Tim Parks - An Italian Education

The bagnino comes round to open our shade. He is followed by a girl, perhaps no more than fifteen. Tall, slim, very well endowed, she doesn’t help him, doesn’t even talk to him, but drapes herself on objects round about. He is eighteen, perhaps, blond and bright. They are both very aware of each other’s presence, and aware of other people’s awareness of that.

He opens our shade and our lounge bed and, because it is our first day, introduces himself. Then he moves on to open the other shades. His girlfriend follows, finds somewhere to drape herself, watches.

Suddenly I stand up and dash through the sunshades screaming, ‘The sea! The sea!’ The children come hurtling after. Behind me, La Signora Jukebox is paring her nails, or examining a mole, or searching for split ends. The sea, as we splash into it, is perfectly flat and still.

When I try to describe Pescara to English friends, when I try to persuade them to join me here, they are always unimpressed, even the ones who love Italy and who will visit Florence and Rome and Venice a thousand times. It is this gridwork of sunshades that depresses them, this routine of rented deck chairs and lounge beds, the machinery of it, the beach bureaucracy. They remember their experiences on crowded English beaches those few days when real heat miraculously coincided with a weekend or bank holiday. They remember their fear of encroachment when people laid their towels between themselves and another family who had already seemed much too near, so that they could smell the steam from their coffee flasks, the oil on their skin. It’s a scene I remember all too well myself. A dog sniffs at your foot. A ball bounces over your wife’s legs. And where can you let your own children play cricket? On your back, eyes closed, you sense the sunshine being constantly darkened by people threading their way through the little encampments, all but treading on your towel, as you too will all but tread on the towels of others when you return from the sea, worried that you’re going to drip cold water on lobster backs or shaved arms and legs. And now there’s a teabag in the sand, and here a sandwich wrapper that someone is clumsily chasing after as the breeze blows it over alarmed sunbathers…

On the Adriatic beach, precisely the regular distance between ample shades prevents all this. Nobody can come any closer than that, those two and a half metres. It’s near, I know. But it’s not too near. Anyway, most shades are rented for the summer by locals, who only come at the weekend or after work. And nobody else can take them over when they’re not in use. For this is another of the bagnino ’s jobs: to keep out freeloaders. As for sandwich wrappers, who would ever dream of bringing sandwiches when there is the bar, the lovely terrace, just a hundred metres away? People don’t even possess thermos flasks, probably wouldn’t even know what they were. For the litter there are litter bins every four shades or so, regularly emptied, not to mention an army of boys employed by the bathing station to keep the place clean. Every evening they go by with a small industrial machine that lifts up the top inch or so of sand and passes it through a sieve before dropping it back on the beach. So there is no driftwood either. No rusty nails in splintery wood. Seashells are only permitted right by the waterline. And when a rare wind and heavy sea brings in some seaweed, they collect that too.

The young bagnino toils away with a pitchfork, gathering seaweed into piles. His girlfriend leans on the shady side of the little van he hoists it into. She watches him. Her costume is a tropical cocktail of colour against cinnamon skin and she has a big synthetic pink flower in her hair. Her boyfriend hoists up heavy piles of seaweed. He keeps the beach clean for us.

As long as you’re not expecting a direct encounter with nature (of the variety my mother was after), Pescara is impeccable.

But the real pleasure here, and one you won’t imagine till you’ve experienced it, is this chance to observe the same people at play every day , to know where to find them and how to avoid them in this rich warren of shade and light. How would Aschenbach ever have fallen in love with Tadzio if he hadn’t been able to watch him on the Lido every day, to know where he would be? In Pescara you have time to get your eye in. People cease to be just shapes, ugly or attractive; you get to know exactly how they move and gesture, what their routine is, the mothers’ neuroses and the men’s newspapers, the pensioners’ scars. You overhear their conversation, which puts colour in bodies and faces quite as much as the sun. You learn how so and so clips her nails, how this man smokes. You find people capable of reading for hours on their backs holding their books up against the sun, others who can never find a position comfortable enough to finish a newspaper article. You see an extraordinary number of folk tackling the pages of the Settimana enigmistica , the Puzzler’s Weekly , forty pages of crosswords and riddles. Even Signora Jukebox does it when she’s not got her orange sanding card in her hand, searching for some part of her body to file down. It’s a splendid intimacy these sunshades bring.

Unknowingly, between their swims and fights and sandcastles, the children become engaged in this intense sport of watching each other. On perhaps the third or fourth day, Stefi will be saying, ‘Why does that girl follow the bagnino round all the time.’ Michele will say quite angrily, ‘Why doesn’t she leave him alone? How is he supposed to save people drowning if she’s always falling over him?’ They are repeating what they have overheard everybody else saying on the beach and under all the other sunshades. The bagnino ’s girlfriend is the focus of attention at the Medusa this summer. Everybody pretends to be indignant at the way she never, never leaves him be. She sits beside him at his observation chair at the front. She lies on the back of his little rowing catamaran when he paddles out among the bathers. She follows him on all his rounds of the sunshades. Everybody is waiting for the moment when those two will start touching each other…

I plunge into the water, followed by the children. It’s around nine o’clock. The sea is shallow, tepid, motionless. Yet most bathers turn back, or just walk the shallows parallel with the shore: grandmothers with straw hats and sunglasses, fat men deep in conversation. In the first stretch of water, the older boys play games of volleyball or tamburello . Almost nobody ventures out of their depth.

I encourage my own children to swim. I have mock fights with them. I persuade them to paddle out to the rocky breakwater and even to dive on the other side, in the open sea, where nobody goes. In doing so I am constantly aware of obeying a different cultural programming, of not being relaxed enough. Other parents just like to stand in the warm shallows, admiring their own brown skins glistening in the sun and water, ignoring their children, enjoying the mill of people near the shore.

And if someone does swim seriously, it is a boy. None of the girls seem to swim. The girls stand at wading depth and make a gesture I don’t remember seeing in England. In up to their thighs, they lift handfuls of water and let it dribble down over their bodies. They repeat the gesture perhaps three or four times. You imagine they’re getting acclimatized, ready for the plunge, but just when you think they’re going to plunge, they turn round and wade out again. Watching them, realising the motions are habitual, I’m reminded of something I once translated, about a mythical girl called Iphimedeia. She had fallen in love with Poseidon and would often walk along the beach, go down into the sea, raise the water from the waves and let it flow down over her body. It was a gesture of love, of seduction. And it worked. Finally, Poseidon emerged from the water, wrapped himself round her and promptly generated two children. After which Iphimedeia no doubt became just another of the young mothers on the beach. ‘Do you want a banana, Benedetta? Come on, you need some fruit after your pizzetta . Don’t throw sand. Don’t bother your little sister. No, you can’t go in the water till ten o’clock. You haven’t digested yet. And you need some cream on your tummy, you’re burning, can’t you feel you’re burning?’