L'AVVENTURA

Same beach, same sea. . . . At the bottom of the sleepy, dirty road my in-laws have inhabited since longer than anyone wishes to remember, lies the beach. We walk down there every morning, buckets and spades in hand. But before the beach one has to cross the lungomare, the seafront road. Aerial photographs would no doubt be able to show that there are still traces of zebra-striped crossings every hundred meters or so along this busy road, but local drivers are cheerfully unaware of this, and the authorities do not seem eager to remind them. We stand there, Michele, Stefi, and I, on the curb as the cars race by. Nobody stops. After a few minutes’ pointless patience, I make the coma gesture with both fists, grab the children one in each hand and walk right into the flow. Like the waters of the Red Sea, the cars respond to this gesture of mad faith. But only to this. Nothing less than complete recklessness will ever work that miracle of getting you across the seafront road at Pescara. The children are quick to take note. South of Bologna, it sometimes seems there is no rule but gesture and response. Fortunately, on the other side you do indeed arrive in the promised land . . .

First, there's a thin line of slightly raised grass plots held in broken marble surrounds. Arrive in June, and the grass is still uncut, perhaps two feet high, as if this were some ghost resort, untended for years. They get to it just before or just after the season officially begins in July. Spaced every ten yards or so in the coarse prickly grass stand the seafront palms. Some are old and majestic, some new and fresh, and some so young they look like no more than the fat tops of giant pineapples pushing out of the earth. But however old or young, these palm trees always seem to have the same size fronds, and it's this that gives the seafront its solid geometry, its sense of repeating the same pattern on and on and on, every ten yards, tree after tree after tree as far as the eye can see. Their scaly barks make you think of snakes and reptiles, of drowsy survival in torrid heat. I always feel more “away from home” when I see a line of palm trees.

Not so the children, who ignore them.

Between the palms and grass plots there are posts bearing rusty frames for holding posters. Again, one every ten yards. Without exception the posters advertise breasts and bottoms bursting from designer bathing costumes, or young lips kissing ice creams under a lover's gaze. The images, like so much advertising in Italy, particularly summer advertising, have a slightly fifties, distinctly nostalgic feel to them—the dramatic makeup, the extravagant breasts—as if there were always some heyday to be remembered, some mythical past to be recalled and repeated ad infinitum.

Beyond the grass and the palms there's a sort of avenue, a seafront promenade, where bicycles pass, and—illegally—mopeds and scooters. On the weekend cars invade the space and park there, again illegally, and sometimes the police or the carabinieri come and move them all away and fine everybody and are desperately rigid and unpleasant, and sometimes they don't. The drivers risk it.

I get the kids down to the front by eight or eight-thirty. Already this is a bit lazy of me, since both my wife and Io e il mio bambino have insisted that the sun is best at seven-thirty. Best, of course, means healthiest, the vitamins without the ultra-violet, since the key to every official discussion about an Italian holiday is pretending that it is undertaken entirely for health purposes, whereas all the images you actually see, on those posters, on TV, and later on the beach itself, are screaming Fun, Pleasure, Sex . . .

The children want to walk along the parapet a couple of meters above the beach. In this way we proceed past the Delfino verde (the Green Dolphin), then the Orsa maggiore (The Great Bear) until we come to the Medusa. These are the bathing concessions, and the children know all their names on and on along the front toward the center— Calipso, Sette pini, La Sirena, Belvedere, Miramare, Aurora—all their names and all their various advantages and disadvantages: the bar at the Delfino verde doesn't have fresh brioches, but the hot showers are truly hot and even have a windscreen, of bamboo, an unusual feature in a country where most people will desert the beach if the breeze does anything more than stir the tassles on the sunshades. The Orsa maggiore has hot showers too, and you don't even have to pay here. But there is no windscreen, and the attendant hangs around to see that you don't push the time switch down more than twice. You get two spurts of no more than forty seconds each. The Medusa has freezing cold showers lined up in a row on a block of cement. They deliver unbelievably icy water in great swishing jets that still the heart as you step under them from burning sand. But the Medusa also has the best terrace bar, with the best pizzette, and the best computer games.

“And the color of the sunshades, kids? Do you remember the color of the sunshades on the different concessions?”

It's the first day. We're passing the Orsa maggiore, and I'm holding Stefi's hand as she walks the parapet. Michele likes to lead the way, as little boys will. “Close your eyes, now, don't cheat. See if you can remember them from last year. Oh, but you'll have to stop walking a moment if you close your eyes!”

Although the children are reasonably bilingual, there are some categories of things they will always return to Italian for: the days of the week, the months, numbers, colors, all things that have some kind of order, funnily enough, some rigid formality.

So Michele now begins: “Delfino verde, verde e arancione.” Green and yellow.

