Tim Parks - An Italian Education

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

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

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

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

Sapore di sale, sapore di mare ,

hai sulla pelle il sapore del sole .

Salt taste, sea taste

Your skin has a sun taste.

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

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

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

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

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

I ask the children if they know how to say medusa in English. Stefi at once says jellyfish. And she is right. Medusa means jellyfish. But Michele knows that Medusa was also a sea monster with snakes for hair and eyes that could turn you to stone.

‘So why are the Medusa’s colours blue and white?’

They are puzzled by this. Every morning I use this kind of chat to put off the moment when I’ll have to run into the sea.

‘I mean why aren’t they pink, which is the colour of jellyfish, or some horrible snaky grey and blood red, for Medusa?’

Michele, who is perhaps pounding on my chest or trying to bury my legs in the sand, makes the mistake of actually trying to think this one through, so seductive is the notion of relations between words and things. ‘If Medusa was a sea goddess,’ he begins, ‘wouldn’t blue and white…’ With more female intuition, examining painted toenails, Stefi tells me, ‘Because they are nice colours.’

And they are. The Medusa is blue and white. All the big sunshades are blue and white. In segments. The deck chairs and lounge beds are blue and white. The low wall round the terrace, the bathing huts, the pedal-boats and skiffs for hire, everything is obsessively blue and white. In exactly even doses, at exactly equal distances.

In the morning when you arrive, the sunshades are still closed, limp, like still-closed sunflowers along the autostrada at dawn. But already the bagnino , the lifeguard and general dogsbody, is coming round to open them, popping them out one by one, not all together as the sun would. Each sunshade is exactly two and a half metres from the next, and at this early hour with the sunshine slanting from the sea, the shade from your shade is almost beneath the shade behind. Should we sit there, I ask Michele, in their deck chair but in our shade — the shade from our shade — or here on our deck chair but in the next person’s shade, the shade from his shade? ‘Oh come in the sea, Papà,’ he shouts. ‘Come in the sea. I’m going to tear you to pieces and feed you to the fish.’

During the day the shade rotates elliptically, as it must, starting boldly out in the open, hiding right under the great blue-and-white umbrella when the sun is hottest, then stealing off seaward as the afternoon progresses and the sun falls towards the hills. Thousands of holiday-makers drag deck chairs and sunbeds after it, or away from it, depending on the state of their tans. The beach is in constant movement.