The bus wasn’t due for another hour, and while they waited in the piazza, they bought the newspaper. The festival for L’Unità³ was taking place, and on page one of the newspaper they read that some thousand copies had been sold, and that the Metalworkers’ Union had declared that civil disobedience was a legitimate way to protest against the rise in transportation fares, and maybe also electricity rates.

The bus finally arrived. They skirted orange and yellow fields, vineyards and olive groves, the red-tiled roofs of a town that ran along the single road that passed through it, up to the rail-yard, where the sea was. The bus left immediately. The daughter wanted to wait, to watch a train go by, but none arrived – the train and bus schedules almost never coincided. Beyond the platforms, a few buildings, deserted by now: restaurants, bars, hotels open in August, destined for the boisterous tourism of southern labourers who had migrated north, and who, in dance halls, bars and cheap hotels, had twenty days at best to revel, love, relax and spend all their money in an ongoing clamour of car horns and transistor radios. Apart from these migrants, tourism didn’t flourish here. This was also the case along other parts of the Adriatic coast, because of the state forest situated along the shoreline.

That Sunday in late September there was hardly a soul: four young people, who clambered out of a Fiat 500, rapidly undressing and diving into the water; a prudent mother and child holding hands, both impeccably dressed, strolling along the water’s edge.

Father and daughter went into the sea and started up endless shenanigans, splashing each other, diving in, racing, swimming.

The woman lay out in the sun, at first with her clothes on; then she took them off, since the black bra and underpants weren’t that unlike a real bathing suit. Her body was thin, youthful, adorned by her puffy Geisha hairstyle. Reassured by her appearance, she wanted to abandon herself to the sun. But the feverish warmth of her period, which held her in a state of levitation and discomfort, didn’t mix well with the sun, brazen and direct but not powerful enough to vanquish her inner heat. That sun, broken up by the wind, called for races and swims, not distraught levitations. She was stretched out, her arms spread, before the sea. Her body formed a cross. Many kilometres in the distance, she thought, to the left and right of her, on both sides, were two other places on the Adriatic she knew well.

Ten years ago, in Rimini, in September, before they had a daughter, when they’d hitchhiked carefree on three hundred lire a day, they’d stayed with some friends in an abandoned cabin, breaking in through a window. The next morning she’d woken up on a vast desert of sand and cabins. A drunken lifeguard, taking advantage of a moment in which she’d hung back from the others, had grabbed her breast: that cold September, deprived of women, his eyes had popped from the orbits of his ruddy face, while a little boy dragged a wooden spool at his feet by a string.