'The Signora's nephew,' he explained, briefly, curtly, in a small voice.
It was as if he were ashamed, or too deeply chagrined.
The woman had seen us watching, so she came across the sunshine with the
child, laughing, talking to the baby, not coming out of her own world to
us, not acknowledging us, except formally.
The Signor Pietro, queer old horse, began to laugh and neigh at the
child, with strange, rancorous envy. The child twisted its face to cry.
The Signora caught it away, dancing back a few yards from her
old husband.
'I am a stranger,' I said to her across the distance. 'He is afraid of a
stranger.'
'No, no,' she cried back, her eyes flaring up. 'It is the man. He always
cries at the men.'
She advanced again, laughing and roused, with the child in her arms. Her
husband stood as if overcast, obliterated. She and I and the baby, in
the sunshine, laughed a moment. Then I heard the neighing, forced laugh
of the old man. He would not be left out. He seemed to force himself
forward. He was bitter, acrid with chagrin and obliteration, struggling
as if to assert his own existence. He was nullified.
The woman also was uncomfortable. I could see she wanted to go away with
the child, to enjoy him alone, with palpitating, pained enjoyment. It
was her brother's boy. And the old padrone was as if nullified by her
ecstasy over the baby. He held his chin, gloomy, fretful, unimportant.
He was annulled. I was startled when I realized it. It was as though his
reality were not attested till he had a child. It was as if his _raison
d'être_ had been to have a son. And he had no children. Therefore he had
no _raison d'être_. He was nothing, a shadow that vanishes into nothing.
And he was ashamed, consumed by his own nothingness.
I was startled. This, then, is the secret of Italy's attraction for us,
this phallic worship. To the Italian the phallus is the symbol of
individual creative immortality, to each man his own Godhead. The child
is but the evidence of the Godhead.
And this is why the Italian is attractive, supple, and beautiful,
because he worships the Godhead in the flesh. We envy him, we feel pale
and insignificant beside him. Yet at the same time we feel superior to
him, as if he were a child and we adult.
Wherein are we superior? Only because we went beyond the phallus in the
search of the Godhead, the creative origin. And we found the physical
forces and the secrets of science.
We have exalted Man far above the man who is in each one of us. Our aim
is a perfect humanity, a perfect and equable human consciousness,
selfless. And we obtain it in the subjection, reduction, analysis, and
destruction of the Self. So on we go, active in science and mechanics,
and social reform.
But we have exhausted ourselves in the process. We have found great
treasures, and we are now impotent to use them. So we have said: 'What
good are these treasures, they are vulgar nothings.' We have said: 'Let
us go back from this adventuring, let us enjoy our own flesh, like the
Italian.' But our habit of life, our very constitution, prevents our
being quite like the Italian. The phallus will never serve us as a
Godhead, because we do not believe in it: no Northern race does.
Therefore, either we set ourselves to serve our children, calling them
'the future', or else we turn perverse and destructive, give ourselves
joy in the destruction of the flesh.
The children are not the future. The living truth is the future. Time
and people do not make the future. Retrogression is not the future.
Fifty million children growing up purposeless, with no purpose save the
attainment of their own individual desires, these are not the future,
they are only a disintegration of the past. The future is in living,
growing truth, in advancing fulfilment.
But it is no good. Whatever we do, it is within the greater will towards
self-reduction and a perfect society, analysis on the one hand, and
mechanical construction on the other. This will dominates us as a whole,
and until the whole breaks down, the will must persist. So that now,
continuing in the old, splendid will for a perfect selfless humanity, we
have become inhuman and unable to help ourselves, we are but attributes
of the great mechanized society we have created on our way to
perfection. And this great mechanized society, being selfless, is
pitiless. It works on mechanically and destroys us, it is our master
and our God.
