A sense of well-being

And the one threat to it

photo by Holly Huitt

I picked this summer’s holiday out of a novel. I didn’t pick it because it sounded particularly beautiful, or interesting. I picked it because the narrator was changed there. She experienced a “sense of well-being that I had never known before.” I wanted to experience a sense of well-being that I had never known before, and so we went.

The narrator is Elena from Elena Ferrante’s My Brilliant Friend, which, for me, is a foundational text. In the months leading up to the trip, when the subject of my summer travel came up, I found that people split into two camps: those who have never read My Brilliant Friend and therefore responded to my largely unknown (by Americans and Australians) destination with vague puzzlement, and those who had read My Brilliant Friend and immediately knew where I was going and why I was drawn there.

My husband and I did virtually no research or preparation for the trip, which was unlike us. Maybe because we were busy, or tired, but we were both feeling deeply unambitious. We agreed that our only goals were to swim in the sea and be with our kids.

And that’s what we did. The same routine every day—wake mid-morning, feed ourselves and the kids cornetti, put on swimsuits, and walk to the beach. There we swam, laid beneath frondy umbrellas, had lunch in an echoing cafeteria with freshly shaved ham and bowls of melon, then back into the water until the sun began to descend in earnest. Gelato on the walk home. Home, where we showered off the salt, visible on our skin. The boys watched Looney Tunes in Italian on the old TV for an hour before we set out for a late dinner by the sea.

We did this again and again, day after day, the four of us sinking into the very kind of atmospheric happiness Ferrante wrote about. Each day was fully known upon waking. Despite our kids being young, and usually very eager for stimulus, they, too, wished to change nothing. They wanted to sit in the same beach chairs, eat the same food, climb on the same rocks.

The one threat to the peace was “seal rock.” Far out in the bay, where the boats docked, was a bright white rock that resembled a seal on its stomach, with its nose lifted. On our very first day, my 7-year-old watched a group of adults swim what seemed like miles out to it and then clamber over its surface. He told me he wanted to do it. Absolutely not, I said.

But the next day he studied more groups of people who successfully completed the journey—most on paddleboards, but some others laughing and splashing their way there in large groups. He observed that he was a better swimmer than the adults who were making the journey. He told me he knew he could do it. Absolutely not, I said.

He was a better swimmer than those parties. He is a better swimmer than me, a better swimmer than most adults I know. He first taught himself to swim in the Mediterranean two summers before, after we cajoled him into putting on a snorkel mask and looking beneath the surface. From that moment, he has been in the water every possible second. He was the youngest member of our town’s swim team last year, and once described the seemingly endless laps he swims as “not hard, just relaxing.”

But still, the answer was no. So he, clever boy, got my husband alone and asked him instead. Sure, my husband said, I’ll go with you. Veto, I said. My husband reasonably suggested that if our son got tired, he could hitch a ride on his back. What if you have a brain aneurysm? I asked, but even I knew this was too far. My husband is a very strong swimmer, and I knew he could easily tow our son. Tomorrow morning, we agreed.

My son, who at times seems so big and other times so small, ate double his usual amount at breakfast, “for strength.” I could count his vertebrae as he sat eating his yogurt, but I could also see the muscles in his shoulders and his arms. I could see the physical strength he contained, the strength that he’s been building on since he started walking and hanging and climbing at 11 months old. What I didn’t know, and couldn’t know, was whether he was strong enough inside. What if he got scared out there? What if he panicked? What if he failed and, in doing so, never took a risk again?

Reader, he swam to seal rock.

My husband and son, waving from seal rock.