'Can I go and look at them?'
'I should think so.'
The landlord glaringly watched me go out. I went down the stone passage
and found a great, half-lighted room that might be used to hold
meetings, with forms piled at the side. At one end was raised platform
or stage. And on this stage was a table and a lamp, and the Italians
grouped round the light, gesticulating and laughing. Their beer mugs
were on the table and on the floor of the stage; the little sharp youth
was intently looking over some papers, the others were bending over the
table with him.
They looked up as I entered from the distance, looked at me in the
distant twilight of the dusky room, as if I were an intruder, as if I
should go away when I had seen them. But I said in German:
'May I look?'
They were still unwilling to see or to hear me.
'What do you say?' the small one asked in reply.
The others stood and watched, slightly at bay, like suspicious animals.
'If I might come and look,' I said in German; then, feeling very
uncomfortable, in Italian: 'You are doing a drama, the landlady
told me.'
The big empty room was behind me, dark, the little company of Italians
stood above me in the light of the lamp which was on the table. They all
watched with unseeing, unwilling looks: I was merely an intrusion.
'We are only learning it,' said the small youth.
They wanted me to go away. But I wanted to stay.
'May I listen?' I said. 'I don't want to stay in there.' And I
indicated, with a movement of the head, the inn-room beyond.
'Yes,' said the young intelligent man. 'But we are only reading our
parts.'
They had all become more friendly to me, they accepted me.
'You are a German?' asked one youth.
'No--English.'
'English? But do you live in Switzerland?'
'No--I am walking to Italy.'
'On foot?'
They looked with wakened eyes.
'Yes.'
So I told them about my journey. They were puzzled. They did not quite
understand why I wanted to walk. But they were delighted with the idea
of going to Lugano and Como and then to Milan.
'Where do you come from?' I asked them.
They were all from the villages between Verona and Venice. They had seen
the Garda. I told them of my living there.
'Those peasants of the mountains,' they said at once, 'they are people
of little education. Rather wild folk.'
And they spoke with good-humoured contempt.
I thought of Paolo, and Il Duro, and the Signor Pietro, our padrone, and
I resented these factory-hands for criticizing them.
So I sat on the edge of the stage whilst they rehearsed their parts. The
little thin intelligent fellow, Giuseppino, was the leader. The others
read their parts in the laborious, disjointed fashion of the peasant,
who can only see one word at a time, and has then to put the words
together, afterwards, to make sense. The play was an amateur melodrama,
printed in little penny booklets, for carnival production. This was only
the second reading they had given it, and the handsome, dark fellow, who
was roused and displaying himself before the girl, a hard, erect piece
of callousness, laughed and flushed and stumbled, and understood nothing
till it was transferred into him direct through Giuseppino. The fat,
fair, slow man was more conscientious. He laboured through his part. The
other two men were in the background more or less.
The most confidential was the fat, fair, slow man, who was called
Alberto. His part was not very important, so he could sit by me and
talk to me.
He said they were all workers in the factory--silk, I think it was--in
the village. They were a whole colony of Italians, thirty or more
families. They had all come at different times.
Giuseppino had been longest in the village. He had come when he was
eleven, with his parents, and had attended the Swiss school. So he spoke
perfect German. He was a clever man, was married, and had two children.
He himself, Alberto, had been seven years in the valley; the girl, la
Maddelena, had been here ten years; the dark man, Alfredo, who was
flushed with excitement of her, had been in the village about nine
years--he alone of all men was not married.
The others had all married Italian wives, and they lived in the great
dwelling whose windows shone yellow by the rattling factory. They lived
entirely among themselves; none of them could speak German, more than a
few words, except the Giuseppino, who was like a native here.
It was very strange being among these Italians exiled in Switzerland.
Alfredo, the dark one, the unmarried, was in the old tradition. Yet even
he was curiously subject to a new purpose, as if there were some greater
new will that included him, sensuous, mindless as he was. He seemed to
give his consent to something beyond himself. In this he was different
from Il Duro, in that he had put himself under the control of the
outside conception.
It was strange to watch them on the stage, the Italians all lambent,
soft, warm, sensuous, yet moving subject round Giuseppino, who was
always quiet, always ready, always impersonal. There was a look of
purpose, almost of devotion on his face, that singled him out and made
him seem the one stable, eternal being among them. They quarrelled, and
he let them quarrel up to a certain point; then he called them back. He
let them do as they liked so long as they adhered more or less to the
central purpose, so long as they got on in some measure with the play.
All the while they were drinking beer and smoking cigarettes. The
Alberto was barman: he went out continually with the glasses. The
Maddelena had a small glass. In the lamplight of the stage the little
party read and smoked and practised, exposed to the empty darkness of
the big room. Queer and isolated it seemed, a tiny, pathetic magicland
far away from the barrenness of Switzerland. I could believe in the old
fairy-tales where, when the rock was opened, a magic underworld
was revealed.
