The Geometry of Waiting
August in Marisòla teaches you that waiting has a shape. Not the shapeless thing people mean when they complain about it — the empty afternoon, the unanswered question, the season that will not end. Waiting, properly observed, has angles and distances. It has a particular quality of light, and in August it has a temperature.
By ten in the morning the heat has taken a position and does not intend to give it up. I have learned to cross the town the way the cats do, from one patch of shade to the next, pretending each move was always where I was going. The walk to Bar del Corso is no longer a walk. It is a series of considered stops. I pause under the awning of Nino’s edicola as though I have come for a newspaper. Nino hands me the Corriere before I can pretend otherwise. We do not discuss anything, which is why it works.
I have been watching Peppè and Calòggero for three summers now. Every morning one of them makes the journey toward the other across a fixed distance. If you ask what they are doing, they will tell you they are going to argue, which is true and also not the whole story. What they are doing, precisely, is closing a gap they have kept open since 1974 — the year the argument began, over the lighthouse, or possibly something else, nobody is certain. It has never been resolved. It has also never been abandoned. Each contradicts the other every minute and seeks him out every morning; neither can sit through the argument, and neither can leave it alone. In Marisòla this passes for devotion.
In August even they slow. On most afternoons you will find Calòggero stretched out in one of his old rowing boats, half asleep, a transistor radio from the 1980s beside him playing old Italian songs to no one in particular — a radio that, unlike almost everything else in Marisòla, works perfectly well. He lies there in the full knowledge that nothing requires his attention and that this is perfectly acceptable. The boat does not move. Neither does he. The argument will resume tomorrow morning, as it has every morning for half a century. It can wait until then.
The rest of the town manages as it can. People move between patches of shade with the seriousness of a military manoeuvre. Chairs are repositioned to follow the retreat of the sun. Ventilators are switched on, consulted, and found wanting. The sea sits there, unhelpfully beautiful, offering no relief to anyone not already in it.
I confess I resisted this at first. I am northern enough in my habits to believe a day should contain some accomplishment, and I spent my first Augusts here trying to work through the afternoons at the kitchen table, sweating onto the page, producing nothing I kept. The heat is a better editor than I am. It removes urgency the way the sea removes the sharp edge from glass — slowly, and without asking whether you had finished.
So now I do as the town does. The morning is taken as it comes. The afternoon is taken as it arrives, behind closed shutters, in a room that still smells of the morning’s espresso. The evening, when the heat finally relents, is taken outside with a coffee and no particular hurry. Nothing is being neglected. This is the talent the rest of us no longer see for what it is, and are too quick to call laziness — dolce far niente, the sweetness of doing nothing, which is not the absence of activity but the presence of something quieter in its place, and never more so than in August.
Dante understood all this before I did. He has found the coolest corner of the kitchen floor and does not intend to leave it. He is not waiting for anything to happen. He is simply present in the time that exists, which I am beginning to suspect was the whole point, and which I have spent a considerable amount of energy failing to learn from a dog.
August continues. There is no urgency. There never was.
Osalio Verbino Marisòla, summer 2026
Osalio Verbino — Appunti da Marisòla Track 04: Two Fishermen, One Argument
Music: AI-generated with Suno Pro 2026