In the autumn the little rosy cyclamens blossom in the shade of this
west side of the lake. They are very cold and fragrant, and their scent
seems to belong to Greece, to the Bacchae. They are real flowers of the
past. They seem to be blossoming in the landscape of Phaedra and Helen.
They bend down, they brood like little chill fires. They are little
living myths that I cannot understand.
After the cyclamens the Christmas roses are in bud. It is at this season
that the cacchi are ripe on the trees in the garden, whole naked trees
full of lustrous, orange-yellow, paradisal fruit, gleaming against the
wintry blue sky. The monthly roses still blossom frail and pink, there
are still crimson and yellow roses. But the vines are bare and the
lemon-houses shut. And then, mid-winter, the lowest buds of the
Christmas roses appear under the hedges and rocks and by the streams.
They are very lovely, these first large, cold, pure buds, like violets,
like magnolias, but cold, lit up with the light from the snow.
The days go by, through the brief silence of winter, when the sunshine
is so still and pure, like iced wine, and the dead leaves gleam brown,
and water sounds hoarse in the ravines. It is so still and transcendent,
the cypress trees poise like flames of forgotten darkness, that should
have been blown out at the end of the summer. For as we have candles to
light the darkness of night, so the cypresses are candles to keep the
darkness aflame in the full sunshine.
Meanwhile, the Christmas roses become many. They rise from their budded,
intact humbleness near the ground, they rise up, they throw up their
crystal, they become handsome, they are heaps of confident, mysterious
whiteness in the shadow of a rocky stream. It is almost uncanny to see
them. They are the flowers of darkness, white and wonderful
beyond belief.
Then their radiance becomes soiled and brown, they thaw, break, and
scatter and vanish away. Already the primroses are coming out, and the
almond is in bud. The winter is passing away. On the mountains the
fierce snow gleams apricot gold as evening approaches, golden, apricot,
but so bright that it is almost frightening. What can be so fiercely
gleaming when all is shadowy? It is something inhuman and unmitigated
between heaven and earth.
The heavens are strange and proud all the winter, their progress goes on
without reference to the dim earth. The dawns come white and
translucent, the lake is a moonstone in the dark hills, then across the
lake there stretches a vein of fire, then a whole, orange, flashing
track over the whiteness. There is the exquisite silent passage of the
day, and then at evening the afterglow, a huge incandescence of rose,
hanging above and gleaming, as if it were the presence of a host of
angels in rapture. It gleams like a rapturous chorus, then passes away,
and the stars appear, large and flashing.
Meanwhile, the primroses are dawning on the ground, their light is
growing stronger, spreading over the banks and under the bushes. Between
the olive roots the violets are out, large, white, grave violets, and
less serious blue ones. And looking down the bill, among the grey smoke
of olive leaves, pink puffs of smoke are rising up. It is the almond and
the apricot trees, it is the Spring.
Soon the primroses are strong on the ground. There is a bank of small,
frail crocuses shooting the lavender into this spring. And then the
tussocks and tussocks of primroses are fully out, there is full morning
everywhere on the banks and roadsides and stream-sides, and around the
olive roots, a morning of primroses underfoot, with an invisible
threading of many violets, and then the lovely blue clusters of
hepatica, really like pieces of blue sky showing through a clarity of
primrose. The few birds are piping thinly and shyly, the streams sing
again, there is a strange flowering shrub full of incense, overturned
flowers of crimson and gold, like Bohemian glass. Between the olive
roots new grass is coming, day is leaping all clear and coloured from
the earth, it is full Spring, full first rapture.
Does it pass away, or does it only lose its pristine quality? It deepens
and intensifies, like experience. The days seem to be darker and richer,
there is a sense of power in the strong air. On the banks by the lake
the orchids are out, many, many pale bee-orchids standing clear from the
short grass over the lake. And in the hollows are the grape hyacinths,
purple as noon, with the heavy, sensual fragrance of noon. They are
many-breasted, and full of milk, and ripe, and sun-darkened, like
many-breasted Diana.
We could not bear to live down in the village any more, now that the
days opened large and spacious and the evenings drew out in sunshine. We
could not bear the indoors, when above us the mountains shone in clear
air. It was time to go up, to climb with the sun.
So after Easter we went to San Gaudenzio. It was three miles away, up
the winding mule-track that climbed higher and higher along the lake.
Leaving the last house of the village, the path wound on the steep,
cliff-like side of the lake, curving into the hollow where the landslip
had tumbled the rocks in chaos, then out again on to the bluff of a
headland that hung over the lake.
