Tim Parks: An Italian Education

‘Michele, you’ve forgotten to put your suncream on,’ Stefi is saying. At six years old! Having just explained to me about the humidity!

We change. There’s the old shout of Cocco! and the clanking of a bucket, but we don’t buy. Coconut would be heavy on our stomachs before a swim. Wouldn’t it? The way to the sea is thick with the back and forth of tamburello , and some men in their forties and fifties are playing out tonight’s big football match, as I remember doing as a boy. ‘Albertini to Signori, Signori to Baggio, beats one, beats two, gol!!!!! ’

‘No, it went over the post,’ the tubby white Nigerian keeper objects. The post is a green Benetton sweater with fluorescent document pouch for greater definition. The men argue like children about whether it was a goal or not…

In the water, a fashionable mother is taking advantage of that honey-look low light spreads to make photographs of her lovely daughter. The girl, perhaps eight or nine, is on a silly inflatable boat with some kind of pedal-paddling affair at the end. Quite unnecessarily she is wearing a bikini top, and she lounges back on the boat voluptuously, hands behind her curly head in a pose television has taught her. The mother crouches in the water with her automatic focus camera, seeking exactly the right shot to frame for some living room shelf in Milan or Turin. But the current drags the boat away. ‘Pedal!’ the mother shouts. ‘Try and keep it where it is.’ The girl complains that turning the pedals brings up the seaweed that drifts and laps about in the shallow water. The seaweed is scummy. She won’t touch the seaweed! So mother, who has a la-di-da Milan accent, has to come and drag the boat herself and turn it round to have it in the exact right relation to the sun. Then she fusses about her own shadow falling in the picture. Aim, frame… too late. The boat has drifted again. The girl refuses to pedal. She seems to be mocking a mother willing to make so many sacrifices for that photo to show off to friends. Perhaps rightly so. The hell with photographing one’s children. And it goes on and on and on until finally the snap is snapped, and mother brings the pink and white boat safely to shore so that the little lady will not have to put her feet in amongst the seaweed. Then with a great sigh she slumps into a deck chair and lights a super-slim cigarette.

Why do I secretly hope that picture won’t come out?

We splash towards the rocks, past the sign announcing LIMITE DELLE ACQUE SICURE, into the adventure of three or four feet. The children have invented a game called bruco marino , sea caterpillar. This involves Papà lying on his belly on the bottom of the sea while they ride or stamp on his back. As he worms caterpillar-like amongst the crabs, he can just vaguely catch through the tepid water the song they have invented to accompany their ride. ‘ Il bruco marino, ha perso il codino, ha perso il culino, non riesce a cagar .’ The which, translated, will seem even more mindless than in Italian, lacking rhyme and diminutives: The sea caterpillar has lost his little tail, has lost his little bottom, he can’t poo.

I prefer not to speculate on whether, since I am the caterpillar, there isn’t some awful Freudian significance behind this, or some reference to the whole problem of Italian anality. I plough on, underwater, allowed up for breath every forty seconds or so, until, emerging much farther out than I had meant, we are all witness to a scene that is conclusion and climax, as it were, to one whole aspect of the holiday. The children’s discovery of… well…

Or let’s put it this way: on this, the last day — for as I said all days are one here, and this the last as much as the first — on this last day of our holiday, the mystery of the bagnino and his girl, always together but never quite touching, is finally resolved, and in such a way that seems quite deliberately a show for us, an education for the children.

Moravia would have loved it.

We’re in about five feet of water, quite near the big rocks, with the children treading water or swimming or hanging on to me. I am finally allowed up from being a sea caterpillar and we turn back towards the shore. Only to find, no more than ten yards away, the bagnino’s moscone , his little red catamaran lifeguard’s skiff.

The bagnino has rowed out from the beach despite the fact that there are very few people in the water (doubtless because of the dangerous humidity). As always, his girl is with him in her tropical cocktail bikini, so fetching against the warm buttered toast of her fifteen-year-old skin. They are not touching. He has his job to think of, his responsibilities. He can’t hang around snogging in groups like the lucky lads on the jetty. But now, very suddenly, perhaps a hundred yards out and with the boat facing away from the shore, they both slither into the water off the front. That is, they are now standing in five feet of water between the two prongs of the floats that form the front of the catamaran, perfectly hidden from the shore by the built-up wooden platform and slightly elevated rowing position designed to give a bagnino the view he needs over waters where babes may be drowning. She stands with her back to the platform, arms over the floats to anchor the thing, he is turned toward her, and thus able to keep half a wary eye on the beach and his boss, the owner of the bathing station. Then they get down to it. They attack each other quite savagely. But the odd thing is that they do this knowing full well that we, almost the only bathers in this damp late afternoon sea, are only perhaps ten yards away, And in the fullest possible view. And knowing that the children, who they have seen with me every day, are young indeed and that I am a respectable adult client of the bathing station. It’s as if, having screened themselves from the shore, from the bagnino ’s boss and any locals who know the boss, they don’t give a damn who sees them. All that not touching, the long hot days in and out, the azure blue afternoons, must be trying indeed.

They devour each other.

This time Stefi says with frank appreciation: ‘ È l’amore ’ — it’s love — thus distinguishing it from the kids on the rocks. Is she thinking of that graffiti. Could this actually be Amalia? ‘It’s not the sea you see…’ But Michele, in the way little boys have of being sworn enemies of romance right up to the day before they’re about it themselves, is outraged. ‘How can they do that,’ he shouts. ‘How can they? When the bagnino ’s supposed to be watching people in the water. What would happen if someone was drowning now, crying for help?’

Simultaneously, both the children have the same idea. In a gale of giggles, treading water, they both cry, ‘ Aiuto!!! ’ Help! ‘Aiu-u-to-o-o!’ waving their arms and trying to get the bagnino ’s attention. They’re laughing so hard they can hardly stay above water. Stefi gasps, goes under, gets a mouthful. An excellent imitation of someone drowning.

But the bagnino doesn’t even turn, so determinedly are those two making up for lost time. ‘Stop, kids, I insist. Stop, that’s not fair.’ I take them back to the shore, play the whole thing down. ‘Quick, we’ll have to get dry before getting damp!’ But you can see they are impressed by the event. It’s this bathing station situation that has done it, the intimacy it generates, the way you feel you know people, the way you watch and speculate. They would hardly have noticed had it been two people we’d never seen before. Now they will talk about it for ages, though I never hear them connect it with what Papà told them about how Mamma’s baby came about. We are such strange animals in this sense. We have such ways of knowing and not knowing, communicating and not communicating. This, I suspect, as with the Calabrian girl’s debatable virginity, is how it should be.