Grove by Esther Kinsky

Author:Esther Kinsky
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Transit Books
Published: 2020-08-14T16:00:00+00:00

Swimming

WE SPENT TIME AT THE SEASIDE, some days vacillating indecisively between the open, free beaches and the private ones, which, subdivided into named zones, were enclosed by blue and green, colorful beach cottages. Lounge chairs stood in rows and a tanned muscleman, when presented with a receipt, would distribute them and assign visitors to a beach cabana.

The free beach lay outside of town, at the end of an avenue lined by stone pines. A path led up a narrow dune crest, no higher than an embankment. From there one looked onto the cornfields up country, pierced by rows of poplars, small farms and cars, glittering in the blazing sunlight on the coastal roads beyond. In the other direction one looked to the beach: to the stripes of garbage the surf would wash up, take away, throw back onto land. To the bathers, families with colorful sun umbrellas, large beach towels, dogs. That was the beach for people who lived at the seaside resort year-round, for the families of waiters, gelato shop employees, gas station attendants and car mechanics, of the small-shop owners and the intrepid drivers of the gray, three-wheeled delivery vehicles that overran the streets, transporting everything from fruit and vegetables to gas cylinders and balls of dirty laundry from the guesthouses. The mothers, children, feckless teenage brothers of all the businessmen, craftsmen, and employees also had to get this hot summer over with. Here the coconut and melon slice vendors, black from the sun, must have dozed away their rare breaks as well, without being afforded any shade. My father probably leaned toward the open beach—he had his notions about what constituted the real Italy—but we finally ended up in one of the monitored sections, furnished with bathing huts and lounge chairs and emblazoned with a name. My father paid the rental fee at a kiosk and the beach attendant presented us with lounge chairs and the key to a pale-blue beach hut, whose smell of mildew and salt and wood and urine left an indelible impression on me.

My father was bored at the beach. He read the newspaper, doled out the small fragments of language that we asked him for in order to communicate with other children and, once or twice a day, went for a very long swim. My father was a strong swimmer. In his youth he swam in the Rhine, from one bank to the other, where the river was wide and the current treacherous. After half an hour my mother would become nervous, and we would stand beside her at the edge of the water, shading our eyes with our hands, my nearsighted mother looking through her opera glasses out to the sea, which, in the afternoons above all, glittered insufferably, stinging the eyes. Of course we never could see my father. Near the beach there were always too many people in the surf, and farther out the tiny dots of brave swimmers were too small to recognize as individuals. But eventually we

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