What the Sea Returns
The beach that nobody uses is mine, in August, before eight o’clock in the morning. After that the heat takes it, and the heat does not share.
I go with Dante, who treats the shoreline as a serious matter requiring full investigation. He works methodically, nose to the sand, covering ground with the concentration of someone who has been given an important assignment and intends to complete it. I walk behind him and do not think about anything in particular, which is the point.
The sea returns things. This is something I have known for a long time without finding it remarkable, but it becomes noticeable if you stand at the edge of it morning after morning. Objects arrive worn smooth, stripped of whatever they once were, turned into something simpler. A piece of green glass that was a bottle once, a decade ago, in another country possibly. A coin so corroded it has become purely circular — denomination and origin dissolved, only the shape of currency left. Rope, wood, fragments of ceramic. The sea is not sentimental about these things. It simply returns them.
I pick things up sometimes. Mostly I don’t. There is a pleasure in leaving them.
The most important thing I have found on this beach — and I use the word important carefully, because I mean it — is a stone with a hole through its centre. The legend, which Marisòla accepts with the practical attitude it reserves for things that cannot be disproved, is that such a stone keeps evil spirits away. I carried it home and placed it on the chest of drawers in the entrance of Villa Verbino. The entrance seemed right — if the stone has a function, it belongs at the threshold. And if it doesn’t, it is still a stone with a hole through it, which the sea made over a very long time, and that is enough. A man who lives alone in a house too large for him may keep a charm at the door without needing to believe in it. My grandmother would have understood. You never know, she used to say, which was her position on almost everything.
Dante, having completed his survey, falls into step beside me. We turn back toward town.
At Bar del Corso, George and Clooney are already there. Where they go between leaving Villa Verbino and arriving at the bar is a question I have stopped asking. They were not on the beach. They were not on the street. They are simply here now, seated with the composure of two creatures who arrived first and have been waiting, with some patience, for the rest of us to catch up.
The bar is loud with last night’s match. Tonino the barman is listening to three opinions at once and refilling water glasses without appearing to do either. I drink my espresso standing — this is not a morning for sitting, still less for joining the argument, which is a lost cause — and leave without anyone noticing, which suits all parties.
The way home passes through the piazza, where the news of Marisòla is kept and worn smooth by retelling — the way the sea works on glass, each account a little rounder than the last, the sharp corners of fact gone. There has been no newspaper to correct this since 1971. If you want to know what has happened you go to the piazza, which is less reliable than print and considerably more opinionated.
I walk the rest of the way home. The stone is on the chest of drawers where it always has been. Dante settles under the kitchen table. The cats will return at some point, having been wherever they were, and will not explain themselves, and I will not ask.
The sea is visible from the kitchen window. It occurs to me, some mornings, that it returned me as well — sent away young, delivered back worn, a good deal of the original wording gone. It holds on, smooths the edges, and lets go when the time is right. With me it appears to be taking the long way about.
Osalio Verbino
Marisòla, summer 2026
Osalio Verbino — Appunti da Marisòla Track 06: The Cats Ignore Everything
Music: AI-generated with Suno Pro 2026