The Homecoming

Actually it was just another day. I kept at it through the morning and the afternoon but packed up at five. That's when the light gets sentimental at Taormina. I had just gotten divorced. I was off sentimentality. I told myself I painted and lived better that way.

By 5:30 I was washed and shaved and went down for tea at the Mocambo. All the tourists do, but that never bothered me. It's fun to watch Viscount Charlie park, talking to his Porsche as if it were a recalcitrant Doberman. I enjoy the procession of nonobjective shirts, wraparound sunglasses, rinsed ponytails and custom-made sandals. I don't even mind the Mocambo orchestra heaping their everlasting Sigmund Romberg into the blue-gold air. I admire the cracked ancient steeple of Santo Agostino for enduring all this so well, and I like great Etna and the fuzzy Calabrian sea, between which the Taorminian mirage is suspended on a crazy cliff-borne trapeze. It's pleasant to see the grandeurs and the absurdities mingle with such nonchalance in the evening sun. It is a method of relaxation.

Sammy and Lilo turned up at the Mocambo that day, which was something of a surprise. The Mocambo terrace has a better view, more gapers and therefore less chic than the adjoining Anglo-American Tea Room. The choice between Mocambo and Anglo-American separates the transients from the residents. Sammy and Lilo are intensely resident. Sammy, of course, was born in Taormina, but the fact that no one calls him Salvatore anymore shows that he has ceased to be a native. The tennis pro of the town, he is, in a sense, also a bullfighter. Sammy's medium is ladies but the reverence and ruthlessness of his art would bring any Spanish arena to its feet. He is small, with black urgent African eyes, wavy hair and a Greek profile, and he moves with a matador's careless grace. In the past season he dispatched a newly widowed comtesse, a 17-year-old Belgian traveling with her journalist father, and a Milanese on a weekend visit to her invalid aunt. I think that what draws Sammy to women is their difficulties instead of their attractions. He loves to conquer the great world that comes down monthly to conquer Taormina. He is a man of gestures, not of satisfactions. A cigarette poses perennially (continued on page 158) Homecoming (continued from page 155) between his middle and index fingers but seldom touches his lips. He wears the finest crimson kerchief round his throat, and he insists on paying his father, a taxi driver, the full fare.

As for Lilo, his real name is Leland. (It is the custom of The Set here to Anglicize Italian names and Latinize Anglo-Saxon ones.) He is a thin elderly boy who's pushing 40 and tries to earn his large income with his perceptive-ness -- at the first of each month he mails a diary airmail registered to his solicitor in London. He mitigates his adenoids with wit. He loves being near Sammy as the landlubber loves the boardwalk. In fact, he cleans up after him: takes Sammy's discards to dinner; brings them news of Sammy's "indispositions"; sees them to the station, or maps out for them the best route to Naples. Being harmless to women, he is soothing to them; and being post-Sammy, their psyches are in states his diary can be perceptive about. It all works out well.

When I joined them that particular evening, they were sitting with Helga. Danish Helga, some butter king's daughter, was at the stage where Sammy still had his hand on the back of her chair, while Lilo already squeezed lemon into her tea. As we sipped and leaned, I realized why Sammy had picked the Mocambo. He was telling Helga about the scenic drive to Syracuse, but the real weight of his glances rested on the table to our immediate right.

Quite a girl occupied it. Her black bangs fringed the flat, simple, beautiful face frequent among our upper-class daughters. She must have been around 25 and her tight dungarees, crossed high, showed long, strictly made-in-America legs. A big blond young man in leather shorts sat by her side. At first he seemed part of our village-wide costume party, but it didn't take me long to recognize the real thing. He was a bona fide Alpine peasant. His hand, instead of grasping the cup by the handle, hugged it whole-hog. He lifted it when the girl raised hers; set it down the moment after she did. She broke off a bit of cake and he brushed away from her the crumbs scattered over her part of the table. She laughed. He didn't smile back, curiously enough. She fondled his elbow. He achieved a slow smile, but at the same time touched his pomaded hair, wiped off the grease against his shorts. She finished the cake. He removed the plate. She rapped him playfully across the knuckles, so playfully that she upset her mocha cup. That was it. Sammy tore the crimson kerchief off his neck and dammed the black flow.