The Alfredo, flushed, roused, handsome, but very soft and enveloping in
his heat, laughed and threw himself into his pose, laughed foolishly,
and then gave himself up to his part. The Alberto, slow and laborious,
yet with a spark of vividness and natural intensity flashing through,
replied and gesticulated; the Maddelena laid her head on the bosom of
Alfredo, the other men started into action, and the play proceeded
intently for half an hour.
Quick, vivid, and sharp, the little Giuseppino was always central. But
he seemed almost invisible. When I think back, I can scarcely see him, I
can only see the others, the lamplight on their faces and on their full
gesticulating limbs. I can see--the Maddelena, rather coarse and hard
and repellent, declaiming her words in a loud, half-cynical voice,
falling on the breast of the Alfredo, who was soft and sensuous, more
like a female, flushing, with his mouth getting wet, his eyes moist, as
he was roused. I can see the Alberto, slow, laboured, yet with a kind of
pristine simplicity in all his movements, that touched his fat
commonplaceness with beauty. Then there were the two other men, shy,
inflammable, unintelligent, with their sudden Italian rushes of hot
feeling. All their faces are distinct in the lamplight, all their bodies
ate palpable and dramatic.
But the face of the Giuseppino is like a pale luminousness, a sort of
gleam among all the ruddy glow, his body is evanescent, like a shadow.
And his being seemed to cast its influence over all the others, except
perhaps the woman, who was hard and resistant. The other men seemed all
overcast, mitigated, in part transfigured by the will of the little
leader. But they were very soft stuff, if inflammable.
The young woman of the inn, niece of the landlady, came down and called
out across the room.
'We will go away from here now,' said the Giuseppino to me. 'They close
at eleven. But we have another inn in the next parish that is open all
night. Come with us and drink some wine.'
'But,' I said, 'you would rather be alone.'
No; they pressed me to go, they wanted me to go with them, they were
eager, they wanted to entertain me. Alfredo, flushed, wet-mouthed, warm,
protested I must drink wine, the real Italian red wine, from their own
village at home. They would have no nay.
So I told the landlady. She said I must be back by twelve o'clock.
The night was very dark. Below the road the stream was rushing; there
was a great factory on the other side of the water, making faint
quivering lights of reflection, and one could see the working of
machinery shadowy through the lighted windows. Near by was the tall
tenement where the Italians lived.
We went on through the straggling, raw village, deep beside the stream,
then over the small bridge, and up the steep hill down which I had come
earlier in the evening.
So we arrived at the café. It was so different inside from the German
inn, yet it was not like an Italian café either. It was brilliantly
lighted, clean, new, and there were red-and-white cloths on the tables.
The host was in the room, and his daughter, a beautiful red-haired girl.
Greetings were exchanged with the quick, intimate directness of Italy.
But there was another note also, a faint echo of reserve, as though they
reserved themselves from the outer world, making a special inner
community.
Alfredo was hot: he took off his coat. We all sat freely at a long
table, whilst the red-haired girl brought a quart of red wine. At other
tables men were playing cards, with the odd Neapolitan cards. They too
were talking Italian. It was a warm, ruddy bit of Italy within the cold
darkness of Switzerland.
'When you come to Italy,' they said to me, 'salute it from us, salute
the sun, and the earth, _l'Italia_.'
So we drank in salute of Italy. They sent their greeting by me.
'You know in Italy there is the sun, the sun,' said Alfredo to me,
profoundly moved, wet-mouthed, tipsy.
I was reminded of Enrico Persevalli and his terrifying cry at the end of
_Ghosts_:
'_Il sole, il sole!_'
So we talked for a while of Italy. They had a pained tenderness for it,
sad, reserved.
'Don't you want to go back?' I said, pressing them to tell me
definitely. 'Won't you go back some time?'
'Yes,' they said, 'we will go back.'
But they spoke reservedly, without freedom. We talked about Italy, about
songs, and Carnival; about the food, polenta, and salt. They laughed at
my pretending to cut the slabs of polenta with a string: that rejoiced
them all: it took them back to the Italian mezzo-giorno, the bells
jangling in the campanile, the eating after the heavy work on the land.
But they laughed with the slight pain and contempt and fondness which
every man feels towards his past, when he has struggled away from that
past, from the conditions which made it.
They loved Italy passionately; but they would not go back. All their
blood, all their senses were Italian, needed the Italian sky, the
speech, the sensuous life. They could hardly live except through the
senses. Their minds were not developed, mentally they were children,
lovable, naïve, almost fragile children. But sensually they were men:
sensually they were accomplished.
