For some time Amedeo had tended to reduce his participation in active life to the minimum. Not that he didn’t like action: on the contrary, love of action nourished his whole character, all his tastes; and yet, from one year to the next, the yearning to be someone who did things declined, declined, until he wondered if he had ever really harbored that yearning. His interest in action survived, however, in his pleasure in reading; his passion was always the narration of events, stories, the tangle of human situations. Nineteenth-century novels, especially, but also memoirs and biographies; and so on, down to thrillers and science fiction, which he didn’t disdain but which gave him less satisfaction because they were short. Amedeo loved thick tomes, and in tackling them he felt the physical pleasure of undertaking a great task. Weighing them in his hand, solid, closely-printed, squat, he would consider with some apprehension the number of pages, the length of the chapters, then venture into them, a bit reluctant at the beginning, without any desire to overcome the initial chore of remembering the names, catching the drift of the story; then, entrusting himself to it, running along the lines, crossing the grid of the uniform page, and beyond the leaden print the flame and fire of battle appeared, the cannonball that, whistling through the sky, fell at the feet of Prince Andrei, and the shop filled with engravings and statues where Frédéric Moreau, his heart in his mouth, was to meet the Arnoux family. Beyond the surface of the page you entered a world where life was more alive than here, on this side: like the surface of the water that separates us from that blue and green world, rifts as far as the eye can see, expanses of fine, ribbed sand, creatures half-animal and half-vegetable.
The sun beat down hard, the rock was burning, and after a while Amedeo felt he was one with the rock. He reached the end of the chapter, closed the book, inserting an advertising coupon to mark his place, took off his canvas cap and his glasses, stood up, half-dazed, and with broad leaps went down to the far end of the rock, where a group of kids, at all hours, were constantly diving in and climbing out. Amedeo stood erect on a shelf over the sea, not too high, a couple of meters above the water; his eyes, still dazzled, contemplated the luminous transparence below him, and all of a sudden he plunged. His dive was always the same, headlong, fairly correct, but with a certain stiffness. The passage from the sunny air to the tepid water would have been almost unnoticeable, if it hadn’t been abrupt. He didn’t surface immediately, he liked to swim underwater, down, down, his belly almost scraping bottom, as long as his breath held out. He very much enjoyed physical effort, setting himself difficult assignments (for this, he came to read his book at the cape, making the climb on his bicycle, pedaling up furiously under the noonday sun). Every time, swimming underwater, he tried to reach a wall of rocks that rose at a certain point from the sandy bed, covered by a thick patch of sea grasses. He surfaced among those rocks and swam around a bit; he began to do “the Australian crawl” methodically, but expending more energy than necessary; soon, tired of swimming with his face in the water, as if blind, he took to a freer side-stroke; seeing gave him more satisfaction than movement, and in a little while he gave up the side-stroke to drift on his back, moving less and less regularly and steadily, until he stopped altogether, in a dead-man’s float. And so he turned and twisted in that sea as if in a bed without sides, and he would set himself the goal of a sandbar to be reached, or he would limit the number of strokes, and he couldn’t rest until he had carried out that task; for a while he would dawdle lazily, then he would head out to sea, taken by the desire to have nothing around him but sky and water; for a while he would move close to the rocks scattered along the cape, not to overlook any of the possible itineraries of that little archipelago. But, as he swam, he realized that the curiosity occupying more and more of his mind was that of knowing the outcome – for example – of the story of Albertine. Would Marcel find her again, or not? He swam furiously or floated idly, but his heart was between the pages of the book left behind on shore. And so, with rapid strokes, he would regain his rock, seek the place for climbing up, and almost without realizing it, he would be up there, rubbing the Turkish towel over his back. Sticking the canvas cap on his head once more, he would lie again in the sun, to begin the next chapter.
He was not, however, a hasty, voracious reader. He had reached the age when re-reading a book for the second, third, or fourth time affords more pleasure than a first reading. And yet he still had many continents to discover. Every summer, the most laborious packing before the departure for the sea involved the heavy suitcase to be filled with books. Following the whims and dictates of the months of city life, each year Amedeo would choose certain famous books to re-read and certain authors to essay for the first time. And there, on the rock, he went through them, lingering over sentences, often raising his eyes from the page to ponder, to collect his thoughts. At a certain point, raising his eyes in this way, he saw that on the little pebble beach below, in the inlet, a woman had appeared and was lying there.