"Thank you!" cried the girl.

"Nothing, absolutely," said Sammy, whose English is grave, quite precise and preferably polysyllabic.

"A waiter should do that!"

"Ah," Sammy said, "you are new in Taormina."

"How did you know?"

"To rely on waiters here," Lilo said, "is to go on a reducing diet."

The girl laughed. There were introductions; the tables were moved closer. She was Doris. And that -- she ran her hand over her companion's arm -- that was Ferdinand. I suppose it was her eyebrows that kept her face from a mask-like perfection. They were vivid and black, barely tamed by tweezers. Perhaps gross, if they hadn't always budged with little peremptory motions. The whole girl was peremptory, full of an innocent, exuberant, dainty suddenness which her eyebrows punctuated. Up they flew as she called, "Garçon!" And in defiance of tradition Giacomo came running to wipe the table. Up went the brows as she stopped her Ferdinand's hand: "There you go with the plates. The bus boy will do that -- foolish Ferdy!"

She turned to us. "Will you please forgive Ferdinand?" She stroked his arm. "He isn't used to cafés yet. He's a carver of Christs, do you know? Wayside shrines? Beautiful things!"

On she went. Had we heard of Brittlug -- Brittlug, the Tyrol? That's where she had found Ferdinand. That's where she had broken her ankle slaloming this winter. A lovely place, Brittlug, but not even on the map. Practically a secret! Please never breathe a word of it to anyone? Keep it unspoiled, like Ferdinand? She patted him on the neck. But the Brittlug people! Her eyebrows plummeted slightly into a frown. Dreadful characters. They'd been such beasts about Ferdy going away with her. But why shouldn't he? He'd been a sweet when she'd been down -- her own night-and-day nurse. And every morning he'd taken her broken-ankle shoe and brought back a slipperful of mountain flowers. So afterward she just had to scoop him into her Midgy. (Her chin gave a little toss at the MG sunning itself in front of the Mocambo.) Imagine, he'd never been in Cortina. Just across the border, two hours from Brittlug, and never been there. Not to speak of Venice or Rome which had just bowled him over -- hadn't they? She gently pulled a hair on his wrist. He nodded. His fingers felt again for the alien pomade. "Bowled over both of us!" she said. "Taormina, too."

"You have the intention to stay long, we hope?" Sammy asked. His hand had slipped off Helga's chair to flick an ash.

"We have to wait for the permicion," Ferdinand enunciated unexpectedly in very careful English.

"Ah, the permicion," Sammy said. It is part of Sammy's personality to shun questions. If he doesn't understand, he leans back and repeats.

"The permicion to get married, from the American Government." The phrase seemed quite familiar to Ferdinand.

Doris took Ferdinand's head between her hands. "Sh! Sh! Not c!" she said, shaking his head fondly. "It's permishion!" She turned to us, leaving an arm around his neck. "Don't Austrians talk nicely? I once had a dentist in Kitzbühel. All he wore in his office was the tiniest leather shorts and all he could say was 'I lover your toot.'"

"Permishion," Ferdinand said low, for her.

"He learns everything," Doris said. "He's so big he couldn't even get into my Midgy. But he learned how to collapse himself!"

"Excuse me," Sammy said. He had sprinkled Doris while wringing the coffee out of his kerchief. With a whisk of a napkin he wiped the drop off the smoothness of her upper arm. "Your car," Sammy said, "it has the possibility of going on top of Monte Tauro. The singular spot in Italy where you can see two volcanoes."

"I can't resist volcanoes!" Doris exclaimed.

"Etna and Stromboli," Sammy said.

Helga remarked that Sammy had never told her about that.

"You have a Mercedes." Sammy put his arm back on Helga's chair. "The Mercedes is too big for the Two Volcano Road."

