Summer Doorways by W. S. Merwin

Author:W. S. Merwin
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781619028142
Publisher: Counterpoint
Published: 2015-12-18T05:00:00+00:00

22

In the morning Alan arrived not long after breakfast. There was the Jeep station wagon parked down on the wharf. He had already spoken with the harbor officials, and he came on board with a couple of them. We went through most of the arrival formalities on the table in the dining room where we had just had breakfast. Then our trunks were taken down the gangplank and packed into the car, the last arrival procedures were taken care of at an office along the wharf, and Alan drove us through the high gates at the end of it, into Italy.

It was (I remember happily) long before the days of autoroutes, overpasses, underpasses, and of much mechanized traffic. Ours was one of the few cars. Even around the wharves there were mule carts, and more of them as we made our way through back streets to the edge of town, into thoroughfares, turning at corners between small stuccoed houses with vegetable gardens fitting tightly around them, vines deep on their walls. We edged out of town, westward, to a small road along the coast, all of us chattering, excited to be there.

The road led past beaches and followed the tops of bluffs overlooking long, inviting bays: the Riviera di Ponente. As the day warmed, Peter wanted to stop for a swim, and Alan pulled over to a level space on the ocean side of the road, where we looked down a bank to a stretch of sand and a few clusters of people bathing or lying in the sun. We got out and started rummaging in our belongings for bathing suits.

Since his first appearance on the freighter that morning, I had sensed an aspect of Alan that I had not glimpsed before. It seemed to be a recollection of pleasure and freedom, a reassured confidence, a savored return to a world he had missed, to a kind of ease and indulgence that he may have recalled, or imagined that he recalled, from childhood. It appeared in the way he waved aside overconcern about modesty in getting into our bathing suits, pointing out people down on the beach changing under the token screening of their towels. His manner suggested that he had returned to, and was introducing us to, a liberated Old-Worldliness that had always been part of his birthright. We changed behind the open car doors, and as Alan and the boys and I stepped naked from clothes into swimming trunks, we saw three young Italian women watching us with unabashed interest from the beach below. Alan waved, and they waved back, laughing, and it confirmed something he felt about being there. But he locked the car carefully before we left it.

After the swim in the Mediterranean we went on along the coast for a few hours, pausing at a beach with fishing boats and a restaurant for a lunch of fish and shellfish just brought in, and then at Portofino to sip mineral water and eat ices, looking down to the masts and slender decks of yachts in the protected basin below.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.