The children are nervous. They do not want to jump. The sea urchins frighten them. They have an instinctive terror of nacreous bodies that wait, unseen, in the water; of stings administered silently and without warning. It has taken them so long to establish that the world is predictable, that its elements are fixed, that its properties interrelate reliably: they will not easily forget their fear of the unknown.
I take a few steps back, and then run forward and hurl myself into the water. It was easy: I am in the deep part, swimming with the fish in regions of exquisite turquoise coolness. I tread water and look back to shore. Ophelia is having none of it. She has withdrawn from the waterside, and is sitting on a rock with her chin in her hands. But Hamlet is tempted. She stands on the brink, in an agony of indecision. She is a daredeviclass="underline" she cannot bear to feel afraid, and so she is inexorably drawn to do the things she fears the most. I admire her for this trait, which I conspicuously lack, but I have failed to understand its significance, which is that she experiences more than the common portion of terror, not less. She is more frightened than Ophelia of jumping into the water, and for this reason she will force herself to do it, while Ophelia sits calmly on her rock. Her father tells her not to try: he thinks it is too dangerous after all. It was easy enough jumping in, but it is unclear how we are going to get out. But it is too late; Hamlet comes flying through the air, her fists clenched into balls at her sides, and thuds into the water beside me. She springs up again, victorious. For a while we swim around, but there is nowhere to put our feet. The water is deep here. I begin to see the difficulty. We swim toward the rocks and through the crystalline water Hamlet sees the sea urchins, plump and glossy as blood clots, as if through a magnifying glass. The game is up: there in the water she flings her arms around my neck and sticks there like a limpet. She is heavy and I thrash about, trying to stay afloat. I ask her to let go and she shrieks and tightens her grip. On her rock, Ophelia begins to cry. I realize that one way or another I am going to have to get us out. I reach the rocks with Hamlet around my neck. Ophelia’s crying is getting on my nerves. There is only one way back to the shore, which is to clamber up the shelving rock among the sea urchins. From a distance the rock looks smooth but close up it is chaotic and sharp. I cut my hands and feet, and so does Hamlet. We stagger out into the dry afternoon with its high white sun. Hamlet and Ophelia cry uncontrollably. I am angry. I don’t know why, but I am angrier than I have ever been. I shout at them while blood runs down my legs. There are one or two Italians nearby, sunning themselves on the rocks. They look at us in consternation. They look at me. They know that the whole thing was entirely my fault. I am ashamed. I try to stop shouting but I can’t. I can’t.
We roam in the soughing pinewoods. We lie by the water, talking. We peer at the Etruscan tombs, following dusty paths through fields of dry grass. There is the Tomb of the Chariots and the Tomb of the Attic Vases and the Tomb of the Funereal Couches. There are dome-shaped tombs like dirt-colored igloos in the grass. We stare at them but we do not understand them: they are the core, the impenetrable kernel of this land’s mystery.
For four nights we sleep in the tent on its dry, rustling carpet of leaves. The children sleep deeply, soundlessly. We lie close together. In the darkness there is no perspective. It is like being held in the palm of a hand.
All day and all night I am half asleep and half awake. I am thinking about the future, though these thoughts are wordless and indistinct. They are like running water, a single entity. They pour toward an edge, a precipice, and tumble over the side. I do not want to go home. More precisely, I don’t know how to go home. My consciousness runs swiftly, smoothly toward this edge and then tumbles over, a cataract. I need to find a path down out of these months in Italy. They stand behind us like mountains. To have climbed them, to have known their paths and peaks: in certain lights it has seemed that these are the dimensions of life itself, but lying in the tent I know this isn’t so. Life could become flat again, ordinary again. It is desire that is big and grand and treacherous; desire, not life. I remember the Apuan mountains, their abysses, their glinting white fastnesses of rock: we will pass them on the road home and look up from the flatlands at their awful faces. We will remember that we were once there. But we will pass them. We will stay on the road.
A big group of Italian teenagers arrives, and they pitch their tents around ours in a circle. They giggle and shriek and sing English pop songs all night. Our clothes are filthy; there is nowhere to sit, except on the ground. Our hair is matted and our tent is full of ants. We wake up on the fifth day and realize that we want to leave Baratti. We pack up the car, and follow this slender thread of desire north.
On the road outside La Spezia, the telephone rings. I have made some money: a South Korean publisher has bought the rights to one of my books, for a handsome sum. We cheer the South Koreans, zigzagging madly across both lanes of the N1. It is late afternoon, thirty-nine degrees, the sky gray and turbid and pregnant-looking. We turn off at Rapallo, looking for campsites. The road is dense with traffic. We crawl into town and out the other side, and follow the road down the Portofino peninsula. It does not seem likely that we will find a campsite along this road: the hills rise in steep green terraces to the right, and to the left plunge straight down to the sea. On the other side, back toward Rapallo, the cars have come to a standstill. The sky is clear here, and the sun is hot. A few people are getting out, to sit in the shade by the side of the road and wait. The rest keep their engines running and their tinted windows tight shut. Their forms can be glimpsed in the dark, air-conditioned interiors: they are like nocturnal animals, carved out of shadow, with strange glimmering accents embedded in their eyes and jewelry. There are some very expensive cars in the traffic jam. This is the rich Portofino crowd, whose giant yachts we see later in the harbor, dwarfing the narrow sunset-colored terraces. But the peninsula is beautiful, as lush and romantic as a Giorgione landscape, with its faded pink palazzi, its villas sunk in the trees, its road winding above the water. The cars form a little packed rope of anxiety, weaving through the loveliness of a dream.
It is past six o’clock and the children are hot and fretful. The dust of Baratti is everywhere, in our clothes and hair, caked in our nails. There is no turning back: the road the other way is at a standstill. We are being forced along the peninsula like something being digested. We inch toward Santa Margherita, and when we get there we abandon the car and walk in search of a hotel. The cheap hotels are full. The expensive hotels are full too. We try the ugly hotels: I feel sure that in Italy the ugly hotels will always have space. Up a backstreet I find a hotel that is situated in the middle of a concrete multistory car park. The receptionist is sitting in a glass box in a gray-carpeted foyer, from where long, low-ceilinged gray corridors with rows of identical doors extend out to every side. Through the foyer window, five or six feet away, I can see cars going up and down the concrete ramps of the car park: that is the only view. No other human being is visible, except for the receptionist in her box. She wears a red uniform, like an air hostess. She speaks to me through a grille. She tells me that the hotel is completely full.