Thus we came to the tall barred gate of San Gaudenzio, on which was the
usual little fire-insurance tablet, and then the advertisements for
beer, 'Birra, Verona', which is becoming a more and more popular drink.
Through the gate, inside the high wall, is the little Garden of Eden, a
property of three or four acres fairly level upon a headland over the
lake. The high wall girds it on the land side, and makes it perfectly
secluded. On the lake-side it is bounded by the sudden drops of the
land, in sharp banks and terraces, overgrown with ilex and with laurel
bushes, down to the brink of the cliff, so that the thicket of the first
declivities seems to safeguard the property.
The pink farm-house stands almost in the centre of the little territory,
among the olive trees. It is a solid, six-roomed place, about fifty
years old, having been rebuilt by Paolo's uncle. Here we came to live
for a time with the Fiori, Maria and Paolo, and their three children,
Giovanni and Marco and Felicina.
Paolo had inherited, or partly inherited, San Gaudenzio, which had been
in his family for generations. He was a peasant of fifty-three, very
grey and wrinkled and worn-looking, but at the same time robust, with
full strong limbs and a powerful chest. His face was old, but his body
was solid and powerful. His eyes were blue like upper ice, beautiful. He
had been a fair-haired man, now he was almost white.
He, was strangely like the pictures of peasants in the northern Italian
pictures, with the same curious nobility, the same aristocratic, eternal
look of motionlessness, something statuesque. His head was hard and
fine, the bone finely constructed, though the skin of his face was loose
and furrowed with work. His temples had that fine, hard clarity which is
seen in Mantegna, an almost jewel-like quality.
We all loved Paolo, he was so finished in his being, detached, with an
almost classic simplicity and gentleness, an eternal kind of sureness.
There was also something concluded and unalterable about him, something
inaccessible.
Maria Fiori was different. She was from the plain, like Enrico
Persevalli and the Bersaglier from the Venetian district. She reminded
me again of oxen, broad-boned and massive in physique, dark-skinned,
slow in her soul. But, like the oxen of the plain, she knew her work,
she knew the other people engaged in the work. Her intelligence was
attentive and purposive. She had been a housekeeper, a servant, in
Venice and Verona, before her marriage. She had got the hang of this
world of commerce and activity, she wanted to master it. But she was
weighted down by her heavy animal blood.
Paolo and she were the opposite sides of the universe, the light and the
dark. Yet they lived together now without friction, detached, each
subordinated in their common relationship. With regard to Maria, Paolo
omitted himself; Maria omitted herself with regard to Paolo. Their souls
were silent and detached, completely apart, and silent, quite silent.
They shared the physical relationship of marriage as if it were
something beyond them, a third thing.
They had suffered very much in the earlier stages of their connexion.
Now the storm had gone by, leaving them, as it were, spent. They were
both by nature passionate, vehement. But the lines of their passion were
opposite. Hers was the primitive, crude, violent flux of the blood,
emotional and undiscriminating, but wanting to mix and mingle. His was
the hard, clear, invulnerable passion of the bones, finely tempered and
unchangeable. She was the flint and he the steel. But in continual
striking together they only destroyed each other. The fire was a third
thing, belonging to neither of them.
She was still heavy and full of desire. She was much younger than he.
'How long did you know your Signora before you were married?' she asked
me.
'Six weeks,' I said.
'_Il Paolo e me, venti giorni, tre settimane_,' she cried vehemently.
Three weeks they had known each other when they married. She still
triumphed in the fact. So did Paolo. But it was past, strangely and
rather terribly past.
What did they want when they came together, Paolo and she? He was a man
over thirty, she was a woman of twenty-three. They were both violent in
desire and of strong will. They came together at once, like two
wrestlers almost matched in strength. Their meetings must have been
splendid. Giovanni, the eldest child, was a tall lad of sixteen, with
soft brown hair and grey eyes, and a clarity of brow, and the same calm
simplicity of bearing which made Paolo so complete; but the son had at
the same time a certain brownness of skin, a heaviness of blood, which
he had from his mother. Paolo was so clear and translucent.
In Giovanni the fusion of the parents was perfect, he was a perfect
spark from the flint and steel. There was in Paolo a subtle intelligence
in feeling, a delicate appreciation of the other person. But the mind
was unintelligent, he could not grasp a new order. Maria Fiori was much
sharper and more adaptable to the ways of the world. Paolo had an almost
glass-like quality, fine and clear and perfectly tempered; but he was
also finished and brittle. Maria was much coarser, more vulgar, but also
she was more human, more fertile, with crude potentiality. His passion
was too fixed in its motion, hers too loose and overwhelming.
