Last night I went down the steps at half past eight, while it was still the evening I had come for.
Tonight I did not.
I should be honest that this was curiosity rather than appetite. I had written that the good part of this coast is free and over by nine, and it seemed lazy to say that without having sat through the part I was being superior about. So I went back to the same bar in the rocks, took a table on the same level, and stayed where I was.
The handover happens at about half past nine, and it is the most interesting thing that occurs all night.
The seven o’clock people leave in ones and twos, the way you leave somewhere when you have a table booked. Then there is a genuinely empty half hour that nobody photographs. The staff changes the cloths. Somebody tests the sound and turns it down again. A man goes round the rocks with a torch checking the lights sunk into them, tapping the ones that flicker, which fixes about half.
Then it fills up with a different species entirely.
The two old men with the cards were not there. Their table was, and four people were at it, and I felt oddly protective about it, which is ridiculous after one evening.
What arrives after ten is not what I expected, and I had expected something fairly unkind.
It is quieter. That is the thing nobody tells you. By midnight there were perhaps two hundred people on that terrace, and it was quieter than the same rocks at seven, because at seven everyone is talking and at midnight everyone is arranged. People arrive in groups, sit down, and turn outward. There is a lot of looking at the room. There is a lot of standing up to be seen standing up.
Nobody was dancing. It was half past twelve in the most famous nightlife on this coast, and nobody was dancing, and I do not believe anybody had come expecting to.
I am not going to do the arithmetic here, because I have done it properly in the guide and it is dull to do twice. I will say only that the number is not the interesting part. The interesting part is that everybody in that room knew what everybody else had paid, roughly, and that this was the actual currency of the evening. Not the music. The music was fine and could have been anywhere.
The same waiter who put a small dish of olives in front of me at seven brought me a drink at midnight. He had been on before I arrived the first time. He was still there when I left. We had a short conversation about how many days I had been on the coast, and he was politely astonished that I had spent one of them inland, which I have decided to take as a compliment to the inland.
One woman took her shoes off and carried them across the rock to her table, and it was the only ungoverned thing I saw all night.
Camille would have lasted eleven minutes. She would have loved the lights in the granite and the steepness of it, and then she would have wanted to know why everyone was standing up if nobody intended to dance, and she would have asked that out loud, in French, at volume, and I would have had to take her somewhere else. I thought about texting her and then thought better of it, because she would have been asleep and would have replied in the morning with something I would have had to answer for.
I left at about one.
The quay at that hour is beautiful and completely uninterested in you. Crew moving about on deck doing competent unhurried things. One boat with every light on and nobody visible on it at all. A very small dog being walked along the pontoon by a man in evening clothes, both of them looking equally put upon.
Then the drive back, which is the same road as last night.
Empty again. But the emptiness at one in the morning is not the same as the emptiness at half past seven, and I spent most of the drive working out why. At half past seven it is a thing nobody has taken yet. At one it is a thing everybody has finished with. Same road, same absence of cars, and the two feel nothing alike.
I do not regret going. I would not do it twice.
What I keep coming back to is that the expensive hours and the free ones are in the same place, on the same rocks, four hours apart, and the free ones are better. Not more virtuous. Better. The light is better, the conversation is better, the rock is still warm from the day, and there is nobody in it working out what you spent.
Four days here now. Inland, on the water, the hour before dinner, and this.
The granite goes rose tomorrow at about half past seven, the way it did tonight, whether anybody drives up for it or not.
V.
More images from the Costa Smeralda
This is a diary from the Costa Smeralda in Sardinia. What the evening actually costs, hour by hour, is in the nightlife guide; the village itself is in my guide to Porto Cervo, the hour before all this is in the hour nobody plans for, and the coast as a whole is in my complete guide to the Costa Smeralda.
