The Unmoved Mover

Though he’d lived in captivity from the day of his birth, Ivo couldn’t imagine that this would be the day of his further capture.

The spacious corral within which he was allowed to move at will included a Bay with its Reefs, the City on the Sea with its harbour, and of course, the Beach: this was the place—anything but contemptible in terms of form, size and content—where, year after year, he was allowed four long months of Summer. They were analogue days in an analogue world but consumed as if they were real. Because Ivo was sixteen years old and to him, not only were those days real but, as far as he was concerned, life outside of there wasn’t worth living.

From the first seaside holiday of the Brandani family, in the late ’50s, he suddenly saw life in Winter—which is to say, any existence outside of that corral of land and water—as an intolerable constraint.

At the very instant he first set foot on a beach, it became clear to him that he had found something special and practically perfect; this in other words was the sole setting that clearly existed for one purpose only, the happiness of its inhabitants. Happiness in air & water, happiness of sand, smells, skin. Happiness of shade and light, happiness of fishes, of sails.

With the passage of time and the succession of Summers, the beach added other, more complicated and hidden forms of possible ecstasy to these basic happinesses. Ivo Brandani’s youth and inexperience were capable of transforming them into authentic and specific forms of suffering that he had never before encountered. Four months of analogue existence spent in the enclosed and apparently artificial universe of the beach, which included the arm of the sea contained in the Bay. A perfect niche, if only that year it hadn’t been contaminated by a subject he was going to be tested on come September: philosophy. He’d always thought he was good at philosophy, he liked it and believed he had a natural gift for it—that’s why he hadn’t bothered to study, except in spurts, and that’s why Bottazzi had assigned him the test right after summer holidays. Bottazzi. Young, slight of stature, with his tiny feet invariably shod in a pair of worn-out black loafers. When he talked he displayed a pile of crooked teeth that looked as though they’d been tossed at random into his chicken-butt mouth. His lips glistened, he drooled slightly and gesticulated, joining his fingers into cones and windmilling his hands through the air, one whirling around the other, or else he’d place them on the lectern as if he were moving pieces on a chessboard. He was obnoxious, off-putting and gloomy; his teaching style was boring and complicated, and yet every time Ivo found himself hypnotized by those strange movements of hands and lips. Bottazzi was a Catholic and appeared to be profoundly bored: by himself first and foremost, by the profession he’d chosen, by the thoughts of others that he was obliged to set forth in his lessons, thoughts to which he seemed to be utterly indifferent. For Bottazzi it was Curriculum and nothing else. And whatever the cost, the Curriculum had to be finished. In the last dwindling days of that school year he’d managed to complete the Curriculum, but only by stuffing in medieval philosophy at the end, so hastily that Ivo practically hadn’t noticed, maybe he’d been absent that day, he couldn’t recall. And so it was that during an oral exam based on a ‘random sampling’ of the topics covered he proved to be completely ignorant of St Thomas and all the rest of them and was therefore flunked and scheduled for retesting in September. A test to take in September was an intolerable insult to the glistening prospect of his Summer, at the precise moment it was about to begin—that was the life that was owed to him, that was his real life and it belonged to him alone.

‘At the sea they can’t reach you, they don’t know how to go underwater, there they’ll never lay hands on you, they can’t tell you what you can do or can’t do . . . Father is far away, usually he shows up Friday night, or Saturday. He gets there tired, on edge, pale, and reeking of sour sweat, aggressive, disappointed, the back of his shirt soaked from the car’s upholstery . . . Go ahead, work yourself to death, I wish you’d just die, then you’d finally leave me in peace. What are you even coming out here for? Don’t you see how pale and white you are? Don’t you smell yourself? What do you have in common with all this? With the Bay, with the Sea, with the Mandrake? Do you want the Mandrake tomorrow morning? Fine. But why do you insist on taking it out if you don’t know how to sail it?’

‘No, Papà, tomorrow I can’t go, I have something planned with Giacomo, we’re going fishing. No, please, tomorrow we have a motorboat, we’re going to Ponente. We’re getting up early, at six. Tomorrow of all days, no, please, I’m begging you . . .’

Father’s pale, embittered face, with his perennial grimace of disgust, his mouth twisted into a crease of disappointment, which only deepens as he says—it’s what he always says—that he’s ‘working himself to death’ for them: ‘Yes, and for you too, to give you all this and then, when I do come down, not once that we can spend some time together, not even for an outing in a boat.’

Ivo could perfectly well say to him: ‘Why do you want to spend time with me, if everything we ever talk turns into a sermon, an endless, infinite busting of my balls? I always wind up saying: Yes, certainly, Papà. I always have to agree that you’re right, otherwise you lose your temper and sometimes you even hit me. Why do you want to spend time with your son if you can’t tolerate anything different from what you think? I already know what you think about everything, and I’ve known for some time now. All you do is repeat it to me. You agree with the professors, with the priests. You’re all just one thing, a single huge alliance of ball-busters.’

Of course, in theory that’s what Ivo could tell him, but it would constitute a catastrophic violation of protocol; instead he listens patiently, head bowed, and then slips away as soon as possible, leaves, tries to make himself invisible, impossible to find. You can’t joke around with Father, who’s already furious about the test to be taken in September: ‘I don’t care if it’s just one subject,’ he says, ‘the fact remains that you shirked your duty.’

The day of his further capture is more or less like all the others, simple & bright. He sleeps in until mid-afternoon, except when he plans to go sailing, in which case he asks Giuseppa to wake him up around eleven, but there’s usually no wind before one o’clock, or if there is, it’s not much. Otherwise, he sleeps as long as he likes.

Breakfast very late, with a cafe latte, alone, because Ivo lives offbeat from Mother and his sisters, who are already on the beach, or in town. So when he returns home, driven by hunger, he lunches at three or four in the afternoon. He stays out late at night. First he goes to the arena for a movie, then out for a gelato, after which a drive somewhere, or else he hangs out with his friends, each stupider than the next, strolling aimlessly down the dark avenues of the city on the sea, laughing joking smoking almost until break of day. In Summer, you feel feverish and tense, nothing is really a holiday, nothing is done with ease, everything is challenging, enigmatic, mysterious, dream-like, exciting, effortful, until you crash into sleep.

His body is being transformed, it grows lean. Skinniness & agility, the increase in stature, shoulders already broadening since last winter, at judo class in the gym. In the months to come, swimming, rowing, sailing will all make Ivo’s muscles a little more voluminous, toned, tough, articulated and edgy. But leisure is fundamental, reading comic books in the afternoon, stretched out on the flowered bedcover along with the sand that clings to his heels . . .

The Mandrake is fast, but winning is entirely another matter. In order to win, you have to be able to sense when the boat is slipping through the water the absolute best that she can, so you need to centre her to perfection. In a regatta you have to understand exactly where the wind is coming from at all times, know when to come around and why, learn how to manage the start, avoid being caught in the lee of anyone else’s sails, refuse to let anyone else crush you. You have to know how to skip out of the way. You have to know how to depart at the right time. All of these are things he doesn’t really know how to do well, and they can be added to the rising tide of other things he doesn’t do well, that he does just OK, with no real commitment, concentration or discipline.

This is his first walk on the beach, today—it’s hot and, for now, there’s no wind.

The asphalt on the beachfront promenade is scorching hot. Villas to one side, changing cabins on the other, a long row of cars parked in the sun, young skinny plane-tree saplings that offer very little shade and are used by dogs to pee on. Ivo has already had the tragic experience of stepping on a fresh dogshit in his Hong Kong flip-flops. You can hear music, muffled by the hot air, coming up from the loudspeakers on the beach, beyond the gaps between the cabins you can see flags barely fluttering in the sea breeze, no more than a breath of air. Brushing past the red-hot line of parked cars, the long seasonal migration of weary people flip-flopping home, still in their swimsuits. People loaded down with bags, women pushing baby carriages, with toddlers holding their hands, the dogshits by now well plastered down onto the marble-chip floor tiles of the walkway. Girls in bikinis, under a beachwrap knotted at the back of their neck, boys holding packs of cigarettes, various brands—Stop Marlboro Kent Rothmans Peer Muratti Winston—or else tucked away in the rolled-up T-shirt sleeve, the Ronson or the Zippo in the pockets of their Bermuda shorts—everyone smokes, they insist on smoking, they show off packs of American cigarettes, they show off lighters that emit powerful jets of flame.

Carriages hauled by horses steaming in the heat have left pestilential trails of manure behind them on the asphalt, manure that ferments in the hot sunshine and assaults every sense. A few people go sailing by full throttle on their mopeds, shirts swollen with air, crushing that manure repeatedly, intentionally, under their wheels: flap, flap, flap.

A long line of wooden booths in which to change, cabins for rent for the day or even for the whole summer, a little beat up and chipped from the many seasonal assemblies, disassemblies and stackings.

Inside cabin 348, a wooden shelf, a line of coat hooks, a standard folding chair; light comes in through the gaps between the boards and the shutter slats, set up high, above the door. The wooden plank floor is covered with slightly damp sand—someone’s gone swimming, someone’s changed out of their suit. A woman’s swimsuit lies on the floor, wet and coated with sand. It looks like a mollusc, a beached jellyfish. Ivo has entered a world of specific objects, here everything is very solid, very simple.

The Brandani-Salvetti family’s cabin is large, there are also a woman’s dress in light cotton with shoulder pads, a striped T-shirt, a pair of men’s swimming trunks hanging on a nail, navy blue, with internal netting to contain penis and scrotum. Ivo turns his gaze away as if it were something obscene: Father leaves it here during the week, it’s there to remind them that he’s still there, that he exists, they they owe all this to him and his work and that it’s provisional, undeserved, illegitimate. There’s a straw beach bag, another bag made of coloured canvas, robes, cotton hats and straw hats, spare two-piece swimsuits, the bra cups lined in white fabric, women’s swimsuit bottoms, the crotch lined with white cloth. The mystery of Big Sister’s and the Salvetti cousin’s pubic areas, signals of something not clearly imaginable, dark, sordid. Mother’s swimsuit, a black one-piece, which she almost never wears. Then there are sundresses, combs in colourful plastic, with oversized teeth.

He only needs the cabin as a place to leave his Hong Kong flip-flops on the floor and toss his T-shirt over a chair. But he loves this ambiguous space immersed in penumbra, the sounds of the beach reaching it muffled, as if from measureless, dazzling distances. There is a strong smell here of creams in small jars and tubes, sun creams and after-sun moisturizers piled up on the shelf: two families make use of this cabin, parents, sisters, uncles and aunts, cousins of both genders. Pure chaos.

In the corners, fishing gear, a net, a fishing spear, the speargun that Ivo found last year in the water, abandoned on the seabed, a Cressi Cernia Velox spring gun, too long and too hard to load, full of sand, practically shot, then a bamboo fishing pole, assemblable, obsolete, with tarnished brass joints; he no longer knows who it belongs to. A toy beach bucket, shovel and moulds, a plastic toy boat that belongs to his cousins, still kids (the battery-powered electric motor broke the very first day), cheap beach games, heavy ceramic beach discuses, sand marbles, a wooden sailboat with red sails, diving fins, masks, and snorkels, a deflated swim ring, a deflated rubber boat folded up in a corner, a child’s beach ball, another one for grown-ups. Rolled-up straw beach mats, wooden clogs scattered on the floor, a heap of magazines on the chair: Oggi, Gente, Stop, Epoca; a few comic books rumpled from the damp: Topolino, Tiramolla, L’Intrepido, Il Monello. All this stuff manages to fit into a small cabin—of course it does, this is the beach. It’s late, mothers and children have gone back. No aunts or uncles around. Big Sister is certainly down at the cafe with all her friends, by this time of the afternoon there shouldn’t be anyone under the umbrella. From here on, for the next 100 or 150 feet, the sand is scorching hot. Ivo leaps from one cement slab to the next to avoid burning his feet. He veers close to the public bathrooms, likewise made of cement (sand-covered porcelain, the smell of bleach, wet with fresh water, with urine), at a run he reaches the navy blue shade of the Brandani-Salvetti canopy.

Three rows of devices to block light. Large, stout beach umbrellas planted in the sand, a few tiny holes in the canvas that produce an intensely luminous dot of light on the bodies of those sitting in the shade. The wooden pole is thick, professional, the joint is made of bright metal with glints of oil, no rust, well-made equipment, built to last, the umbrella ribs are made of bamboo, flexible, the tip of each rib is covered with brass and a ring grommet to hold the canvas. That wooden pole is a benchmark of Summer. Hanging from one of the ribs is a little pink card marked with the number 348 and, in pencil, the name of the person who rented that umbrella.

Names of families that have been coming here for years and who always plump down in the same place in accordance with a map that we might call inviolable, institutional, universally respected. Beach umbrellas like homes: the way it was last summer and the summer before that, this year too number 348 is assigned to the Brandani-Salvetti family, for four months.

The folding chairs are essential, comfortable, heavy, stout. The kind of thing you only see here at the beach, with the name of the beach club impressed on the outside of the backrest. All in very durable sailcloth. Recliners with adjustable awnings and backs. Simple but ingenious mechanisms, reliable, even though every so often someone does manage to pinch their fingers. There is no such thing as an absolutely and definitively comfortable position on the beach: you have to move, get up, adjust, change, sit back down, in the shade in the sun, stretch out on the sand, on the beach towel, get back up again, take a swim, take a walk. The beach is work, it doesn’t take care of itself. Every morning there are the people-with-the-neighbouring-beach-umbrella to greet, and that’s a rule; Ivo does his part distractedly but cordially. All around are people he’s known for years, Signora Rodoni, skinny, lipstick on her lips, in the shade, reading Mario Tobino, The Underground, with the bellyband still on it announcing ‘Strega Prizewinner.’ People read newspapers, do crossword puzzles, skilfully solve rebuses in the Settimana Enigmistica—the Weekly Puzzler.

The beach has a sort of virtual affinity and correspondence in the Settimana Enigmistica. The beach too is white and useless, dotted with episodes, covered with slight puzzles, rebuses. The entire Eastern Beach is one vast Investigation with Susi—it’s like a huge double page of Sharpen Your Eyesight, full of details to discover, correspondences to find. Ivo couldn’t really say why he so adores the Weekly Puzzler, which Mother never fails to buy when they’re here, as if it were an integral part of the summer package. Idle chatter, riddles, horoscopes.

At this time of day the beach is tired, it’s hungry, it’s rapidly emptying out, soon the changing of the guard will be complete. Ivo is here out of inertia, because he doesn’t know where else to go, and most of all because there’s not much wind offshore. But also because he likes the beach at this time of day. He likes the long slanting rays of light and the general feeling of indolence, the relaxation of adult control, the torrid atmosphere that settles over people and things. It feels as if anything could happen, but nothing ever does. This is the moment of the babysitters, the suntan obsessives who lie there in silence roasting themselves to a turn, the serving girls who come down to get some sun in the early afternoon, the off-hours; they have no lounge chairs, no beach umbrella, they sit down on the shore, they lay out their colourful beach towels where the sand is perennially damp and hard, amid the paddle boats hauled up out of the water, the holes excavated by little kids and then left unfilled. They even go swimming. And they take a look around. A few local males, muscular and wearing extremely skimpy swimsuits, pace back and forth, measuring the beach in that very zone and evaluating the resources it has to offer. Groups of dark silhouettes plays volleyball with the sun behind them, just beyond the tideline, where moving is still easy, but the water softens the falls, the dives.