But Giovanni was beautiful, gentle, and courtly like Paolo, but warm,
like Maria, ready to flush like a girl with anger or confusion. He stood
straight and tall, and seemed to look into the far distance with his
clear grey eyes. Yet also he could look at one and touch one with his
look, he could meet one. Paolo's blue eyes were like the eyes of the old
spinning-woman, clear and blue and belonging to the mountains, their
vision seemed to end in space, abstract. They reminded me of the eyes of
the eagle, which looks into the sun, and which teaches its young to do
the same, although they are unwilling.
Marco, the second son, was thirteen years old. He was his mother's
favourite, Giovanni loved his father best. But Marco was his mother's
son, with the same brown-gold and red complexion, like a pomegranate,
and coarse black hair, and brown eyes like pebble, like agate, like an
animal's eyes. He had the same broad, bovine figure, though he was only
a boy. But there was some discrepancy in him. He was not unified, he had
no identity.
He was strong and full of animal life, but always aimless, as though his
wits scarcely controlled him. But he loved his mother with a
fundamental, generous, undistinguishing love. Only he always forgot what
he was going to do. He was much more sensitive than Maria, more shy and
reluctant. But his shyness, his sensitiveness only made him more aimless
and awkward, a tiresome clown, slack and uncontrolled, witless. All day
long his mother shouted and shrilled and scolded at him, or hit him
angrily. He did not mind, he came up like a cork, warm and roguish and
curiously appealing. She loved him with a fierce protective love,
grounded on pain. There was such a split, a contrariety in his soul, one
part reacting against the other, which landed him always into trouble.
It was when Marco was a baby that Paolo had gone to America. They were
poor on San Gaudenzio. There were the few olive trees, the grapes, and
the fruit; there was the one cow. But these scarcely made a living.
Neither was Maria content with the real peasants' lot any more, polenta
at midday and vegetable soup in the evening, and no way out, nothing to
look forward to, no future, only this eternal present. She had been in
service, and had eaten bread and drunk coffee, and known the flux and
variable chance of life. She had departed from the old static
conception. She knew what one might be, given a certain chance. The
fixture was the thing she militated against. So Paolo went to America,
to California, into the gold mines.
Maria wanted the future, the endless possibility of life on earth. She
wanted her sons to be freer, to achieve a new plane of living. The
peasant's life was a slave's life, she said, railing against the poverty
and the drudgery. And it was quite true, Paolo and Giovanni worked
twelve and fourteen hours a day at heavy laborious work that would have
broken an Englishman. And there was nothing at the end of it. Yet Paolo
was even happy so. This was the truth to him.
It was the mother who wanted things different. It was she who railed and
railed against the miserable life of the peasants. When we were going to
throw to the fowls a dry broken penny roll of white bread, Maria said,
with anger and shame and resentment in her voice: 'Give it to Marco, he
will eat it. It isn't too dry for him.'
White bread was a treat for them even now, when everybody eats bread.
And Maria Fiori hated it, that bread should be a treat to her children,
when it was the meanest food of all the rest of the world. She was in
opposition to this order. She did not want her sons to be peasants,
fixed and static as posts driven in the earth. She wanted them to be in
the great flux of life in the midst of all possibilities. So she at
length sent Paolo to America to the gold-mines. Meanwhile, she covered
the wall of her parlour with picture postcards, to bring the outer world
of cities and industries into her house.
Paolo was entirely remote from Maria's world. He had not yet even
grasped the fact of money, not thoroughly. He reckoned in land and olive
trees. So he had the old fatalistic attitude to his circumstances, even
to his food. The earth was the Lord's and the fulness thereof; also the
leanness thereof. Paolo could only do his part and leave the rest. If he
ate in plenty, having oil and wine and sausage in the house, and plenty
of maize-meal, he was glad with the Lord. If he ate meagrely, of poor
polenta, that was fate, it was the skies that ruled these things, and no
man ruled the skies. He took his fate as it fell from the skies.
Maria was exorbitant about money. She would charge us all she could for
what we had and for what was done for us.
Yet she was not mean in her soul. In her soul she was in a state of
anger because of her own closeness. It was a violation to her strong
animal nature. Yet her mind had wakened to the value of money. She knew
she could alter her position, the position of her children, by virtue of
money. She knew it was only money that made the difference between
master and servant. And this was all the difference she would
acknowledge. So she ruled her life according to money. Her supreme
passion was to be mistress rather than servant, her supreme aspiration
for her children was that in the end they might be masters and
not servants.