I got up at that point. I said I had a date that night, which was perfectly true, and went off to search for my check. But when I had finished my business with Giacomo, Lilo hailed me on my way out.

"Emergency!" Lilo called. "Tell him in German. Tell him it's all right to yank that off." He pointed at the plumed knight's helmet hanging from the flagpole above the table to advertise the "Orlando" puppet show.

"Just the plume, not the helmet!" Doris begged, and her fist was a small soft hammer against Ferdinand's arm. "Tell Ferdy I'll pay for it. Sometimes we have such language trouble. It's so beautiful!"

Her eyebrows yearned toward me from the perfect sun-flushed oval of her face. Even her shoulders rose under the pastel polo shirt to back her appeal. She was the prettiest thing I had seen in months. I became quite angry.

"I wanted to ask you," I said, "since when does the Government give Americans permission to marry?"

"The consul has to get one, doesn't the, if he's going to marry us?" she said, mildly astonished."Please!" Her head fell against Ferdinand's shoulder, sigh (continued on page 219) Homecoming(continued from page 158) ing at the plume. "It'll make such a dreamy hat ..."

Sammy reached across Helga to waylay Giacomo. He produced two discreet 1000-lira notes, jerking his thumb upward: "For the puppet man. OK?"

"Now it's all right," Doris said to Ferdinand. "You climbed for the edelweiss at Cortina for me, didn't you? And the edelweiss was much more difficult!"

Ferdinand put his hands round the mocha cup. "It was just for you, in Cortina," he said to the cup.

"The plume's just for me!"

"It was different," Ferdinand said quietly.

"Ferdy! You mean we were alone in Cortina? Only because my leg was still bad! We couldn't go out and meet people and so on! Don't be so desperate because I'm more lively now!"

She put her arms round his torso and gave a mock groan to hoist him. "Oohchch!"

It brought him to his feet. The six-foot-three of him was standing, heavy-ribbed gray socks, leather shorts, leather braces and all. He drew his hand across his mouth slowly as I've seen Alpine peasants do when weighing uncertain weather. But I realized now that there was nothing of the yokel in him. His eyes were deep-set, deep brown -- unusual in a man of his coloring. He looked at the girl fixedly and, as his hand sank from his face to his side, I suspected that he was appalled, had been appalled, perhaps, for days. His tensed, rigid bulk, his jutting profile and heaped-up hair mass reminded me, for all his youth, of a captive forest patriarch -- animalistic, saintly, baffled at the same time. There was about him a trapped uprooted splendor on which the curiosity of the Mocambo fed, a many-antlered magnificence helpless amid the bars and stares of a zoo.

Then he leaped, reached the flagpole with both hands, chinned himself up, came astraddle with a swoop of his legs, slid forward, tore off the string from which the helmet hung, jumped down.

Sammy took the helmet from him and put it on Doris' black hair. He gave her neck a light stroke. "I dub you the knight," he said.

"Thank you!" she cried, and pressed Ferdinand's and Sammy's hands against herself. She really was the prettiest thing in months.

I realized that I was still standing there and went on home.

• • •

But Taormina is a small if high-class hole. You can't lose anybody. Two hours later I was on my way to meet my date's train. A path leads from the village at the top of the cliff to the station and Mazarro beach at the bottom. I had more than two thirds of the way behind me when I saw them, Doris and Ferdinand, on Mazarro. He knelt before her, removing her sandals; he blew a bit of sand off her instep. They ran. He in old-fashioned-looking striped shorts, she in a golden two-piece. They ran hand in hand till they hit the surf. I lost them quickly in the glitter of the sunset waves. Which was just as well, for I heard the whistle of my train.

My guest that evening was one of a series sent me by a positive New York aunt who wants to restore me to marriage and to usefulness. This particular visitor wasn't bad. She received standard treatment. Dinner at José's, short guided tour along the Corso Umberto, La Taverna. La Taverna constitutes the better part of our night life and provides local color in the form of sleepy waiters in old Sicilian costume. While the band played Anima e Core I found out that her fiancé had fallen at Salerno. Afterward, I inferred, she had become hostess-housekeeper to her brother, a bachelor politician in a New England state; he had become an attorney general but nothing had happened to her. I guess her three months' trip to Europe was supposed to make something happen at last.