Under the umbrellas or wandering the beach, or else out in the water, or playing ball along the beachfront, Ivo sees friends of his, boys and girls, people from his circle of reference, a group he doesn’t really feel he belongs to, but which still possesses sufficient critical mass to draw him into its gravitational pull. He considers them landlubbers, kids who have no sense of the sea, who fail to feel any primary commitment to the water, the fish, the seabeds in the gulf, who don’t sail and who don’t take part in regattas. Beach people, in other words, like all those who spend their whole days sitting on paddle boats shooting the breeze, fooling around, and trying to make time with girls, who organize every afternoon, in regular rotation, a party at someone’s place. Records and Coca-Cola, potato chips, single-portion pizzas, orangeade, Peroni beer, Chinotto soft drinks, even Tamarindo, the tamarind-pulp beverage. There was dancing. Ivo always goes to them, but on the beach he spends little time with the Group. He doesn’t feel like getting sucked into all that coming and going with petty crushes, petty quarrels, petty rages, continuously gossiping and backbiting. Ivo doesn’t know and can’t understand that the true purpose of the Group is to teach a fruitful and convenient social mode of behaviour, to learn the cunning and wiles of living with other people, training in the manoeuvres of courtship, how to leave and how to take, how to know women, the way they think and, finally, their body. He hates the successions of leaders and leaderesses, the formation of royal couples, the spectacular beauties surrounded by their handmaidens, the prestige of the boys with the most money, the biggest and best terrace or garden, the moped, the Vespa, the motorcycle, some of them even have a car.

To him it’s not even conceivable, the way that Father is by nature, that, once he turns eighteen, he might be given, I don’t know, a black, or red, Alfa Romeo GT Veloce, and enough money to buy petrol, cigarettes and all the rest. And yet there are those among the ones who know each other here that have exactly that: someone who might even have flunked the year at school, some relaxed smug son-of-a-bitch in gleaming Ray-Bans and tight-fitting Lacoste.

The beach is bristling with platforms set high on cement pilings, cylindrical columns that conceal insidious shadows, full of things that belong to the various establishments, under the jurisdiction of the lifeguards and attendants. The wooden canopies covered with reeds, the awnings in rough blue or green canvas, which protect from the blazing sunshine bars and kiosks that sell mini-pizzas and Coca-Colas, orangeades, calzones and hot pockets, sugar-dusted custard buns and fried doughnuts, but especially packaged ice cream. They sell Toseroni ice-cream bars—Ivo’s never tried one, because the trusted family trademark is Algida, if he’s feeling adventuresome, Alemagna—then there is Eskibon, Mottarello, Fortunello, Coppa del Nonno, lemon orange mint, sour black cherry popsicles, violently coloured green red yellow magenta, rainbow-hued. Ivo leaves the popsicles whole and sucks away the syrup from the ice until they turn transparent. Round tables, stackable chairs in aluminium tubing and plaited plastic, that leave a bright red imprint on your ass, or wooden folding chairs. Music plays continuously from the jukebox, boys sitting smoking, leaning against the wooden railings. Girls in bikinis and long smooth hair, cigarettes burning, crushed-out stubs on the floor, sand and dampness everywhere. Everywhere what prevails is the unsaid, the lewd eye, the rapid or the carefully considered evaluation, repeated and impudent, or awkward, embarrassed. The silent gaze of everyone rests on the bodies of everyone, withdraws, returns, persists. Barely defined pectorals and abdominals. Hairs on chests, bellies. Breasts, red zits, shaved hair growing back on the insides of thighs, here and there pubic hairs poking out from under swimsuits. Toenails, flaking nail polish. The quality of the human material changes from bar to bar, kiosk to kiosk. As you move from west to east, the beach becomes more well to do, fancier, more obnoxious, unwelcoming. The platforms of the bars and cafes all the way down there, where the sand ends and the rocky shoals begin, are for the wealthier beach-goers. There the girls are prettier and more confident, they appear unattainable, out of reach. Ivo is intimidated, he almost never goes there. The territory where his family can afford an umbrella, a ring of shade that Father’s Work can procure them for four months’ time, is in an intermediate zone between the rich families that frequent the bar and the hicks and losers of the stretch before the Rotunda, the people at the Bagni Tritone: the beach never lies about your social standing.

When he leaves the circle of shade, which the slanting early-afternoon sunlight has pushed away from the family beach umbrella, Ivo turns westward where, a few hundred yards away, the Rotunda can be seen. Suddenly to go there strikes him as better than sprawling lazily in a lounge chair, nursing his incipient hunger. He estimates that he’ll be in time to scarf down one of the last remaining minipizzas. He picks up his pace.

Walking along the landscape of the water’s edge he encounters the shower stalls, arranged at regular intervals; on the slippery wooden boards, slightly rotten, velvety moss takes root while tiny torrents of fresh water carve out little canyons through the sand down to the sea. Where children have worked all day to divert the streams with dams and other works of hydraulic engineering, now there lie only ruins made of foul-smelling sand, abandoned to be trodden under by grown-ups. Ivo is very familiar with these minimal, precise geographies, stagnant pools of foam even though the use of shampoo is forbidden: there’s a sign but it’s ignored. There are people waiting to take a shower, people rinsing off, scrubbing themselves, men holding their swimsuits open to let streams of fresh water pour in, first in the front, then in the rear. It’s an obscene gesture and they know it; when they’re done they look around, brashly. The water is cold, in fact it’s freezing, sickly sweet, slippery, unholy, odourless. There are very few girls, this time of day, beneath the spray; Ivo has always observed the mystery of their bodies and their actions with feverish attention: gleaming, fit, with their skin icy and shivering, drenched hair that they’ll brush at length, sitting meditatively in the sun, or chatting with a girlfriend, or a group of friends, or in their boyfriend’s company. It’s almost three, there’s no longer a sign of blue-lipped children wrapped in bathrobes, their fingers pruned by the water, noses dripping—the beach is now fully adult.

Here’s the Rotunda, huge, modern, sprawling on the water like a gigantic crab on cement piers all encrusted with mussels. You climb the steps and inside you find a cafe, still crowded with people in swimsuits. They cluster around the cash register, here too ordering the usual things: espressos and Coca-Colas and supplì croquettes and doughnuts. There are still a couple of small pizzas, Ivo gets in line, then he goes over to the counter, made of filled and polished travertine and glass, and before long he has a small pizza in one hand, nice and fresh and warm, knowing that if he folds it awkwardly it will spill oil onto his hand and then down to his elbow.

The restaurant dining room, large, half-deserted, echoing behind the glass doors. The guests dine in shorts and T-shirts, in compliance with the posted regulations:

OUR GUESTS ARE HEREBY INFORMED

THAT ADMITTANCE TO THIS FACILITY

IS NOT ALLOWED IN SWIMSUITS

Ivo is attracted by seaside restaurants. As he bites into his minipizza—he can already perceive the oil as it starts to drip down his forearm—he steps close to the plate-glass window and looks in. White tablecloths, napkins, waiters, carafes of wine from a large flask, yellowish. From the kitchen comes wafting strong smells of fried squid and shrimp, seafood risottos, spaghetti with clam sauce, carpet-shell or cherrystone clams as the diner prefers, spaghetti with mixed seafood, linguine with prawns, sautéed mussels, fish soups, octopus Luciana-style, mixed seafood antipastos, tellin bruschetta, grilled sole, sole meunière, stewed sea bass with mayonnaise, sliced houndshark with tomato sauce, sargo, gilthead bream, grilled swordfish filets, stewed angler fish, even lobster—at least that’s what the menu claims, printed and framed by the entrance.

‘But, if you wish, sir, we can have the chef whip up a nice little grilled steak, a lovely veal chop with sautéed potatoes, or we can offer a bowl of spaghetti with meat sauce, a saltimbocca, that is sautéed slices of veal with ham and sage, or a breaded Milanese cutlet, some stewed or poached chicory, as you wish. Caprese salad, poached string beans or blanched string beans with olive oil and lemon juice . . .’ that is, what the waiter had added once, the only time that he had eaten lunch there with Father.

Outside, on the large ring-shaped terrace, there are more tables and chairs and people sitting around listening to a juke box playing at full volume. Men are smoking and watching the women in swimsuits. Groups of boys joke around, shouting and laughing with their dicks hard in their elasticized Speedos, so horny that it takes practically nothing and they have to go hide, to the snickering of the others. Ivo imagines that many of these young men are going to be taking exams in two or three subjects in October, and yet here they are wasting their time, carefree, as if they had nothing in the world to worry about.

‘Some of them have surely flunked their year, but it’s nothing serious for them, it’s just a pain in the ass to have to be left back a year . . . But how can they do it? If it happened to me, Father would kill me, he’d throw me out of the house, he’d send me to work. I can’t even stand to think about what he’d do to me . . .’

The girls are wearing bikinis with pastel-hued bra cups: pistachio, straw yellow, salmon pink. But also black, and white. Their hair has streaks of sun-bleaching, smooth. They laugh, bronzed and made-up; all is calm, thoughts of elsewhere are far away. Ivo bites into his 50-lire minipizza. It’s delicious.

Going back to the Brandani-Salvetti precinct of shade, he sees Sandro sitting and reading under an umbrella in the second row. He waves hello to him. Sandro is a member of Big Sister’s social circle. He’s at the university, a freshman majoring in Political Science, if Ivo’s not remembering wrong. Ivo respects him because he looks like someone who thinks, who reads and who stays informed. He’s tall, fat, flaccid, homely, with thick-lensed glasses and bulging myopic eyes, a headful of straight black hair, bristly as a rosemary bush. He has large teeth, thick wet lips, a wide mobile mouth, with undefined outlines, and Ivo can’t keep himself from staring at it. He laughs, heaving, continuously, practically squeaking like a giant mouse, but he knows how to speak about almost anything, with precision and authority, especially about politics. He almost always has a newspaper, a magazine and a book in his hands, he speaks continuously and explains earnestly, as if he were engaged in a perennial debate. He argues his point of view and never seems to lose his temper. He never goes in the water, he never lies in the sun, his flesh is pasty white, covered with tufts of hair and large moles, he wears a pair of dark, very loose Bermuda shorts made out of some synthetic material. Ivo perceives him to be a kind and open person, slightly patronizing, and he likes talking with him. He walks over and asks: ‘What are you reading?’ even though he can see perfectly well for himself. Sandro looks up from his copy of L’Espresso, a bedsheet of a newsmagazine covered with banner headlines and large black-and-white photos. On the back page, Ivo rapidly reads an advertisement, spare, primitive:

Tell me bon voyage, but sell me

SUPERCORTEMAGGIORE

the powerful Peninsular petrol.

On the front page, there is an enigmatic banner headline:

After our electric power supply

WHAT ELSE CAN BE NATIONALIZED?

And then, below that, a headline above a photo of Marilyn Monroe states:

THE WORLD THAT DESTROYED MARILYN

On the bottom right there is a smaller photograph of a smiling Stefania Sandrelli. She’s wearing a light blouse, unbuttoned, the hems knotted over her wet swimsuit. The blouse is wet, where her breasts are. ‘Her too, her especially.’

At home, that newsmagazine was never allowed, because Father refuses to read it. Father buys only Il Tempo and sometimes Il Borghese, which is a political publication but which always features very daring photographs of half-nude women, in stockings and garter belts which Ivo uses for his daily masturbation.

Sandro immediately snickers, and says nothing but: ‘Late empire.’

Then he says it again: ‘We’re in the middle of the late empire. Late empire.’ He likes the formulation. Right away he emits another one of his electric-discharge giggles. Ivo has heard from his sister that Sandro is ‘radical’. But he has no idea of what that means.

‘The price, you understand? The consolation prize required to form part of the coalition government, that is, without actually forming part, but abstaining, supporting it from the outside, that is, throwing the stone but hiding the hand that threw it, is the nationalization of the electric system. You get it? They were going to start a revolution and now they’re willing to settle for nationalizing the electric system. Late empire.’ Nervous little giggle.

Ivo hardly understands a word of what he’s saying, but he’s immediately reminded of Father, who inveighs at the dinner table against the ‘little comrades’ who want to nationalize the electric power grid, and then adds: ‘This is just the beginning: I don’t have a lira to my name, but if I did, I’d take it and put it in a Swiss bank, the way the ones who have money do, that is, everyone else but me . . .’

Ivo thinks about declaring his opposition to nationalization right then and there, even though he doesn’t actually know what it is. And so, just to have something to say, he blurts out a: ‘So this is only the beginning, eh?’

‘In what sense? If you think that this is the first step on the road to the Soviets . . .’—‘What the fuck are Soviets?’ Ivo wonders—‘. . . you’re badly mistaken. This is just a consolation prize and it’s never going to be anything more than a consolation prize. The Christian Democrats could eat the Socialists for breakfast . . . That’s exactly how Moro split the Socialist–Communist front, he pitted them one against the other, you see that? I’m a liberal, but the establishment of a national agencies for electric power is fine with me. It’s necessary. We’re a country poor in resources. No coal. Electricity is strategic, you understand? Late empire.’

‘But, weren’t you . . . radical?’

‘Certainly (giggle). And what do you think the radicals really are? Huh?’

‘Liberals?’

‘Sure, good work. Liberals and secular, there’s even another definition, “liberal-socialists”, which is of course absurd. We are the only political force that is authentically, radically anti-clerical . . . The priests say that the radicals are all Freemasons . . . In other words, your choice.’

Suddenly Ivo is reminded that he too, not just the pinchbeck losers of the Rotunda, has an exam to redo. And today Giorgio is tutoring him! At three! He has just ten minutes. Enough time to run straight home, grab a pen, his book, and his notebook, and head back down. Everything he needs is right there, in a few yards’ space. The building where they rent an flat every year overlooks the beach, on the far side of the beachfront promenade. Next to it is the great big villa owned by Giorgio’s family, and the tutoring takes place in a small guest house behind it.

He says: ‘Are you staying here? See you later, then! Ciao!’

And he runs off.

The one-storey building is small and low, under eucalyptus trees covered with cicadas. A din of insect noise in the afternoon heat of a Tyrrhenian August comes in through the open window, under the half-lowered wooden roller blind. Giorgio goes on, imperturbably, holding his cigarette clamped between forefinger and thumb of his right hand, burning vertically, almost never taking a puff. The ashes form a small, ever-taller pillar, which inevitably begins to lean to one side, so that after a while Ivo’s undivided attention is there, to capture the moment that it spills onto the table. But Giorgio’s pillar of ash remains erect, until the cigarette is almost entirely consumed, until the ember grazes the long fingers, yellow with nicotine, that is, until the moment in which he crushes it out in the ashtray.

Giorgio is very clear, much clearer than Signor Bottazzi. With him, Ivo has the sensation that he understands everything, he waxes enthusiastic, even: the Immovable Motor, the Unmoved Mover, infinitely powerful, is St Thomas’s God, at the very start of the chain of causation, engendering everything there is.

‘The proofs of St Thomas are five in number, ex Motu—you know, when it’s time for the exam you’re going to be expected to know them by heart—ex Causa, ex Contingentia, ex Gradu—don’t worry about the ashes, just write down the list—and ex Fine. Ex Fine, that is, things in the universe appear orderly to us, they seem to have a purpose, and therefore there must be an Orderer . . . St Thomas proceeds both inductively and deductively . . .’

The Scholastics: Duns Scotus, Robert Grosseteste, William of Ockham, Roger Bacon, Jean Buridan . . . abstruse, he’s going to have to know them all. The school where his family has sent him without so much as a by-your-leave is run by priests, it’s for rich kids—‘You’ll see, they’ll set you straight there,’ says Father (‘. . . Father isn’t Catholic, he’s not especially religious, and he has nothing but bad things to say about priests: so why did he want to send me to that school? What needs to be set straight about me . . .?’)—and the priests have a special interest in Scholasticism. That’s what Giorgio told him at the beginning of their month of tutoring.

‘Which means you need to know them well. Don’t try to skimp on this—they can flunk you even if you’re only taking a single test. It’s happened before.’

‘. . . things can exist or not exist, if they exist, someone has acted to ensure they exist . . .’