It is past the time to leave off, to cease entirely from what we are
doing, and from what we have been doing for hundreds of years. It is
past the time to cease seeking one Infinite, ignoring, striving to
eliminate the other. The Infinite is twofold, the Father and the Son,
the Dark and the Light, the Senses and the Mind, the Soul and the
Spirit, the self and the not-self, the Eagle and the Dove, the Tiger and
the Lamb. The consummation of man is twofold, in the Self and in
Selflessness. By great retrogression back to the source of darkness in
me, the Self, deep in the senses, I arrive at the Original, Creative
Infinite. By projection forth from myself, by the elimination of my
absolute sensual self, I arrive at the Ultimate Infinite, Oneness in the
Spirit. They are two Infinites, twofold approach to God. And man must
know both.
But he must never confuse them. They are eternally separate. The lion
shall never lie down with the lamb. The lion eternally shall devour the
lamb, the lamb eternally shall be devoured. Man knows the great
consummation in the flesh, the sensual ecstasy, and that is eternal.
Also the spiritual ecstasy of unanimity, that is eternal. But the two
are separate and never to be confused. To neutralize the one with the
other is unthinkable, an abomination. Confusion is horror and
nothingness.
The two Infinites, negative and positive, they are always related, but
they are never identical. They are always opposite, but there exists a
relation between them. This is the Holy Ghost of the Christian Trinity.
And it is this, the relation which is established between the two
Infinites, the two natures of God, which we have transgressed,
forgotten, sinned against. The Father is the Father, and the Son is the
Son. I may know the Son and deny the Father, or know the Father and deny
the Son. But that which I may never deny, and which I have denied, is
the Holy Ghost which relates the dual Infinites into One Whole, which
relates and keeps distinct the dual natures of God. To say that the two
are one, this is the inadmissible lie. The two are related, by the
intervention of the Third, into a Oneness.
There are two ways, there is not only One. There are two opposite ways
to consummation. But that which relates them, like the base of the
triangle, this is the constant, the Absolute, this makes the Ultimate
Whole. And in the Holy Spirit I know the Two Ways, the Two Infinites,
the Two Consummations. And knowing the Two, I admit the Whole. But
excluding One, I exclude the Whole. And confusing the two, I make
nullity nihil.
'_Mais_,' said the Signore, starting from his scene of ignominy, where
his wife played with another man's child, '_mais--voulez-vous vous
promener dans mes petites terres?_'
It came out fluently, he was so much roused in self-defence and
self-assertion.
We walked under the pergola of bony vine-stocks, secure in the sunshine
within the walls, only the long mountain, parallel with us, looking in.
I said how I liked the big vine-garden, I asked when it ended. The pride
of the padrone came back with a click. He pointed me to the terrace, to
the great shut lemon-houses above. They were all his. But--he shrugged
his Italian shoulders--it was nothing, just a little garden, _vous
savez, monsieur_. I protested it was beautiful, that I loved it, and
that it seemed to me _very_ large indeed. He admitted that today,
perhaps, it was beautiful.
'_Perchè--parce que--il fait un tempo--così--très bell'--très beau,
ecco!_'
He alighted on the word _beau_ hurriedly, like a bird coming to ground
with a little bounce.
The terraces of the garden are held up to the sun, the sun falls full
upon them, they are like a vessel slanted up, to catch the superb, heavy
light. Within the walls we are remote, perfect, moving in heavy spring
sunshine, under the bony avenue of vines. The padrone makes little
exclamatory noises that mean nothing, and teaches me the names of
vegetables. The land is rich and black.
Opposite us, looking down on our security, is the long, arched mountain
of snow. We climbed one flight of steps, and we could see the little
villages on the opposite side of the lake. We climbed again, and could
see the water rippling.
We came to a great stone building that I had thought was a storehouse,
for open-air storage, because the walls are open halfway up, showing the
darkness inside and the corner pillar very white and square and distinct
in front of it.