And Stefi: “Orsa maggiore, rosso e giallo.” Red and yellow. But they argue about this because Michele thinks it is rosso e bianco. They stand there above me, eyes screwed shut arguing about the colors of the sunshades. On the parapet below them I notice an obscene graffiti. It says: “I peli della figa istupidiscono la gente.” Literally: “Cunt hair drives people crazy.” Fair comment. But for the moment I say: “Okay, we'll check the Orsa maggiore in a minute. What about the Medusa?” Immediately, the children sing: “Bianco e blu,” and they're right, of course, because it is to the Medusa we go every year. The Medusa is the best. It is our bathing concession. Same beach, same sea. Never never change.

I'm thinking now that perhaps the best way I can tell you about Pescara, about Italian holidays in general, is just to take you through a day, one day. Because a day in Pescara is many days, and everybody's day. And not just in Pescara either, but in Rimini, Cesenatico, and Jesolo, too, and in Senigallia and Riccione and San Benedetto and every last seaside resort along the Adriatic. A day in Pescara is triumphantly representative; it reproduces itself, like the palm trees and sunshades, endlessly in time and space. For this is not a holiday such as those I remember from my own childhood, where the first thing Mother and Father did was to buy an ordinance survey map and track down the places mentioned in the brochures you'd find left on a shelf by the door in boarding house or rented trailer. Then each day we would have to decide what we were doing, which walks to take, which villages to explore, museums to see, rocks to scale, all the time scrutinizing the sky and saying, “It's nice now, but how will it be in half an hour?” Or more often, “It's miserable now, but with this wind there's no reason why it shouldn't be beautiful later on, so that in the end you set out anyway, rain or shine, often visiting a museum when the sun was powering down, or the beach when gales blew your towels away—wonderful holidays of discovery in windswept Welsh bays or nosing about those noble homes the aristocracy was just opening to the likes of us so that they could continue to enjoy their heritage at our expense, holidays of adventure and risk, of foaming surf, hard shale, precipitous paths, holidays where you might get caught in a thunderstorm far from home with Father cleaning his glasses vigorously on his shirt tails and saying, “But on the map this definitely goes on through that thicket and back to the cottage"—he prided himself on his map reading—whereas in reality the track petered out in dense bramble where an Austin A 40 had been abandoned, and you would have to backtrack a mile and more under heavy rain in waterproofs that never were, and when you finally got back, exhausted from exposure, Mother heated soup from tins, fussing with the gas bottle, and invariably she would say, “Well, that was a good trek,” or, “Well, that was a walk and a half, wasn't it? Now, what shall we do tomorrow?” Those were holidays that made a hero of you, that made you proud of our glorious centuries of miserable weather, holidays that made you English.

Pescara is not that kind of holiday.

In Pescara you don't consult maps. You don't wonder what you will do. You don't scrutinize the sky, which you know will be blue and blistering. You don't discover anything. Or not the things my parents would have considered discoveries. For although steep hills rise directly behind the town to peak in a red-and-white communications beacon that my father, like so many Englishmen, would immediately have wanted to climb to, nobody does that here. The temperature is in the high thirties, the hillside has been defaced by ugly and probably illegal second homes made from great slabs of cement and defended by barbed wire and railings and thick cypress hedges. Nobody takes walks around the town. And very few people venture up the tortuous roads to the ancient villages of the hinterland, where parking is difficult and shade at a premium. Charming these places may very well be when you get there, but who has the energy to look for them in this heat? No, when in Pescara, you stay in Pescara. Or more precisely you stay the other side of that hectic road that marks off the town from the seafront. In short, you stay on the beach, where the discoveries you may make, as that all too eloquent graffiti daubed on the seafront parapet suggests, are ultimately those that my parents would have done anything to prevent us even imagining.

“Adventure” in English: a hazardous enterprise, a risk, an exciting experience, with positive and above all respectable connotations of courage and bravado on the part of he who risks.

“Avventura” in vernacular Italian: a brief affair.

But leaving aside, if we can, the steamier aspects, the fact is that in Pescara, on this Italian holiday, you are saved the awful business of trying to get a number of people to decide on what the day's “projects” will be. In Pescara you head off to the sea. Everybody heads off to the sea. The only decisions are: Shall we take the masks and flippers as well as the buckets and spades and the air bed? And who is going to carry what?

First day then, eight-thirty: We've remembered the names of the bathing stations, we've remembered the colors of their sunshades, and now we pass through a vine-twisted arch into the Medusa, the name written deco-style in cleverly twisted metal. Here, unusually, I decide I need a cappuccino. The kids, I tell them, can walk through to where there are tall swings on the first part of the beach. They aren't happy about this. They want me immediately. They want to be in the water now! But I need a break, I'm not into the rhythm of this yet. I deploy the classic ricatto. If Michele wants his tokens for the computer game after our swim, if Stefi wants me to build her a sandcastle, I deserve, don't I, having dressed and breakfasted them, a few moments pausa to get my head together at the beginning of a long hot holiday.

