The cloud moved slowly over the beach, like fresh summer linen, crisp and creaseless, and soft; so soft that it broke apart just above where I lay on a sun bed, still wet, and its two untethered halves drifted on at slightly different paces towards the green hills that rose gently to the west. I closed my eyes, and waited for some minutes to pass. When I looked again in that direction, I could no longer pick out the two halves from the handful of other clouds that hovered just off the horizon. The sky above was now clear. My eyes moved from the terraced trees and villas that studded the sloping hills and I looked once again ahead of me, into the untroubled and endless sea.
The languid Mediterranean was reposed in its eternal inspiration, and that brilliance kept alive in me a spark of hope that the strip of beach on which I found myself would turn up something special, something worth lying around for. Nothing was lacking in the setting; around me to the right and left were sun beds, only moderately peopled due to being the private preserve of the hotel to which they, the beds and the people, belonged. The hotel I was visiting only for a night, a stopover on the recommendation of a friend. It had the good grace to be partly occupied- considering the season one might even say it seemed to be unpopular- which added immensely to its appeal. It was very pretty, well situated and, as far as I knew, didn’t lack for any of the usual luxuries. The beach, which I had decided to spend the afternoon enjoying, was predictably pristine. The garden behind the main building of the hotel opened up onto the bay, which was fringed in the middle with fine sand giving way to turquoise and then clear, dark water; the land curved round for some miles on both sides in a wide, laurel-like blush of hilly green country, crowning the sea. I had picked a lounger, mostly at random, and after a short swim I lay down under the sun.
There were a few lone figures and couples lying on sun beds, but most of the beach citizenry was arranged in groups in the sea, clustered around three floating rings over which some of them were sprawled. During the course of an hour I saw people detach themselves from the groups in ones and twos to go back to their sunbed camps, and others got up noiselessly from the sand and joined a group in the sea. This all happened at random and undefined intervals, and soon the movement began to seem not like the decided action of individuals but a natural phenomenon. Through half closed eyes, in the streaked sun that filtered through my lashes, the bodies became amorphous, the easy rolling of the waves up and down the beach would carry people out and back, like it might carry shells or little rocks; their movement became the flowing displacement of grains of sand, inevitable and inconsequential. Occasionally, a spurt of laughter or a particular phrase drifted down to me from one of the groups, coming up the beach on the tip of a wave, perhaps with a returning man or woman for company. And once, a group transferred wholesale from sea onto land. That was a wonderful migration, and only slowly, through the flowing out and the flowing in, did the natural equilibrium re-establish itself. Although that heady Mediterranean afternoon laze was certainly upon me, at such a change I could not help but open my eyes to look around. When I focused on them, my companions on the beach presented a problem.
There was initially the circumstance that, justifiably or not, puts all inhabitants of Europe on immediate alert: the American accent, which was almost ubiquitously in use. What were they up to, the Americans? On the beach, one man wore a baseball cap which didn’t suit his face, another was over-muscled and kept looking around him; in the sea, a young swimmer was perched on a floating recliner paddling her feet uselessly; a middle aged, attractive woman unceasingly called out “now don’t go in too deep” to her two children in a Southern drawl; behind me two women were lying side by side, one, short but shapely, had been talking about face creams for at least the last quarter of an hour, whilst the other, perhaps bored, I hoped, stared somewhere behind her sunglasses, immobile on her back. Three beds to my left, a man talked to his wife about returning to last night’s restaurant for dinner. Before and during and after all this was that same unfortunate disadvantage of audibly American voices, and to purify myself of my unbecoming and atavistic judgement, I thought regretfully of a time in a muddled vision of the past where, I assumed, an American accent might have meant more than only the likelihood of having an afternoon by the sea thoroughly ruined.
Being lately so accustomed to a sanitised life, I was uniquely vulnerable against the bad air of poor taste. They talked unceasingly. I viewed with suspicion both the possibility that they all knew each other and the alternative, that they were not friends at all and had struck up so many conversations so uncaringly. Whilst I watched them, I became convinced that they didn’t understand anything at all; I felt the indignation of a sensitive soul towards insensitivity, and the anger of loss, for most of all I mourned the lost discomfort of possibility, that had been soothed by this new enjoyable and observational boredom. This irritation inhibited my otherwise complete enjoyment of the diamantine moment: that endless, anachronistic afternoon hour of the uttermost summer, when the sun expends a certain melancholic and fiercely assertive light, when the sea is gilded with the knowledge that its blazing glory will soon dim to a frigid closure, doomed at last to be spurned by its summer lovers, and claims all the warmth it can while the month lasts. “It is all ending,” whispered the waves, as the Americans babbled over that rare and strange language of the sea.
