Michele's lido is as crowded as every Sunday, with the band on the left blasting music for boys and girls indifferent to the heat of a torrid July day, the children playing on the left on swings and miniature acrobatic walkways, at the center the bar, conveniently roofed to offer shelter to bathers who are hungry, but above all thirsty, and opposite the expanse of white umbrellas that thins out near the sea with three rows of gigantic, well-spaced palms, arranged to welcome into their great protective shade the privileged few who can afford it.Sergio, a philosophy professor in Florence and a writer known in the residual circles of literary criticism but amply ignored by the readers of the present day, bitterly regrets having come down to the sea on that Sunday afternoon in order to leave in peace for a few hours the friend who is absent-mindedly putting him up in a fine house with a pool in the hinterland of the Adriatic coast.He decided on impulse to go to the sea to get away from his friend, generous and hospitable but sometimes unbearable in his fussiness, accentuated by an age that is turning toward the sunset of hopes and expectations. Undecided about everything amid the throng at the bar that gives off scents and sweat, he is providentially spotted by Michele, who leads him to the first row of umbrellas, the one just before the palms, and says to him doctor (Michele calls doctor anyone who does not stink of that gamey wildness, the unmistakable odor that the peasant of these parts carries with him through an atavistic incrustation, resistant to baths, showers and perfumes) take umbrella 14 and enjoy a nice swim. Heartened by the unexpected help of the owner of the establishment he thanks him and follows his advice, granting himself a regenerating swim in water of an opaque transparency. After the swim he stretches out on the lounger of umbrella 14 and begins to read the latest novel by his friend Giuseppe Munforte, Dove batte l'onda, he too much appreciated by some critics though unknown to the mythical avid readers. As he reads, every now and then, he casts an eye over the beach in the hope of intercepting a fine backside well set on shapely, amber-tanned legs, and he sees a little scene that piques his curiosity: at a palm to his left, in the last row from the sea and the first after the umbrellas, he sees a waiter arriving with, in one hand, a glass carafe holding a liquid that looks like tea, slightly clouded by the abundant ice, and in the other a large tray heaped with local and exotic fruit, artfully arranged on plates of colored ceramic and partly skewered on big sticks. Even from a distance one can see the sheen of the fruit, well chilled and ready to be bitten into in that heat, but, to his surprise, he notices that the two couples of forty-somethings, ten years younger than he, after the festive welcome given to the tray and the waiter, go back to conversing and smiling at he cannot tell what, given the distance that separates them. He goes back to reading, disappointed by the failed encounter with a worthy backside and slightly astonished by the aristocratic behavior of the double couple who, faced with the pitcher of a cold drink and the juicy fragrance of the fresh fruit, put up an ostentatious indifference. After a few pages he cannot resist looking again and finds the scene unchanged: the four of them talking and smiling among themselves, the tray untouched and the carafe full. Protected only by the parasol of the lounger and, like everyone, a victim of the sultriness, he does not understand, indeed he is much annoyed by it, how one can leave untouched a fine carafe of iced tea and so much lovely, good fruit on a serving tray, and so he decides to indulge the good sense that is in him and to resign himself to keeping quiet (with himself, in this case) in the face of what cannot be understood. He resumes reading Dove batte l'onda, and lets himself be captured by the story of a man who loses himself precisely at the moment when he deludes himself that he has found a meaning in an encounter, in a woman who brings him back into a life that had been his, and in the memory of a sinking beneath the waves from which he has resurfaced he realizes that the wave still beats its paw. He has just finished reading the novel and, incredulous, sees the tray still full of tea and fruit, but the carafe has lost the moisture of cold, the fruit all its freshness, and the double couple the apparent brilliance of their conversation.

The sun is setting, it no longer burns, but the heat, though lessened, keeps its grip on the skin in that irritating stickiness that only a restoring shower can relieve. He gets up and heads toward the bar to settle the bill and go home, but when he reaches the walkway leading to the till he veers toward the sea to pass near the palm of the double couple and sees the changed little scene up close: the tray still untouched, the pitcher with its tea slightly paler from the ice now melted, which the sun has turned into a warm drink, the fruit almost withered, the silence between the two couples on the now deserted beach. To get to the till he has to pass near the palm again, and as he goes past it, without looking, he catches in his nose the whiff of that gamey reek which he has learned to recognize after the many holidays spent at the house of his friend, who owns a farmstead inherited from the family, where he has sometimes been to help with the grape harvest and there smelled that unmistakable stench. On the short drive home he again looks for an explanation for the behavior of the two couples of friends at the palm but, for the second time, he surrenders to the incomprehensible. Once home he tells his friend about the strange situation he observed on the beach and sees his ironic smile, as if to him it were all clear. It makes you laugh, he says to him, to me it seems absurd and it would piss me off if your irony were aimed at my astonishment. No, the friend answers him, it is natural that you do not understand, but in reality it is all very simple and straightforward. Tanino and Aliseo are two former peasants of the big-boots-and-sharp-brain type who, tired of working the land without much profit, courted, flattering and abasing themselves, a rich gentleman of the town who was a manager at a large company in central Italy, persuading him to put together a business for the production and marketing of wine. To the manager's objection that he had no time, and besides he could not be a partner without leaving his own company, they answered that time was not a problem, because five minutes of his genius was worth a year of their work put together, and for the business there was no difficulty: the two of them would formally set it up, but as soon as he could he would come in, regularizing the private agreement that they could make right away. In this way he would have only advantages, because before recovering the investments the company would not make profits, and by the time he formally came in the difficult years of start-up and of breaking even would have passed. His formal entry would take place only at the moment when the fruits of the troublesome initial work, which the two of them would take upon their shoulders, would be harvested, and then they concluded we are third-generation farmers and for us the given word is more sacred than life. Only after much repeated insistence did the manager consent to the agreement, and instead of five minutes he devoted a great deal of time, concentration and attention first to the design, then to the construction of the winery. Afterward he studied strategic marketing, but the hardest work was defining the vinification protocol with the oenologist and positioning the company in the most important national and international guides. To this work he devoted all his weekends, his holidays and his free time. After only four years the company was known and appreciated in the domestic market and abroad; by the sixth it was beginning to make considerable profits. Tanino had become a skilled trader and Aliseo a good cellarman, and at that point they could do without the oenologist and the manager, and so they did. When the manager asked to formalize his entry, since he had resolved the problems with his own company and could become a partner, they first raised procedural problems against him and then told him bluntly that to come in he would have to resign from his company, pay six years of wages for their grueling work and mortgage his properties, as they had done at the time the winery was set up, and they added ironically that theirs was a manager's salary. The two former peasants had become entrepreneurs, and the manager, who had kept a crumb of common sense, let it go, recovering at least the money invested in a company that had also been his own. Aliseo has been a beast of burden since he was a boy, and whereas before he sweated on the land now he slogs away in the cellar, while Tanino, from a dandy peasant, has become a trader with hundredweights of hair on his stomach, but, deep down, they have remained peasants with that little gamey tang that no perfume will ever be able to erase, and so their pleasure is not to drink the tea and eat exotic fruit under the palm, but to display, indeed to flaunt, that they do not feel like it and can leave it on show, like other peasants who have built, next to the old country house, a stylish villa, fully furnished, but live in the kitchen of the old house. They have remained poor inside, and no wealth will emancipate them. Is it true that everything is simple and clear? At my answering yes the friend added, no, in reality not everything is, all the way down, because that manager was me. At that point everything became clear to me, including the story, which had had to wait for the friend's explanation in order to be written.