grace aux Allemands.”
It was a fact, as already had been noticed, that the coming of the “Germans” was bringing out the worst in the community.
The doctor looked up from his Stendhal. She would not, he said tranquilly, want them to take all their views from books. They must learn from what they saw around them.
“From Nature’s book, eh?” quoted Mike, with a loud laugh, clapping the old man on the shoulder.
And from what they heard, the doctor added in a lowered voice to his daughter: children, like old people, were afraid of any suggestion of change; one had to be careful how one spoke of it to them—let them see more and hear less. He looked at his watch. “Viens, mon fils,” he said to his grandson. “C’est l’heure.”
It was too early, objected the others, but the old man insisted that François should take him and the younger children home. Mike and Arturo pushed the rowboat off.
“Regarde, mon fils,” said the doctor, as the boat rounded into the harbor.
The boy at the oars briefly raised his eyes to the marble mountains in the distance.
“Elles sont belles, les montagnes?”
“Pourquoi?” said his grandfather.
All the children gazed at the white-capped peaks.
“Parce que le marbre ressemble à la neige,” the boy answered promptly. But it was a cheat, he added in his hoarse, angry voice. “C’est truqué, quoi. C’est de la fausse neige. Et cela ne justifie pas le progrès.”
Perhaps not, the old man replied serenely, but it justified snow. This afternoon, he continued, hopping out of the boat and holding the painter for his grandson, they would all go to see the quarries.
The youngest children looked doubtful. “Elles sont loin, les carrières.”
Not too far, said the doctor; they would start right after lunch.
It was the first time the “French” had visited the marble quarries, though for several years a sign, “Visitate le cave di marmo,” had been urging them to do so, on the road from Viareggio. This sign, in fact, which recently had begun reiterating its message in German, had killed their interest in the trip. But now several cars filled with “French” followed the doctor in his old Peugeot. The last car in the procession was the poet’s battered Austin station wagon; having got wind of the expedition, he had brought his wife, a stroller, and four of his children—the baby had been left at home.
The first stop was at one of the quarries advertised on the road from Carrara. It was a “commercial” quarry; near the entrance was a stand selling Coca-Cola and beer and another selling marble souvenirs. Around the souvenir stand were German tourists in a group; a tourist bus stood waiting, and the cars parked along the highway were all marked with a big “D” for Deutschland. The quarry, which was not very deep, was no longer worked, and the principal attraction was a train track on which carts carrying blocks of marble shuttled back and forth. This was not the real thing, Mike protested.
“Bien sûr,” said the doctor, but it would amuse the younger children. The real quarries lay beyond, high in the mountains; the doctor had telephoned the doctor from Carrara, who had suggested the itinerary. After the “play” quarry, they would leave the tourist area and visit the mills where the marble was cut.
The mills lay along a stream that had turned white with marble dust; they made an atrocious noise, cutting the marble into slices with big iron blades—the small children were frightened. They wanted to go back and see the little train again.
The adults glanced at each other. The poor mountain villages that straggled out from the mills were extremely dusty; everyone began to cough. The mills themselves were dismal; the water from the stream used in the cutting process splashed over the ground, creating a gray mud. The streets of the villages were caked with gray mud; there were no trees, and the air was cold and wintry, for the mountains cut off the afternoon sun.
“Ça suffit, papa!” exclaimed Hélène, but the doctor would not heed her, leading them from village to village, mill to mill, consulting from time to time a slip of paper. They ought to see everything, he said. In each mill, he asked questions, which Arturo translated, while the others paced restively about, the Irishman pushing the stroller; the doctor wanted to know the details of the cutting mechanism, the incidence of silicosis among the mill workers—were there many tuberculars?
“Tu es en vacances, papa!” irritably cried Hélène. “Yes, Doctor,” said the poet. “Take it easy; you’re on holiday.”
Finally the cars left the melancholy mills and proceeded farther into the mountains along a narrow winding road, past chambers of smooth gray marble cut into the hillsides and heaps of marble gravel. Suddenly the doctor braked, and the “French” for the first time saw, right before their eyes, the snow fissures and gleaming glaciers they had known for so many years from across the river. These in fact were marble slides—avalanches of quite ordinary-looking stones that had tumbled down the mountainsides. Seen close up, they were not even white but a pale leaden gray in some places and a pale urinous yellow in others. Dr. Bernheim glanced at his slip of paper, and the cars continued upward till they arrived at a narrow bridge across a chasm; here a worker stopped them. They were at Fantiscritti, the last name on the doctor’s list. It was the end of the road. Because of the dangerous marble slides, cars were not permitted to go any farther; if the francesi wanted to visit the quarries beyond, they would have to go on foot.
