The first time I saw Il Duro was on a sunny day when there came up a
party of pleasure-makers to San Gaudenzio. They were three women and
three men. The women were in cotton frocks, one a large, dark, florid
woman in pink, the other two rather insignificant. The men I scarcely
noticed at first, except that two were young and one elderly.
They were a queer party, even on a feast day, coming up purely for
pleasure, in the morning, strange, and slightly uncertain, advancing
between the vines. They greeted Maria and Paolo in loud, coarse voices.
There was something blowsy and uncertain and hesitating about the women
in particular, which made one at once notice them.
Then a picnic was arranged for them out of doors, on the grass. They sat
just in front of the house, under the olive tree, beyond the well. It
should have been pretty, the women in their cotton frocks, and their
friends, sitting with wine and food in the spring sunshine. But somehow
it was not: it was hard and slightly ugly.
But since they were picnicking out of doors, we must do so too. We were
at once envious. But Maria was a little unwilling, and then she set a
table for us.
The strange party did not speak to us, they seemed slightly uneasy and
angry at our presence. I asked Maria who they were. She lifted her
shoulders, and, after a second's cold pause, said they were people from
down below, and then, in her rather strident, shrill, slightly bitter,
slightly derogatory voice, she added:
'They are not people for you, signore. You don't know them.'
She spoke slightly angrily and contemptuously of them, rather
protectively of me. So that vaguely I gathered that they were not quite
'respectable'.
Only one man came into the house. He was very handsome, beautiful
rather, a man of thirty-two or-three, with a clear golden skin, and
perfectly turned face, something godlike. But the expression was
strange. His hair was jet black and fine and smooth, glossy as a bird's
wing, his brows were beautifully drawn, calm above his grey eyes, that
had long dark lashes.
His eyes, however, had a sinister light in them, a pale, slightly
repelling gleam, very much like a god's pale-gleaming eyes, with the
same vivid pallor. And all his face had the slightly malignant,
suffering look of a satyr. Yet he was very beautiful.
He walked quickly and surely, with his head rather down, passing from
his desire to his object, absorbed, yet curiously indifferent, as if the
transit were in a strange world, as if none of what he was doing were
worth the while. Yet he did it for his own pleasure, and the light on
his face, a pale, strange gleam through his clear skin, remained like a
translucent smile, unchanging as time.
He seemed familiar with the household, he came and fetched wine at his
will. Maria was angry with him. She railed loudly and violently. He was
unchanged. He went out with the wine to the party on the grass. Maria
regarded them all with some hostility.
They drank a good deal out there in the sunshine. The women and the
older man talked floridly. Il Duro crouched at the feast in his curious
fashion--he had strangely flexible loins, upon which he seemed to crouch
forward. But he was separate, like an animal that remains quite single,
no matter where it is.
The party remained until about two o'clock. Then, slightly flushed, it
moved on in a ragged group up to the village beyond. I do not know if
they went to one of the inns of the stony village, or to the large
strange house which belonged to the rich young grocer of the village
below, a house kept only for feasts and riots, uninhabited for the most
part. Maria would tell me nothing about them. Only the young well-to-do
grocer, who had lived in Vienna, the Bertolotti, came later in the
afternoon inquiring for the party.
And towards sunset I saw the elderly man of the group stumbling home
very drunk down the path, after the two women, who had gone on in front.
Then Paolo sent Giovanni to see the drunken one safely past the
landslip, which was dangerous. Altogether it was an unsatisfactory
business, very much like any other such party in any other country.
Then in the evening Il Duro came in. His name is Faustino, but everybody
in the village has a nickname, which is almost invariably used. He came
in and asked for supper. We had all eaten. So he ate a little food alone
at the table, whilst we sat round the fire.
Afterwards we played 'Up, Jenkins'. That was the one game we played with
the peasants, except that exciting one of theirs, which consists in
shouting in rapid succession your guesses at the number of fingers
rapidly spread out and shut into the hands again upon the table.
