The boat leaves early because of the light, and because by eleven the water at the arch has other people in it.
There were four of us and the man who owned the boat. He did not talk. I have thought since that this was not reserve. There was simply nothing that needed saying, and he had been out here every morning of his life.
Filicudi is the far end of everything. You come out on the western run and the crossings get longer and the boats get thinner, and then there is an island with one small road on it and a post office and no bank, and that is the whole of it.
We went round the north side and the cliffs came up out of the water with nothing at the bottom of them. No beach. No shelf. The rock goes in and keeps going.
Then the arch, which is a piece of the headland the sea has taken the middle out of.
You do not appreciate it from the land. From the water you go under it, and there is a moment of shade and cold air coming off wet stone, and then you are out the other side and it is hot again. Ten seconds. It happens too fast to think about while it is happening.
The cave is round the corner from there.
It is the biggest in the islands, and it is not dark. That is the thing nobody says properly. You go in and the sea outside is lit right through, and the light comes back up off the floor of it and into the cave underneath, so the water inside is green. Not blue gone slightly green. Green, the way a bottle is green, and lit from below, and moving.
I got in off the side of the boat and swam into it and stopped swimming.
It is deep. You cannot see the bottom, and the green does not get darker the way you expect. It just goes on being green until it stops being anything. Cold underneath and warm on the surface, and the two layers are so distinct that you can hang there with your legs in one and your shoulders in the other.
Nobody in the boat said very much either.
I stayed in until my hands went strange. There is a particular thing that happens to your hands after a long time in cold water, a sort of thickness, and you notice it before you notice you are cold.
Then out, and onto hot wood, and the salt drying on my shoulders and going tight.
We came back round to Pecorini in the middle of the day, the small settlement on the south side, a row of houses along the water and a few boats pulled up. I pulled a cotton dress on over the swimsuit while we were still moving, which is not elegant and is the only sensible way to do it. It was wet through at the back within a minute and stayed that way for two hours.
Lunch was late, and slow, and outside.
Fish, and bread, and tomatoes that tasted of something. There is a way of eating in these places where nothing arrives quickly and nobody apologises for it, and after the first twenty minutes you stop checking. The water was ten feet away. A cat came and sat under the table and did not beg. It simply sat, which I respected.
I had the book with me.
Camille put it in my bag in Paris two years ago and I have carried it to a great many places and not read it. She does that. She has never once asked whether I read any of them, which is worse, and is the point. She will go six weeks without a word and then send a photograph of a shelf.
I read it on Filicudi because there was nothing else.
That is not a compliment to the book and it is not an insult to it either. It is just true. There is no shop. There are two places to eat and one of them shuts around the middle of September. You swim, and you walk up through the terraces to the houses nobody lives in any more, and you read, and the day is very long.
By the third afternoon I was reading properly. Not the way you read on a train.
The pages had gone soft with the salt and the damp and they turned differently, thicker, and the spine had opened up flat. The book was ruined in the specific way that means it was actually used.
I thought about photographing it to send to her. I did not.
She would have said something unbearable about it taking an island to get me to sit still, and she would have been right. There was no signal anyway.
The heat went out of the day around six.
That is the hour here. The light comes in very low along the water and everything the sun has been hitting all day starts giving it back, the road, the houses, the boats. You can feel the whole island doing it at once.
I walked up from the front and there was a woman watering pots in the dark of a doorway and, further along, two men not talking.
That was everybody I saw.
The thing about Filicudi is that it does not want anything from you.
Stromboli performs. It goes off every twenty minutes and there are boats out on the water watching it and you are, whether you like it or not, an audience.
This is the opposite.
Nothing here is going to happen at you. The water will be that green tomorrow whether anyone swims in it, and the houses on the high ground will go on being empty, and the boat will go out at seven because it always does.
I have been trying to work out why I found it so restful and I think it is that.
Nobody is waiting for me to be impressed.
V.
More images from Filicudi
