The Beach by Cesare Pavese Read Free Book Online Page B

under the sun. Because Doro liked to rest during the hottest hours and I am unable to sleep during the day, I went inside merely to rid myself of Berti. Now the daily tedium of the hot and empty hours began. I wandered through the village, as always, but by now I knew every corner by heart. Then I took the road to the villa in the hope of talking to Clelia. But it was still very early and I stayed for a while ruminating on a low wall behind some trees that were silhouetted against the sea. Among other things I thought for the first time that somebody not knowing Clelia well and seeing the two of us strolling and laughing together would have said there was something between us a little stronger than friendly acquaintance.
    I found Clelia in the garden, lying back in the shade on a wicker chair. She seemed glad to see me and started talking. She told me that Doro was sick of always painting the sea and wanted to stop. I couldn't hold back a smile. "Your friend Guido will be happy," I said. "Why?" Then I tried to explain that, according to Guido, Doro was thinking more of his painting than of her and that this was the reason for their quarrels.
    "Quarrels?" Clelia said, frowning.
    I was irritated. "Come now, Clelia, don't try to make me believe that you haven't been fighting a little. Remember the evening when you asked me to keep him company and distract him..."
    Clelia listened, slightly offended, and kept shaking her head. "I never said a thing," she muttered. "I don't remember." She smiled. "I don't want to remember. And don't you play the home- wrecker."
    "Ye gods," I said. "The first day I was here. We had just got back from that trip where we were shot at..."
    "Wonderful!" Clelia exclaimed. "That little white man and his monkey shines ?"
    I had to smile, and Clelia said: "Everyone takes me literally. You all remember what I say. And you grill me, you want to know." She clouded over again. "It's like being back in school."
    "For my part..." I grumbled.
    "People should never remember the things I say. I talk and talk because I have a tongue in my head, because I don't know how to be alone. Don't you take me seriously too,- it's not worth the trouble."
    "Oh, Clelia," I said, "are we tired of life?"
    "Of course not. It's so beautiful," she said, laughing.
    Then I said that I no longer understood poor Doro. Why should he want to stop painting? He had become so good at it.
    Clelia grew pensive and said that if she weren't what she was— a bad child who didn't know how to make anything—she would have painted the sea herself, she liked it so much. It was something of her own; not only the sea but the houses, the people, the steep stairs, all of Genoa. "I like it all so much," she said.
    "Perhaps this is why Doro ran away. For the same reason. He likes the hills."
    "That might be. But he says his country is beautiful only in his memory. I couldn't be like that. I have nothing beyond myself."
    We were waiting for Doro, facing one another across a small table. Clelia went back to telling me about her girlhood and laughed a great deal about the ingenuousness of that life—in the closed atmosphere of elderly men who wanted to make her a countess and bounced her around between three houses: a shop, a palazzo, and a villa. What pleased her was the triangle of streets that linked them together through all that mass of city. Her uncle's palazzo was an ancient building with frescoes and brocades, full of glass cases like a museum. From the road its big leaded windows seemed to jut out over the sea. As a child, she said, it had been a nightmare to enter that immense hallway and spend her afternoons in the gloomy darkness of the small rooms. Beyond the roof was the sea, the air, the busy street. She had to wait until her mother had finished whispering with the old lady, and endlessly, martyred by boredom, she used to raise her eyes to the dark pictures where mustaches glimmered, cardinals' hats, pale cheeks of ageless, doll-like