Il Duro joined in the game. And that was because he had been in America,
and now was rich. He felt he could come near to the strange signori. But
he was always inscrutable.
It was queer to look at the hands spread on the table: the Englishwomen,
having rings on their soft fingers; the large fresh hands of the elder
boy, the brown paws of the younger; Paolo's distorted great hard hands
of a peasant; and the big, dark brown, animal, shapely hands
of Faustino.
He had been in America first for two years and then for five
years--seven years altogether--but he only spoke a very little English.
He was always with Italians. He had served chiefly in a flag factory,
and had had very little to do save to push a trolley with flags from the
dyeing-room to the drying-room I believe it was this.
Then he had come home from America with a fair amount of money, he had
taken his uncle's garden, had inherited his uncle's little house, and he
lived quite alone.
He was rich, Maria said, shouting in her strident voice. He at once
disclaimed it, peasant-wise. But before the signori he was glad also to
appear rich. He was mean, that was more, Maria cried, half-teasing, half
getting at him.
He attended to his garden, grew vegetables all the year round, lived in
his little house, and in spring made good money as a vine-grafter: he
was an expert vine-grafter.
After the boys had gone to bed he sat and talked to me. He was curiously
attractive and curiously beautiful, but somehow like stone in his clear
colouring and his clear-cut face. His temples, with the black hair, were
distinct and fine as a work of art.
But always his eyes had this strange, half-diabolic, half-tortured pale
gleam, like a goat's, and his mouth was shut almost uglily, his cheeks
stern. His moustache was brown, his teeth strong and spaced. The women
said it was a pity his moustache was brown.
'_Peccato!--sa, per bellezza, i baffi neri--ah-h!_'
Then a long-drawn exclamation of voluptuous appreciation.
'You live quite alone?' I said to him.
He did. And even when he had been ill he was alone. He had been ill two
years before. His cheeks seemed to harden like marble and to become pale
at the thought. He was afraid, like marble with fear.
'But why,' I said, 'why do you live alone? You are sad--_è triste_.'
He looked at me with his queer, pale eyes. I felt a great static misery
in him, something very strange.
'_Triste!_' he repeated, stiffening up, hostile. I could not understand.
'_Vuol' dire che hai l'aria dolorosa_,' cried Maria, like a chorus
interpreting. And there was always a sort of loud ring of challenge
somewhere in her voice.
'Sad,' I said in English.
'Sad I' he repeated, also in English. And he did not smile or change,
only his face seemed to become more stone-like. And he only looked at
me, into my eyes, with the long, pale, steady, inscrutable look of a
goat, I can only repeat, something stone-like.
'Why,' I said, 'don't you marry? Man doesn't live alone.'
'I don't marry,' he said to me, in his emphatic, deliberate, cold
fashion, 'because I've seen too much. _Ho visto troppo._'
'I don't understand,' I said.
Yet I could feel that Paolo, sitting silent, like a monolith also, in
the chimney opening, he understood: Maria also understood.
Il Duro looked again steadily into my eyes.
'_Ho visto troppo_,' he repeated, and the words seemed engraved on
stone. 'I've seen too much.'
'But you can marry,' I said, 'however much you have seen, if you have
seen all the world.'
He watched me steadily, like a strange creature looking at me.
'What woman?' he said to me.
'You can find a woman--there are plenty of women,' I said.
'Not for me,' he said. 'I have known too many. I've known too much, I
can marry nobody.'
'Do you dislike women?' I said.
'No--quite otherwise. I don't think ill of them.'
'Then why can't you marry? Why must you live alone?'
'Why live with a woman?' he said to me, and he looked mockingly. 'Which
woman is it to be?'
'You can find her,' I said. 'There are many women.'
Again he shook his head in the stony, final fashion.
'Not for me. I have known too much.'
'But does that prevent you from marrying?'
He looked at me steadily, finally. And I could see it was impossible for
us to understand each other, or for me to understand him. I could not
understand the strange white gleam of his eyes, where it came from.
