The painter laughed as he splashed into the shallows. A million crabs
were idling in the linked gold of the sun, and they scurried away or
burrowed frantically into the sand at his irruption among them. He
waded on, catching his breath delightedly at the freshness of the
rising water. The fancy came to him that he was entering a new world
by this downward path: he wondered how the clouds would look from the
bottom of the sea--and the stars, and the scudding _bragozzi_. He
glanced back a moment, to the world from which he had fled. The Alps
filled the horizon with pale outlines of shadow. Between them and the
long spit of the Lido were shining lagoon spaces, out of which the
clustered towers seemed to look wistfully over into the unpent sea.
With the vividness of mirage he recalled a placid water avenue winding
green between its lines of awninged palaces. Then he turned from it
all, in sudden hatred of his artificial life, of the restlessness to
express. He envied the fisherfolk under their butterfly sails out there
where the Adriatic swept bare and blue to the east. There were the
true creators! They did not copy those colours to hang on a wall. They
made them--to blow in the open sea, to toss unspoiled in the rains of
heaven! They did not watch. They lived.
The painter threw himself forward with a great splash, opening wide
his arms and ducking his head as if in homage. He laughed as he came
up. Blinking and sputtering, he swam lazily to the full extent of his
limbs in the joy of finding himself in a new element, rid of the last
conventionality of clothes. The content of it filled him. As he moved
over green abysses, somehow hanging miraculously as he chose, he seemed
to be free from even so dogging a burden as Gravity. And his whole
body--not merely hands and face--was alive to poignant sensations, to
the freshness and rhythm of the sea.
A long time he drifted in the slow swell, jealous to take in the tingle
of sea and sun and sky through every pore. And as he idly floated there
a shout suddenly startled him from behind, and a great dash of water
half choked him. Then someone began to laugh, but stopped short. When
at last he could breathe and see, he found a young man regarding him
out of smiling eyes that tried to look grave.
“I beg your pardon,” said the newcomer, who spoke in the slow dialect
of the lagoon--so different from the slippery talk of the Venetians. “I
thought you were my brother. He is of the _dazio_ here at Alberoni, and
I meant to surprise him. I would not have disturbed you if I had known.”
“No matter,” replied the painter. “There is room in the sea for both of
us.”
The other laughed, regarding the painter curiously.
The painter returned the gaze as frankly. With the skilled eye of his
craft, yet almost as if his fancy were realised and this were the first
met of a new race, he noted the clear tanned skin, the set of the neck,
the turn of the sinewy arm. He wondered how they would understand each
other, forgetting that they had already spoken.
“You are not from Chioggia,” said the stranger. “I know almost
everybody there; and then you do not speak their language. I know the
Pellestrina dialect too, and the Venetian, and the Buranello; but yours
is different from them all. Where is your country? I am from Malamocco.”
The painter smiled.
“Venice is my country now,” he answered, “but I speak the Florentine
dialect.” Although he had picked up the speech of the lagoon his
foreign accent always betrayed him.
“Ah, _Fiorenza_!” exclaimed the stranger, using the beautiful old
name which the Florentines themselves have discarded. “That is on
the mainland, isn’t it? I have been only to places on the lagoon,
like Campalto and La Rana. But I would like to see Florence, too....
You swim differently there, as well as talk differently,” he added,
watching the painter’s stroke. “This is the way we swim.” He struck out
hand over hand, throwing his body from one side to the other with great
splashes. He made such headway that the painter could not keep up with
him. “If you swam that way I think you would go faster,” he suggested
politely.
“I am afraid not,” returned the painter. “I don’t swim very well.”
“Can you dive?” asked the stranger. “Let’s see who can bring up
something first.” He turned a somersault and disappeared glimmering
into the green depths, whence presently he shot up waving a streamer of
seaweed. “Didn’t you get anything?” he asked, noting his companion’s
empty hand.
“I didn’t even try,” smiled the painter. “You swim much better than I.”
“_Ma!_” exclaimed the other. “I have probably had more practice.” He
paused, half embarrassed. “I think I will swim out a little. Will you
come?”
“Thank you, but perhaps not,” replied the painter. “I have been out a
good while. I am going in now.”
“Well, have you forgiven me for drowning you?” laughed the stranger.