Giorgio also belongs to Ivo’s older sister’s Group, but he’s older than Sandro, he’s taking his degree in Philosophy. Unfailingly serious, reflective, completely chilly, indifferent to any attempts to establish a slightly more confidential tone. Giorgio’s mouth resembles Bottazzi’s to a certain extent, and like it, is perennially pursed in a chicken-butt pout. Like Bottazzi, Giorgio also moves his hands when he explains, but only his right hand, because his left hand is in use, holding his cigarette poised vertically, with the ash perfectly balanced. Ivo gets the idea that all philosophers are in a vast coalition, explaining one single thing—abstruse, uniform, asexual, detached and fuming: millions of cigarettes—domestic, unfiltered—lit and smoking away.

The lesson continues amid the incessant whirring of the cicadas.

Giorgio lights additional cigarettes and adroitly lets them consume themselves, as he argues points and explains each issue with great precision. It’s not as if Ivo understands everything but he does seem to be getting a fairly clear general picture. Suddenly, without really thinking about it, he breaks into Giorgio’s stream of words and says: ‘But if the Church asks you to take it on faith then what need is there for a proof of God’s existence? Isn’t there a contradiction there? If you need proof, then what kind of faith is that? What’s more: How does St Thomas know that everything in the universe is ordered towards a certain end?’

‘Why can’t I just shut up? Why do I need to talk? Why don’t I just zip my lips, now that the hour is even up?’

Instead Giorgio answers him immediately: ‘A Christian has to understand what he believes in. And a non-Christian should be convinced of the goodness and the superiority, philosophical as well as theological, of faith in Christ. Fides quaerens intellectum. Reason serves faith and vice versa. A believer’s intellect also requires gratification.’

Ivo dares to say it: ‘But isn’t it a sort of . . . consolation prize?’

‘If you like, you can call it that, but don’t even think of uttering any definitions of that nature during the exam. And after all, frankly, to call Scholasticism a consolation prize . . .’

‘. . . the consolation prize of the little comrades . . .’

Giorgio looks at him quizzically, as if he had suddenly been startled awake from his philosophical dream. With a complicated manoeuvre of his head and arm, he manages to take a drag on his cigarette, leaving it poised vertically and safeguarding the integrity of the pillar of ash (Ivo adores this move); then, after exhaling a long plume of smoke from his mouth and nostrils: ‘Who are the little comrades?’

‘The ones in favour of the nationalization of the electric power company?’ Ivo replies, uncertainly, but at this point freewheeling out of control.

‘The Socialists . . .’ says Giorgio. ‘The nationalization of the power company would be a consolation prize for the little comrades? To get them to join in the coalition government? What would make you think such a thing? And what does it have to do with St Thomas?’

‘Well, I was talking about it on the beach, with Sandro . . .’

‘In any case, yes. You can call it a consolation prize . . . They broke the unity on the left to jump into a coalition government with the Christian Democrats, with the Social Democrats . . .’ Then, pensively, he adds: ‘We behave in such a schizophrenic manner . . . In Berlin, they build a wall and seal themselves in . . . Here we give it all away and stroll arm-in-arm with the Christian Democrats, we split the formation, we let our class enemy insinuate himself in the fissures of division and gain leverage, separating us more and more . . . In any case. Let’s drop that topic. It’s time for you to get going, I have another lesson. I’ll see you the day after tomorrow.’

Ivo says: ‘Yes, Friday, at three . . . But what does “class enemy” mean? Who’s that?’

‘That’s no simple matter to explain. We can talk about it some other time. On Friday, by the way, we’ll come back to St Thomas . . .’

The beach is right down below, Ivo has to go back to see if she’s there. She always gets there about 2.30 or 3 in the afternoon, she lies under a beach umbrella in the second row on a line with the showers. She has a distinctive pose all her own, thanks to which Ivo has learnt to spot her from afar. She uses the technique of the lounger with the back stop reversed, a technique that makes it lie lower, almost like a beach bed, and there she lounges, one leg bent, her foot braced against the crosspiece of the chair. She has dark hair that’s always wet, and she never stops running an oversized yellow large-toothed beach comb through it. It’s the pose of a woman, indolent and fantastic. She seems exhausted, she barely moves, she rarely goes in the water. From a distance she looks beautiful. Little by little, day after day, Ivo has noticed all this from his spot in the Brandani-Savetti circle of shade. The curvature of the foot, sharply arched. The graceful fingers, turned slightly upwards, while the foot points downwards, the heel resting on the canvas-covered wooden frame.

If Ivo had an experienced man close at hand, someone who knew all about life and women, that man would have said to him: ‘Ivo, always steer clear of indolent women, beware of lazy, indifferent women, keep your distance from the ones who pretend not to see you, the ones you can’t get to notice you, but who watch you sidelong, the ones who are busy minding their own business, lying there without a man at their side, or the ones who might have a cluster of men around them, because they’re the sorceresses you can’t defend yourself against, they’re the ones who’ll cast a spell on you just for the fun of the thing, like Circe, for the pleasure of watching you grunt like a pig at their feet. Steer clear of them. It’s not their fault, that’s just how they are. It’s in their nature, trust me on this.’ But just now this sage adviser isn’t available, and Ivo watches this girl, he can’t stop watching her as the days go by and she, steady as clockwork, comes to the beach at the same time of day. She’s beautiful, she resembles neither Brigitte nor Audrey, but she reminds him of them both . . .

Brigitte & Audrey are two absolute opposites, two paradigms that battle in his mind and torment his loins. Without giving quarter, without offering conciliation: there is no possible synthesis between Brigitte and Audrey, and all other women are nothing in comparison.

Both of them give him a strange ache in the belly, both of them make him uneasy in a way that can’t be described as anything other than heat, down under, between penis and pelvis, in a zone of the body that is directly connected to the eyes, to the mind. These aren’t erections, or they’re not just erections. He has erections all day long, at the drop of a hat, often for no good reason, sometimes without so much as a thought to justify them. This is something different, a sort of painful yet pleasurable emotion, of the body, as if the flesh concealed within had suddenly turned incandescent and red, flushed with desperately pulsating blood. Brigitte & Audrey, each in her way, stir in him the discomfort of an impossible desire, put him face-to-face with the simple and unbearable truth of the fact that, however much he may be swept away with desire, he’ll never possess them. Never, ever.

Both of them are made of velvet, but of two different kinds.

Audrey asks you for protection, for kindness. You have to rescue her from that South American guy, or maybe he’s Spanish, take her away from that guy with salt-and-pepper hair and all that money, his name is José Luis de Vilallonga, take her away with you, for ever. Make her yours, her and the cat, in one single toasty embrace of whispers and softness and perfume, while outside it’s been raining for weeks and there’s a fire crackling in your fireplace and in front of the hearth there’s a thick carpet where she crouches in a black leotard, with the cat purring in her arms. All you have to do is love her for ever. Outside it’ll go on raining for all time, the fire in the fireplace will never go out . . . Audrey is the goddess of staying indoors in the Winter.

Brigitte promises you nothing, and asks you for nothing. With her you can’t even dream of making it, unless you’re handsome and rich, unless you have a villa at Saint-Tropez and a chalet in St Moritz and another one in Gstaad, a yacht so you can take her far offshore to go swimming and watch her swim naked and silent in the crystal clear water off the Côte d’Azur and look at her as she climbs up the boat ladder secured aft, as she pushes her hips forwards and seeks the bottom rung with her petite, arched foot, as that lovely fold of flesh between thigh and belly forms for an instant, the fold of flesh you see in pictures. She’s something free and dangerous, you can’t protect her. She tells you that if you want her all for yourself you’ll have to tame her, keep her on a chain, subdue her: something unthinkable, completely non-possible . . . Brigitte is the goddess of throwing yourself open to Summer.

Ivo watches her from afar and thinks of the impossible com-bination of Audrey and B.B., something non-human and non-conceivable, a creature in which Brigitte’s sexual power finds reconciliation with Audrey’s doe-like sweetness. A woman to love. He ventures so far as to consider uttering the word ‘love’, a word that’s not used by them. They, that is, the boys and girls of the Group, tell each other I’m crazy about you, they never say I love you: loving each other is for grown-ups, it’s a commitment. Can Audrey be loved? Can Brigitte be loved? Ivo doesn’t know the meaning of this word—who ever does?—but he uses it when he thinks of them.

It’s four in the afternoon, he’s hungry, the minipizza he gulped down at the Rotunda has long since been burnt up. He leaves book and notebook in his changing booth and heads off down the beach. The shadows are lengthening, many beach umbrellas are already folded for the night, the loungers and beach chairs neatly stacked against the pole fixed in the sand. He looks around. At first, Sandro is nowhere to be seen. He searches for her. She ought to be down there, a little further off, towards the east. There she is, surrounded by people. He spots Sandro sitting next to her on a wooden folding chair with a copy of L’Espresso folded on his knees: they know each other! Here’s his chance! He heads over and calls hello. Aside from Sandro, there are two other guys he knows by sight, sprawled in two beach loungers, two assholes from the Baretto, the expensive little cafe in town, two guys from somewhere else, not here, a couple of guys from the world of arrogant-assholes-with-money from the Little Shoals. Sandro says hello back, snickering, and since silence has fallen among the others, introduces him. Marcella, do you know . . . (and here he seems to make an effort as if trying to remember his name) . . . Ivo? And then, turning to the others: Do you know each other? Everyone says ciao, but Ivo doesn’t even hear the ciaos of the two assholes from the Baretto—if he bothered to listen closely, he’d be able to detect mistrust and irritation, like: And-who-the-fuck-is-this-supposed-to-be?—because Ivo is focusing on her, on her ciao, on her gaze, which strikes him as particularly attentive, interested, curious. He’s taken off his sunglasses to show off his blue eyes. A basic technique that backfires this time: Marcella’s gaze is level and confident, Ivo’s naked eyes are intimidated, he dodges her glance, his gaze slides elsewhere. ‘This is Fabrizio and this is Massimiliano,’ she says as she looks him up and down. She’s wearing a wet bikini with red pinstripes, with a wireframe balcony bikini top, and the bottom with elastic waistband, slightly poofy. She’s totally charming and totally sexy. She’s sitting in her usual pose, half-reclining, one leg bent, her thighs slightly open, an undetectable tuft of pubic hair protruding from the swimsuit bottom . . . . There is always that zone of a girl’s swimsuit-clad body, between the legs, where Ivo’s eyes continually wander; it seems to be slightly protruding, that is, it seems to contain something substantial, fleshy, to judge from the shape that the fabric takes on at that point: Does the pussy possess a certain volume? Is it more than just a void, a negative space? Does it occupy its own portion of convex, hairy space . . .?

Marcella stretches, throwing her arms back and twisting in Fabrizio’s direction to encourage him to resume the interrupted conversation—she makes this motion in a natural, padded, fluid manner, like a cat, and as she does she reveals an armpit shave that dates from a few days earlier. It’s the Regrowth, which Ivo is used to because all girls have it.

‘Get yourself a chair,’ she says, addressing Ivo, who’s put his sunglasses back on and is scrutinizing her from behind the dark lenses. She’s slightly cross-eyed, she resembles Lea Massari, brown-skinned, dark-eyed, slightly nearsighted, a perfect voice with a hint of the drawling accent of those who live in the City of God. Her body is ripe, sleepy, buttery, quite another matter from the firm springiness of the girls Ivo’s age, though he still adores them. The first and unmistakable message emanating from her is I am a woman grown and aware, even though Ivo, who receives it full in the face like a blast of hot wind, wouldn’t know how to decipher it in anything like such a clear and concise form. To him, Marcella is pure emotion, she’s one further event in the rushing chaos of the world, an enigma in the larger enigma of the Universe, a mystery among the mysteries of the Chain of Causation. She might be eighteen, nineteen years old, no older, but the gap between her and Ivo might as well be a generation. ‘She’s out of your league,’ the sage adviser would tell him, if he was standing behind him, ‘go on home, read yourself a comic book, take a nice nap, and go to the party this afternoon, probably you’ll see Carla there, you remember Carla? You used to like her, until yesterday anyway . . .’

Fabrizio is talking about who knows what (calling yourself Fabrizio, instead of Ivo, is already an advantage to start with . . .), but whatever it is, it certainly has something to do with tennis, the night sessions of this year’s tournament. He seems detached, his head cocked to one side, his mop of dark hair hanging lank—Ivo envies him all that smooth hair, Ivo has hair that’s not-curly-not-smooth-not-wavy but sickly looking, shambling, with small pretentious waves, unjustifiable, that unfailingly appear whenever he lets his hair get past a certain length. And to think that long hair is in, while his hairline already seems to be receding, and when he tries to grow his out what he finds on his head is a sort of brownish clump of tow, like a plumber. The portion of Fabrizio’s face that his Ray-Bans (with the horizontal mother-of-pearl bridge) leave uncovered shows that he has regular features (his nose is somewhat hooked, to tell the truth): a tanned, bored face. He’s announcing that he’s only going to compete in the doubles, with a guy who’s a friend of his, he says they’ve been training. He has a completely deep, adult voice. He reels off the names of the good players, drawling his words, the names of the ones that he knows are probably seeded, he says that they ought to have two tournaments, one for the seeded players and the other for everyone else: where’s the fun in getting crushed by the usual aces? Under a green Lacoste shirt he wears a pair of red flowered Bermuda shorts, tight-fitting, made to order. In one hand he holds a bunch of car keys. ‘He has a car,’ and he continually points out the fact. He too must be eighteen or twenty years old—a gulf in age and status separates him from Ivo, a gulf of virility, attitude, and hair: Fabrizio is an adult and belongs to the clan of rich patrons of the Baretto.

Sandro snickers, clearly tennis isn’t his topic, but he’s not entirely ignorant either, so every now and then he throws in a comment or two. The subject of the Pancho Gonzales signature rackets comes up, rackets that feature a photo of the player, it also comes up that Laver and Rosewall are winning everything these days. Gonzales has practically retired. ‘It’s a posthumous signature,’ says Sandro, who seems to be comfortable now, as he tries to win back the spotlight. Marcella concedes him the centre of attention, while she basically remains silent. ‘What need is there to pretend that we’re having a conversation among ourselves, if everything that’s said in this gathering is said to You, for You, to make You laugh, to impress You, to interest You, to charm You?’ Marcella is the mass at the centre of a gravitational system so powerful that it holds four young lives clinging to it that would otherwise be elsewhere, each of them busy sizzling and burning energy and emotions in other more enjoyable, more relaxed summer activities, instead of striving to make an impression on her.

Massimiliano only speaks up rarely. He’s renowned as an athlete but he doesn’t play tennis. His interests include swimming, football, basketball, track and field (he’s regional champion of the Eighty Obstacles and he plays centrefield in some Serie C team) and, especially, spearfishing. Ivo has heard it said of him that he free-dives to depths of 20 yards on the Shoal, that he comes back up with 25-pound groupers. Ivo hears that Massimiliano is part of a group of fishermen with real grown-up equipment, professionals, people who own wetsuits, who don’t go fishing in T-shirts the way he does . . .

Massimiliano—Max—is wearing only a black Port Cros swimsuit, the kind that hooks on the hip, and has a clearly articulated musculature, you might say scientifically engineered, with a V-shaped chest. He can’t seem to stop caressing his pecs. Maybe he’s cold right now, but he won’t put on something warm. Max too, everything he does and says, he does and says for Marcella’s eyes and ears. That skimpy swimsuit instead of a pair of Bermuda shorts, his naked chest—you can tell it’s all for her.