Entering carelessly into the dimness, I started, for at my feet was a
great floor of water, clear and green in its obscurity, going down
between the walls, a reservoir in the gloom. The Signore laughed at my
surprise. It was for irrigating the land, he said. It stank, slightly,
with a raw smell; otherwise, I said, what a wonderful bath it would
make. The old Signore gave his little neighing laugh at the idea.
Then we climbed into a great loft of leaves, ruddy brown, stored in a
great bank under the roof, seeming to give off a little red heat, as
they gave off the lovely perfume of the hills. We passed through, and
stood at the foot of the lemon-house. The big, blind building rose high
in the sunshine before us.
All summer long, upon the mountain slopes steep by the lake, stands the
rows of naked pillars rising out of the green foliage like ruins of
temples: white, square pillars of masonry, standing forlorn in their
colonnades and squares, rising up the mountain-sides here and there, as
if they remained from some great race that had once worshipped here. And
still, in the winter, some are seen, standing away in lonely places
where the sun streams full, grey rows of pillars rising out of a broken
wall, tier above tier, naked to the sky, forsaken.
They are the lemon plantations, and the pillars are to support the heavy
branches of the trees, but finally to act as scaffolding of the great
wooden houses that stand blind and ugly, covering the lemon trees in
the winter.
In November, when cold winds came down and snow had fallen on the
mountains, from out of the storehouses the men were carrying timber, and
we heard the clang of falling planks. Then, as we walked along the
military road on the mountain-side, we saw below, on the top of the
lemon gardens, long, thin poles laid from pillar to pillar, and we heard
the two men talking and singing as they walked across perilously,
placing the poles. In their clumsy zoccoli they strode easily across,
though they had twenty or thirty feet to fall if they slipped. But the
mountain-side, rising steeply, seemed near, and above their heads the
rocks glowed high into the sky, so that the sense of elevation must have
been taken away. At any rate, they went easily from pillar-summit to
pillar-summit, with a great cave of space below. Then again was the
rattle and clang of planks being laid in order, ringing from the
mountain-side over the blue lake, till a platform of timber, old and
brown, projected from the mountain-side, a floor when seen from above, a
hanging roof when seen from below. And we, on the road above, saw the
men sitting easily on this flimsy hanging platform, hammering the
planks. And all day long the sound of hammering echoed among the rocks
and olive woods, and came, a faint, quick concussion, to the men on the
boats far out. When the roofs were on they put in the fronts, blocked in
between the white pillars withhold, dark wood, in roughly made panels.
And here and there, at irregular intervals, was a panel of glass, pane
overlapping pane in the long strip of narrow window. So that now these
enormous, unsightly buildings bulge out on the mountain-sides, rising in
two or three receding tiers, blind, dark, sordid-looking places.
In the morning I often lie in bed and watch the sunrise. The lake lies
dim and milky, the mountains are dark blue at the back, while over them
the sky gushes and glistens with light. At a certain place on the
mountain ridge the light burns gold, seems to fuse a little groove on
the hill's rim. It fuses and fuses at this point, till of a sudden it
comes, the intense, molten, living light. The mountains melt suddenly,
the light steps down, there is a glitter, a spangle, a clutch of
spangles, a great unbearable sun-track flashing across the milky lake,
and the light falls on my face. Then, looking aside, I hear the little
slotting noise which tells me they are opening the lemon gardens, a long
panel here and there, a long slot of darkness at irregular intervals
between the brown wood and the glass stripes.
'_Voulez-vous_'--the Signore bows me in with outstretched
hand--'_voulez-vous entrer, monsieur?_'
I went into the lemon-house, where the poor threes seem to mope in the
darkness. It is an immense, dark, cold place. Tall lemon trees, heavy
with half-visible fruit, crowd together, and rise in the gloom. They
look like ghosts in the darkness of the underworld, stately, and as if
in life, but only grand shadows of themselves. And lurking here and
there, I see one of the pillars, But he, too, seems a shadow, not one of
the dazzling white fellows I knew. Here we are trees, men, pillars, the
dark earth, the sad black paths, shut in in this enormous box. It is
true, there are long strips of window and slots of space, so that the
front is striped, and an occasional beam of light fingers the leaves of
an enclosed tree and the sickly round lemons. But it is nevertheless
very gloomy.