I must confess that though I remember everything else so well, I have forgotten her name. But still vivid in my mind is how compliantly she danced, and that the Mediterranean sun had darkened and dimpled what was probably a pale jagged face in Vermont, and that she threw her head back carefully when laughing to make her neck stay smooth. And that, throughout the evening, she waited. It might have been quite nice to hold onto her hand a moment longer than necessary after a rumba, and to remark that it was a little ill-considered of her to move on so soon to Messina tomorrow without giving me the chance to show her the Greek amphitheater. But it wasn't in me -- I'd had it for a while. In the alcove across the dance floor sat Doris and Ferdinand.

Their company, of course, was Sammy, Lilo and Helga. Since they were in my direct line of vision, I changed seats. I didn't want to stare past my visitor too often. Yet either out of the corner of my eye or while I was on the dance floor, the whole spectacle forced itself on me in trombone-deafened pantomime.

First, during rumbas, Lilo danced with Doris, Sammy with Helga. The knight's plume was pinned to Doris' dress hilariously like a corsage and Ferdinand sat lone and upright on his chair, watching it. Then, during fox trots, Lilo danced with Danish Helga and Sammy with Doris. But Doris ran back to the table and Ferdinand had to help her take off her shoes so she wouldn't be taller than Sammy. Waltzes came on; with Ferdinand's help she slipped into her shoes to dance with Lilo. Sammy fanned himself behind Doris' back to indicate to Helga that he was hot. Helga tried to giggle with Ferdinand, but only got his lips into some courteous movement. He kept looking for Doris' plume. Tangos began and Doris threw off her shoes to dance with Sammy. Lilo and Helga smoked. Ferdinand sat very upright, staring into the dance floor. I don't believe he could see the plume anymore, for the lights had dimmed. I did, since I was dancing myself with my visitor, who moved well, smiled steadily, had soft compliant tango-thighs not averse to contact.

The plume was no longer pinned to Doris' dress. It must have been an obstacle to the rapt deft ardor of Sammy's swaying; his one arm curved tight into the small of her back while the other raised her hand to an oblivious height. The plume hung obliquely from Sammy's teeth, bobbing now and then into Doris' armpit. She would give a small tickled scream and try to snatch the plume with her own teeth, in vain. Once she caught me watching and tossed me the headlong smile of a child caught in ardent play -- the kind of insidiously lovely girl-child you want to kiss hard and spank hard at the same time. I decided to dance cheek to cheek with my visitor. It was a form of self-defense against the child. It didn't work. I kept on watching.

Intermission: Sammy whispered with the orchestra, Doris stuck her plume into Ferdinand's hair. He removed it. She shrugged, drank, slumped, didn't bother to put on her shoes again. The lights dimmed; barefoot, she receded with Sammy into a thicket of tangos. Helga bent with Lilo over a caricature Lilo was drawing on a napkin.

Ferdinand sat upright. Suddenly he was up. He walked to the wardrobe girl. A moment later he groped onto the dance floor in his leather shorts, a baffled giant wading into a waist-high creek. He threw the lace stole across Doris' shoulders, led her to the door. But there he had to stop, stoop, to put on her shoes. It was enough time for the three others to catch up with them. Sammy offered Lilo's caricature to Doris. Their laughter continued into the outside as the orchestra played Anima e Core again.

We left shorthly after them. I became aware of a certain scared expectancy in my visitor after our cheek-to-cheek, and decided there was no point in leading her on. I told her that the Greek amphitheater wasn't half as interesting as Messina's Montasoli Fountain. But I suppose it was some sort of an evening for her. I kissed her in the lobby of the San Domenico and on the whole didn't bring it off too badly. Afterward, I combed the cafés. Nothing. Doris and her friends were nowhere.

