I got up at six because I could not sleep, which is becoming a habit, and I went down to the harbour because it was the only thing open.
That turned out to be wrong. Half the town was open. It just was not open to me.
The boats come in at about half past six and the quay is already set up for them: crates stacked, ice, a small van backed up with its doors open. Three men were working one boat and none of them was hurrying and none of them was talking much either, which I think is what happens when four people have done the same thing together several thousand times.
The fish went from the deck into crates and the crates went up the steps and into the van, and about forty minutes later the whole thing was over and the quay was being hosed down.
I bought a coffee from a bar on the front where the other customers were all men in working clothes, and stood at the counter, and nobody looked at me twice, which was a relief.
The thing I keep thinking about is the language.
I have been listening for it since I arrived and mostly not finding it, because in the restaurants and the shops in the middle of the old town everybody speaks Italian and quite a lot of English. I had started to wonder whether the bilingual street signs were mostly a gesture.
They are not. You just have to be up early.
The men on the quay were speaking Catalan. Not Italian with some words in it: a different language, flatter and more clipped, with sounds Italian does not have. I could not follow any of it. Every so often an Italian word would go past like something floating in a river.
Six hundred and seventy years, and it is not in the museum, it is on the fish quay at seven in the morning being used to talk about crates.
Later I hired a car for the day and went inland, which almost nobody does here, and the country behind Alghero turns out to be flat and dry and full of vines and very old olive trees.
I stopped because I saw a heap of stones in a field and I have been in Sardinia long enough now to be suspicious of heaps of stones.
It was not signposted. There was no gate and no ticket office and no path. It was just a low ring of enormous dry-set blocks in the corner of somebody’s field with grass growing over it, and it was unmistakably built rather than fallen.
I did not go in. It was on private land and I have no idea what it was.
But I sat on the wall by the road for a while and looked at it, and thought about the fact that there are seven thousand of these things on this island, and that nobody knows what they were for, and that this one is so unremarkable to the man who farms around it that he has not even put a sign up.
There is a version of that fact that is sad and a version that is not. I think I prefer the second one. A thing does not have to be visited to be worth having.
On the way back toward the coast I passed the necropolis, which is the older thing and the one I had not expected to affect me.
It is a field of pale flat rock with square holes cut down into it. Thirty eight of them. You walk across the top and there are steps going down into the ground and then chambers, some with more than one room, and on the wall of one there are carved horns.
They were dug out of solid rock with stone tools, more than five thousand years ago, by people who came a thousand years before the tower builders and were just as gone.
I went down into one. It is a small room, and cool, and completely silent in the way that only underground is silent, and it took a while to accept that somebody made it. Not built it up out of blocks. Removed a room’s worth of rock, by hand, with harder rock, to put their dead in.
There was nobody else on the site. There is no shade and it was the wrong time of day for it and I did not care.
In the afternoon I went out to the proper site, the one with the ticket office, and stood inside the main chamber where the stones step inward over your head until they meet.
It is cool in there, and very dark after the glare, and the walls are dry-laid without a scrap of mortar. Three and a half thousand years. My eyes took a long time to adjust and when they did I was looking up at a ceiling built by people who left no writing at all, so that everything anyone thinks about them is a guess made from what they stacked.
There was a stone bench running around the wall of the other hut, the big round one, and a carved model of a tower in the middle of the floor.
Something happened in that room. Meetings, probably. Or worship, or law, or arguments about grazing.
Nobody knows. That is the honest answer and I like that it is the answer.
In the evening I went back up on the wall, because that is what you do here, and the town was doing its slow circuit in both directions.
The men from the quay were probably among them and I would not have recognised any of them. They were in different clothes and they were walking, not working, and they would have been speaking the older language to each other about something else entirely.
V.