These three aren’t friends. They know one another distantly, they meet at afternoon parties, in the normal course of affairs they don’t even talk to one another, but here, now, it’s an intense exchange of views and ideas; they compete to impress her the way superheroes might do, each of them unsheathing their own specific superpowers: money & car (Fabrizio), physique & prowess (Max), culture & words (Sandro). The situation would be clear-cut—Ivo feels useless, tired, would gladly go home, the stakes at this table are too high for him, the other players are too good, the cards in his hand too insignificant, he has no ultrapowers, he’s sixteen years old, he even flunked philosophy, sure he’s tall, but you can see that he’s still growing, just a kid, he’s out of his league—except that she’s looking at him.

With her head thrown back, against the taut canvas of the lounge chair, her chin lifted, her strangely shaped eyes and her long—extremely long—half-lidded black lashes, Marcella doesn’t appear to be listening to the exchange of chatter, she seems to be looking at him, Ivo! He can’t be absolutely positive but that’s what it looks like to him. She’s constantly combing her hair, cocking her head to one side, raising her elbow behind the face that some perverse pagan god constructed so that it would trigger pleasure and desire at a single glance: above her full lips, the slight hollow that twists them and keeps them just open, her faintly flattened nose, arching gently out from her brow, her high cheekbones . . . Certainly, in the Group there are girls who are prettier than her but that’s not what this is about . . . This is about that way she has, impossible to define, elusive, detached and yet open . . . ‘Be careful, what attracts you is just her ambiguity,’ an expert and discreet adviser might whisper in his ear, if Ivo had one right now, but he doesn’t.

And so when she suddenly stands up and says: ‘I’m going for a swim,’ and strides through the circle of onlookers and walks straight over to him and takes him by the hand, for an instant he remains seated, turned to stone, and then she pulls him by the arm to make him stand up and says to him: ‘Are you coming?’ (Are you coming? ARE YOU COMING? A-R-E Y-O-U?), when all this actually happens, he doesn’t shirk, he doesn’t invent an excuse, he doesn’t turn and run, he stands up, places his sunglasses on the chair and silently follows her . . . We don’t know why he doesn’t fall to the ground, overwrought, since his heart is pounding so violently in his throat that he can’t utter a single word, even if he could think of something to say . . .

And this, without a doubt, is the moment of his capture.

You could say he was being dragged along by her, but he finds himself walking into the water, at first easily and then with increasing effort, while she tugs on his arm and says in a voice with the precise and perfect timbre: ‘The water is beautiful today, don’t you agree?’—she says: ‘Don’t you agree?’; no one he knows would use such a clear, adult expression—and immediately she lets go of his hand and dives forwards and starts swimming quickly out to sea, then she stops, turns around to look at him, then says, unhurriedly, without anxiety, as if she were fastening a collar around a dog’s neck: ‘Come on, why don’t you?’

Yes, the water . . . It’s beautiful today, much clearer than usual here, where it’s always murky because of the sand, the currents, the gusting southwest winds. It takes days and days of dead calm, a moderate northwest mistral, before you’ll see clear water, when you can go underwater fishing even off the smaller shoals, when you can see the seabed and the bath attendant goes octopus hunting with a bucket and a long fishing spear: these are the things Ivo ought to be doing, not standing here with the water up to his thighs, his head muddled, his heart pounding in his temples, and the hunger you get when you skip lunch. The clear waters call out to him but Ivo Brandani turns a deaf ear, he’s been captured and there’s nothing to be done about it.

He dives forwards, he’s immediately cold, she’s far away, swimming on her own, she seems to be ignoring him now. ‘I have to catch up with her . . . get closer to her . . . Here I come, I’m on my way.’ He starts swimming. Three strokes and a breath, then three more and another breath, in all maybe ten strokes, then he lifts his head and she’s nowhere to be seen. He turns around, she’s heading back to shore. She’s far away now. He floats alone for a while, watching Marcella as she leaves the water. He might feel like a complete jerk now if she hadn’t asked him, ‘Are you coming?’ But she did. She stood up and asked him. She asked him and no one else. She didn’t ask Sandro. Or for that matter either of the two assholes from the Baretto. She asked him. ‘Me,’ he says over and over to himself, ‘she asked me . . . And she took me by the hand . . . And she practically dragged me into the water, with her.’ A few drops of salt water sting in his empty stomach.

When he gets back he finds that the circle around Marcella, which at first was a little slacker and looser, seems to have tightened around her. Her worshippers, like Penelope’s suitors, have instinctively closed ranks, filling the space that Ivo occupied until ten minutes ago. Ten minutes ago Ivo was no one, they weren’t afraid of him. Just some kid, some friend of Sandro’s, nothing more. But now things are different: ever since he was Chosen to go Swimming, once he’d been made the object of her attention, the situation in the Circle of the Captured has changed: there’s a new worshipper at the altar. A new pawn on the chess board, no one can say how powerful, because the mystery of her capriciousness is absolute. So far, Marcella hasn’t made a choice, but sooner or later she will. ‘Sooner or later she’ll make it clear to me that she likes me’—it’s taken for granted that each and every one of her worshippers is saying this to himself—‘Otherwise why would she keep me here? Why would she give me this sensation, so clear and unmistakable, that she’s not indifferent to me?’ It’s a tough game, and it’s been like that for days now. But no one thinks of withdrawing, no one’s about to leave, because what’s at stake is too valuable, because each in their own way, they’re head over heels in love with her.

When Ivo gets closer he sees Marcella standing at the centre of the circle, with a sea-green bathrobe thrown around her shoulders. She’s already taken a brief shower. She’s chatting and laughing. She shoots him a reassuring glance, another tacit, fatal, murderous, ‘Are you coming?’ He sits down on a wooden folding chair. He’s a little outside the circle but that doesn’t matter, she’s the one who wants him there . . . In the chain of causation of events, the capture of Ivo and his entry into the circle of worshippers determines everything else that happens. Everything. What had seemed like a happy summer, spread uniformly over an immense four-month time span, suddenly presents a peak in the curve, or perhaps we should say a fracture, a fault: the two space-time planes of the Before Marcella and the After Marcella are no longer aligned, there is no longer a continuity. The fracture runs straight through his mind and splits it in two: What things from the Before still have any importance? What could be worth more than a Kiss from Marcella? The make-up exam? Tutoring with Giorgio? Sailing? Fishing? Water? The west wind? The Spitfire? The gusting winds of two in the afternoon? The shards of light that cover the sea, when you sail out into open water on your own? The Group? The parties? Carla? ‘CARLA? Does she still matter to you? Did she matter to you before? Do you still like her? Do Mother & Father still count? And the friends you went fishing with? Do you still care anything about them? Is there anything that could be more important than her now?’ Ivo doesn’t know, but when he isn’t sitting rapt in the Circle of Marcella, he goes on studying philosophy with Giorgio.

By now the Circle forms punctually every day when—and only if—she comes down to the beach, that is, around 3 or 3.30 in the afternoon, and it dissolves around 5.30 or 6, when she leaves; no one knows where she lives or what she does when she’s not at the beach, she says she studies but it’s not clear what, she says she goes to the university but not what she’s majoring in: Where does she go at night? Does she go out? Who with?

Outside of the Circle, Ivo continues to take the sailing club’s Finn out, but the Time of Wind clashes with the Time of Her, so now he only goes sailing in the late morning, and only when there’s a breeze. He also continues to attend the parties of the Group, dances with the girls in the Group, goes out for gelato with the Group, goes to the movies with the Group. Sometimes, early in the morning, he goes out fishing with Giacomo, especially for octopus, they go to the Little Shoals, but also to Ponente, Grottoes and the Mute Arch. In spite of the increasingly impenetrable enigma of Marcella and his piercing desire for her—as she refuses to release him and keeps him chained at her side, and each time all it takes is a glance to inflame his hope of who knows what—Ivo still tries to manage the Sacred Summer, the True Life to which he has a right four months of every year.

But when he tries to break loose, when he tries to say: ‘Well, I’m leaving,’ to say: ‘Tomorrow I’m not coming down to the beach,’ whenever she senses any lessening of his faith, a weakening in his hope, then with just a couple of words, or a few—‘Oh, you’re going? Too bad’ / ‘You’re leaving already?’ / ‘Aren’t you going in the water today?’ / ‘Will you be here tomorrow?’—or else with a glance, or by touching his shoulder, a knee, or else by employing all three of these weapons simultaneously, she hurls him violently back into the Circle: ‘Just where do you think you’re going, eh?’

Most of all, in comparison with the three other worshippers, Ivo possesses no superpowers. He’s a kid, he’s penniless, Mother gives him a laughably small allowance, which he rounds out every day with secret pilferings from her pocketbook: 50, at the most 100 lire.

What’s more, Ivo knows nothing, except for the things that at school they force him to glue into his mind. He doesn’t read the papers, only comic books—before falling into Marcella’s gravitational field, he used to like to spend his afternoons lying on his bed with a comic book or the Settimana Enigmistica—he knows nothing about politics, except for Father’s invectives about the young Communists and the Christian Democrats, which he’d just as happily do without entirely because he, like Mother and the Sisters, just wants to be left to eat in peace, dine in tranquil-lity, distractedly—‘Pass me the salt’ / ‘Are you going to eat your mozzarella?’—even being able to enunciate the proposition ‘I don’t like this,’ a forbidden statement with Father there . . .

Then there are the books. Ivo hasn’t been reading long and he practically only reads the books that Big Sister gives him, books that in her turn she is given by a guy she’s dating, a guy who’s cultured-even-though-he’s-an-engineer. They’re all titles published by BUR, the Biblioteca Universale Rizzoli, off-grey covers, tiny type: the complete short stories of Poe, then Chesterton, Chekhov. That guy’s tastes—even though Ivo scarcely even knows him—are transmitted indirectly to him through Big Sister, secretly orienting him, partially shaping him, like everything else that touches him in those years . . . There is also a different kind of literature, the books that he uses for masturbating, books that belong to Mother and are considered ‘not suitable’: Moravia’s Boredom is perfect for the purpose—by now the volume opens automatically to the most interesting pages, like the scene where he covers her with money before having sex with her—while other titles, such as Pamela Moore’s Chocolates for Breakfast or Erskine Caldwell’s God’s Little Acre, contain sex scenes described in an indirectand metaphorical manner, as ridiculous as it is irritating. Still, sometimes Ivo takes these books into the bathroom, just for a change of pace. Then there’s the insurmountable cliff of Faulkner’s Sanctuary: an incomprehensible mass of words wherein, as Giacomo assures him, lies hidden the Rape with a Corncob, though Ivo never manages to find it, not even after reading practically the whole book without even understanding what it’s about. So unless the conversation veers over to Poe, Chesterton and Chekhov, he won’t have much to offer—competing is out of the question—in the conver-sation with Sandro; but for that matter, neither of the two assholes from the Baretto can hope to compete either.

At tennis Ivo is a disaster, he goes spearfishing with a rented pedal-boat and a spring-loaded speargun he found underwater, enormous and rusty, that he can only load by pushing the spear into dirt. So once he’s fired it, he has to fall back on using the spear as a hand-held harpoon. He’s pathetic at football, as a fullback, like everyone who can’t really play, he’s assigned to a defensive position, knocking down all the opposing strikers. He’s an adequate sailor but not a great one—he’s mediocre, he never wins.

The community of worshippers, as it waits for Marcella to make her selection, does its best to ignore him and would long since have called him out of the game entirely, were it not for the fact that Marcella, enigmatically, chooses to keep him as one of the rivals. Every time that the Circle assembles, it’s as if everyone were wondering: ‘What is this little kid still doing here?’ Marcella hasn’t invited him to go swimming with her again, she hasn’t said to him again in that way she has, so natural, tranquil, irresistible: ‘Are you coming?’ . . . Once Fabrizio was chosen to go swimming and a couple of times Max, who took advantage of the opportunity to get a running start practically from her umbrella—does this umbrella belong to Marcella, come to think of it?—and plunge into the shallow water like a galloping horse and finally perform an excellent, and, to Ivo, astonishing, dive with a front-flip in mid-air, making Fabrizio—bored and impassive behind his Ray-Bans—hiss the word ‘asshole’ loud enough for even Marcella to hear it, though she had just taken off at a dead run too, though no one could say whether or not she actually did hear.

Sandro—you have to admire the stamina that he shows in opposing the two assholes from the Baretto—has never been summoned to swim with her alone, but he’s been able to participate in the collective invitations, though clearly never happy about it. ‘Shall we all go swimming?’ is the formulation of the collective invitation. Once or twice, Sandro remained behind to read the newspaper, keeping an eye on the others to check out the situation, just in case there was some new development, some clue that needed studying, something that might finally help him solve the riddle . . . But if Sandro is perplexed, Ivo understands practically nothing; the only thing he grasps clearly is the power of attraction Marcella exerts when she says to him chidingly: ‘Are you leaving?’ or, even more diabolically: ‘Am I going to see you tomorrow?’

‘Why why why . . . oh God . . . Why do you want to see me tomorrow? Is there something you want to tell me? Are you trying to send me some kind of signal that I ought to understand but I don’t because I’m an asshole too?’

An experienced connoisseur of women, someone unlike Ivo who’s just a boy with a few muddled notions about girls, would have promptly decreed: ‘I’ll tell you here and now, and you can do whatever the fuck you like: at this point either you forget about her, you pull out and you go graze in greener pastures—which would be the smart thing to do: remember Carla?—or else you go and see this bitch’s cards, call her bluff. Now if you want another opinion, here it is: if you ask me, she’s veering vaguely towards the asshole in the Ray-Bans, because he’s more of a grown-up than all the rest of you, he has more money and he has a car. Everything comme il faut, get it? What the hell do you think you’re up to?’ This wise man might not understand that it’s precisely the fact that Marcella is a woman, instead of a little girl, that has dazzled him and is paralysing him and keeps him from breaking out of her clutches. By now he’s a swine among swine and he’s grunting and rooting at her feet, just like the others. ‘But Fabrizio isn’t grunting and rooting at her feet,’ the wise man behind him would point out, ‘so watch and learn, kid . . .’

At 4.30 or 5 in the afternoon Marcella closes up shop and leaves. Where does she live? No one knows. All they know is that she never shows up at the parties of the Groups that Ivo knows. They know that at night she doesn’t go out for gelato. They know that she doesn’t go watch movies at the arena, alone or accompanied. Perhaps the only one who knows where she lives is Fabrizio, because Ivo has the impression that one time he drove her somewhere in his car, maybe home. But if Fabrizio does know, he’s keeping it to himself.

While Ivo stagnates in the Circle of Worshippers, the Group isn’t sitting there idly, it’s seething and scalding in the flames of Summer: nothing stands still, everything churns and recombines in continuation. There’s a constant coming and going, a back and forth of arrivals and departures, couples exploding and reforming in different configurations. And then there are the sub-groups that amalgamate around a leader, male or female as it happens. The quarrels, the gossip, the alliances, the skirmishes. The morning theatre for all this drama is the beach where, however, everything manifests itself as if muffled by the open air, by the sunshine. In the afternoons, the Group shows itself at its best in the parties that it unfailingly organizes—by one o’clock or so, the decision where to go has been set and word gets around—without skipping a single day. At the parties, if you have something in mind, you take concrete steps. If you like a girl, the party gives you a chance to give it a shot. And giving it a shot with a girl at a party is a simple, well-established practice: no talking is involved, nothing needs to get said, there’s no complicated itinerary of seduction, you need only comply with the current rules of engagement. Words, if words are needed, will come later, when you can say that the situation has been clarified to some extent. At the parties there is dancing, and dancing is the crucial medium of communication. Do you like a girl? Then ask her to dance over and over, so she knows you’re interested and, after a while, try putting your arms around her: if she goes along with it, it means she’s willing; if she doesn’t like you, she’ll stiffen up; if you get pushy, she’ll jab her elbow into your chest; if you keep trying she’ll tell you she has a headache and doesn’t feel like dancing any more; and that’s the end of it. Everyone meanwhile has been watching the whole thing, everyone in the Group will know what’s happened, whether the two of you are an item now or not. Every move pulled at the afternoon party will then be tested out in final form that night, at the movies. If new couples have formed there will be an unspoken rejuggling of seating assignments to take into account the new amorous assortment attained earlier that day. Once you’re sitting side by side, you’re supposed to hold hands with her, it’s what she expects. Then comes kissing and touching; if you manage to get your hands on her breasts—maybe not right away, it stands to reason—then new horizons open before you, a world to be explored—it’s up to you to figure out where the boundaries lie. And the thought that you might be about to set out on this journey of research takes your breath away, ties your guts in knots, makes your palms sweaty.