Paolo was untouched by all this. For him there was some divinity about a
master which even America had not destroyed. If we came in for supper
whilst the family was still at table he would have the children at once
take their plates to the wall, he would have Maria at once set the table
for us, though their own meal were never finished. And this was not
servility, it was the dignity of a religious conception. Paolo regarded
us as belonging to the Signoria, those who are elect, near to God. And
this was part of his religious service. His life was a ritual. It was
very beautiful, but it made me unhappy, the purity of his spirit was so
sacred and the actual facts seemed such a sacrilege to it. Maria was
nearer to the actual truth when she said that money was the only
distinction. But Paolo had hold of an eternal truth, where hers was
temporal. Only Paolo misapplied this eternal truth. He should not have
given Giovanni the inferior status and a fat, mean Italian tradesman the
superior. That was false, a real falsity. Maria knew it and hated it.
But Paolo could not distinguish between the accident of riches and the
aristocracy of the spirit. So Maria rejected him altogether, and went to
the other extreme. We were all human beings like herself; naked, there
was no distinction between us, no higher nor lower. But we were
possessed of more money than she. And she had to steer her course
between these two conceptions. The money alone made the real
distinction, the separation; the being, the life made the common level.
Paolo had the curious peasant's avarice also, but it was not meanness.
It was a sort of religious conservation of his own power, his own self.
Fortunately he could leave all business transactions on our account to
Maria, so that his relation with us was purely ritualistic. He would
have given me anything, trusting implicitly that I would fulfil my own
nature as Signore, one of those more godlike, nearer the light of
perfection than himself, a peasant. It was pure bliss to him to bring us
the first-fruit of the garden, it was like laying it on an altar.
And his fulfilment was in a fine, subtle, exquisite relationship, not of
manners, but subtle interappreciation. He worshipped a finer
understanding and a subtler tact. A further fineness and dignity and
freedom in bearing was to him an approach towards the divine, so he
loved men best of all, they fulfilled his soul. A woman was always a
woman, and sex was a low level whereon he did not esteem himself. But a
man, a doer, the instrument of God, he was really godlike.
Paolo was a Conservative. For him the world was established and divine
in its establishment. His vision grasped a small circle. A finer nature,
a higher understanding, took in a greater circle, comprehended the
whole. So that when Paolo was in relation to a man of further vision, he
himself was extended towards the whole. Thus he was fulfilled. And his
initial assumption was that every signore, every gentleman, was a man of
further, purer vision than himself. This assumption was false. But
Maria's assumption, that no one had a further vision, no one was more
elect than herself, that we are all one flesh and blood and being, was
even more false. Paolo was mistaken in actual life, but Maria was
ultimately mistaken.
Paolo, conservative as he was, believing that a priest must be a priest
of God, yet very rarely went to church. And he used the religious oaths
that Maria hated, even _Porca-Maria_. He always used oaths, either
Bacchus or God or Mary or the Sacrament. Maria was always offended. Yet
it was she who, in her soul, jeered at the Church and at religion. She
wanted the human society as the absolute, without religious
abstractions. So Paolo's oaths enraged her, because of their profanity,
she said. But it was really because of their subscribing to another
superhuman order. She jeered at the clerical people. She made a loud
clamour of derision when the parish priest of the village above went
down to the big village on the lake, and across the piazza, the quay,
with two pigs in a sack on his shoulder. This was a real picture of the
sacred minister to her.
One day, when a storm had blown down an olive tree in front of the
house, and Paolo and Giovanni were beginning to cut it up, this same
priest of Mugiano came to San Gaudenzio. He was an iron-grey, thin,
disreputable-looking priest, very talkative and loud and queer. He
seemed like an old ne'er-do-well in priests' black, and he talked
loudly, almost to himself, as drunken people do. At once _he_ must show
the Fiori how to cut up the tree, he must have the axe from Paolo. He
shouted to Maria for a glass of wine. She brought it out to him with a
sort of insolent deference, insolent contempt of the man and traditional
deference to the cloth. The priest drained the tumblerful of wine at one
drink, his thin throat with its Adam's apple working. And he did not pay
the penny.