Arturo took the slip of paper from his father-in-law. “Mais tu t’es trompé, Maurice,” he said. “Sûrement.” This was the conviction of everyone—that the doctor had come to the wrong place.
Looking about them, they were conscious of a fearful disappointment. The spot on which they stood, surrounded by marble slides, looking into a chasm of rubble at the bottom of which ran a dirty torrente, was at the farthest extreme from what they had imagined. The scenery around them, far from being alpine, was a Cyclopean desert or monstrous manufactured wilderness that resembled, more than anything else, a set for some early super-colossal film, before the day of sound or color. The absence of sun in this pocket of the mountain combined with the bleaching light diffused by the monochrome stony gravel to suggest an interior, artificially lit and yet without shadow. There was no sign of a quarry or of a village—only a sort of frontier hut with a bus placard posted on it, around which some workers were loitering. Added to this, it was dusty; everyone was thirsty.
As they stood there, uncertain, a boy approached them and offered to accompany them to the nearest quarry, which he said was two kilometres off. They were in the right place, he assured Arturo and the editor. The quarries up there—he nodded toward the farthest mountain—were very old; Michelangelo had worked there before the birth of Christ, and slaves had carved pictures of Roman soldiers on the walls, which was why the place was called Fantiscritti.
The “French” smiled dubiously at each other and looked at their watches: to go or not to go and see for themselves? Looking up at the towering mountains, the younger children refused; they were afraid of the avalanches. Finally it was decided that the men should go ahead with the older children, while the women could stay behind with the younger ones. “I’ll take Seanie in the stroller if you like,” said the poet, speaking of his six-year-old, but the boy guide protested this arrangement and Sean was left behind with his mother.
The women walked across the bridge in the direction in which the others were vanishing up a mountain track; as they chatted, Sean slipped away from them and began to sidle down a sort of path that led to the half-dry torrente. Suddenly the women heard cries in a dialect they did not understand; a worker came running very fast across the bridge to warn them. What the boy was doing was dangerous. At any moment he might dislodge a stone and start a slide that would bury him.
But he seemed not to hear the workers’ cries or his pregnant mother’s pleas to come back, and Hélène started to run down after him.
“No, signora, no!” the workers shouted. A few stones began falling, like flour from a sifter, in her wake. She hesitated, saw the peril for the boy in her rashness, and turned back.
Then they simply waited, holding their breath, watching the child wave to them from the abyss; in the end, he returned coolly, unconscious of his danger, carrying with him a purple flower he had picked on the edge of the stream.
This nerve-racking episode confirmed the sinister impression made by the lonely spot. A bus came and collected the workers from the other side of the bridge, turned around, and started down the mountain. There was not another human being to be seen; they had not passed a single car on the way up; the women and children were alone.
“I don’t like it here,” “I want a drink of water,” “I want to go home,” the children whimpered, looking at the family cars, driverless, like a group of widows, on the other side of the chasm. Sean’s older sister, Brigid, profited from the occasion by trying to imitate her brother’s exploit; she was hauled back at once and spanked, with the approval of the child psychologist. Time passed; from the changing of the light, the women assumed that somewhere the sun had set. It grew colder, and the children were shivering in their summer clothes. The mothers fought down their hysteria, offering each other various explanations of why their husbands were so long in coming back. When the men and the older children at last returned from the quarry, they found their families huddled, terrified, in the automobiles, with the heaters turned on.
It had not been so different from the tourist quarry, they reported—another chamber cut into the wall of the mountain. The deep quarries, where they cut the white marble, were higher up; the workers walked an hour and a half every morning to get to them.
“Did you see the soldiers?” demanded the little children.
No, they had not seen the soldiers; the old Roman quarry had been closed a long time ago and the fanti, the foreman had said, were in the museum in Carrara.
“On peut visiter, maman?” said the children, coming to life.
But again they were told no; another day perhaps—at this hour the museum would be shut.
So instead, though it was dark and nearly their suppertime when they reached the bottom of the mountains, they all had ice-cream cones at the marble counter of a gelateria in Carrara, and the older children and the fathers heard about Sean’s adventure.
“Qu’est-ce que tu es venu chercher ici, papa?” Hélène said thoughtfully to her father on the way home.
“Rien,” equably replied Dr. Bernheim. “Une petite distraction.”
