Tim Parks: An Italian Education

Here we are then at the sea’s edge. The water isn’t even lapping. There’s just a steady sheen in the growing light and beyond that the etched black of the rocks. Out at sea, the flash of a beacon makes time intermittent, slows it down, stretches it out. On, off. On, off. There isn’t a breath of wind. I hope we didn’t come too early.

We stand and wait. Far from being the packed scene of Nonno’s childhood, there is almost no one on the beach and certainly no bonfires up on the hills. About a hundred yards down from us a family of five have opened the deck chairs in the first row of sunshades and arranged themselves to face the horizon. Further down still, a group of adolescents are sitting in a circle. Probably they never went to bed. They’re quiet, talking in whispers. For a moment I’m reminded of those situations where you arrive at a remote bus stop and can’t decide from the size of the queue whether the bus is due any minute or not for another hour or so. Perhaps the people are not even waiting for your bus at all. Perhaps the adolescents don’t know this is the day you watch the sun rise. They finish all their nights sitting in a circle on the beach. Then there’s a clatter from behind us, and it’s the woman who runs the Delfino Verde raising the shutter to her bar. Amazingly, the bar is going to open. With relief I reflect that you can rely on a shopkeeper to know when things are going to happen.

Michele has stripped to his bathing costume and is dancing by the water’s edge. That never ending dilemma. Do you deter kids, or let them do as vitality prompts? Do they have to be strictly civilised or are they innately more civilised than us? Understand how the grain of a people curls around this knotty question and you have their culture in one. Am I getting more and more indecisive because I am falling between the stools of two cultures? I’m not English any more, but I still can’t worship Baggio… Or is it just age?

‘Wait till you’ve seen the sun rise,’ I tell him. ‘That’s what we’re here for. Then you can go in for just a minute. But no cold shower.’

‘Where’s Nonno gone?’ Stefi enquires.

Indeed, where has Nonno gone? I swivel round. No sign. Has the sea taken him? Its very stillness gives the water a mysterious feel. But Nonno, as I’ve said before, is famous for his unannounced arrivals and departures.

Then, in just a few minutes, the dawn. The sky suddenly brightens and lifts itself from the sea. Lines sharpen. Not least the horizon. Colours are found. The prosaic floods in like a tide. Already, I want to slow it down: sand beige, sunshades green-and-yellow, the red moscone pulled up on the shore. Same old beach. Without reaching out a single rosy finger to warn us, the sun rims the distance between two breakwaters.

The children are agog at the size of it. It’s huge. And the colour. Not unlike that of my eyes right now. ‘Il sole,’ Stefi breathes, ‘red as a peperone !’ She gazes. She likes to be mesmerised, likes a moment to be what it should be, as if her determined awe could create a magic in the sun, the way candles in churches make a god, and theatrical embraces a mother-in-law. Further along the beach the adolescents cheer. There is even the sound of an Alé, alé! , as if the great red ball now half clear of the water had been kicked there with terrible precision by you know who. Then, more miraculously still, Nonno reappears with a bag full of croissants. ‘ Bello ,’ he says with his mouth full.

Following the example of other spectators, the children rush into the water. For a few moments they bathe in a dazzle of red as the sun rolls a regal carpet across the water. Their bodies shine in the horizontal rays. They have that wonderful enamel you can only mix with young skin and water and bright light. Then already the sun’s too bright to look at, and hence in a curious way not there any more, dissolved in an everyday glare that kindles traffic noises along the seafront road and finds an overnight litter of cans and wrappers that the bagnino will have to clear. Immediately, the children lose interest and rush out shivering for their croissants. Michele rudely demands to know which is the biggest. Then it’s up the beach to the bar for the ceremony of the cappuccino, the more familiar rituals of Italian life.

‘Maybe Lucia will be born when we get home,’ Michele says. And Stefi immediately replies, ‘I can’t wait to kiss her.’

‘Madness,’ Nonno says, thinking of the mouths that have to be fed, the bodies clothed, the coddling and spoiling and pampering, and then again the debts paid, the apartments bought, the enquiries about the will.

‘No better place to grow up than Italy,’ I tease him.

Spooning foam into his mouth like a big baby, the crumbs of a second brioche on his lips, my father-in-law is quick to correct me: ‘No better place,’ he says, ‘not to grow up!