Every Group is an ecosystem unto itself, an inhabitable planet in the universe of summer, it’s a corral within the larger corral of the Bay, a cultural capsule: the door is open only to the like-minded, the social selection is strict. The Group knows its own ranking in the seaside hierarchy of status, the kids know perfectly well where they stand, they know who their peers are, who they can consider their inferiors and who occupies a higher level. The Group has a history all its own, its own customs, it’s a niche where everyone feels the effects of their own existence among others, where your actions are observed, evaluated and judged, welcomed or rejected. The Afternoon Party is the place where the Group performs its particular rituals, the place where, if you learn how to move, you can find a girlfriend, a boyfriend, where everything you do, you do under the eyes of the others, where everything is reported and everyone knows everything about you, where everything that happens is a collective, participatory product.

A broad terrace on the second floor, covering an expanse of garage stalls, large black holm oaks that provide shade and shelter from the road, their trunks covered with ants and oozing some dark-brown liquid, large earthenware vases full of oleanders and small espaliered trees, smaller planters with geraniums. A pergola covered with blooming bougainvillea. On the white wall, Vietri ceramic inserts. On the table, family-size bottles of Coca-Cola, Fanta, very bubbly mineral water, Peroni beer, minipizzas, tea sandwiches, finger pastries. The quantity is limited, this is the third time that Francesca has shouldered the burden of the Afternoon Party, her mother must be fed up. It’s probably six o’clock, Ivo just came up from the beach, he went by the flat to get changed—he threw on a Lacoste polo shirt and a skin-tight pair of white Lee jeans, no belt, on his feet a pair of Positano sandals custom-made for him, just like for everyone else (everybody wears them here), by a shoemaker over by the train station (the shoemaker runs a ballpoint pen all around your foot, slipping between the big toe and your other toes and then tells you, done, they’ll be ready the day after tomorrow), thrown around his shoulders is a light fisherman’s sweater with horizontal stripes, just in case, scratchy, in navy-blue wool—you can buy them on Thursdays in town, at the market. All the kids are dressed more or less like him. On the table is a portable record player, but someone else bought a spare portable record player, just in case that one broke.

When Ivo sets foot on Francesca’s terrace he feels almost at ease, this at least is familiar territory; the party is coming close to the tipping point, that is, the moment when all the boys who have manoeuvred in some direction or other start to see results, if there are going to be any. Giacomo comes over to him immediately and says: ‘Hey you’d better look out because Paolo’s making a serious run . . .’ At first Ivo doesn’t understand and then, after Giacomo adds, ‘. . . at Carla,’ he turns around and sees her in the middle of the terrace: she’s dancing with Paolo. It’s still light out but under the branches of the holm oaks it’s already getting dark. The air is still, heavy and hot. Ivo’s Lacoste is already damp with sweat down his spine. The music is going, the Group (who brings the records? who chooses them? who buys them? Ivo doesn’t really know, he just knows that they’re there, that someone always seems to have a record player, he knows that there’s never a lack of music) puts on a series of slow dances. No one wants to dance anything else at this time of day.

Paolo is tall, with very dark skin, Ivo’s not really on speaking terms with him, they aren’t friends. Giacomo says it to him again: ‘Look out, he’s making a serious run at her . . . And if you ask me, she’s up for it.’ Ivo waits for the record to end, then he goes over to Carla and says to her: ‘Ciao.’ Then he asks: ‘Dance?’ The question, stated like that, struck him as kind of brutal—Dance?—harsh, rudimentary, but Carla promptly replies: ‘Sure.’

When the music starts up, Ivo wraps his right hand around her waist while with his left hand he takes hers and, bending his forearm back, lays it on his chest: that’s the standard starting position. All the work that follows is going to have to be done with his right hand. Carla’s left hand notices that his polo shirt is damp down the spine and it shifts to one side. ‘Fuck,’ thinks Ivo, ‘I disgust her, I’m all sweaty . . .’ But then there’s her scent, which seizes hold of him almost instantly and wins him over, it’s a smell of air and flesh, clean clothing, shampoo, after-sun lotion. Carla gives off a sweet-smelling warmth that makes its way to him and hits him head on. He perceives in her a sort of yielding quality, like a timid, restrained lunge towards him. It’s not that she’s encouraging, but neither is she defensive: they’re simultaneous sensations that trigger a stab of excitement in him. In an instant, and there’s nothing that he can do about it, he finds himself virtually stripped naked in the middle of that terrace, with that pair of Lee’s, too light and too tight, revealing on the front an unmistakable bulge. It’s nothing new, it happens to him every time, or so it seems. It happens to everyone, but today, for whatever reason, it’s too visible: Ivo is embarrassed, he hopes that no one notices. He runs his fingers down the groove of her spine, all the way down the accentuated arch of her back, with the narrowing around her kidneys, the delicious jut of her ass out into space. The wise and expert adviser would say to him: ‘Yes, exactly, the real difference is right there.’

Ivo starts trying things, he does it explicitly, almost brutally. He thinks about Marcella: ‘Her, by God, her . . . her-her-her . . . now her, yes.’ He tells himself that he doesn’t give a damn about Carla, that he’s trying with her just for the hell of it. ‘She makes me horny and that’s it,’ he told Giacomo. Whereupon Giacomo gave him a glare, as if to say: ‘Don’t you think you’re putting on a little too much of a show?’

Without saying anything to her, without using any of the tricks that he’s learnt—breathing on her neck, sighing some well chosen words into her ear, like, ‘Do you know that I like you?’—he starts to pull her decisively close to him. At first she seems puzzled but not surprised. She gently resists him for a few seconds, then rises to her tiptoes and whispers to him: ‘What are you looking for?’ He says, and in the very instant that he says it he feels like an asshole for saying it, but still he says it: ‘Would you like it if we went steady?’ Suddenly he glues himself even tighter to her, pulling her waist to him, adhering to her with his pelvis, blatantly pushing to make her feel his cock (‘But you did at least let her feel your cock, didn’t you? Once they feel your cock they don’t know what they’re doing any more . . . ,’ these are the kind of things he and his friends say to one another—miserable overheated young males). Carla pulls her pelvis away from him but her cheek is still pressed against his and she says, hesitantly, breathing hard: ‘Have you made up your mind you want to have some fun?’ Her hot breath in his ear gives him a shiver of desperation; suddenly, unmistakably, he senses the unbridgeable distance that separates him from Marcella, from her mind, from her life, from her body; everything that has to do with her is completely unattainable—she doesn’t know and she doesn’t want to know what he could give her, what he could do for her . . . ‘What could you do for her? . . . If she’d only let me go, if she just wouldn’t go on giving me hope every time . . .’ But Carla is here, she’s ready for him, within his grasp, ready to deliver herself up. She’s not saying no to him, she’s just trying to understand—women, God only knows why, always have to clarify in advance what your intentions are, they want to know how much you love them or, even worse, how much you ‘care for them’. ‘They need to be able to gauge how to handle the situation,’ Ivo’s secret adviser might tell him. ‘It’s different for them than it is for us. Being female is very different.’ That’s right: for instance, if a girl says ‘no’ it doesn’t always mean that they really want to say ‘no’, Ivo knows that, he’s learnt it, though he doesn’t really understand it.

In the name of Marcella, Ivo could burn down the whole coast and empty the gulf in a sign of devotion and sacrifice, he could immolate on a stone altar the unsuspecting creature who in this very moment is breathing sweetly into his ear: ‘What are your intentions?’

‘I just want to do things with her . . .’ he’d confided to Giacomo only a few minutes ago.

She’s the lamb whose throat he plans to cut in honour of Marcella, the warm object upon which he’ll take revenge for Marcella’s uncaring ferocity. If at first he’d had some lingering doubts, now he has none: ‘Carla likes me! She means nothing to me but she likes me.’ And so he wants to possess her, use her, take his revenge on her. His excitement at Carla’s closeness and availability goads him into an uncontrolled and confused delirium of possession: to have Carla, that’s the plan, bastardly and vicious, that Ivo formulates for her, while down inside his Lee’s he can feel his cock about to burst.

‘I care for you,’ he replies to her, very close to her earlobe, and then he presses himself against her. ‘There, now she’s happier,’ Ivo tells himself, ‘that’s all she wanted.’

Beyond the railing and under the holm oaks it’s getting dark, while the sky is still luminous and he’s in a secluded corner, dancing with his arms around Carla. Every so often he kisses her on the lips, on the neck. She clings peacefully to his body, thighs against thighs, she presses her breasts against his chest, her sex against his sex.

Giacomo is watching them from afar.

On the record player, Cuando calienta el sol is spinning continuously, the Group is pretending not to notice, but the phenomenon now under way, that is, the formation of a New Couple, escapes nobody and is sure to become the subject of extensive commentary, tonight at the ice cream shop and tomorrow on the beach. Paolo, who just two hours ago enjoyed a normal degree of status, is now the one who shot a blank. He pretends he doesn’t care, but it’s obvious that he’s unhappy about it. He’s over there talking seriously to a couple of girls who are basically window dressing, the kind of girls who become your friends. Maybe they’re trying to make him feel better.

Then Ivo and Carla break away and go over to sit on the glider sofa. Ivo’s erection is visible, but the worst part is that right at what cannot be anything other than the tip of his penis, a wet smear has formed, a slather that is not only dampening his underwear but the white denim of his jeans too, which has turned translucent at that spot, giving a glimpse, through the thin material, of the blood-charged pink of his glans. He, giddy and confused by the fullness of his new conquest, pays it no mind, perhaps he doesn’t even notice it. He plans to have her all to himself tonight, to make a full-court press at the movies and then to take her to the beach.

‘Can you come to the movies with me tonight?’

‘I can’t, I have to be with my folks. My dad is going to be there.’

‘So you really can’t?’

‘No. Not tonight. But tomorrow I can. That is, I think I can, if my folks will let me go . . .’

Just then Francesca’s mother is going by, carrying a tray full of empty Coca-Cola and orangeade bottles, crumpled paper napkins, used paper cups. She wears trousers, she’s tall, blond, pretty, severe, impassive, with short hair and practically no make-up but with fuchsia gloss on her lips. Clenched in her teeth is a mother-of-pearl cigarette holder with a lit cigarette. A mother who’s been around the block, the kind you see a lot of, here. A mother with her eyes wide open and her brain clicking. One of those mothers who doesn’t miss a trick. She’s been keeping her eye on the two of them for a while now, and even now her level gaze is appraising the situation.

A few minutes after the mother has gone inside, Francesca’s older brother walks over to Ivo and says to him, clearly embarrassed: ‘Can I talk to you for a second?’

The words he adds, after taking him aside, run exactly like this: ‘Listen, it’s not my fault . . . So don’t hold it against me, OK? But there’s something I have to tell you . . . So, it’s this . . . My mother told me to tell you to go take a walk and come back when you’ve calmed down a little . . .’

‘Calmed down from what?’ Ivo asks him, weirded out and a little frantic. Then he looks down at the crotch of his pants and he sees the state he’s in and he feels a flush of heat and sweat surge up into his face. Without replying, he heads for the door and leaves, he practically runs away. It’s only one flight of stairs to the ground floor and when he’s already in the street he hears Carla behind him, calling down from the terrace. He looks up and calls to her: ‘I’ll explain tomorrow . . . No, I’m not mad at you . . . Like I told you, I’ll explain tomorrow, enough already!’

Giacomo appears at Carla’s side, gazing down at him with a quizzical look on his face and, with a gesture of his hands, asks wordlessly: ‘What’s the matter?’ Ivo gestures up to him to come down and when he gets out in the street, curious, corpulent, out of breath, he tells him to come over, out of sight, under the shade of a holm oak, and says to him: ‘Francesca’s mother . . . She kicked me out . . . That bitch. Because I had a hard-on and it was making a bulge in my pants, can you believe it? I’m so ashamed of myself . . . She could have just overlooked it, but no, she had to shame me . . . You’ll see, in a couple of seconds everyone else is going to know about it . . .’

Giacomo figures out what’s happened but only after further explanations. At that point he laughs. Then he turns serious and says: ‘I saw that Carletta was willing to be with you . . .’

‘What are you laughing about, Como?’ asks Ivo, using Giacomo’s nickname. Then he continues: ‘Yeah, that’s what it looks like, only I had to tell her “I love you”, you know how it is . . .’

Giacomo doesn’t know how it is, because he still hasn’t had a girl willing to be with him, but he nods silently. If Ivo had eyes in his head, if he wasn’t so excited confused desperate, if he wasn’t so completely absorbed in himself and his own business, if at his side he’d had the expert adviser to suggest he be a little more careful, he’d see the embarrassment and perhaps even the pain and jealousy that flicker in Giacomo’s gaze. But his mind is elsewhere and he rattles on, foppishly, about his conquest: ‘. . . I was horny as a dog, if you only knew how willing she is, she scrubbed my tonsils with her tongue, the minute I get a chance to take her somewhere private, wait and see how I rough her up . . .’ As he says these things he feels like a vulgar asshole and a son of a bitch, but he goes on saying them because that’s how he wants to think of himself. He goes on along these lines for some time while his friend says nothing, a forced smile on his face.

Then Giacomo asks him: ‘Did you tell her that you love her?’

‘Yes.’

‘But do you give even the slightest damn for her?’

‘No, Como . . . I like another girl, I can’t tell you who she is . . .’

‘I’m pretty sure I know who it is.’

‘You don’t know a fucking thing, Como . . . And if by some unlikely chance you do, keep it to yourself . . .’

‘Do you have a chance with this other girl?’

‘I don’t know, I don’t know anything, I’m crushing on her so bad . . . There are times when I get the feeling she likes me, but most of the time she doesn’t even know I exist . . . It’s been going on like this for a while, with me tagging along after her like a complete asshole . . . She’s someone who likes to have her little entourage, you know, guys trailing after her . . . They’re all older than me, there’s one who has a car of his own, a black Alfa Giulietta Spider . . . Do you understand the one I mean? One of the assholes from the Baretto . . . Giacomo, I just happened into this situation, I don’t even know how it happened . . . She got her claws into me and now she won’t let go . . . She’s a girl who fires you up and cools you down, continuously, she works me however she wants . . . And I just stay there, kneeling at her feet in adoration like a jerk . . . She sends me to get minipizzas for her from the Rotunda and I go, too. It makes me sick to think about it . . . I wind up crying, you get it? And I need to study, too . . .’

‘What about Carla?’

‘I gotta have something to fall back on . . .’

As Ivo answers him in these terms, Como notices that his face is taking on the vulgar expression of a shitbag son of a bitch: eyes narrowed, gaze averted, a lewd grin in search of complicity.

The Circle has been in session for some time already. Sandro folds L’Espresso back to the page that he’s reading and hands it over to him: ‘Take a look at that.’

ANGOLAN VILLAGE DESTROYED BY NAPALM

At first, Ivo doesn’t understand. The photograph is slightly blurry, a little confusing. Then he realizes to his disbelief that it is a picture of heads stuck on stakes that are jammed into the ground. The tip of the stakes are inside the mouths, thrusting up through their throats. Underneath it, another photograph shows white soldiers in camouflage jumpsuits, smiling, gripping in their hands clusters of black heads.