Straight ahead of me, on a floating recliner put out deeper than the rest of the swimmers, a young man was talking to a girl. Very soon they compelled all of my attention. The young man looked entirely at ease, his physique and handsome features seemed heroic in their commanding tranquillity. His head, framed by delicate Davidian curls, was thrown back, and the slight smile with which he braved the burning light was like a challenge to the sun. He was a sleeping Mars. Next to him, Venus lay with hair honey-blonde, slicked with seawater, her legs stretched straight out in an impression of proportioned length. I was most moved by her attitude, which seemed not sweetly naive and placidly good mannered, which had proved so infuriating in the others, but more attuned to the spirit of the country we were in - sultry, passionate, imperious. The two hardly moved, and for the next hour my eyes flickered back and forth out to them over the sea. A wistfulness accompanied her sweetly melodic laughter, ringing down to me over the echoing distance of the waves, joyful, but not innocent, a laughter full of knowledge and of sorrow. She often looked over her shoulder at the hills, or up at the seagulls in the azure sky through penetrating, narrowed eyes. What was she expecting from them, that she should interrupt her talk and fix them with such a gaze? In the intermittent moments when I closed my eyes under the sun and entered the half-dream, I saw the birds fly to the trees on the hills, coming back laden with lemons and figs to drop into her exquisite hands, or circle above and burst apart into a shower of raindrops, hot summer rain that fell on her shoulders, heating the blood as they trickled down her body, or maybe I saw them simply vanish, each replaced with a single chrysanthemum that fell gently through the air, until she reached out, plucked the flower and placed it in her glittering hair. When I opened my eyes and saw reality again, it all seemed very possible to me, and I felt impelled by imagination to see fulfilled in this world, where we both resided, whatever she might whim in the intimate world of her dreams.
Only fleeting were the short moments of jealousy when I reminded myself that they were for each other and not for me. This emotion was secondary and surmountable, both because my philosophy was more committed to the abstract than the practical, but also because I knew to be content with my own lot, in which I had not suffered untowardly. Instead, I resolved that this couple had redeemed the population of the beach and that I should say something to gain their acquaintance. I threw aside my shirt and made for the sea, swimming in long easy strokes out to where the water became deep. To disguise my motives, and perhaps in part to show some athletic kinship through my prowess as a swimmer, I completed a few swift lengths between two arbitrary points. The cool water was sent flooding over my ears by the movement of my arms, and I was claimed for those stopped moments by the lyrical silence of the sea, conscious only of the effort of my own regulated breaths, everything, sea and sky, becoming blue. When I finally stood up again in the shallows, all the sounds of life- that leisured Mediterranean life that consists only of foaming waves and chirping birds and the tinkling of glasses from beachside bars- returned in their fullness. I would surely have been tempted into distraction by the pleasure of that return, but for the fact that I had come up looking straight at the girl, and she was looking straight at me. I paddled over to them.
I knew from overheard conversation that they were American, though she had spoken in a pleasant mid-Atlantic tone that was different from the other voices on the beach.
“Howdy,” I called out to them in my unaltered English accent, for I thought it might be amusing.
The young man smiled slightly, though it might have been the same smile he was wearing before, and otherwise remained totally motionless, but the girl laughed and said “howdy” back.
“It’s quite pleasant out here, I’d say you’ve nabbed the best spot.”
“It’s a little too hot,” the girl replied.
“Why don’t you move, come and have a swim?” I said.
“Oh no,” she replied, “as you said, it’s the best spot.”
“Didn’t you say it’s a little too hot?”
“It is, but today I would like to be a little too hot. Besides, all the attention we’ve been getting from people like you on the beach makes up for it.”
I laughed. The young man shifted his pose to get a better look at me, though he seemed unsurprised at the animation with which the girl had answered me.
“I wondered if you had noticed my envious glances. So you won’t come in and have a paddle with me?” I asked.
“No, I’m afraid, and Jack doesn’t like to swim. Besides, you are doing such a good job that I think you can carry on by yourself.”
“That’s a very charming way to protect your real estate,” I laughed. “Very well, but I can’t promise to stop looking over at you.”
“Oh no, don’t even think about it,” she replied and lowered her head to fix me with a look that filled me with spirit. I pushed off from the platform a little way, smiled and gave a theatrical bow in the sea; I could sense they had decided on being friendly towards me and so I was perfectly satisfied with the conversation.
I nodded “good day”, and again to him, and they both signalled back as I turned and swam away.