The staff behind the bar welcome me. Yes, of course they recognize me from the year before. How is my wife, my father-in-law, my mother-in-law, my children? Same beach, same sea. . . . Same pleasant people taking your money.

I sit down at a table and stir a sprinkle of sugar into my foam. The terrace is deserted, people tend not to breakfast here. There's the softest breeze among tamarisk trees which provide a checker of shade around the plastic tables—just as well, since I've forgotten my sunglasses. I'm beginning to wonder how long I can leave the kids on the swings when a young mother appears with, perhaps, a four-year-old boy. Instead of walking through the terrace and down to the beach as everybody else does, she passes by my table to get to the jukebox beneath the bamboo awning against the wall that ends the terrace.

She sets the child down. She is in her late twenties and wears a lime green shift that just fringes buttocks left naked by her tanga costume. Not quite the buttocks of a girl, but almost. The child is eager to get to the beach, already whining and tugging her hand. But Mamma is stooped over the jukebox, her finger moving carefully over the titles, like someone looking for an elusive name in a big phone directory. Then she's found it. Her money must be in one of those fashionable little fluorescent pouches that tie round the waist, for she fiddles a moment under her shift. And she must be a regular frequentor of the Medusa because I know this machine takes tokens you buy at the bar, not coins. She has some. She slips one in. “Listen to this, ciccio,” she says to the little boy. He. deigns to stop a moment. She stands, one heel in beach sandals off the ground, one forearm raised, the position of a girl about to dance. Nothing happens. She gives the machine a little push. It doesn't go. Under her breath she says what she shouldn't—“Porca puttana!” (Pig whore). She pushes the machine a little harder. Nothing happens. The child has started to wander off now, knowing Mamma will follow. But apparently it is very important for Mamma to hear this song. Seeing the fat man who runs the concession coming in from the road, she goes over to him. Like everybody else in Pescara they exchange the greetings of people who have known each other since at least the beginning of this life. The tubby man, in red shorts and a tank top, waddles over to the machine and fiddles with something behind. The speakers crackle to life.

So what kind of song is it that our young mother wants to listen to, wants her little boy to listen to? Some nostalgic thing, like “Stessa spiaggia"? Or the sexier:

Sapore di sale, sapore di mare,

hai sulla pelle il sapore del sole.

Salt taste, sea taste

Your skin has a sun taste.

This in a languorous male voice with just the right catch in it.

Or is she going to put on some more contemporary song, perhaps thinking of the husband left behind in Milan or Turin. “Non c'è, non c'è il profumo di te. . .”—Not here, not here, your smell this year . . .—this one sung in a passionate woman's voice of the more uninhibited, sadly-obliged-to-pleasure-herself-alone variety.

Or even a song for someone she has just met on the beach, someone she has begun a holiday avventura with? “Sei un mito,” perhaps. “Sei un mito, sei un mito . . .—You're a myth, you're a myth . . ., with all that word's ambiguous aura of the non plus ultra and the untrue.

No. She puts on none of these Italian songs, whether traditional or contemporary. She presses the buttons again and hurries off to grab her little son as the music clashes to life. There's an ominous grinding of synthesized guitars, far too loud, then an equally ersatz, parodically urgent drum beat, over which, unnecessarily raw and abrasive, an English, indeed a cockney, voice starts to shout something like: “What y'gonna be, what y’ gonna do? Don't you know I gotta have you? Gotta have you! Gotta have you!” The child—dark curly hair, big brown eyes—gapes in amazement and incomprehension, seems on the brink of tears. But Mamma has started to dance. At eight-thirty-five A.M. on the empty terrace of the Medusa, she twists and turns with enviable grace by the jukebox beside the palm tree that rises from a mass of geraniums. Her shift lifts. She waves her arms. Her eyes are closed in concentrated pleasure. She doesn't even see that her little son has run off. A few minutes later, when she catches up with him halfway across the beach, I can hear her shrill voice shouting, “Non era bellissimo?”—Wasn't that wonderful? As I leave, the fat proprietor gives me a fat and knowing smile.

We track down our sunshade. It's three rows from the front, four in from the walkway. Remember that, Michele. And then I notice that the jukebox mother is only two rows behind us. She's rubbing cream into herself on the lounge bed and ignoring her little boy's fussing in the sand. Sorting out the deck chairs, it occurs to me that here is a mother who will never pore over ordinance survey maps and the contents of provincial museums, who will never use expressions like, “So what's our project for today?” or “Well, that was a trek and a half, wasn't it!” Like the mothers in Moravia's Agostino, or Morante's Aracoeli, it is she herself who is there for the child to discover . . . an area, I suspect, where I shall be a rather poor stand-in for my wife.