IN THE MORNING I LEFT THE NAZIONALE before they started serving breakfast at seven-thirty. The day was going to be hot. The sun was barely up and already the air was getting hazy. The early morning breeze was replaced by a thick summer stillness that seemed to make everything go a lot slower. In the square the fish woman was pushing her cart, full of tiny silver fish that the Italians deep fry and eat whole. She was bellowing up the echoing stairways of the buildings she passed, “Pesce, pesce, pesce!” As she walked she was eating a piece of focaccia. I hurried on so I could get to the beach at Paraggi in time to get some focaccia myself from the Banini before he went out to the rowboats.

By the wall on the way to Paraggi, I stopped to breathe in the verdant green smell. I closed my eyes and inhaled deeply through my nose. Fig, gardenia, wild thyme, oregano, arugula, and other mysterious green smells. I was back!

These ten days every year were the best of my life. And this year, because Mom and Dad had sent me to a boarding school in England last autumn, I was especially grateful for Italy, the path to Paraggi, and the smells, smells the English and Swiss never even dream of. The English boarding school was worse than Janet teaching me. I was finally learning to read, but I was so far behind the other boys in the school I had become a sort of joke, almost a kind of byword, a standard by which failure was measured. Teachers would say things to other boys like, “If you aren’t careful, my lad, you’ll wake up one fine day and find you’ve become thick as Becker here.”

The good side of going to English boarding school was that when I met Jennifer this year I could tell her I was at a boys’ school in England just like her school for girls. At last I would have something to tell her about myself that was true. This would make things easier because when you have to tell lies all the time because you don’t want people to know about your family, it gets confusing. Especially if you have to lie each year to the same person and have to remember what your story was the year before in case the person was really listening and remembered that you said you were in the American School in Montreaux and that your dad taught there and now you’ve forgotten and said that you are studying in the English school in Villars. When really of course you were just playing around the yard of your house as Mom kept an eye on you while she typed up prayer letters to send to our Reformed Presbyterian supporters of our ministry to Roman Catholic youth.