She was deeply tanned, thin, not very young, nor of great beauty, but nakedness became her (she wore a very tiny “two-piece”, rolled up at the edges to get as much sun as she could), and Amedeo’s eye was drawn to her. He realized that, as he read, he raised his eyes more and more often from the book to gaze into the air; and this air was the air that lay between that woman and himself. She was stretched out on the sloping shore, on a rubber mattress, and at every flicker of his pupils Amedeo saw her legs, not shapely but harmonious, the excellently smooth belly, the bosom slim in a perhaps not unpleasant way but probably sagging a bit, the shoulders a bit too bony and then the neck and the arms, and the face masked by the black eyeglasses and by the brim of the straw hat. Her face was slightly lined, lively, aware, and ironic. Amedeo classified the type: the independent woman, on holiday by herself, who dislikes crowded beaches and prefers the more deserted rocks, and likes to lie there and become black as coal; he evaluated the amount of lazy sensuality and of chronic frustration there was in her; he thought fleetingly of the likelihood of a rapidly consummated fling, measured them against the prospect of a trite conversation, a program for the evening, probable logistic difficulties, the effort of concentration always required to become acquainted, even superficially, with a person; and he went on reading, convinced that this woman couldn’t interest him at all.
But he had been lying on that stretch of rock for too long, or else those fleeting thoughts had left a wake of restlessness in him; anyway, he felt an ache, the harshness of the rock under the towel that was his only pallet began to chafe him. He got up to look for another spot where he could stretch out. For a moment, he hesitated between two places that seemed equally comfortable to him: one more distant from the little beach where the tanned lady was lying (actually behind an outcrop of the rock which blocked the sight of her), the other closer. The thought of approaching and of then perhaps being led by some unforeseeable circumstance to start a conversation and thus perforce to interrupt his reading, made him immediately prefer the farther spot; but when he thought it over, it actually would look as if, the moment that lady had arrived, he wanted to run off, and this might seem a bit rude; thus he picked the closer spot, since his reading so absorbed him anyway that the view of the lady – not specially beautiful, for that matter – could hardly distract him. He lay on one side, holding the book so that it blocked the sight of her, but it was awkward to keep his arm at that height and, in the end, he lowered it. Now the same gaze that ran along the lines encountered, every time he had to start a new line, just beyond the edge of the page, the legs of the solitary vacationer. She, too, had shifted slightly, looking for a more comfortable position, and the fact that she had raised her knees and crossed her legs precisely in Amedeo’s direction, allowed him to observe better her proportions, not at all unattractive. In short, Amedeo (though a shaft of rock was sawing at his hip) couldn’t have found a finer position: the pleasure he could derive from the sight of the tanned lady – a marginal pleasure, something extra, but not for that reason to
be discarded, since it could be enjoyed with no effort – did not mar the pleasure of reading, but was inserted into its normal process; now he was sure he could go on reading without being tempted to look away.
Everything was calm; only the course of his reading flowed on, for which the motionless landscape served as frame, and the tanned lady had become a necessary part of this landscape. Amedeo naturally was relying on his own ability to remain for a long time absolutely still, but he hadn’t taken into account the woman’s restlessness: she now rose, was standing, proceeding among the stones towards the water. She had moved – Amedeo understood immediately – to see, closer, a great medusa, that a group of boys was bringing ashore, poking at it with some reeds. The tanned lady bent towards the overturned body of the medusa and was questioning the boys; her legs rose from wooden clogs with very high heels, unsuited to those rocks; her body, seen from behind as Amedeo now saw it, was that of a woman more attractive, younger than she had first seemed to him. He thought that, for a man seeking a romance, that dialogue between her and the fisher-boys would have been a “classic” opening: approach, also remark on the capture of the medusa, and, in that way, engage her in conversation. The very thing he wouldn’t have done for all the gold in the world! he added to himself, plunging again into his reading. To be sure, this rule of conduct of his also prevented him from satisfying a natural curiosity concerning the medusa, which seemed, as he saw it there, of unusual dimensions, and also of a strange hue between pink and violet. This curiosity about marine animals, too, was in no way a side-track; it was coherent with the nature of his passion for reading; at that moment, in any case, his concentration on the page he was reading – a long descriptive passage – had been relaxing; in short, it was absurd that to protect himself against the danger of starting a conversation with that woman he should also deny himself spontaneous and quite legitimate impulses such as that of amusing himself for a few minutes by taking a close look at a medusa. He shut his book at the marked page and stood up: his decision couldn’t have been more timely: at that same moment the lady moved away from the little group of boys, preparing to return to her mattress. Amedeo realized this as he was approaching and felt the need of immediately saying something in a loud voice. He shouted to the kids: “Watch out! It could be dangerous!”
The boys, crouched around the animal, didn’t even look up: they continued, with the lengths of reed they held in their hands, to try to raise it and turn it over; but the lady turned abruptly and went back to the shore, with a half-questioning, half-fearful air. “Oh, how frightening! Does it bite?”
