Tim Parks: An Italian Education

‘It’s hard to see why they’re at the beach at all,’ I object as Michele clutches at my toes. Certainly I can’t remember so much mere lounging when we were by the sea at Blackpool. We were always up and doing then. It was all games and eating, swimming and shivering and escape.

Rita is reading a publication called Io e il mio bambino — Me and My Baby. There was a free teething ring in it. Too late for Michele.

I repeat my complaint.

‘Because of the sea air,’ Rita explains. ‘It’s good for the children’s lungs. The doctor tells them to come. There’s quite a technical article about it here somewhere: the therapeutic action of iodine on the bronchi.’

‘But you can’t even smell the sea.’

‘Not from here.’

This is remarkable. At least to me. Given the calmness of the water, the stillness of the warm air (and perhaps the ubiquity of suntan lotion), you can’t actually smell that wonderful sea tang until you’re almost in the water. Indeed, if you didn’t look in that direction, you might well be in some sort of pleasure-ground Sahara.

The two teachers are comparing the peeling on their shoulders while their two children ignore each other. Not once in more than an hour have they said anything that might betray their professional interests. But Rita isn’t impressed by my criticisms; she’s reading an article about flat feet now. She’s afraid Michele may have flat feet. She gets him to lie on his back and examines his soles, which only makes him giggle. To me they look like two nicely puffy bread rolls, and I decide it’s time to take him down to the sea.

One can see why Italian mothers are not perhaps too unhappy about their husbands not being at the beach all day. By eleven o’clock the beach at Pescara has begun to take on a distinctly erotic feel of the variety that hardly encourages midlife monogamy. By eleven o’clock the adolescents have begun to arrive, and what can only be described as the serious sunbathers. Holding my toddler by the hand, I walk painfully slowly around a somewhat razzled mermaid, in a monokini that is no more than a thread of fluorescent green between tightly dark buttocks. Interestingly enough, she always comes with a fat elderly man, her grandfather perhaps, or perhaps not. Upturned on his lounge bed, he is reading La Gazzetta dello Sport with not a trace of a smirk on his face. Summer is the transfer season, and one has to guess which players are going where.

Michele cries. The hot sand is burning his feet. I pick him up and carry him to the central path. On all sides now, amongst the shades, on the edge of deck chairs, sixteen- and seventeen-year-old girls are preening and preparing themselves for the solemn business of ‘taking the sun’. They are local, Adriatic girls, smooth and darkly slim in what this year are brilliantly coloured costumes cut high on the thigh, though there is always the problem of changing costume from day to day, or even two or three times in the same day, so as to tan as low on the stomach and as high on the legs as possible.

I concentrate on keeping Michele’s sunhat on, very aware that women and girls are all turning to look and smile, but not at me, no, at my golden little boy as he toddles blondly forward. For myself, I might as well be invisible. Children do this to you. Perhaps more so in Italy than elsewhere. Children are magnets for women’s attention. I wouldn’t be surprised if some unscrupulous fellows didn’t use them the way others buy a fast car…

We break out of the sunshades into those twenty measured metres of empty sand before the sea. No doubt there is a regulation. And it’s here that the action is, it’s here that people come when they’ve had enough of their sunshades, when they can no longer just sizzle or chat or preen or read. The sand is beaten hard here, and there is even a metre or two that is darkly damp where the water laps. So you can walk with ease, and games can be played. Or really only one game, tamburello . For in Italy people are remarkable above all for their conformity, for all doing the same thing at the same time. The old folks stride by along the sea’s edge, tummies toppling over tight costumes, the scars of their operations everywhere evident; the children rush into sheets of sparkling water; the mothers stand together on the shore to watch that they don’t get far away, chatting to each other and occasionally shouting; while the adolescents, plus any able-bodied men who for some reason are not at work, or any women who for some reason do not have children, play tamburello .

If somebody is playing something else, then they are not Italian.

Tamburello is a game where, originally, you used a kind of wooden tambourine thing to hit a hard ball back and forth, but now you use a short, solid-plywood racket and a tennis ball. Of course, the ball isn’t supposed to bounce, since it wouldn’t come up from the sand. Which means you have to hit it hard… Ten or fifteen metres apart and parallel to the shoreline (to be on the flat), partners wham the thing at each other, scrambling about in the sand: pock, pock pock! The popularity of the game sometimes makes it tricky getting across this stretch of territory to the sea, especially with a young child. You wouldn’t want him to be hit by a hurtling tennis ball or, even worse, by a young man diving with a swipe of wooden racket.

I make a significant detour round a pair of local boys slugging it out, then I sit Michele down at the sea’s edge and proceed to dig out a little bathing pool for him. I must be about the only person doing this along five miles of busy beach, since this kind of heavy physical commitment does not form part of Italian beach-going traditions. Even Michele seems more inclined to watch than participate. Or he sits still staring at the glare of sky over sea, occasionally raising his arms, palms upward, as if in worship of that fantastically bright Mediterranean light. It’s rather annoying when I am making the protestant effort to get involved and be a good father.

To my left as I dig, on a chair perched some two or three metres high at the top of a white stepladder contraption, the lifeguard in his red T-shirt is smoking a cigarette and likewise staring out to sea, though without Michele’s rapture. Indeed, his attitude has discomfort and indecision written all over it; he can’t seem to make up his mind which hand should cup his chin… Chatting on the sand below, and always ready to distract his attention, are two smooth young sirens; they have brightly coloured ties holding back raven hair, ankle bracelets, painted toenails. They giggle. They call to him mockingly, waiting for his descent, while he, a hefty healthy boy, gazes expressionless at the bathers. Summer affairs with the bagnino , the lifeguard and general dogsbody of the bathing station, are a staple of Italian beach mythology.

While Michele stamps about in a couple of inches of water, I take a break and watch the bathers. The previous summer, I remember, I had spent some weeks in the USA, where I visited a lake beach in New England. Here they had not one lifeguard but two, and for a much smaller area, since bathing was cordoned off to make sure people couldn’t swim out into the distance and risk being torn to shreds by the richer folks with their motorboats. Doubtless this arrangement had much to do with American insurance laws and the genuine concern for safety such laws inspire. But all the same, as someone who loves to swim a distance rather than back and forth, I found the restriction depressing, especially since the rules were applied most rigidly, with whistles blown and arms waved and people screamed at and threatened with fines the moment they strayed from the fold.

At first glance, down on the beach at Pescara, the uninitiated might be led to believe that something of the same thing was going on. For only thirty feet out into the sandy wavelets a rusty pole emerges not quite vertical from the shallows and a notice on top announces: LIMITE DELLE ACQUE SICURE — end of safe water. To either side of the pole, a blue nylon rope sags between chunks of polystyrene to mark the line.