• • •

The following day I worked till dinner and for some time after it. Worked fairly well, as a matter of fact. But suddenly, around nine, there sneaked into the house a wicked silence that drove me out. I walked the length of the Corso, past the couples and the café tinkle and the smell of olive oil from the trattorias mixed with the women's perfumes, and it was fine. But then I reached the piazza in front of the Mocambo, and it was bad. For this is a piazza only by day. By night it becomes a silly and evil veranda. From it the cliff falls away into the sea in a darkness of granite and groves. The exhalation of oleander and jasmine, the star-far lights of Calabria, the soft echoed bark of dogs, and the twinkle of boats upon the bay -- all that, all right. I had become used to it.

But that night there was the additional excess of a rife moon and two violins from the Mocambo swarming in the breeze. A couple stood silhouetted in front of me, and the girl, a short, exquisitely scented creature, reached up slowly along her lanky escort's back and anchored her hand in the hair on his nape. For a moment I tried to recall my ex-visitor's hotel reservation in Messina. She had had those nice tango-thighs. And telegrams are dirt cheap in Italy. But it wasn't in me. It just wasn't in me. Being with a girl in such a place at such a moment is corny, I told myself, though being alone is terrible.

And then I saw Ferdinand. He must have just said goodnight to Lilo and Helga; his back was still curved in the medieval bow that has survived in the courtesy of the Alpine peasant. Lilo walked away, already "cleaning up," for his arm was thrust through Helga's, gesturing. She sent out a thin, premeditated titter. There was another giggle in the dark square, perhaps at Ferdinand. He stood alone now, an oversize, strangely dressed apparition. He drew his hand across his mouth, blinking up at Etna. He stood so damned much alone that I went to him and wished him good evening.

Etna was useful because we could look at it and I could bring up last year's eruption. But after a while that exhausted itself. Not even the fact that we talked German helped. He just stood there, drawing his hand across his mouth. I felt stuck, and tried to manufacture some more companionship. I asked him if he had brought any of his carvings to Italy.

"Some," he said.

"May I see them?"

He looked at me. He nodded. We walked through the alleys and up the stone steps to the Timeo, their hotel. Just before we reached it, he said hastily, as if to get the matter out of the way, "She is being shown the two volcanoes from the mountaintop," and I nodded as one does to acknowledge a minor clarification.

They had an airy double room with poplars below the window. We both avoided the three white suitcases from which pink things trailed. I almost hated her more for this incidental indiscretion.

He went to his bed, pulled out from under it an ancient traveling chest with iron hinges. To this day I don't know how he'd stuffed it into her tiny MG. He opened it. Inside were two white shirts like the one he was wearing and, wrapped in a heavy, gray-loden jacket, four unfinished crucifixes. They were crib-length and that, together with the fresh white birch which was their flesh and the tender, tentative way he laid them side by side upon the bed, made me think of babies. I asked him if his art was in his family.

"Yes," he said, "my father and my grandfather." And suddenly: "They didn't talk to me, any of them. I went away with her and they all had their windows open. They just looked at me. And then they closed them again." His hand stroked across the figures, pulled at the coverlet to make it a more comfortable thing to rest on.

"There are no faces," he said.

It was true. Some of the figures were still shapeless bundles; in others the agony of a shoulder was already defined, or the nail through the foot. But what they all had in common was the blankness above the neck.

"That's interesting," I said. I felt I ought to say something. "So you always do the faces last?"

"I finish each one complete -- I used to," he said. He turned away a little. "I can't do the faces anymore since I left the valley."

He had his carving knife out now, but merely grazed the toe of the third figure with the point of the blade. The knife handle ended in a ram's head whose woolly mane had been worn smooth. Like the chest, the knife had probably been handed down through generations. So were the features of the Savior. I remembered how almost every valley in the Tyrol has its own Christ. And I thought how strange it was, this black-haired girl skiing into his village from across the ocean, ripping him lightly out of his world, roaring away with him in her MG, dropping him off at another planet, next to a volcano, into an indirectly lit double room with bath, with view, and leaving him there, sitting on an empty double bed with four faceless figures, alone.