‘Africa . . .’ Sandro snickers. ‘Those are Portuguese soldiers, there’s a civil war going on in Angola, and the Portuguese are coming down hard. But they’re going to have to withdraw at a certain point, just like the French in Algeria . . . You can see that history teaches them nothing . . .’ he continues, still chuckling. ‘. . . if they had just given them independence first thing, they would have spared themselves fighting and saved themselves money and the lives of plenty of soldiers . . . Instead they’re not going to leave until they’re forced out . . . Eh . . . But you’ll see, sooner or later . . .’ Then he suddenly falls silent because she has arrived.

There she is, Marcella. She’s just emerged from the passageway between the changing cabins, a beachwrap knotted around her neck to cover her bikini, beach bag bulging with things. She walks towards the circle, she seems pleased to find them already there, waiting, and she smiles in her way, that is, staring at them individually, one by one, with a gaze that seems to state: ‘Don’t pay any attention to the others, they’re just bit players, I’m here for you.’

‘I’m leaving tomorrow, end of my holiday,’ she says immediately. Then she looks around, unruffled, to see what effect her statement has had.

‘She’s leaving! Tomorrow! She’s going away! She’s about to vanish, swallowed by the Winter in the City, by another universe, she’s escaping into another space-time dimension . . . Like something out of an issue of Urania . . . Into a world that is certainly better than the one I live in . . .’

Marcella is leaving the Summer with nonchalance and turning serenely to face the horrors of Winter. For Ivo there’s still all of September, still a good solid month or so, with the not inconsiderable interval of the make-up exam. Summer in the enclosure of the Gulf is the only knowable universe, the only place where he can still move with agility and dexterity. Summer is his, it belongs to him by now through well established tradition, it’s his right. When, on the 30th of September, he will be obliged to board the train—the rest of the family will make the trip by car—he’ll perform his secret ritual of bidding farewell to the sea, he’ll climb onto the lowermost branch of the big plane tree in the apartment-building gardens, which towers over the Gulf, overlooking all its geographic institutions, the Islands and the Mountain sitting perched in the distance, just beneath the horizon line, and he’ll stay there for a while, looking at the sea and trying to cry. Marcella will be lost, unless he can manage it today, by tonight, or right now, to speak to her to clarify to ask her to make his declaration—to do something, in other words, that can resolve this intolerable doubt . . . He’s stunned by the blow he’s received, he tries for the umpteenth time to think clearly, to get a grasp on things: ‘Max, obviously, is fed up . . . There’s just the three of us left . . . Sandro is fat, he’s bug-eyed, the lenses of his glasses are too thick . . . He’s not going anywhere . . . That leaves Fabrizio, the little asshole from the Baretto, or else I guess . . . Who? M-me? Naaah. And then it’ll turn out after all that she was never dreaming of anything serious with any of us . . . All we did was keep her company, like a bunch of lap dogs . . . And anyway, she’s leaving . . . But still. Still. Even just a little while ago, when she touched my shoulder . . . Was she or was she not sort of caressing me? Certainly, she was caressing me: if she doesn’t care about me, then why would she caress me? Why would she bother giving me the impression I mean something to her? Could I really just be imagining it all?’

The mere thought of meeting her in the city, in the clothing of Winter—he imagines her in a woollen kilt, fastened to one side with a golden pin and a cashmere sweater, white socks and Collegian loafers with the fringe in front, but only because the girls he knows all dress that way in the winter, when they go out in the afternoon, when he goes to meet them outside of the school—stirs him almost to tears and shakes him deeply, triggering flashes of deranged fantasies.

‘Maybe she actually likes me . . . In the city we could go steady, we could go to the movies on Saturday afternoons . . . She’d be wearing an overcoat . . . A fur coat made of nutria, otterskin . . . Boots . . . Stockings, garterbelt . . . That stretch of naked thigh that you can reach in the dark with your hand . . .’

As always his gaze rests at some length on Marcella’s delicately arched foot, resting as usual on the crossbar of the lounge chair, her heel pushing into the canvas and the toes splayed slightly upwards: he adores her feet, the only feet on the beach that don’t make him think of the hands of apes deformed by too much walking. He imagines them in a pair of high-heeled shoes, at a party in Winter, dressed in a fancy outfit, dancing the twist, or the Madison.

The wise man we referred to above, if he could read his mind right now, would tell him in his usual calm voice that smacks of tobacco smoke: ‘You’re trying to drag her into your world, kid. Marcella isn’t a girl your age, she doesn’t wear Collegian loafers, she’s two or three years older than you, which is quite enough to place her on the opposite side of the mountain that you’re climbing —forget about her, trust me on this one.’

Suddenly, if he thinks about Marcella, his natural revulsion for Winter flips into its opposite: now it appears to him as a warm and woolly expanse of grey skies and rain, but filled with love and tenderness and enjoyment and making out at the movies, caressing Marcella’s breasts, which seem so generous, so mysterious. But that’s not enough, Ivo ventures so far as to imagine her stretched out nude, on a bed. A shameful erection which bursts upon him instantaneously, so urgently that his elasticized swimsuit is power-less to conceal it, and he’s forced to run to the cabin until he can calm down. But once he’s there, in the dark, with the door locked and his cock on the verge of exploding and pulsating like an inner tube with every beat of his heart, he can’t resist and he starts masturbating. All it takes is a few jerks of his hand and he comes suddenly and an uncontrolled, sacrilegious spurt of sperm winds up on his little sister’s tank top, draped over a chair. He uses the same sacred tank top to wipe off his cock, then he leaves the cabin, goes to wash off the shirt in the bathrooms nearby, comes back, hangs it out to dry on the backrest of the chair—he just hopes it’s dry in the morning.

When he gets back to the Circle, Sandro has started talking about the war in Angola again, the Portuguese regime. Marcella asks him questions and that encourages him to go on talking, Ivo can see him swelling with pride. For the past few days, Massimiliano has been absent from the company of the Adepts of Marcella, but Ivo knows he hasn’t left yet, because he saw him the night before at the arena watching Distant Drums and smoking sprawled out in his metal chair, his legs stretched over the back of the seat in front of him.

Fabrizio says nothing and plays with his car keys, behind his usual Ray-Bans, wearing the usual Lacoste polo shirt and the usual Positano Bermuda shorts. Whenever Sandro turns to political topics or talks about books, Fabrizio remains impassive, silently nodding, as if he already knew it all, as if he’d already figured it all it and didn’t give a damn about any of it, but today he suddenly interrupts and with absolute nonchalance mentions to Marcella that tonight there’s an after-dinner party at ‘some guy’s, I can’t even remember his name.’ She replies that yes, she already knew about that, it’s at Attilio’s place and just this once she’s planning to go, she’d like to say goodbye before going. Fabrizio seems to regret having shared this information with Ivo and Sandro too, but only to a certain extent; now that Massimiliano has thrown in the towel, he seems pretty confident that he no longer has rivals.

Then that’s the other piece of news: tonight, that’s where she’ll be! Ivo needs to study, the exams are coming up soon and tomorrow afternoon, at 6.30, Giorgio wants to drill him on the whole programme, but he absolutely has to go to that party. He knows Attilio, he’s in Big Sister’s group of friends; she’ll probably be there too; he doesn’t have to wangle an invitation, he can just show up at the front door.

‘Ivo, don’t tell me you can’t come. It’s the last night . . .’

He looks up at her and sees that she’s staring at him in a way that strikes him as intense, exclusive. It seems as if she really does care; his heart leaps in his throat, as it always does, when she looks him like that.

‘I have some studying to do but I’ll definitely come,’ he stammers.

After-dinner parties start around ten, when the Gulf has been shrouded in darkness for hours.

After the doldrums of the late afternoon, a land breeze has sprung up which, in conditions of western weather, that is, pleasant and cool, will sweep the ocean all night long. The lights of the port and the lights of the beachfront promenade dot the coastline, redesigning it. There’s no moon. A distant sound of music emanates from the Rotunda which is all lit up, its reflection doubled in the water. The rest of the beach is immersed in complete darkness and the shoreline can be guessed at from the reflections of the lights on the sea, where they come to a sudden end.

Attilio’s terrace overlooks all this. It’s a spacious platform, with a parapet in Vietri majolica, decorated with fish and crabs and octopuses and seahorses and starfish. Two big white umbrellas, metal chairs upholstered in navy blue canvas cushions, a glider, tables with tablecloths and good things to eat, various alcoholic beverages and a bottle of whisky, even, no wine, lots of beer.

Here Peppino Di Capri is playing. When Ivo sets foot, the terrace is already crowded with people and ‘Voce ’e notte’ is on the record player, which immediately brings a lump to his throat. All the kids are older than him: they have different manners, different voices, different bodies—university students, already clued in to the idea that in just a few years they’re already going to be fulfilling a different role, fully aware, you’d think, of their future responsibilities and money and professional salaries, sports clubs, marriages & children, weddings that for some of them are impending, to be held strictly in early-Christian basilicas outside the Walls of the City of God. For most of them, their career will consist of following in their father’s footsteps, they’ll be engineers in the company, or else notaries, lawyers, doctors or architects. They’ll get some undergraduate degree or other before joining the family business, running well-known shops in the centre of town, or else they’ll gradually take over the reins of import–export businesses, a coffee roastery, a construction supplies company. Better yet, car dealerships, which have been making money hand over fist for the past few years. The three or four years of extra age means that they live in other worlds from Ivo, where everything is different.

In this moment in the History of the World, being eighteen or nineteen and belonging to a bourgeois family means taking part in a different and prior culture, in comparison with someone who is only two or three years younger, it means confidently preparing for a future that appears unquestionable, safe, guaranteed, like a road already laid out, with exact boundaries—you only need to take that road. Ivo doesn’t know all these things, exactly, but he senses them from the differences in the ways that, here, males and females treat one another: they talk a lot, and in low voices, they don’t curse, they rarely laugh loudly, they dance standing straight instead of coiling around one another like octopuses, without tongues in one another’s mouths and hickeys on one another’s necks, even the steady couples limit themselves to a dignified cheek to cheek. They do lots of slow dances, the occasional twist and the Madison, even a cha-cha. The men wear buttoned shirts or, more frequently, Lacostes, sweater thrown over their shoulders or tied around their waist, long pants only, in white or light-coloured cotton, Capri sandals, but more often moccasins without socks. A few of the better-dressed girls are wearing sheath dresses, with a straight neckline and narrow shoulders, pointy-toe flats or with low heels, but nearly all the rest of them wearing tight-fitting pedal pushers with a split at the calf, sleeveless or long-sleeved blouses, boat-neck sweaters, all of them colourful, their shoes are ballet slippers or low-heeled sandals. Some of them have headbands in their hair. They all carry cheap straw handbags, with a sweater tied around the handles.

Here too the girls are an absolute enigma, none of the boys really knows what they are, what they want, but theories circulate. Nearly all of the girls are studying, certainly. The ones who aren’t still in high school are enrolled at the university in Literature, or Languages, or else they’re going to the School for Interpreters, or the Department of Psychology. Some of them, not many though, are going to the Medical School. The others are all girl departments, departments for girls. These girls, to hear what Mother has to say about it when she talks with Big Sister—but Ivo struggles to believe it—are thinking about, or ‘should be thinking about, if they had a grain of sense in their heads, and not all these goofy ideas, landing a good husband, setting up housekeeping and having children’. The few of them that actually do work will be teaching school: they’ll have their afternoons free to stay home with the children and more or less three months of paid holidays—low salaries, certainly, but you can easily afford to hire a housekeeper, health insurance and social security included. Their husbands will take care of everything else. Some of these girls think they’ve already found a husband and, for many of them, in the final analysis, that’s what the beach is for. Some of the boys see things the same way. The atmosphere is still a little confused—a lot of balls will have to go into a lot of pockets before everything, apparently, can consolidate and crystallize—but these young men and women are already at an age of serious pursuits, clear-eyed planning. The young women especially: no more fucking around and French-kissing the first guy to come along, obviously. But also with your boyfriend (you don’t use the Italian slang term ‘fiancé’, even if he actually is or is about to become one) you don’t give up much, because you wouldn’t want him to get the wrong idea about you and see you as an ‘easy’ girl, one who’s a little too willing—a loose girl, one he can have ‘some fun’ with.

This is the air that you breathe, undeclared, unenunciated, unstated, on Attilio’s platform, a terrace suspended above the sea on this night in late August of 1962. The problem is that certain specimens of the alien species Older Girls aren’t behaving at all as if the only thing they had in mind was the husband–family project, in fact, they seem to be interested in continuing to have fun, to seduce, to play with the boys. They have a way of acting that attracts them, catches them off guard, excites them, reels them in, disorients them, makes them fall in love. They’re rare and, above all, they’re dangerous and Ivo would immediately count Marcella among their number.

Instead of being on this terrace and among these people, he ought to be somewhere else, say at home, studying William of Ockham in the Lamanna textbook, or at the cinema giving it his all with Carla; instead he’s here, looking around in search of her while everyone dances chats and drinks, leaning on the blue majolica parapet or sitting on the recliners, the canvas folding chairs, the glider. But he doesn’t see her. Instead he sees Big Sister dancing with Attilio and he sees the silhouette of Sandro leaning against the parapet, chatting with a couple of friends. He pours himself a glass full of beer—he hates beer but he needs to buck himself up—goes over to him and says Ciao, expecting to get enough of his attention to be able at least to ask him about Marcella. But Sandro continues spouting a river of words and laughing, Ivo stands there staring at that large wet mouth that keeps moving incessantly, the lips forming syllables with great precision, without accent, and which stretch into laughter, baring large serrated incisors. When the two others finally move away, Ivo asks him: ‘Have you seen Marcella?’

‘No.’ Sandro is a little brusque, almost rude.

‘Do you know if she’s coming?’

‘Attilio says she’s supposed to come . . . But aren’t you a little . . . out of your depth?’

Ivo reddens, he doesn’t answer.

‘The fuck do you care, you overweight piece of shit, where I might or might not be? Exactly what depth do you think I belong in? Are you trying to tell me that I’m too much of a kid to be here? Have you taken a look at yourself in the mirror anytime lately? What are you laughing about? What do you have to be laughing about, continuously, like that?’

That’s how he’d like to answer him, because he’s furious. But deep down, he’s ashamed: it’s true that he shouldn’t be here, because there’s nothing here for him; even Attilio, when he saw him at the door, got a look of surprise on his face, but then he probably didn’t say anything to him because he’s a friend of Big Sister’s. Ivo could leave, but he stays and goes to get himself another beer. Then he tucks himself away into a dark corner of the terrace, he leans against the Vietri majolica parapet and looks out at the sea.

Sistavoccadesider’evase, nun è peccate . . .

The music pours into him, encountering no obstacles or lines of defence. He looks out at the distant sea and almost bursts into tears. The song by Peppino Di Capri arrives from the Rotunda, it’s muffled by the distance but it’s clear. Ivo contemplates the Great Room of earth and water where he is allowed to live out his Summer in partial freedom: the City, the Beach, the Wave-Tossed Rocks, the sea, more or less stretching out to the Horizon, and the Faraway Mountain—they’re all his. Behind him there is only land and, an hour and a half away by car, the unparalleled ferment of the City of God, where he will spend the Winter, where everything always seems to be under construction, building sites as far as the eye can see, an expanse covering the hills and spreading out into the plain and then up other hills, endlessly. In this muddy wasteland of building sites is Father’s Work, there are his Machines, his Trucks, his Cranes, on the scaffoldings are his men, labouring, with paper hats on their heads. It is from there—Father never forgets to remind him—that the money comes which affords him those four months of oblivion . . . So to flee in the opposite direction from the land, far from Father, towards the Horizon, towards the Islands that every so often you can glimpse there in the distance. And then, like a fish, to plunge into the open sea, towards the far ends of the Mediterranean, towards the Ocean water and more water, nothing but water.

‘There they could never find me, they’d never take me alive.’

