The Beach Read Online Free PDF

unfaithfulness to all of us.
    "I don't think so," Clelia said. "I listen to it when I'm naked and stretched out. I don't care who sees us."
    "Who knows?" Guido said. "Who knows what conversations a woman like that carries on with the waves? I can imagine what you say, you and the sea, when you're in each other's arms."
    Doro's seascapes—he finished two in those few days—were done in pale, fuzzy colors, almost as though the very violence of the sun and air, dazzling and deafening, had muted his strokes. Someone had climbed up behind Doro, followed his hand, and given him advice. He didn't reply. Once he told me that one amuses oneself the best one can. I tried to tell him that he wasn't painting from life because the sea was a good deal more beautiful than his pictures; it was enough just to look at it. In his place and with the talent he had, I would have done portraits; it's satisfying to guess at people's natures. Doro laughed and said that when the season was over he would close his paintbox and think no more about it.
    We were joking about this one evening and strolling with Doro to a cafe for aperitifs when friend Guido observed in that crafty tone of his that nobody would have said that under the hard, dynamic shell of a man of the world there slumbered in Doro the soul of an artist. "Slumbers is right," Doro answered, careless and happy. "What doesn't slumber under the shells of us all? One just needs courage to uncover it and be oneself. Or at least to discuss it. There isn't enough discussion in the world."
    "Out with it," I told him. "What have you discovered?"
    "I've discovered nothing. But do you remember how much we talked when we were boys? We talked just for the fun of it. We knew very well it was only talk, but still we enjoyed it."
    "Doro, Doro," I said. "You're getting old. You should leave these things to those children you don't have."
    Then Guido burst out laughing, a pleasant laugh that screwed up his eyes. He put his hand on Doro's shoulder and held himself up, laughing. Incredulously, we looked at the half-bald head and hard eyes of a handsome man on vacation.
    "Something is slumbering in Guido, too," Doro said. "Sometimes he laughs like a half-wit."
    Later I noticed that Guido laughed this way only among men.
    That evening, after we had left Doro and Clelia at the gate of their villa, we dropped the car at the hotel and took a short walk together. Following the shore, we talked about our friends, almost against our wills. Guido explained Doro's trip and his unexpected return, making fun of the restless artist. Curious how Doro had succeeded in convincing everyone of the seriousness of his game. Our little circle was even talking about encouraging him to show his work and make of his art something one might call a profession. "But of course," Clelia chimed in later, "that's what I always tell him myself."
    "Bunk!" Guido said that evening.
    "But Doro is fooling," I said.
    Guido shut up for a while—he was wearing sandals and we shuffled along like a couple of monks. Then he stopped and declared sharply: "I know those two. I know what they are doing and what they want. But I don't know why Doro paints pictures."
    "What's the harm in it? It distracts him."
    What was wrong was that like all artists Doro was not satisfying his wife. "Meaning?" It meant that all this nervous brainwork was weakening his potency, the reason why all painters suffer periods of tremendous depression.
    "Not sculptors?"
    "All of them," Guido grumbled, "all those idiots who force their brains and don't know when to stop."
    We were standing in front of the hotel. I asked him what kind of life, then, ought one to lead. "A healthy life," he said. "Work but not slavery. Have a good time, eat and talk. Above all, have a good time."
    He stood in front of me, hands behind his back, swaying from side to side. His shirt, open and pulled back, gave him the air of a wise adolescent who knows the whole story, of a forty-year-old who has