Yet a new tiny flower was struggling to open in them, the flower of a
new spirit. The substratum of Italy has always been pagan, sensuous, the
most potent symbol the sexual symbol. The child is really a
non-Christian symbol: it is the symbol of mans's triumph of eternal life
in procreation. The worship of the Cross never really held good in
Italy. The Christianity of Northern Europe has never had any
place there.
And now, when Northern Europe is turning back on its own Christianity,
denying it all, the Italians are struggling with might and main against
the sensuous spirit which still dominates them. When Northern Europe,
whether it hates Nietzsche or not, is crying out for the Dionysic
ecstasy, practising on itself the Dionysic ecstasy, Southern Europe is
breaking free from Dionysus, from the triumphal affirmation of life over
death, immortality through procreation.
I could see these sons of Italy would never go back. Men like Paolo and
Il Duro broke away only to return. The dominance of the old form was too
strong for them. Call it love of country or love of the village,
campanilismo, or what not, it was the dominance of the old pagan form,
the old affirmation of immortality through procreation, as opposed to
the Christian affirmation of immortality through self-death and
social love.
But 'John' and these Italians in Switzerland were a generation younger,
and they would not go back, at least not to the old Italy. Suffer as
they might, and they did suffer, wincing in every nerve and fibre from
the cold material insentience of the northern countries and of America,
still they would endure this for the sake of something else they wanted.
They would suffer a death in the flesh, as 'John' had suffered in
fighting the street crowd, as these men suffered year after year cramped
in their black gloomy cold Swiss valley, working in the factory. But
there would come a new spirit out of it.
Even Alfredo was submitted to the new process; though he belonged
entirely by nature to the sort of Il Duro, he was purely sensuous and
mindless. But under the influence of Giuseppino he was thrown down, as
fallow to the new spirit that would come.
And then, when the others were all partially tipsy, the Giuseppino began
to talk to me. In him was a steady flame burning, burning, burning, a
flame of the mind, of the spirit, something new and clear, something
that held even the soft, sensuous Alfredo in submission, besides all the
others, who had some little development of mind.
'_Sa signore_,' said the Giuseppino to me, quiet, almost invisible or
inaudible, as it seemed, like a spirit addressing me, '_l'uomo non ha
patria_--a man has no country. What has the Italian Government to do
with us. What does a Government mean? It makes us work, it takes part of
our wages away from us, it makes us soldiers--and what for? What is
government for?'
'Have you been a soldier?' I interrupted him.
He had not, none of them had: that was why they could not really go back
to Italy. Now this was out; this explained partly their curious
reservation in speaking about their beloved country. They had forfeited
parents as well as homeland.
'What does the Government do? It takes taxes; it has an army and police,
and it makes roads. But we could do without an army, and we could be our
own police, and we could make our own roads. What is this Government?
Who wants it? Only those who are unjust, and want to have advantage over
somebody else. It is an instrument of injustice and of wrong.
'Why should we have a Government? Here, in this village, there are
thirty families of Italians. There is no government for them, no Italian
Government. And we live together better than in Italy. We are richer and
freer, we have no policemen, no poor laws. We help each other, and there
are no poor.
'Why are these Governments always doing what we don't want them to do?
We should not be fighting in the Cirenaica if we were all Italians. It
is the Government that does it. They talk and talk and do things with
us: but we don't want them.'
The others, tipsy, sat round the table with the terrified gravity of
children who are somehow responsible for things they do not understand.
They stirred in their seats, turning aside, with gestures almost of
pain, of imprisonment. Only Alfredo, laying his hand on mine, was
laughing, loosely, floridly. He would upset all the Government with a
jerk of his well-built shoulder, and then he would have a spree--such a
spree. He laughed wetly to me.
The Giuseppino waited patiently during this tipsy confidence, but his
pale clarity and beauty was something constant star-like in comparison
with the flushed, soft handsomeness of the other. He waited patiently,
looking at me.
But I did not want him to go on: I did not want to answer. I could feel
a new spirit in him, something strange and pure and slightly
frightening. He wanted something which was beyond me. And my soul was
somewhere in tears, crying helplessly like an infant in the night. I
could not respond: I could not answer. He seemed to look at me, me, an
Englishman, an educated man, for corroboration. But I could not
corroborate him. I knew the purity and new struggling towards birth of a
true star-like spirit. But I could not confirm him in his utterance: my
soul could not respond. I did not believe in the perfectibility of man.
I did not believe in infinite harmony among men. And this was his star,
this belief.
It was nearly midnight. A Swiss came in and asked for beer. The Italians
gathered round them a curious darkness of reserve. And then I must go.