Then he stripped off his cassock and put away his hat, and, a ludicrous
figure in ill-fitting black knee-breeches and a not very clean shirt, a
red handkerchief round his neck, he proceeded to give great extravagant
blows at the tree. He was like a caricature. In the doorway Maria was
encouraging him rather jeeringly, whilst she winked at me. Marco was
stifling his hysterical amusement in his mother's apron, and prancing
with glee. Paolo and Giovanni stood by the fallen tree, very grave and
unmoved, inscrutable, abstract. Then the youth came away to the doorway,
with a flush mounting on his face and a grimace distorting its
youngness. Only Paolo, unmoved and detached, stood by the tree with
unchanging, abstract face, very strange, his eyes fixed in the ageless
stare which is so characteristic.
Meanwhile the priest swung drunken blows at the tree, his thin buttocks
bending in the green-black broadcloth, supported on thin shanks, and
thin throat growing dull purple in the red-knotted kerchief.
Nevertheless he was doing the job. His face was wet with sweat. He
wanted another glass of wine.
He took no notice of us. He was strangely a local, even a mountebank
figure, but entirely local, an appurtenance of the district.
It was Maria who jeeringly told us the story of the priest, who shrugged
her shoulders to imply that he was a contemptible figure. Paolo sat with
the abstract look on his face, as of one who hears and does not hear, is
not really concerned. He never opposed or contradicted her, but stayed
apart. It was she who was violent and brutal in her ways. But sometimes
Paolo went into a rage, and then Maria, everybody, was afraid. It was a
white heavy rage, when his blue eyes shone unearthly, and his mouth
opened with a curious drawn blindness of the old Furies. There was
something of the cruelty of a falling mass of snow, heavy, horrible.
Maria drew away, there was a silence. Then the avalanche was finished.
They must have had some cruel fights before they learned to withdraw
from each other so completely. They must have begotten Marco in hatred,
terrible disintegrated opposition and otherness. And it was after this,
after the child of their opposition was born, that Paolo went away to
California, leaving his San Gaudenzio, travelling with several
companions, like blind beasts, to Havre, and thence to New York, then to
California. He stayed five years in the gold-mines, in a wild valley,
living with a gang of Italians in a town of corrugated iron.
All the while he had never really left San Gaudenzio. I asked him, 'Used
you to think of it, the lake, the Monte Baldo, the laurel trees down the
slope?' He tried to see what I wanted to know. Yes, he said--but
uncertainly. I could see that he had never been really homesick. It had
been very wretched on the ship going from Havre to New York. That he
told me about. And he told me about the gold-mines, the galleries, the
valley, the huts in the valley. But he had never really fretted for San
Gaudenzio whilst he was in California.
In real truth he was at San Gaudenzio all the time, his fate was riveted
there. His going away was an excursion from reality, a kind of
sleep-walking. He left his own reality there in the soil above the lake
of Garda. That his body was in California, what did it matter? It was
merely for a time, and for the sake of his own earth, his land. He would
pay off the mortgage. But the gate at home was his gate all the time,
his hand was on the latch.
As for Maria, he had felt his duty towards her. She was part of his
little territory, the rooted centre of the world. He sent her home the
money. But it did not occur to him, in his soul, to miss her. He wanted
her to be safe with the children, that was all. In his flesh perhaps he
missed the woman. But his spirit was even more completely isolated since
marriage. Instead of having united with each other, they had made each
other more terribly distinct and separate. He could live alone
eternally. It was his condition. His sex was functional, like eating and
drinking. To take a woman, a prostitute at the camp, or not to take her,
was no more vitally important than to get drunk or not to get drunk of a
Sunday. And fairly often on Sunday Paolo got drunk. His world remained
unaltered.
But Maria suffered more bitterly. She was a young, powerful, passionate
woman, and she was unsatisfied body and soul. Her soul's satisfaction
became a bodily unsatisfaction. Her blood was heavy, violent, anarchic,
insisting on the equality of the blood in all, and therefore on her own
absolute right to satisfaction.
She took a wine licence for San Gaudenzio, and she sold wine. There were
many scandals about her. Somehow it did not matter very much, outwardly.
The authorities were too divided among themselves to enforce public
opinion. Between the clerical party and the radicals and the socialists,
what canons were left that were absolute? Besides, these wild villages
had always been ungoverned.
Yet Maria suffered. Even she, according to her conviction belonged to
Paolo. And she felt betrayed, betrayed and deserted. The iron had gone
deep into her soul. Paolo had deserted her, she had been betrayed to
other men for five years. There was something cruel and implacable in
life. She sat sullen and heavy, for all her quick activity. Her soul was
sullen and heavy.