“If you touch it, it stings,” he explained and realized he was heading not towards the medusa but towards the lady, who, for some reason, covered her bosom with her arms in a useless shudder and cast almost furtive glances first at the supine animal then at Amedeo. He reassured her and so, predictably, they started conversing; but it didn’t matter, because Amedeo would soon be going back to the book awaiting him: he only wanted to take a glance at the medusa, and so he led the tanned lady over, to lean into the center of the circle of boys. The lady was now observing with repulsion, her knuckles against her teeth, and at a certain moment, as she and he were side by side, their arms came into contact and they delayed a moment before separating them. Amedeo then started talking about medusas: his direct experience wasn’t great, but he had read some books by famous fishermen and underwater explorers, so – skipping the smaller fauna – he promptly began talking about the famous manta. The lady listened to him, displaying great interest and interjecting from time to time, always irrelevantly, the way women will. “You see this red place on my arm? That wasn’t a medusa, was it?” Amedeo touched the spot, just above the elbow, and said no. It was a bit red because she had been leaning on it, while lying down.
With that, it was all over. They said good-bye, she went back to her place, he to his and resumed reading. It had been an interval lasting the right amount of time, neither more nor less, a human encounter, not unpleasant (the lady was polite, discreet, unassuming) precisely because it was barely adumbrated. Now in the book he found a far fuller and more concrete attachment to reality, where everything had a meaning, an importance, a rhythm. Amedeo felt himself in a perfect condition: the printed page opened true life to him, profound and exciting and, raising his eyes, he found a pleasant but casual juxtaposition of colors and sensations, an accessory and decorative world, which couldn’t commit him to anything. The tanned lady, from her mattress, gave him a smile and a wave, he replied also with a smile and a vague gesture, and immediately lowered his eyes. But the lady had said something.
“Eh?”
“You’re reading. Do you read all the time?”
“Mm . . .”
“Interesting?”
“Yes.”
“Enjoy yourself!”
“Thank you.”
He mustn’t raise his eyes again. At least not until the end of the chapter. He read it in a flash. The lady now had a cigarette in her mouth and motioned to him, as she pointed to it. Amedeo had the impression that for some time she had been trying to attract his attention. “I beg your pardon?”
“. . . match. Forgive me . . .”
“Oh, I’m very sorry. I don’t smoke . . .”
The chapter was finished. Amedeo rapidly read the first lines of the next one, which he found surprisingly attractive, but to begin the next chapter without concern he had to resolve as quickly as possible the matter of the match. “Wait!” He stood up, began leaping among the rocks, half-dazed by the sun, until he found a little group of people smoking. He borrowed a box of matches, ran to the lady, lighted her cigarette, ran back to return the matches, and they said to him, “Keep them, you can keep them.” He ran again to the lady to leave the matches with her, she thanked him, he waited a moment before leaving her, but realized that after this delay he had to say something and so he said: “You aren’t swimming?”
“In a little while,” the lady said. “What about you?”
“I’ve already had my swim.”
“And you’re not going to take another dip?”
“Yes, I’ll read one more chapter, then have a swim again.”
“Me, too, when I finish my cigarette, I’ll dive in.”
“See you later then.”
“Later . . .”
This kind of appointment restored to Amedeo a calm such as he – now he realized – had not known since the moment he became aware of the solitary lady: now his conscience was no longer oppressed by the thought of having to have any sort of relationship with that lady; everything was postponed to the moment of their swim – a swim he would have taken anyway, even if the lady hadn’t been there – and now he was able to abandon himself without remorse to the pleasure of reading. So thoroughly that he didn’t notice when, at a certain point – before he had reached the end of the chapter – the lady finished her cigarette, stood up, and approached him to invite him to go swimming. He saw the clogs and the straight legs just beyond the book, his eyes moved up, he lowered them again to the page – the sun was dazzling – and read a few lines in haste, looked up again, and heard her say: “Isn’t your head about to explode? I’m going to have a dip!” It was nice to stay there, to go on reading and to look up every now and then. But, since he could no longer put it off, Amedeo did something he never did: he skipped almost half a page, to the conclusion of the chapter, which he read, on the other hand, with great attention, then he stood up. “Let’s go. Shall we dive from the point there?”
After all the talk of diving, the lady cautiously slipped into the water from a ledge on a level with it. Amedeo plunged headlong from a higher rock than usual. It was the hour of the still-slow inclining of the sun. The sea was golden. They swam in that gold, somewhat separated: Amedeo at times sank for a few strokes under water and amused himself by frightening the lady, swimming below her. Amused himself, after a fashion: it was kid stuff, of course, but for that matter, what else was there to do? Swimming with ano
ther person was slightly more tiresome than swimming alone; but the difference, in any case, was minimal. Beyond the gold glints, the water’s blue deepened, as if from down below an inky darkness rose. It was useless: nothing equalled the savor of life found in books. Skimming over some bearded rocks in midwater and leading her, frightened (to help her onto a sandbar, he also clasped her hips and bosom, but his hands, from the immersion, had become almost insensitive, with white, wrinkled pads), Amedeo turned his gaze more and more towards land, where the colored jacket of his book stood out. There was no other story, no other possible expectation beyond what he had left suspended, between the pages where his book-mark was; all the rest was an empty interval.