Also I knew he liked me very much, almost loved me, which again was
strange and puzzling. It was as if he were a fairy, a faun, and had no
soul. But he gave me a feeling of vivid sadness, a sadness that gleamed
like phosphorescence. He himself was not sad. There was a completeness
about him, about the pallid otherworld he inhabited, which excluded
sadness. It was too complete, too final, too defined. There was no
yearning, no vague merging off into mistiness.... He was clear and fine
as semi-transparent rock, as a substance in moonlight. He seemed like a
crystal that has achieved its final shape and has nothing more
to achieve.
That night he slept on the floor of the sitting-room. In the morning he
was gone. But a week after he came again, to graft the vines.
All the morning and the afternoon he was among the vines, crouching
before them, cutting them back with his sharp, bright knife, amazingly
swift and sure, like a god. It filled me with a sort of panic to see him
crouched flexibly, like some strange animal god, doubled on his
haunches, before the young vines, and swiftly, vividly, without thought,
cut, cut, cut at the young budding shoots, which fell unheeded on to the
earth. Then again he strode with his curious half-goatlike movement
across the garden, to prepare the lime.
He mixed the messy stuff, cow-dung and lime and water and earth,
carefully with his hands, as if he understood that too. He was not a
worker. He was a creature in intimate communion with the sensible world,
knowing purely by touch the limey mess he mixed amongst, knowing as if
by relation between that soft matter and the matter of himself.
Then again he strode over the earth, a gleaming piece of earth himself,
moving to the young vines. Quickly, with a few clean cuts of the knife,
he prepared the new shoot, which he had picked out of a handful which
lay beside him on the ground; he went finely to the quick of the plant,
inserted the graft, then bound it up, fast, hard.
It was like God grafting the life of man upon the body of the earth,
intimately conjuring with his own flesh.
All the while Paolo stood by, somehow excluded from the mystery, talking
to me, to Faustino. And Il Duro answered easily, as if his mind were
disengaged. It was his senses that were absorbed in the sensible life of
the plant, and the lime and the cow-dung he handled.
Watching him, watching his absorbed, bestial, and yet godlike crouching
before the plant, as if he were the god of lower life, I somehow
understood his isolation, why he did not marry. Pan and the ministers of
Pan do not marry, the sylvan gods. They are single and isolated in
their being.
It is in the spirit that marriage takes place. In the flesh there is
connexion, but only in the spirit is there a new thing created out of
two different antithetic things. In the body I am conjoined with the
woman. But in the spirit my conjunction with her creates a third thing,
an absolute, a Word, which is neither me nor her, nor of me nor of her,
but which is absolute.
And Faustino had none of this spirit. In him sensation itself was
absolute--not spiritual consummation, but physical sensation. So he
could not marry, it was not for him. He belonged to the god Pan, to the
absolute of the senses.
All the while his beauty, so perfect and so defined, fascinated me, a
strange static perfection about him. But his movements, whilst they
fascinated, also repelled. I can always see him crouched before the
vines on his haunches, his haunches doubled together in a complete
animal unconsciousness, his face seeming in its strange golden pallor
and its hardness of line, with the gleaming black of the fine hair on
the brow and temples, like something reflective, like the reflecting
surface of a stone that gleams out of the depths of night. It was like
darkness revealed in its steady, unchanging pallor.
Again he stayed through the evening, having quarrelled once more with
the Maria about money. He quarrelled violently, yet coldly. There was
something terrifying in it. And as soon as the matter of dispute was
settled, all trace of interest or feeling vanished from him.
Yet he liked, above all things, to be near the English signori. They
seemed to exercise a sort of magnetic attraction over him. It was
something of the purely physical world, as a magnetized needle swings
towards soft iron. He was quite helpless in the relation. Only by
mechanical attraction he gravitated into line with us.
But there was nothing between us except our complete difference. It was
like night and day flowing together.
_7_