"I told them we would be back after getting the marriage permission," he said. "I told them I would do the spring ones meanwhile. But they closed the windows on me."

"Oh," I said briskly. "You make about four at this time of the year?"

He nodded. "I can't do the faces," he said. His knife had begun to hiss against the toe of the third figure. He steadied the figure with his left hand, but at the same time held it away from him as though afraid to touch it too intimately. Somehow I felt I shouldn't see this.

"Well," I said. "Well, in a way I'm in a similar profession. We all have our ups and downs. Goodnight."

"Goodnight," he said, standing up and giving his little medieval bow. He had put down the figure on the bed. But walking away, outside in the corridor, I could hear the low lost hiss of the knife again.

• • •

Next morning I drove to Palermo. It was my regular Palermo day to lay in supplies for the month and maybe smell a little city dust and visit reality. But as I've said, you can't lose anybody. Just as I was about to turn into the highway, I nearly ran him down. Though he walked along the shoulder of the road, though his leather-shorted leviathan shadow was hard to overlook, he had that blind somnambulist stride I always associate with disaster in a pedestrian. The moment he looked up at the screech of the brakes, I realized he had changed.

"Ferdinand! Where're you going?"

He didn't salute me in any way. He pointed to the station: "The train to Palermo."

"This is the car to Palermo," I said. "Hop in!"

I suppose I was always so breezy with him out of some sort of discomfort. He came into the car quickly and wordlessly, with an efficient curling of his endless body. His cheek glinted blond, which meant he hadn't shaved; his hair was no longer plastered against his temples but marched in long waves over his ears. He looked as if he had come out of his valley yesterday. But that wasn't the real change either.

"Where can I let you off in Palermo?" It was the best I could come up with after casting about for a revelatory but safe question.

"The American Consulate, please."

"Can I help you? I know one of the vice-consuls --"

"The permission is necessary," he said, "or the permission is not necessary. It is easy to find out."

For a moment I considered mentioning how time dulls all things and how a year from now all this, et cetera, et cetera. But I realized I'd only make it worse. So, temporizing, I elaborately cursed a Lambretta that overtook me and at the next curve was saved by a little boy with his thumb in the air.

He went to Palermo, too, this little boy, and he had a baby goat in his arms which turned out to be wonderfully energetic. It jumped from front seat to back until it had to be tied down. Even immobilized, it licked everything within reach and, out of sheer exuberance, made a small mess on the seat cover. This caused such prolonged stern Sicilian wrath in the boy that I had to pacify him with gelati at a roadside stand and let him wash off the damage long after it was no longer there. The goatlet, in short, furnished a whole potpourri of exigencies during which Ferdinand could sit straight and silent in the back seat without seeming ignored. It was all so easy that after I had let the boy off at Quattro Canti in Palermo, I felt suddenly rather remiss.

"Are you going back to Taormina tomorrow?"

"I think so," he said.

"Let me pick you up again. Where will you stay?"

"I don't know," he said.

"I'm staying at the Palme. I can reserve you a room."

He shook his head.

"There is the Jolly Hotel. Very nice and inexpensive."

"Thank you." He looked at my hand on the door handle, for we had reached the Consulate. It was a "Thank you" from which everything said to him glanced off.

"Look," I said, "why don't we have a drink tonight? Say at the Palme bar -- between nine and ten? We can talk."

"Thank you," he said, looking at the door handle. I had to let him go.

He didn't appear at the bar, though I waited till 11. The Jolly didn't know of him. Next morning I found the Consulate closed. Saturday -- of course. Though I am not sure how I would have inquired about his inquiries if it had been open. I asked myself what I was making all the fuss about and drove back, via the scenic route along the coast, the radio turned on full.

• • •

But there is this about coming toward Taormina from the north: the green lemon groves on one side and the clean saffron beach on the other assume a drastic brightness. As you come nearer, Etna's peak fevers up silver and the wild geraniums effervesce on the hills. All the world begins to heave. The panorama breathes like an infinite animal made of fine stained glass and goaded by the sun into an ancient, insidious glitter.