From then on, as I tried to float around lazily, I had trouble keeping my balance or relaxing in any way. I was always straining my neck to see if they had moved, or sometimes just to look at them as they lay there soaking under the sun, as one can’t help looking at an attractive painting or the undulating pink of the southern sunset. The cool breeze whipped away beads of sweat that formed on my forehead in the heat of the day, but I was fuelled more by the intensity of having spoken, and in my head become associated in some exclusive manner, with them. We were, I imagined, a group of three kindred souls, inspired and enlightened, adrift of the common, quotidian bubbling of the others. Animated by an anticipation of how this newly conceived epoch of our lives might be nurtured, I was very much unable to enjoy my enforced isolation. What conversations would there be on the beach, at the bar, at dinner in the hotel restaurant, in what manner would we find each other and in few words say much that was easily understood? I began to trace out various contingencies, how my travel plans for the next week or so could be modified to accommodate a diversion if they fancied going somewhere, whether I would talk to them straight away or perhaps wait for the moment to present itself, who I might know that they knew in some way- and I felt sure there would be someone, somehow, from all the time I had spent on these shores- but I thought about how the name might emerge and what I would do with it when it did. When I closed my eyes the hot sun burned through my eyelids and filled my sea-dreaming with golden power. Under such a sun, the docility of all my fellow bathers, bar two, ought to have been impossible. All the limping normality, the perfectly parseable conversation, the innocuous and untroubling responses to the conventions of a moment, was anathema both to courage and to truth. The heat of the day, the bejewelled shoreline of lapis, topaz and emerald, made certain demands on my own spirit which I felt could not be fulfilled amongst these others, who I was sure had never failed to swim when they wanted to swim, who were incapable of the silence required to be buoyed by the lightness of this sea. It was only myself, Mars and Venus, and the secrets of a graceful enervation shared between us. When I turned my head and my eyes flicked open, I saw streaks of cloud aureate above the hills, until a large swell washed over me and cooled the ferocity of these convictions to a more melancholic certainty.
Soon, one of the frequent interruptions to my mid-sea doze yielded a result; I looked up to see that the recliner lay abandoned, and, twisting as I stood, I spotted the two lithe forms sauntering out of the water. They flashed gold and silver as they stepped carefully among the sands, their bodies flickering as the sharpness of the light refracted off the sheen of water that remained wrapped around them, reticent to let go of the smooth and bronzed skin. They made their way with perfect poise, up the sand and away from me. I watched them go with relish.
Then they began to walk slightly apart, and slowly I realised they were going towards different parts of the beach. I drew in my breath and held my nerve tight. The young man stopped first, and I saw him put his arm around a different woman- indeed the one that I recalled had been lounging behind me earlier, talking about face creams in futile terms- he lay down next to her on the sunbed and his lips began to move, participating somehow in the discussion between the woman and her friend. Unbidden, my mind was assailed by an entire picture of existence beginning with the conversation in which he had foolishly just assented, the frivolous cacophony of material things or some paper-thin metaphysics, and ended with a world bare of all sensible feeling. With that profound sense of misery, I watched the colossal and majestic Olympian figure reduced to an insignificant, trifling man. This metamorphosis took only a second, and in the next second came a new mixture of panic and possibility- the latter a hope born of despair- with which I remembered Venus. Still she walked down the beach, in desperation I tried to arrest her steps with my transfixed eyes and bring them over to me! Venus anadyomene, with all the sensuous grace of the ancient world reborn, walked up to a man, a man with any number of imperfections, like other men, a man outside of my mythmaking and therefore a man slightly balding, slightly boorish, slightly nervous and confused, a man with a grotesque laugh, a disgusting appetite and an illiterate, jealous history- in my eyes a lame man with blackened hands- and bestowed on him a kiss devoid of appetite.
Feeling nothing less than disgust, I turned my face away from the beach. My heart, so light for those preceding heaven-bound hours, had become unbearably heavy and sought to sink down through the sea floor somewhere towards the core of the earth. With salt water in my eyes and deaf to all the sounds of the world, I stood in the shallows and looked towards the hills beyond the bay, from whence any rescue, if it were possible, would now have to arrive. After a period of profuse sighs, I abandoned all my hopes. Then I had no trouble floating at all, and I spent the rest of the afternoon unlaboured of cares, weightless out in the caressing sea, listening to the rhythmic susurration of the waves going up and down the beach. Clouds had reappeared in the sunny sky above me, arrayed in many shapes, and I looked nowhere but up at them: appearing, breaking up, floating by…