I could never believe Felicina was Paolo's child. She was an
unprepossessing little girl, affected, cold, selfish, foolish. Maria and
Paolo, with real Italian greatness, were warm and natural towards the
child in her. But they did not love her in their very souls, she was the
fruit of ash to them. And this must have been the reason that she was so
self-conscious and foolish and affected, small child that she was.
Paolo had come back from America a year before she was born--a year
before she was born, Maria insisted. The husband and wife lived together
in a relationship of complete negation. In his soul he was sad for her,
and in her soul she felt annulled. He sat at evening in the
chimney-seat, smoking, always pleasant and cheerful, not for a moment
thinking he was unhappy. It had all taken place in his subconsciousness.
But his eyebrows and eyelids were lifted in a kind of vacancy, his blue
eyes were round and somehow finished, though he was so gentle and
vigorous in body. But the very quick of him was killed. He was like a
ghost in the house, with his loose throat and powerful limbs, his open,
blue extinct eyes, and his musical, slightly husky voice, that seemed to
sound out of the past.
And Maria, stout and strong and handsome like a peasant woman, went
about as if there were a weight on her, and her voice was high and
strident. She, too, was finished in her life. But she remained unbroken,
her will was like a hammer that destroys the old form.
Giovanni was patiently labouring to learn a little English. Paolo knew
only four or five words, the chief of which were 'a'right', 'boss',
'bread', and 'day'. The youth had these by heart, and was studying a
little more. He was very graceful and lovable, but he found it difficult
to learn. A confused light, like hot tears, would come into his eyes
when he had again forgotten the phrase. But he carried the paper about
with him, and he made steady progress.
He would go to America, he also. Not for anything would he stay in San
Gaudenzio. His dream was to be gone. He would come back. The world was
not San Gaudenzio to Giovanni.
The old order, the order of Paolo and of Pietro di Paoli, the
aristocratic order of the supreme God, God the Father, the Lord, was
passing away from the beautiful little territory. The household no
longer receives its food, oil and wine and maize, from out of the earth
in the motion of fate. The earth is annulled, and money takes its place.
The landowner, who is the lieutenant of God and of Fate, like Abraham,
he, too, is annulled. There is now the order of the rich, which
supersedes the order of the Signoria.
It is passing away from Italy as it has passed from England. The peasant
is passing away, the workman is taking his place. The stability is gone.
Paolo is a ghost, Maria is the living body. And the new order means
sorrow for the Italian more even than it has meant for us. But he will
have the new order.
San Gaudenzio is already becoming a thing of the past. Below the house,
where the land drops in sharp slips to the sheer cliff's edge, over
which it is Maria's constant fear that Felicina will tumble, there are
the deserted lemon gardens of the little territory, snug down below.
They are invisible till one descends by tiny paths, sheer down into
them. And there they stand, the pillars and walls erect, but a dead
emptiness prevailing, lemon trees all dead, gone, a few vines in their
place. It is only twenty years since the lemon trees finally perished of
a disease and were not renewed. But the deserted terrace, shut between
great walls, descending in their openness full to the south, to the lake
and the mountain opposite, seem more terrible than Pompeii in their
silence and utter seclusion. The grape hyacinths flower in the cracks,
the lizards run, this strange place hangs suspended and forgotten,
forgotten for ever, its erect pillars utterly meaningless.
I used to sit and write in the great loft of the lemon-house, high up,
far, far from the ground, the open front giving across the lake and the
mountain snow opposite, flush with twilight. The old matting and boards,
the old disused implements of lemon culture made shadows in the deserted
place. Then there would come the call from the back, away above:
'_Venga, venga mangiare_.'
We ate in the kitchen, where the olive and laurel wood burned in the
open fireplace. It was always soup in the evening. Then we played games
or cards, all playing; or there was singing, with the accordion, and
sometimes a rough mountain peasant with a guitar.
But it is all passing away. Giovanni is in America, unless he has come
back to the War. He will not want to live in San Gaudenzio when he is a
man, he says. He and Marco will not spend their lives wringing a little
oil and wine out of the rocky soil, even if they are not killed in the
fighting which is going on at the end of the lake. In my loft by the
lemon-houses now I should hear the guns. And Giovanni kissed me with a
kind of supplication when I went on to the steamer, as if he were
beseeching for a soul. His eyes were bright and clear and lit up with
courage. He will make a good fight for the new soul he wants--that is,
if they do not kill him in this War.
_5_