He even tried once, to escape over the sea: one afternoon he sailed the Mandrake straight for the horizon and decided to go really far. He got out so far you almost couldn’t even see the land any more, as far out as the time of day allowed, then towards evening the wind drops and you might get caught having to row for hours. There, if you look westward, you see the water all covered with luminous scales. Before turning back, he put the prow into the wind and lay there for a while, drifting, in the silence of the water lapping against the side of the hull, until his fear of the sea, of distance, and of being becalmed all pushed him to come away . . .

‘I need to take Carla there,’ he thinks, as he wards off the tears from the music, ‘I need to take her far away and undress her.’

He turns around and sees Marcella come in. And that’s Fabrizio, with her!

At first, he struggles to place her, he’s always seen her in her bathing suit, with wet hair, and now she’s made up, her hair gathered in a bun, a Saint-Tropez blouse in white lace that leaves her belly button and hips uncovered, tight black pants, red dance slippers, a necklace of small chunks of amber around her neck, her glasses low on her nose. No one here is dressed like her. She reminds him of another French actress . . . Anouk Aimée. Ivo has three glasses of beer in his bloodstream, he’s sweating, and he can’t believe his eyes: she’s beautiful and different from all the other girls. Tonight on this terrace, no other female human being is exuding the same degree of power and confidence. Fabrizio is right behind her, relaxed as always. He smiles and looks around, says hello to the few people he knows, he doesn’t belong to this social circle.

Leaning against the parapet, Ivo watches her from a distance and realizes that she too knows almost no one there.

Sandro is already clustering around her, Marcella says hello to him, smiles and looks elsewhere.

Ivo doesn’t feel good, he’s sweaty and his head is spinning slightly, he doesn’t know if Marcella has already seen him. And so he turns the corner of the terrace because the situation has suddenly seemed intolerable to him. He finds a canvas folding chair, sits down and stares out for a long time at the facade of the house across the way, which emerges from a dark mass of magnolias and cheesewood. He observes the light-blue majolica tiles of the parapet, the octopus, the crab, the lobster, the seahorse, the conch shell, he carefully compares two tiles with the same subject and from the differences he notices that they really are hand-painted. Here it’s possible to hear the distant music from the Rotunda more clearly: they’re old songs, worn and tattered now, he can’t make out the words but he knows them, they’re about summer love, beaches, holidays at the sea—it’s the Summer working on the nascent myth of itself.

‘I need to tell her . . . It’s why I came here tonight . . . She’s leaving tomorrow and I’m going to be stuck here, like an asshole . . . For another whole month . . . Like the kids who have to “stay at the beach” . . . Maybe she really does like me . . . She said: “Make sure you come, it matters to me, don’t miss it.” If she said it, she must have had a reason. Otherwise why would she have said it? What reason would she have to say it? She said, “It matters to me” . . .’

Ivo begins working up a plan for his Declaration.

‘I’ll ask her to dance a couple of times and then I’ll tell her that I have a crush on her . . . But how can I tell her? I have to find an unusual, funny, non-obvious way of doing it . . . I need to tell her something that will surprise her, that will make her laugh, that will interest her . . . In the mystery of her mind, maybe she’s already chosen me . . . Yeah, right, and what about Fabrizio?’

Someone has left a mini-Peroni beer—a Peroncino—on the parapet. It’s half-full. He grabs it and drains it in a single gulp. How can he tell her that he loves here—not that he ‘has feelings for her’ but that he loves her—if he can’t keep himself from crying?

An original and imaginative way of telling her.

A light, unconcerned way.

An intense, dramatic way, that smacks of ultimatum.

Some way that’s original with him, that is entirely unlike anybody else’s, that lets him overcome all his disadvantages, his lack of superpowers, the fact that he’s still in school and all the rest.

He steps away from the parapet and heads over towards the centre of the terrace, where people are dancing.

Right now they’re doing the twist, and as he walks Ivo has the sensation that’s he’s weaving slightly. He feels as if he’s been split in two, it always happens to him when he’s had too much to drink.

Marcella is dancing with some guy he’s never seen before.

She waves at him from a distance.

She’s cute, cordial, relaxed, magnificent—everyone on the terrace has noticed.

The twist comes to an end, a slow dance starts up, Ivo goes over to her and asks: ‘Care to dance?’

‘Ciao! Of course, I’m happy you could come . . . I was looking for you before, where were you?’

‘She was looking for me!’

Fabrizio isn’t far away, he’s leaning on the parapet, drinking, watching them.

As soon as Ivo wraps his arm around her waist, Marcella relaxes against him, chatting easily. She clings gently to him, she touches her cheek to his. Ivo is so excited he can scarcely breathe, he feels completely beside himself, a part of him observes the scene as if it had nothing to do with him. He’s sweating, but she doesn’t seem to notice.

‘She likes me! She’s encouraging me!’

‘When they’re interested in you, they let you know, always . . .’ Giacomo told him once, during one of their conversations about the ways of women. The only come-on technique that Ivo knows is the one accepted and practised by the Group: dance and hug close. The only variants are the timing and the intensity of the manoeuvre. This is a situation that demands caution.

‘I can’t just start hugging her close like that . . . But I can give it a try, little by little, I can try to see what happens if I start to put my arms around her . . . I have to start saying sweet nothings to her, breathe close to her earlobe, see if I can give her the shivers . . . I have to work up to it slowly, tell her that I’m head over heels about her! She’s trying to make me realize that by now there’s no more time to waste, that I need to make my move now . . . If I don’t do it now, when am I going to do it? Don’t try to grab her, don’t be obvious, don’t trot out the usual bullshit that little kids come up with, this isn’t Carla, this is something very different . . . I can’t tell her just like that, directly, I have to get there by degrees . . . Otherwise she’ll laugh right in my face, that’s what she’ll do . . .’

A secret adviser would have told him some crucial facts.

But he doesn’t have one, so Ivo, after much hemming and hawing, turns of phrase and hesitations, makes his declaration.

‘Well, your teacher is Catholic and your school is run by priests . . . That’s why the curriculum is skewed towards patristics: usually St Augustine, St Thomas Aquinas, Ockham, and the others are studied only if there’s time. Instead, you’ve studied them in depth. Therefore, first and foremost, we can expect one or more questions on patristics, while at the other end of the scale you’re less likely to get any questions on the pre-Socratics, though maybe you should expect one question . . . In fact, expect it for sure. Socrates, Plato, Aristotle are all names you’re bound to hear about. So study them carefully, those are the ones you’re going to have to study exhaustively, but study up on St Augustine and St Thomas Aquinas too . . . Concerning those two, don’t come up with any ideas of your own . . . Remember they’re at the basis of Catholic doctrine . . . Stoics, Sceptics, Epicureans, they’re all less likely, but still, they might ask you a question on them . . . The Hellenists are the ones I like best, if I could write the school curriculum, I’d give them much greater importance . . . They didn’t give a damn about metaphysics and all that other bullshit—they were interested in man, they’re the only ones who bothered to help us live well . . . We were supposed to talk about Communism, remember? About the “little comrades”, as your father likes to call them . . .’

Ivo pays him no mind, Giorgio is wandering strangely off-topic, maybe because this is the last time they’re going to see each other before the exam. He’s drilled him on spot questions to determine his degree of preparation, he gave him one last round of advice, and now he’s addressing the matter of the little comrades—Ivo had forgotten about it completely. ‘Oh God what a pain in the ass, what the fuck do I care about Communism? Oh, who knows when we’ll get out of here now . . .’—Giorgio talks as if he’s preoccupied, he goes on and on, it’s evident that this is a subject that he cares about. Ivo isn’t thinking about anything, now that the questioning is over he’s gone back to the mental state of the past few hours, which is that of a boxer still dazed from the bout, who is moreover ashamed of how short a time he lasted in the ring, of how easily he let himself be knocked out. The make-up exam is next week, he knows that he’s going to have to study, but that doesn’t really worry him. After the body blows he took last night on Attilio’s terrace—when he got home he wept and he vomited—he’s still stunned, he took an aspirin. He’s just pleased that he managed to answer nearly all of Giorgio’s questions. It’s almost night-time, the days are getting shorter and today, in the afternoon, there was the usual party at the home of one of the girls in the Group; but now he’s sitting here drinking in Giorgio’s unscheduled speechmaking, which is going on and on and now it’s not really all that clear what he’s even talking about.

‘. . . they’ll talk to you about the abolition of private property, but also about theories and philosophies of the opposite persuasion . . . They’ll sing the praises of the free market, of the self-adjusting economy, and so on . . . They’ll tell you all about free love, or its opposite, the value of virginity as a supreme good before marriage . . . They’ll talk about liberty, fraternity and equality. They’ll tell you about the soul & the spirit, about the afterlife, paranormal phenomena, different and better realities. All right, some of these things are wonderful and even I, I’m not going to say that I believe in them but I hope they’re true. Which ones? Well, for instance, equality and the end of all subjugation and exploitation . . . But unlike other comrades of mine—after all, I’m a “little comrade” myself—I don’t have any illusions: humanity is what it is. So Ivo, look out . . .’

But Ivo isn’t paying attention in the slightest, he just wants to leave.

‘. . . there’s nothing left but science. When all is said and done, after you’ve gone through all the metaphysics and all the religions and all the proofs of the existence of a God . . . When you’re done with all abstract reasoning, with all possible and adoptable spirituality, when you’re done with all materialism, there’s science and nothing but science. Science is humanity’s one true hope, Ivo . . .’

He suddenly falls silent, as if he’d just awakened from a hypnotic trance, and that is the end of his philippic. Giorgio, usually so distant, so reserved, seems sorry that he’s always kept him at arm’s length. It’s as if, aside from the study plan for the exam, he suddenly wants to make up for lost time as a teacher.

Ivo is already elsewhere, he mumbles something, as he hands him the envelope with the money that Mother gave him: ‘I’ll call you after the exam . . . Maybe if there’s something that isn’t clear to me, I could come see you for an explanation?’

‘Certainly, come whenever you like. Most of all, don’t worry about the exam—you know everything, so . . .’

Giorgio remains seated, the usual cigarette held vertically, clamped between forefinger and thumb, the ashes poised, and says to him: ‘Break a leg!’ while Ivo is already going through the door.

Ivo manages to reach the ice-cream shop in time to find people from the Group still there, hanging out before dinner. They’re almost all males, he asks them about the party.

Tall skinny blond and hunched over with an already grown-up voice—his voice is already disenchanted, already drawling—Ernesto, who has always irritated him, replies. He replies with his head tilted to one side, the back of his hand turned towards him beneath his mouth, and speaks to him in an unfriendly tone: ‘Are you trying to find out if Carla was there?’

‘Why no, I was just asking . . .’

Ernesto snickers and says: ‘If you only knew who she was making out with . . .’

‘With whom?’

‘Ah, you see that you’re interested?’

‘Fine, I’m interested. Who was she making out with?’

‘Aahhh . . . go on, calm down, she wasn’t making out with anybody and wasn’t dancing with anybody. She was talking the whole time with Giacomo. I’d be worried if I was you.’

Ivo changes the subject: ‘Where’s everyone going tonight?’

‘And where do you want to go? To a nightclub? To race up the coastline in a fast car with a bottle of champagne in a cooler in the trunk? Do you want to speed out into the night in your motorboat? Do you want to set sail for the South Seas? We’re going to the movies. To the arena. Whatever’s on is on. Where do you think you are? Saint-Tropez? Who do you think you are? Gunter Sachs? Jean-Noël Grinda? Do you have a car? Do you have money? No. So where are you going to go? Here, at ten o’clock, obviously.’

Heading home at a brisk pace, just ten minutes on foot, alone up the hill—the coast stretches out progressively wider as the gulf opens out into the east—with tears in his eyes and no appetite at all. But he’s going to have to go inside, he’ll have to eat something, he’s going to have to get his hands on 500 lire for the night out, two hundred to get into the arena and three hundred spending money. September starts tomorrow. Normally he doesn’t even notice, normally Summer flows uninterruptedly well beyond the beginning of September and beyond, right up to the 2nd or 3rd of October, with the scattered few who stay at the beach, the last plunge that you’re almost embarrassed still to be there, but, rather than facing up to Winter you’d stop time, you’d halt the sun in its tracks. This year you have a make-up test, a subject to brush up on, and it acts as a barrier, a wall to be scaled before you can enjoy the declining delights of September, when the City by the Sea empties out, when on the beach they remove a line of umbrellas, and at the beach club it’s no longer necessary to reserve the Finn sailboat, staying out late at the Bar Caravella becomes something approaching a mystical experience, because of the fact that there’s no one around, the silence, the engines of the fishing boats coming and going in the darkness. But the make-up exam is nothing, it’s the departure of Marcella that suddenly emptied the Summer and turned it into a plaything for children, something involving paddling in the water, shovel and pail and boredom, parties that turn into birthday parties for tweens, scratchy records, family-size bottles of Coca-Cola, ritual ice creams and hot slices of pizza, kissing in public at the arena, driving around at night, four of you packed into a Fiat 500, annoying the faggots who are hooking it at the wharf or in the pine grove . . . Everything that before Marcella seemed funny, nice, intoxicating, including Carla, now just seems like greasy kid stuff. Even the Mandrake is now just a little wooden toy boat. Going fishing with Giacomo early in the morning, riding your bike down to Ponente, all the way to the Mute Arch, diving into the cold calm water in your T-shirt: it’s no longer a serious, grown-up thing, the way it used to seem, now it’s just fishing for minnows, strictly for poorly equipped incompetents. Even the afternoon contemplation of the remains of the Sacred Spitfire, imprisoned on a pedestal in the plaza at the edge of the wave-tossed rocks, no long has the same powerful meaning. All this, the entire Summer with the Gulf and the Islands, everything, everything, has been rendered meaningless by Marcella at a single fell swoop. By her, when she went away into her mysterious Winter in the City, vanished into the warm unattainable intimacy of her life and her things. Ivo doesn’t know where she lives, but he imagines her in a big house, with lots of carpets, furs on the beds, etchings of hunting scenes on the walls. He even imagines a fireplace with a crackling fire, her sitting on the deep, soft carpet, in a black leotard, barefoot, her feet arching, the cat, she’s on the phone, she’s laughing, on the other end of the line the guy who’s going to come by and pick her up around nine, tonight . . .

‘You’re completely out of the running at this point, but there’s still a month before Summer is completely over . . . And there’s still Carla . . . She likes you, she’s cute, you could start trying with her tonight, if she comes to the arena . . .’

At home, Mother is out for a game of canasta, his sisters are home. Big Sister is about to go out, Little Sister is with the nanny who’s getting her to sleep, on the table there’s a zucchini frittata, covered by a dish, a smoked mozzarella, some leftover eggplant parmesan, a little bread, peaches, plums. The Idrolitina fizzy water, made with a tablet, has almost gone flat. He eats with growing, ravenous hunger, he stuffs himself with bread and mozzarella, the eggplant parmesan from last night is delicious. The 500 lire he was counting on isn’t there. He pesters Big Sister until he can manage to pry 250 lire out of her, 200 for the movies and 50 for the ice cream after the movies. In the dresser in his parents’ bedroom is Mother’s carton of cigarettes, from which he steals one whole pack of Murattis. Mother knows that he smokes. Mother sees, monitors and benevolently tolerates. Mother who lets him live his life, who understands the Summer and its power.