Hélène shook her head. It was not just for amusement, she told her husband, that her father had brought them here. He wanted to tell them something. She knew her father, she said.
That night Arturo did not play chess. He and Hélène stood on the pier listening to the music coming from across the river. She was pensive, still thinking of the “scenery” they had visited, which on close view was an industrial landscape—a big gray outdoor mill. It was ugly, she said, turning to Arturo with a question in her voice. “Très laid,” her husband agreed.
She remembered the sallow marble slides and shivered. “François a eu raison. C’est de la fausse neige. Comme dans le théâtre. Nous l’aimons parce que nous aimons la vraie neige.” But everything here, she went on, was slightly false. The “French” were not French; the “Germans” were Italians; the “Jews” were a little of everything. The “Englishman” was maybe a German. Or a Jew, according to her father. The “fishermen” were businessmen. Everything was in quotation marks. Even François’ “birthday.” His real birthday, which they had all forgotten, was today. She sighed heavily. “C’est moi, tu le sais, qui l’a faussée.”
She was the one, alas, who had done it; she had moved his birthday ahead, two years ago, so that it would fall in the middle of the month before the first departures. And now other families had followed suit, so that every child’s birthday celebrated by the summer people of Porto Quaglia was a false birthday. She gave a guilty, skittish little laugh. All was false, she repeated despondently—theatrical snow or the snow in a souvenir paperweight.
Arturo listened. “Ce qui est vrai, Hélène, c’est le travail.” The work of the fishermen, the work of the miners in that fearful dust. It was work that joined man to Nature. Not vacations, despite what people thought.
“J’aime les vacances. Je déteste le travail,” Hélène flung out. And it was true that she loved vacations and was already hating the day they would pack up and leave for the winter’s work. After a pause, she asked in a different voice, diffident and stealthily curious, “Et comment c’était, dans la carrière?”
Bad, Arturo answered; the work conditions were hard. Every other day, according to the workers, a miner lost a thumb, an arm, a leg. “C’est pas joli,” he added, grimacing. The work was unhealthy and badly paid; the less-skilled miners got a thousand lire a day.
“Mille lire!”
Arturo nodded. François, he said, had been very much struck by that; Laure too. There were many strikes, and many of the miners were Anarchists. “C’est drôle que c’est la première fois que nous y sommes allés.”
Yes, agreed Hélène; it was funny that they had never gone there before, in all their years at Porto Quaglia. “Les ‘intellectuels de gauche’!” she burst out after a minute. Another set of quotation marks, another cheat. Good, she went on bitterly, it was finished. They would not come back to Porto Quaglia another summer. She refused to live another summer with such trite illusions and echoes. “ ‘Ah, comme elles sont belles, les montagnes de marbre!’ ‘Que j’adore la Nature!’ ” Mimicking her own voice, she stamped her foot on the pier.
But it was the same everywhere, replied Arturo, smiling. All the desirable vacation spots were like that. All vacationers “adored” the poverty of the natives. “Surtout les âmes sensibles.”
“C’est vrai,” muttered Hélène.
Why not be honest, said Arturo. If they never came back to Porto Quaglia, what would be the reason? “Je ne sais pas,” said Hélène.
The true reason, declared her husband, was very simple: “les vacances payées.” When they had first come to Porto Quaglia, only a few—professional people, artists, and salaried intellectuals like themselves—had a month off in the summer and a car or the price of railroad tickets to take them far from home. Now the many had it, especially the Germans. It was the “higher standard of living”—he quoted the words in English—of the European workers and small employees that had put Porto Quaglia on the map. The vacations of the masses were necessarily mass-produced. There was no escape from the “Germans” except for the very rich. Next summer the same problem would present itself. What would Hélène say when her coiffeur asked her where she was going for her holidays?
“Il faut avoir une réponse, Hélène. C’est une question très importante. Tout le monde a le droit de savoir.” The whole world had a right to an answer—the concierge, the grocer, the mailman, her editor at Gallimard. What was she going to tell them? An undiscovered Greek island? A woodcutters’ hamlet in the Alps? A hotel in Turkey? A cliff on the Dalmatian coast? “Un château en Espagne?”
Hélène did not respond to her husband’s raillery. There were Germans everywhere, she agreed morosely. “Bon, donc. Au travail.” She leaned her head against his chest. “Mais comme j’aimais Porto Quaglia!” Hearing the past tense of the verb that meant love, Arturo stared stiffly ahead of him into the dark.
“Oui, c’était beau,” he said.