'But it is much colder in here than outside,' I said.
'Yes,' replied the Signore, 'now. But at night--I _think_--'
I almost wished it were night to try. I wanted to imagine the trees
cosy. They seemed now in the underworld. Between the lemon trees, beside
the path, were little orange trees, and dozens of oranges hanging like
hot coals in the twilight. When I warm my hands at them the Signore
breaks me off one twig after another, till I have a bunch of burning
oranges among dark leaves, a heavy bouquet. Looking down the Hades of
the lemon-house, the many ruddy-clustered oranges beside the path remind
me of the lights of a village along the lake at night, while the pale
lemons above are the stars. There is a subtle, exquisite scent of lemon
flowers. Then I notice a citron. He hangs heavy and bloated upon so
small a tree, that he seems a dark green enormity. There is a great host
of lemons overhead, half-visible, a swarm of ruddy oranges by the paths,
and here and there a fat citron. It is almost like being under the sea.
At the corners of the path were round little patches of ash and stumps
of charred wood, where fires had been kindled inside the house on cold
nights. For during the second and third weeks in January the snow came
down so low on the mountains that, after climbing for an hour, I found
myself in a snow lane, and saw olive orchards on lawns of snow.
The padrone says that all lemons and sweet oranges are grafted on a
bitter-orange stock. The plants raised from seed, lemon and sweet
orange, fell prey to disease, so the cultivators found it safe only to
raise the native bitter orange, and then graft upon it.
And the maestra--she is the schoolmistress, who wears black gloves while
she teaches us Italian--says that the lemon was brought by St Francis of
Assisi, who came to the Garda here and founded a church and a monastery.
Certainly the church of San Francesco is very old and dilapidated, and
its cloisters have some beautiful and original carvings of leaves and
fruit upon the pillars, which seem to connect San Francesco with the
lemon. I imagine him wandering here with a lemon in his pocket. Perhaps
he made lemonade in the hot summer. But Bacchus had been before him in
the drink trade.
Looking at his lemons, the Signore sighed. I think he hates them. They
are leaving him in the lurch. They are sold retail at a halfpenny each
all the year round. 'But that is as dear, or dearer, than in England,' I
say. 'Ah, but,' says the maestra, 'that is because your lemons are
outdoor fruit from Sicily. _Però_--one of our lemons is as good as _two_
from elsewhere.'
It is true these lemons have an exquisite fragrance and perfume, but
whether their force as lemons is double that of an ordinary fruit is a
question. Oranges are sold at fourpence halfpenny the kilo--it comes
about five for twopence, small ones. The citrons are sold also by weight
in Salò for the making of that liqueur known as 'Cedro'. One citron
fetches sometimes a shilling or more, but then the demand is necessarily
small. So that it is evident, from these figures, the Lago di Garda
cannot afford to grow its lemons much longer. The gardens are already
many of them in ruins, and still more 'Da Vendere'.
We went out of the shadow of the lemon-house on to the roof of the
section below us. When we came to the brink of the roof I sat down. The
padrone stood behind me, a shabby, shaky little figure on his roof in
the sky, a little figure of dilapidation, dilapidated as the
lemon-houses themselves.
We were always level with the mountain-snow opposite. A film of pure
blue was on the hills to the right and the left. There had been a wind,
but it was still now. The water breathed an iridescent dust on the far
shore, where the villages were groups of specks.
On the low level of the world, on the lake, an orange-sailed boat leaned
slim to the dark-blue water, which had flecks of foam. A woman went
down-hill quickly, with two goats and a sheep. Among the olives a man
was whistling.