At 10 p.m. he’s back in town. The members of the group are all standing around, clustered in a very specific section of the ice- cream shop. The wind has shifted, it’s turning into a southwest wind. The air is hot and damp and sticky. Carla is there with the others, silent, with her regulation light sweater over her shoulders, her hair in the wind, whipping at her face, suntanned to berry darkness. She’s pretty, but she never had the court of a young queen, like the other two or three stars of the Group had, she doesn’t surround herself with girlfriends to laugh and whisper with all the time, to take with her when she goes to the restroom. Carla isn’t the kind of girl who likes to stand out and she doesn’t seem to give a damn about it either. Tonight she’s keeping Ivo at arm’s length, she talks with the others, she turns her back on him, while the Group heads towards the Arena Excelsior—Giacomo still hasn’t shown up. He manages to work his way to her side in the ticket line. The Group has acknowledged that they’ve now become a couple at Francesca’s party and it facilitates his manoeuvre: it’s logical that tonight Ivo and Carla should watch the movie sitting next to each other. The way it is for all the other couples, that’s the way it should be for them. They’re showing a French cloak-and-sword movie. Ivo hates cloak-and-sword movies. He hates the swords that look like skewers and they way they laugh as they fight, conversing and ribbing each other. He hates the way the duelists leap and hang from chandeliers. He hates the little moustaches and the king’s guards who always come off looking like fools. He hates this stuff and he loves Westerns and the very rare ones, science-fiction flicks. But tonight he’s not here for the movie. He’s here to try to go all the way with Carla and the thought alone takes his breath away, makes his knees weak. She barely even notices his presence, she doesn’t object to him sitting next to her but she doesn’t facilitate it either.

‘She’s ignoring me, but that’s nothing to worry about . . . It’s when they act like that they’re willing . . . The more they ignore you in public, the more willing they are . . .’

Giacomo’s not there, in the end Ivo manages to get a seat next to Carla, in the back row. The metal seats take a while to warm up and at first you feel them through the cloth of your T-shirt. Scattered all around them are the other couples of the Group. That’s how it always is, at the movies, no one wants to be up close to whoever’s making out, nobody wants to just standing there holding their coats, so a couple zone forms spontaneously, where everyone gets busy and those who aren’t making out watch the film happily clinging to their girl, smoking one cigarette after the other in blessed peace. In other words, for the entire duration of the show, from the precinct of the Arena, a great billowing cloud of smoke rises skyward, visible from outside as if something were burning inside. But when those who are inside look up they see the starry sky: around the Night of St Lawrence, or Night of the Falling Stars, more than once some large falling star has shot past and behind the screen, and the whole audience burst out with a collective ‘Oohh!’ and then everyone has turned around to say ‘Did you see that?’

Ivo begins his manoeuvring, he puts his arm around her shoulders, he stretches out in his seat, he lights a cigarette. Carla is wearing a skirt. Is that a sign? Did she put it on especially for him? He sneaks a peek down at her bronzed legs, the gleaming taut skin of her bent knee, the half-visible thighs, the skin-tight T-shirt with the low neckline, the breasts on view, her bra straps. He sees her body as a job to be done, he tries to evaluate the challenges of gaining access. And he grows excited at the mere thought of touching it, while Carla, who isn’t even looking at him, talks and laughs with the girl next to her, who also has her boyfriend next to her, she too yoked to her boyfriend’s arm, so that the hands of the two males are almost touching. Everything is ready and on track, as the movie starts up and sure enough it is a meatball of a cloak-and-sword flick. Once he’s finished with his cigarette Ivo takes her hand and starts kissing her on the neck working up the back, he starts kissing her on the back of the neck, brushes his lips over her ear and drinks in the fresh smell of her skin, the odour of wind in her hair.

With her face turned towards the screen, she lets him do as he wishes but doesn’t reciprocate, she doesn’t turn to kiss him. At that point, Ivo leans forwards towards her mouth but he finds closed lips. He tries to turn her head towards him but he encounters resistance, she remains stiff, she refuses to turn.

‘What the fuck’s happening? What’s come over her? Until yesterday she was all in, and now?’

‘What’s wrong?’ he asks her.

‘Nothing.’

‘What do you mean “nothing”?’

‘Nothing.’

Once again confronted with the mystery of female behaviour: Ivo must have done something wrong, but what?

‘Yesterday I couldn’t come, I had to study, you know that . . . And today I had my last lesson. Do you think that I’ve been enjoying myself for the past few days?’ he whispers in her ear, making sure that his warm breath wafts over the lobe of her ear. Carla tilts her head towards him and moves away, just slightly, with a smile. Then she says: ‘Watch the movie.’

‘What the fuck do I care about the movie?’

Ivo is wounded, so she must be despised in revenge, like a sacrificial lamb to be immolated in the name of Marcella, superhuman entity, unattainable, who left for the city, where she’ll be surrounded by adults, leaving him here to finish his summer, a kid among kids.

Carla seems to be enjoying the movie, Ivo lights another cigar-ette, he props his feet up on the back of the empty seat in front of him, for a little while he feels exhausted, he gives up his manoeuvring, he loses interest. It’s a French movie, not even all that much of a cloak-and-sword flick, a meatball with actors he’s never heard of, a real piece of shit. He even thinks he recognizes an actor he’s seen before on some television series or other: What’s he doing here, an actor contaminated by TV? The guarantee you get from American movies is that there are hardly any Peninsular faces in the cast and the ones that you do see are super-famous and only in certain movies and they always play Peninsulars. You’ll never find them in Westerns, where they’re unthinkable, and where everyone, except for the Indians and the Mexicans, have blue eyes. After a while Ivo returns to the attack, but Carla, closed tighter than a tortoise, thighs locked and arms clasped across her chest, is impenetrable and there’s no budging her. Ivo feels like an idiot, he chain-smokes and keeps whispering into her ear: ‘What’s the matter? What did I do to you?’

She replies: ‘Nothing, nothing’s the matter, just let me watch the movie.’

But then, during intermission, since he won’t give up asking, she tells him calmly: ‘We’ll talk about it afterwards.’

‘Ah, there, you see that something really is bothering you?’

For the whole second half, Ivo puzzles over what can have gone wrong, he formulates plans of action, he realizes that he’s willing to stoop to any sort of lie, to tell her that he loves her, even, just so he can get his hands on her breasts, between her legs, as long as he can get her to touch his cock. But then the movie ends. Out in the street she says that she has to go home early, he says, ‘I’ll walk you,’ he takes her hand, they head towards the beachfront promenade. The gusts of wind hit them directly the minute they turn the corner, the north wind has got stronger. Ivo returns to the attack: ‘Now are you going to tell me what’s bothering you?’

She remains silent, he persists.

At last, Carla replies without looking at him: ‘Someone told me some things . . . They told me that . . . you just want to have your fun . . .’

‘What are you talking about? Who told you that?’

‘Forget about who it was . . . I’m not going to tell you, anyway . . . Is it true that you’re just planning to be an asshole with me? That you’re just looking to have some fun? Who do you take me for?’

The question is so simple and direct that Ivo says nothing. When confronted with the truth, he doesn’t know what to say. He ought to lie but suddenly he no longer has it in him. Maybe it’s the muggy wind that’s made him change his mind, or else the light of the street lamps, the mist, the damp, chilly air coming off a choppy sea, this road with the buildings on one side and the cabins on the other, so familiar with its young plane trees and the dogshits crushed underfoot on the cement slabs of the pavements. Tonight, here and now, he won’t be able to lie. So he says nothing.

He feels like nothing more than some poor jerk on this beachfront promenade, after he came away empty-handed from his encounter with Her, after he ran the risk at Attilio’s party of doing and saying all those idiotic things, after having watched Her smile at him, politely, politely, as She told him that he must have misunderstood and that in any case She wasn’t thinking and had never thought about him that way, not then and not ever . . . After getting drunk and leaving in tears, because he felt as if his chest had been split open, after vomiting all night long, so that Mother had heard the sound of him retching—Mother, he knows, is a light sleeper—and she’d got out of bed and held his forehead as he was voiding his gut and sobbing and she’d asked him gently: ‘What’s wrong, why are you crying? What’s happened? Why did you drink like that?’ And then she’d walked him back to bed and stayed there with him and stroked his forehead, while he went on crying, and she finally stopped asking questions, as if her son were sick. After all this, walking down to the beachfront promenade swept by the north wind, he suddenly feels like a complete jerk for having tried to have his way with a young girl, in a young boy’s summer as it comes to an end, in a beach resort for families, and he remains silent when she repeats the same question that he’s still unwilling to answer, because he doesn’t feel like lying, but he does feel like weeping.

‘Is it true that you’re just looking for some fun?’

He says ‘No’ to her again but without much conviction. And then: ‘Who told you? Will you tell me that?’

Suddenly, without Ivo having to ask again, she answers him: ‘Giacomo told me.’

He feels exhausted tonight. He feels like staying home. He’s cold. But he went back, he walked the whole distance of the waterfront esplanade to the ice-cream shop. He waited for him and now here he is.

‘Hey Como, where were you?’

‘Having dinner at my aunt’s . . . It ran late. How was the movie?’

‘Don’t ask, it was a piece of shit . . . You know that you’re a jerk?’

‘Ah . . . She told you, did she?’

‘What need was there to go and repeat everything to her? You’re a nice gossip . . . To think that I trusted you . . . Instead, there you have it, you couldn’t wait to run your mouth, just like everyone else . . .’

‘You’re the jerk . . . And don’t use that tone of voice with me . . . It wouldn’t take me long to smash your face in, Ivo.’

‘Why don’t you go fuck yourself . . . You just try, and I’ll beat you bloody.’

Giacomo is determined, resolute.

‘No, you’re the one who needs to go fuck yourself . . . Yeah, sure I told her . . . I told her, I didn’t skip a detail . . . You think you can just do whatever you want? That you can use a girl like Carla for your foul purposes and then, when you’re done with her . . . Just give her a shot and dump her, is that it? Well, with Carla you can’t do that . . . She’s my friend . . . She doesn’t deserve to be treated like that . . . I don’t even know what the fuck she sees in you . . . We spent the whole afternoon talking . . . I don’t know where the fuck you were . . .’

‘I was at tutoring, Giacomo. At tu-to-ring! Next week I have my make-up exam, or did you forget?’

‘OK, well, we talked . . . She’s head over heels about you . . . She was all happy, all charged up . . . She was convinced that you care for her: she was like that the whole time, she refused to dance with anybody else, she was waiting for you . . . She only wanted to be with you . . . In the end I couldn’t take it any more and I told her: “How do you think he cares for you? Ivo is just looking to have some fun . . .” For the rest of the evening she just cried. Then she came to the movies and gave you the back of her hand . . . Or not?’

‘Yes, Como, she gave me the back of her hand. She seemed like the tortoise you have in your backyard . . . You know when it gets scared and pulls into its shell? But what the hell do you care about Carla?’

‘I care for Carla . . . Hadn’t you noticed? She doesn’t even know I exist, but I’m not going to let you play the asshole with her, understood? She’s not just some object you can use to take out your frustration from the smacks in the face you get from other girls . . . So that other girl won’t give you the time of day? That’s your fucking problem, wrap your head around it . . . And leave Carla alone.’

‘What, do you have a crush on her? Fuck, I never noticed a thing . . . Couldn’t you have told me first, at least?’

‘What, am I supposed to tell you everything? It’s my own fucking business . . . I have mine and you have yours.’

‘But I tell you everything, Giacomo . . .’

They remain sitting in the back, against the wall, talking until two in the morning. It’s cold, the southwest wind has picked up some more, but it’s not raining. The air is dense with droplets of brine. Ivo is wearing his light sailor’s sweater with horizontal stripes. The ice-cream shop is closed, but the small knots of boys are still hanging out in front of the place, determined to shoot the shit until dawn, the way they do every night. The girls have all gone home, the more emancipated among them are somewhere with their boyfriend.

‘You want to come to the wharf to see the waves?’

It’s Ernesto and Lorenzo, calling to them from the open window of a sand-coloured Fiat 500. Ivo and Como stand up. Ernesto say: ‘Do you guys have any cigarettes?’

‘I’ve got half a pack, but don’t smoke them all, eh?’ says Ivo.

The wharf is large and it curves back around towards dry land. It’s sheltered from the north winds by a high stone wall. On the opposite side there’s a narrow walkway and then a breakwater made of huge cement blocks to ward off the storm surge. In the wall there are two or three apertures to connect the inside with the outside. The Fiat 500 has slipped in there, in one of these apertures, with the high beams pointing into the raging sea, the windows rolled up and the windshield wipers going full.

The incoming waves smash against that chaos of cement. The spray flies high, so high that it occasionally overtops the great stone wall, the waves splash through the aperture and slap violently against the windshield.

‘Look at this one coming in!’

‘Madonna, tonight the sea is so rough it makes you shit in your pants just to look at it.’

‘Can you imagine being out in that . . . Can you imagine being out right now on an FD? You wouldn’t have time to say amen and you’d already be in the water . . .’

‘Sure, you wouldn’t even be able to hoist the mainsail before it would be ripped to shreds. But just think how you’d cut through the water . . .’

‘Just think about the men out fishing . . .’

‘None of the fishing boats went out, the wharf is full, didn’t you notice?’

‘There’s always someone out . . . Madonna, look at that!’

This wave was really a big one, it’s scary. When it hits the base of the breakwater it disintegrates into a wall of spray that hits the windshield like a sledge hammer. The interior of the Fiat 500 is saturated with smoke, they can’t breathe and their eyes are stinging. Ernesto is sitting behind the wheel because the car is his, he’s eighteen years old already, he’s a year behind at school, but his folks bought him a car all the same. He lowers his window a little to let in some air, but instead a burst of spray comes in and hits Giacomo in the face, in the back seat, where he’s sitting next to Ivo.

‘Fuck, roll it up!’

‘Then stop smoking, you can’t breathe in here! Ivo, what did you wind up doing with that girl? What was her name? Carla? Nice little piece of ass. She giving you any? Did you let her feel it, eh? Did you put it in her hand?’

Ivo says nothing, Ernesto intimidates him. But the older boy continues, calmly, mockingly. He finally replies (but his voice quavers slightly and everyone in that car notices): ‘Cut it out, it’s my own fucking business . . .’ Giacomo says nothing.

‘What are you, acting all indignant? What’s got into you? Do you see yourself as a gentleman? Do you think of yourself as some Porfirio Rubirosa?’

Ernesto knows everything about playboys, they’re a fixation of his. That’s his dream life. Instead of living in the old unhurried and familiar City by the Sea, right now he’d like to be in Saint-Tropez. Instead of being parked on the wharf, training his headlights on the crashing views whipped by the southwest wind, right now he’d be drinking and dancing the night away in the nightclubs of the Côte d’Azur.

‘. . . do you see yourself as Baby Pignatari? Ah, you don’t talk about pussy, eh? You don’t kiss and tell. Do you think that when they give you their pussy it becomes yours? Don’t you know that pussy belongs to everyone, at the most you can hope to take a ride or two?’

Everyone laughs. Ivo laughs along with them, in half-hearted embarrassment. He hopes that Ernesto cuts it out soon. Giacomo is laughing too, and he puts on an amused tone, as if they hadn’t just talked about it all night long, as if he hadn’t just said to him: ‘I’m crazy about Carla.’ Now, in here, the conditions are different, it’s necessary to put on a certain demeanour, act as if they’re up to Ernesto’s level, so now Como too plays the mocking gang member: ‘Come on now, tell us that you’ve done it. Don’t be an asshole, that stuff doesn’t belong to you, after all . . .’

The summer is no longer the immense, glowing, perfect thing that it seemed to be just a month ago. It’s starting to display the first sores, like this gusting southwest wind, too violent and cold to mean anything other than the arrival of something very different, something still distant but inevitable. The night goes on, the sand-coloured Fiat 500 withstands the assault of the spray off the stormy sea. Inside the car, in the air supersaturated with smoke, everyone’s laughing and gazing distractedly into the future. Far far away, nestled in the depths of the universe, the primary cause, the giant black unmoved mover or motor, covered with grease, emits a subdued roar, as it has from time out of mind.

‘You want to go bust the Faggots’ balls?’ someone calls out.