His wife and his son turned and swam back toward the boat, but they took their time. It was not late, they knew. Night was not falling, and there was no sign of a storm. They would not miss dinner at the pensione. They knew from experience that they would reach the pensione long before the tables were set, but they had no choice. They climbed aboard while the father weighed anchor, shouted warnings to the swimmers, and asked advice from the shore. He finally got the boat into the bay, and started around the point.
They had just disappeared when one of the beach boys climbed to the highest rock and waved a red shirt, shouting, “Pesce cane! Pesce cane!”
All the swimmers turned, howling with excitement and kicking up a heavy surf, and swam for the shore. Over the bar where they had been one could see the fin of a shark. The alarm had been given in time, and the shark seemed surly as he cruised through the malachite-colored water. The bathers lined the shore, pointing out the menace to one another, and a little child stood in the shallows shouting, “Brutto! Brutto! Brutto!” Then everyone cheered as down the path came Mario, the best swimmer in the village, carrying a long spear gun. Mario worked as a stonemason, and for some reason?perhaps his industriousness?had never fitted into the scene. His legs were too long or too far apart, his shoulders were too round or too square, his hair was too thin, and that luxuriance of the flesh that had been dealt out so generously to the other bucks had bypassed poor Mario. His nakedness seemed piteous and touching, like a stranger surprised in some intimacy. He was cheered and complimented as he came through the crowd, but he could not even muster a nervous smile, and, setting his thin lips, he strode into the water and swam to the bar. But the shark had gone, and so had most of the sunlight. The disenchantment of a dark beach moved the bathers to gather their things and start for home. No one waited for Mario; no one seemed to care. He stood in the dark water with his spear, ready to take on his shoulders the safety and welfare of the community, but they turned their backs on him and sang as they climbed the cliff.
To hell with “La Famiglia Tosta,” Seton thought. To hell with it. This was the loveliest hour of the whole day. All kinds of pleasure?food, drink, and love?lay ahead of him, and he seemed, by the gathering shadow, gently disengaged from his responsibility for television, from the charge of making sense of his life. Now everything lay in the dark and ample lap of night, and the discourse was suspended.
The stairs they took went past the ramparts they had rented, which were festooned with flowers, and it was on this stretch from here up to the drawbridge and the portal, that the triumph of the King, the architect, and the stonemasons was most imposing, for one was involved in the same breath with military impregnability, princeliness, and beauty. There was no point, no turning, no tower or battlement where these forces seemed separate. All the ramparts were finely corniced, and at every point where the enemy could have been expected to advance, the great, eight-ton crest of the Christian King of Spain proclaimed the blood, the faith, and the good taste of the defender. Over the main portal, the crest had fallen from its fine setting of sea gods with tridents and had crashed into the moat, but it had landed with its blazonings upward, and the quarterings, the cross, and the marble draperies could be seen in the water.
Then, on the wall, among the other legends, Seton saw the words “Americani, go home, go home.” The writing was faint; it might have been there since the war, or its faintness might be accounted for by the fact that it had been done in haste. Neither his wife nor his children saw it, and he stood aside while they crossed the drawbridge into the courtyard, and then he went back to rub the words out with his fingers. Oh, who could have written it? He felt mystified and desolate. He had been invited to come to this strange country. The invitations had been clamorous. Travel agencies, shipping firms, airlines, even the Italian government itself had besought him to give up his comfortable way of life and travel abroad. He had accepted the invitations, he had committed himself to their hospitality, and now he was told, by this ancient wall, that he was not wanted.
He had never before felt unwanted. It had never been said. He had been wanted as a baby, wanted as a young man, wanted as a lover, a husband and father, wanted as a scriptwriter, a raconteur and companion. He had, if anything, been wanted excessively, and his only worry had been to spare himself, to spread his sought-after charms with prudence and discretion, so that they would do the most good. He had been wanted for golf, for tennis, for bridge, for charades, for cocktails, for boards of management?and yet this rude and ancient wall addressed him as if he were a pariah, a nameless beggar, an outcast. He was most deeply wounded.
Ice was stored in the castle dungeon, and Seton took his cocktail shaker there, filled it, made some Martinis, and carried them up to the battlements of the highest tower, where his wife joined him to watch the light ring its changes. Darkness was filling in the honeycombed cliffs of Tarlonia, and while the hills along the shore bore only the most farfetched resemblance to the breasts of women, they calmed Seton’s feelings and stirred in him the same deep tenderness.
“I might go down to the cafe after dinner,” his wife said, “just to see what sort of a job they did with the dubbing.”
She did not understand the strength of his feelings about writing for television; she had never understood. He said nothing. He supposed that, seen at a distance, on his battlement, he might have been taken for what he was not?a poet, a seasoned traveler, a friend of Elsa Maxwell’s, a prince or a duke?but this world lying all about him now did not really have the power to elevate and change him. It was only himself?the author of “The Best Family”?that he had carried at such inconvenience and expense across borders and over the sea. The flowery and massive setting had not changed the fact that he was sunburned, amorous, hungry, and stooped, and that the rock he sat on, set in its place by the great King of Spain, cut into his rump.
At dinner, Clementina, the cook, asked if she might go to the village and see “La Famiglia Tosta.” The boys, of course, were going with their mother. After dinner, Seton went back to his tower. The fishing fleet had begun to go out past the mole, their torches lighted. The moon rose and blazed so brightly on the sea that the water seemed to turn, to spin in the light. From the village he could hear the bel canto of mothers calling their girls, and, from time to time, a squawk from the television set. It would all be over in twenty minutes, but the sense of wrongdoing in absentia made itself felt in his bones. Oh, how could one stop the advance of barbarism, vulgarity, and censoriousness? When he saw the lights his family carried coming up the stairs, he went down to the moat to meet them. They were not alone. Who was with them? Who were these figures ascending? The doctor? The Mayor? And a little girl carrying gladioli. It was a delegation?and a friendly one, he could tell by the lightness of their voices. They had come to praise him.
“It was so beautiful, so comical, so true to life!” the doctor said.
The little girl gave him the flowers, and the Mayor embraced him lightly. “Oh, we thought, signore,” he said, “that you were merely a poet.”