'_Voyez_,' said the padrone, with distant, perfect melancholy. 'There
was once a lemon garden also there--you see the short pillars, cut off
to make a pergola for the vine. Once there were twice as many lemons as
now. Now we must have vine instead. From that piece of land I had two
hundred lire a year, in lemons. From the vine I have only eighty.'
'But wine is a valuable crop,' I said.
'Ah--_così-così_! For a man who grows much. For me--_poco, poco--peu_.'
Suddenly his face broke into a smile of profound melancholy, almost a
grin, like a gargoyle. It was the real Italian melancholy, very
deep, static.
'_Vous voyez, monsieur_--the lemon, it is all the year, all the year.
But the vine--one crop--?'
He lifts his shoulders and spreads his hands with that gesture of
finality and fatality, while his face takes the blank, ageless look of
misery, like a monkey's. There is no hope. There is the present. Either
that is enough, the present, or there is nothing.
I sat and looked at the lake. It was beautiful as paradise, as the first
creation. On the shores were the ruined lemon-pillars standing out in
melancholy, the clumsy, enclosed lemon-houses seemed ramshackle, bulging
among vine stocks and olive trees. The villages, too, clustered upon
their churches, seemed to belong to the past. They seemed to be
lingering in bygone centuries.
'But it is very beautiful,' I protested. 'In England--'
'Ah, in England,' exclaimed the padrone, the same ageless, monkey-like
grin of fatality, tempered by cunning, coming on his face, 'in England
you have the wealth--_les richesses_--you have the mineral coal and the
machines, _vous savez_. Here we have the sun--'
He lifted his withered hand to the sky, to the wonderful source of that
blue day, and he smiled, in histrionic triumph. But his triumph was only
histrionic. The machines were more to his soul than the sun. He did not
know these mechanisms, their great, human-contrived, inhuman power, and
he wanted to know them. As for the sun, that is common property, and no
man is distinguished by it. He wanted machines, machine production,
money, and human power. He wanted to know the joy of man who has got the
earth in his grip, bound it up with railways, burrowed it with iron
fingers, subdued it. He wanted this last triumph of the ego, this last
reduction. He wanted to go where the English have gone, beyond the Self,
into the great inhuman Not Self, to create the great unliving creators,
the machines, out of the active forces of nature that existed
before flesh.
But he is too old. It remains for the young Italian to embrace his
mistress, the machine.
I sat on the roof of the lemon-house, with the lake below and the snowy
mountain opposite, and looked at the ruins on the old, olive-fuming
shores, at all the peace of the ancient world still covered in sunshine,
and the past seemed to me so lovely that one must look towards it,
backwards, only backwards, where there is peace and beauty and no more
dissonance.
I thought of England, the great mass of London, and the black, fuming,
laborious Midlands and north-country. It seemed horrible. And yet, it
was better than the padrone, this old, monkey-like cunning of fatality.
It is better to go forward into error than to stay fixed inextricably
in the past.
Yet what should become of the world? There was London and the industrial
counties spreading like a blackness over all the world, horrible, in the
end destructive. And the Garda was so lovely under the sky of sunshine,
it was intolerable. For away, beyond, beyond all the snowy Alps, with
the iridescence of eternal ice above them, was this England, black and
foul and dry, with her soul worn down, almost worn away. And England was
conquering the world with her machines and her horrible destruction of
natural life. She was conquering the whole world.
And yet, was she not herself finished in this work? She had had enough.
She had conquered the natural life to the end: she was replete with the
conquest of the outer world, satisfied with the destruction of the Self.
She would cease, she would turn round; or else expire.
If she still lived, she would begin to build her knowledge into a great
structure of truth. There it lay, vast masses of rough-hewn knowledge,
vast masses of machines and appliances, vast masses of ideas and
methods, and nothing done with it, only teeming swarms of disintegrated
human beings seething and perishing rapidly away amongst it, till it
seems as if a world will be left covered with huge ruins, and scored by
strange devices of industry, and quite dead, the people disappeared,
swallowed up in the last efforts towards a perfect, selfless society.
_3_