The Beach Bum of the Rivera Who Tried to Avoid His Destiny (and Failed, Elegantly)

More about The Beach Bum of the Rivera Who Tried to Avoid His Destiny (and Failed, Elegantly)

I came to this small bend of the Riviera with one modest goal: to do nothing, and to do it well. I brought a sun-faded towel, a paperback I pretended to read, and the stubborn intention to waste time with a sense of purpose. The cove looked ideal for this: turquoise water rehearsing purity, cliffs posing like retired philosophers, a village behind me that seemed to lean forward to gossip about my laziness.

But the place was alive in ways I hadn’t prepared for.

First were the rocks.
They shifted slightly every day — never enough to be dramatic, just enough to prove they had private ambitions. A rational person would blame currents; I was sure the rocks were plotting a slow-motion escape, inching toward some unseen rendezvous.

Then the tower on the hill began sighing at noon.
A long, weary exhale, the kind an overworked editor gives after reading a hopeless manuscript. I suspected the tower was tired of being a landmark and wanted to reinvent itself as a painter.

But the sea was the most troublesome.
Whenever I tried to nap, it wrote cursive messages on the sand. Fragile, dissolving wisdom. I always arrived too late to read the beginning, but one afternoon I caught the tail end of a sentence:
“…and the protagonist refuses to leave the beach…”
I felt judged.

The locals avoided explanations.
One old fisherman finally muttered, “This cove reads people.” He said it casually, as if he were warning me about strong winds.

Even my shadow turned unreliable.
Some afternoons it stretched toward the drifting rocks, as though applying for a transfer to someone more adventurous. I called it back — a ridiculous spectacle — but it lingered, as if reconsidering its contract with me.

Still, I stayed.

Everything strange here behaved politely, as though the surrealism were curated. The cliffs tilted inward whenever I stood, as if expecting me to make a life-altering decision. The sea kept composing disappearing literature. The rocks continued rehearsing their incremental rebellion.

Naturally, I ignored all of it.

Avoiding destiny is a vocation, and I practice it with the concentration of a monk. I lie on my towel, pretend to read, and promise myself that tomorrow I will accomplish even less than today. The cove, oddly enough, seems content with this arrangement.

Some travelers seek transformation.
I let the coastline do the transforming while I remain perfectly still — the Riviera’s most faithful bum, the man who refuses to move even as the world around him quietly rearranges itself in search of meaning I have no intention of discovering.