I squinted, shut off Radio Napoli. Suddenly I was afraid. There was a train from Palermo scheduled to arrive at least half an hour ago. I was already on my way up to the village, but U-turned, made for the beach of Isola Bella. Lilo's house is built so close to the shore there that an image of its mosquelike pale-blue dome always skitters in the water. Sammy lives in a room on the ground floor and the gravel path that leads to it has known the crunching of many a high heel. On that path Lilo stood now in the pale-blue shorts that matched his dome. I knew from his canter toward the car that Ferdinand had been here. I had never seen Lilo canter before.

"He knocked over the foyer vase." Lilo's head loomed into my car window like a bespectacled balloon. "He frightened the maid so she's still locked in her room."

"Where did he go?" I asked.

"Up to town." Lilo was all adenoid and no wit. "But I called them. I told them to get away from the Timeo. He found their swimming things from last night. He took them." And through the starting motor I heard it again: "He knocked over the foyer vase!"

I parked the car at Mazarro Beach and ran up the spiral path. I knew he must have taken the footpath. I had no idea what to say to him but I ran up as fast as the dusty old steps would let me. I came to the fork; both branches led up to the town-top of the cliff. I ran up the left. Past the eucalyptus copse I had a view of the curves ahead: no one. I ran back to the fork. I panted, coughed hot dust. The sun slammed into my brain. I would never catch him by foot. I ran back to the car. The tires yammered around the curves. I couldn't get my wind back all through the drive. I was still panting when I spotted them at the cliffside terrace of the Mocambo. Sammy slouched back easy in the wire chair; the red kerchief was loose around his neck because of the heat; his olive elbow lay haphazardly on her arm.

"You look hot, do you know," she said, sweet and snow-white in a playsuit. Her eyebrows rose at my wheezing. "You need some iced tea!"

And I saw him. Still far down at the Corso Umberto, partly obscured by a fat woman with a parasol. I didn't move. Not because Sammy's hand held me down -- he wanted this to be all his gesture, I suppose. I didn't move because the face behind the parasol compelled me. It was so direct, straight, simple. My mind, as if to cover the next few seconds' idleness, displayed Ferdinand to me: walking away from Lilo's vase; mounting the spiral path, past the pink outbursts of almond trees and the flower-inflamed cactus; Ferdinand, holding in his hand a golden two-piece and Sammy's trunk triangle, crimson as his kerchief, both relics of the swimming party of the night before. Ferdinand walking through bougainvillaea and tuberoses, his heavy Alpine boots beating down, frightening small lizards into a slither and, perhaps, delaying for a half second or so the happy girl in Riviera shorts who ran forever down the footpath to Mazarro Beach. Ferdinand walking, hand clamped over gold-and-crimson burden; Ferdinand climbing under the stoic Sicilian sun -- and, in my mind's eye at that moment, he looked small among the rocks.

Yet he was upon us, huge in the piazza.

"Ferdy," Doris said, "where in the world have you -- --" and broke off. He had dropped the swim clothes. (I remember them -- crimson crumpled over gold on the pavement like a big, broken butterfly.) Sammy leaped to forestall him, but was tapped away, lay stunned against the curbstone.

Ferdinand hugged her to him, hugged her high. In her white playsuit she hovered above the railing that guards the cliff. She moaned surprised. A drop of sweat ran down his cheek. But only for a second did his mouth crook into a grimace of exertion. Then it relaxed. He put her away from him. He let her go. She didn't scream until she had fallen out of sight.

He turned away from the gasp, the rush, all around him. He ran, but happy and free, like a man heading for supper, and perhaps that was another reason why they didn't stop him. He ran toward the Timeo.

I found him there, ahead of anyone else, in what used to be their room. One of the crucifixes lay cradled in his arms. He was carving the loving and the suffering into the Savior's face. A small breeze ran through the poplars outside the window. A church bell tolled four. His knife whispered, whispered to the wood. I closed the door gently on him. They didn't have to hurry so, down in the street. He was at rest. He was quit of her. I guess he was back in the valley.