They shook hands with me warmly, truthfully, putting a sort of implicit
belief in me, as representative of some further knowledge. But there was
a fixed, calm resolve over the face of the Giuseppino, a sort of steady
faith, even in disappointment. He gave me a copy of a little Anarchist
paper published in Geneva. _L'Anarchista_, I believe it was called. I
glanced at it. It was in Italian, naïve, simple, rather rhetorical. So
they were all Anarchists, these Italians.
I ran down the hill in the thick Swiss darkness to the little bridge,
and along the uneven cobbled street. I did not want to think, I did not
want to know. I wanted to arrest my activity, to keep it confined to the
moment, to the adventure.
When I came to the flight of stone steps which led up to the door of the
inn, at the side I saw in the darkness two figures. They said a low good
night and parted; the girl began to knock at the door, the man
disappeared. It was the niece of the landlady parting from her lover.
We waited outside the locked door, at the top of the stone steps, in the
darkness of midnight. The stream rustled below. Then came a shouting and
an insane snarling within the passage; the bolts were not withdrawn.
'It is the gentleman, it is the strange gentleman,' called the girl.
Then came again the furious shouting snarls, and the landlord's mad
voice:
'Stop out, stop out there. The door won't be opened again.'
'The strange gentleman is here,' repeated the girl.
Then more movement was heard, and the door was suddenly opened, and the
landlord rushed out upon us, wielding a broom. It was a strange sight,
in the half-lighted passage. I stared blankly in the doorway. The
landlord dropped the broom he was waving and collapsed as if by magic,
looking at me, though he continued to mutter madly, unintelligibly. The
girl slipped past me, and the landlord snarled. Then he picked up the
brush, at the same time crying:
'You are late, the door was shut, it will not be opened. We shall have
the police in the house. We said twelve o'clock; at twelve o'clock the
door must be shut, and must not be opened again. If you are late you
stay out--'
So he went snarling, his voice rising higher and higher, away into the
kitchen.
'You are coming to your room?' the landlady said to me coldly. And she
led me upstairs.
The room was over the road, clean, but rather ugly, with a large tin,
that had once contained lard or Swiss-milk, to wash in. But the bed was
good enough, which was all that mattered.
I heard the landlord yelling, and there was a long and systematic
thumping somewhere, thump, thump, thump, and banging. I wondered where
it was. I could not locate it at all, because my room lay beyond another
large room: I had to go through a large room, by the foot of two beds,
to get to my door; so I could not quite tell where anything was.
But I went to sleep whilst I was wondering.
I woke in the morning and washed in the tin. I could see a few people in
the street, walking in the Sunday morning leisure. It felt like Sunday
in England, and I shrank from it. I could see none of the Italians. The
factory stood there, raw and large and sombre, by the stream, and the
drab-coloured stone tenements were close by. Otherwise the village was a
straggling Swiss street, almost untouched.
The landlord was quiet and reasonable, even friendly, in the morning. He
wanted to talk to me: where had I bought my boots, was his first
question. I told him in Munich. And how much had they cost? I told him
twenty-eight marks. He was much impressed by them: such good boots, of
such soft, strong, beautiful leather; he had not seen such boots for a
long time.
Then I knew it was he who had cleaned my boots. I could see him
fingering them and wondering over them. I rather liked him. I could see
he had had imagination once, and a certain fineness of nature. Now he
was corrupted with drink, too far gone to be even a human being. I hated
the village.
They set bread and butter and a piece of cheese weighing about five
pounds, and large, fresh, sweet cakes for breakfast. I ate and was
thankful: the food was good.
A couple of village youths came in, in their Sunday clothes. They had
the Sunday stiffness. It reminded me of the stiffness and curious
self-consciousness that comes over life in England on a Sunday. But the
Landlord sat with his waistcoat hanging open over his shirt,
pot-bellied, his ruined face leaning forward, talking, always talking,
wanting to know.
So in a few minutes I was out on the road again, thanking God for the
blessing of a road that belongs to no man, and travels away from
all men.
I did not want to see the Italians. Something had got tied up in me, and
I could not bear to see them again. I liked them so much; but, for some
reason or other, my mind stopped like clockwork if I wanted to think of
them and of what their lives would be, their future. It was as if some
curious negative magnetism arrested my mind, prevented it from working,
the moment I turned it towards these Italians.
I do not know why it was. But I could never write to them, or think of
them, or even read the paper they gave me though it lay in my drawer for
months, in Italy, and I often glanced over six lines of it. And often,
often my mind went back to the group, the play they were rehearsing, the
wine in the pleasant café, and the night. But the moment my memory
touched them, my whole soul stopped and was null; I could not go on.
Even now I cannot really consider them in thought.