At last the blue light resolves itself into the familiar flat gray of an April dawn on the south coast. We wind our way toward the port, past the toylike Parker Pen factory, past the little train station and into the harbor, whose steeply rising grassy sides seem to be undergoing a kind of surgery, with their diggers and their piles of breeze blocks and their half-finished housing developments that look lived in and discarded before they’ve even been built. Rounding the bend, we see our boat, black plumes of smoke pouring from its funnels, monolithic against the miniature scale of the muddy harbor. There are a few other cars waiting under the gray wadded sky, and some lorries, each like a great beast that has crept out of the night with its solitary driver. It is not yet the holiday season: people are at work; children have returned to school. We stare out of our car windows at the other cars. In the back we have clothes, books, a guitar, a box of toys, tennis rackets, a thermos flask, a large Italian dictionary, a set of watercolors, and a leather-bound backgammon case. Other people seem to have nothing at all. They gaze through their windscreens, their back seats empty. Sometimes there is a pillow in a faded patterned pillowcase lying on the shelf behind, as if it is the only desire they can conceive of feeling, the need to pull up and sleep for an hour or two. We all inch our way gradually forward. I feel as if we are being held in a last moment of compression, like seeds held tightly in a hand before being scattered; as though our obligation to feel connected to others is running down to its last seconds. It is the only thing that remains to be shed, this garment of nationhood. We move slowly forward in the dull gray light that has broken now over the sea. When it is our turn we show our passports. We say goodbye to the officer in her booth, and roll out across the concrete jetty to where the boat stands shuddering vastly in the water, the smoke streaming from its chimneys, its doors standing open, its insides showing, its men amid the ribs in their white overalls, like people in a strange dream, beckoning us in.
Upstairs the boat smells of baked beans and fried food. I remember this smell from other journeys: it lies just off the shoreline like an olfactory fence, through which admittance must be gained in or out. The canteen isn’t open yet, but a queue of people is waiting at the shuttered hatches. We go and sit at the front, in the chilly air-conditioned salon with its wood veneer and hard gray-upholstered arrangements of chairs fixed to the floor. When the boat begins to move we hardly notice. The land slides noiselessly away past the windows. The gray-blue water churns mildly in front. A few gulls hover and circle our bulk and eventually drift back to shore.
For a while the two children are excited. They run up and down the half-empty boat, past people who are sitting silently or reading newspapers or breaking open packets of food, people who are conversing brightly despite the early hour, people who are already fathomlessly asleep amid their bags and coats and jackets. For each of these groups they reserve a measure of interest as they pass and repass them: they cast out looks as fishermen cast out lines; they give them an opportunity, an opening. I see that it is, for them, the central mystery of life, how a course of events forms itself. They tiptoe around the closed bar with its fruit machines pulsing in the shadows. They keep us abreast of developments in the canteen, which to their satisfaction eventually opens, though this represents no particular change in their circumstances. For a while they haunt a corner of the salon where a family, all very pale and soft and large and all clad in black, are handing round biscuits and packets of crisps and colorless fizzy lemonade from a plastic liter bottle. The children clearly feel that this is a transaction of which they might at last entertain some hopes. They stay within this family’s rustling and torpid aura while the mother glances at them expressionlessly. Finally, they trail back to our table and sit down. They have exhausted every avenue and come back empty-handed. The boat having been found to be a place of no opportunity, they wish to know when we will arrive.
I am studying Italian verbs and phrases. I have a little book in which I write everything down. Faccio, fai, fa, facciamo, fate, fanno. I have not yet spoken any of these words: they are a form of trousseau, a virgin’s drawerful of unblemished linen. I like them in their spotless condition and cannot quite imagine the congress that is their destiny. Vengo, vieni, viene, veniamo, venite, vengono. I also have an Italian textbook, called Contatti! There are various recurring characters in Contatti!, Italian men consecrated in the national customs of eating and drinking, earnest young Italian women who ask for directions to public landmarks, and even an English couple called the Robinsons. It is full of human situations that are both stilted and consoling, as though through this gauze of language everything impure and uncertain has been filtered away. The signora arrives with her daughters. The American students work hard. Did you sleep badly at Capodanno?
It strikes me that Contatti! has something about it of Debrett’s book of social etiquette, in its insistence on the correct forms of expression within the randomness of the human plight. But there is even more of the atmosphere of the afterlife amid its pages, of an unprogressing limbo where Tony and Mario are forever ordering the appropriate coffee for the time of day at the bar and Marcella, in her loop of eternity, stands on a street corner in Verona asking Fabrizio for directions to the railway station. People are helpful and kind in Contatti!, but they are untouched by passion or by failure: they do not scream or cry or love, or try to thwart Peter and Mary Robinson in their ambition to purchase a house in the Italian countryside. L’agenzia puo fissare una visita al mattino. The Robinsons seem to have an awful lot of Italian friends for a dull middle-class English couple. They crop up in nearly every chapter, lunching with the Pacianos at their Roman apartment, meeting up for drinks with their old pals Roberto and Carla, Peter banging on all the while about their casa di campagna, Mary unfailingly repeating her unatmospheric observation that the Italians don’t consume nearly as much alcohol as the English. Because it’s Contatti!, no one tells them to shut up. E vero, says Carla solemnly, beviano molto poco. Yet there is something soothing, something almost instructive in their tedium, for Contatti! startlingly omits to provide translations for the majority of things I say on a daily basis. I have come to rely on harsh imperatives and interrogatives in verbal expression, though I’m sure this didn’t used to be the case. Such grammatical refinements occur much later on in the pages of Contatti!, where in all probability I will never find my way. (It is an alleviating prospect, that of being confined to simple statements, straightforward desires, and polite verbal forms.)
The ferry hums in its sphere of gray cloud and water. It is so large that it has encompassed the sensation of travel itself: sealed in and air-conditioned as we are, we appear to be virtually motionless. There is no tipping or rocking, no groaning of timbers, no wind or sea spray on our faces, no work that is necessary to advance us to our destination. There is nothing to do but wait, for one thing to become another. The great gray nothingness inches past the windows. I have the strange feeling that the other passengers are familiar to me. The man with combed-back hair and plaid shirt sitting reading The Times, the woman in the Barbour jacket with the face of a withered Memling damsel, the hefty Rhinemaiden doing Sudoku puzzles, who purses her powerful mouth round her pen and scans the air with narrowed eyes — surely I have met them somewhere before. Again and again I look at a face or a hairstyle or even an article of clothing and feel a sense of recognition that is almost like a touching of nerves in distant parts of the body. But instead of gaining substance the feeling recedes and grows indistinct. The memory does not come, just as the memories of certain dreams that on waking seemed so concrete implacably make their way into oblivion, like a train pulling out of a station and slowly vanishing down the tracks.