“_A rivedersi!_”
The painter watched till the black head was a mere dancing speck in the
water.
“That was amusing,” he thought. “He wouldn’t have called me ‘thou’ if I
had had my clothes on. And he is a better man than I....”
Back on the beach the painter abandoned himself anew to sheer
sensation. He did not think. He scarcely remembered. He simply felt in
every nerve the glow of the sun, the caress of the air, the pulse of
the sea lapping softly at his feet. As he lay there, happy and languid
in the warm sand, the sound of splashing in the shallows came like an
intrusion. But opening his eyes he saw the young man of Malamocco come
up from the water, seemly and sunburned and glistening in the light.
It might have been a young sea-god rising from the waves. The painter
smiled as he watched the dripping apparition, so in keeping with
his humour. The youth caught the smile and answered it. He came and
threw himself down in the sand beside the painter. They looked at one
another, the smile still in their eyes.
The painter was glad he had hidden his clothes. He felt how absurd were
those distinctions in the world from which he came, of nationality,
of belief, of rank. They could be laid aside with one’s coat. This
was another world, with other standards. He and the young man beside
him--by what different roads had they travelled to this beach! But
what influence in their lives had wrought upon them like that secret
pre-natal influence which on separate continents, among different
races, had cast them in an identical mould? Here lay the two of them
together by the sea, children both of earth, without distinction or
preference between them--unless that most ancient preference of earth
for the fit.
“How white you are!” exclaimed the stranger. “I am all black from
the sun.” He lifted his arm to show how the darkness of the lower
tan shaded into tone but a trifle paler. “When we fish in the lagoon
we often go like this. But even on the sea the sun burns through our
clothes. I have always been black. I never saw anybody so white as you
are--except perhaps women, and sick people, and the _signori_ at the
Lido.”
Shame filled the painter--shame, and a passionate envy. He looked
admiringly at the young fisherman stretched out beside him, followed
all the lines of the strong bronzed figure, without a curve of excess
in its supple youth, and without one of deficiency. Then he glanced at
his own lank white limbs. He felt the cut of being classed with women
and sick people and _signori_! This was the only shame of nakedness--to
have a body not worth looking at. Instinctively he took up handfuls
of the fine sand and poured it over himself. The mockery of the life
he had fled from that morning surged back over him. How he hated the
imprisonment of houses, the lure of ambition, the thirst for pleasure,
that had made him what he was! How he envied this fisherman his life of
sun and sea, and his untroubled youth, and his unspoiled body!
“You take too little at a time,” laughed the fisherman. He sat up to
scoop out great handfuls of sand, which he threw over the painter’s
body until it was quite buried. Then he heaped a mound over himself,
and looked inquiringly at the painter. “I know by your skin that you
are not of my _mestiere_. But people in Venice do many things. What is
your trade?”
The painter felt more comfortable under the sand, and the unsuspecting
“_ti_” of the dialect touched him again.
“My _mestiere_ is to paint,” he said. “I make pictures.”
“Ah, that is a nice trade! My cousin is on one of the Chioggia
steamers, and he makes pictures of the _bragozzi_ when he has taken
the tickets. You should see how beautiful they are. Do you paint
_bragozzi_?”
“Yes, and other things: houses, and gardens, and sometimes people.”
“It must be very difficult. Did you have someone to show you how?”
“Yes,” answered the painter gravely. He thought of New York, and Paris,
and the great galleries.
“Ah! That is different. My cousin says faces are very hard, unless you
have a master. But he does _bragozzi_ well because he knows all about
them. His father builds them. He sold one once for ten francs. Do you
sell yours?”
“Sometimes. But I paint a great many more than I sell.”
“So does my cousin. He gives them to people to hang in their houses.
And in the shops he buys more cheaply if he gives a _bragozzo_. Do you
do anything else?”
It was evident that the fisherman’s conception of the picture market
was based on the sale effected by his relative, and that his deductions
regarding the painter’s income were therefore not dazzling.
The painter was pleased. He had feared lest a breach separate him and
his companion too early in their relations.
“No,” he confessed. “I don’t know how to do anything else.”
The fisherman looked at him in surprise.
“But who knows?” he pursued encouragingly. “If you do nothing else
perhaps you will come to paint big pictures with gold frames--like the
ones under the _procuratie_ in the Piazza San Marco. My cousin says the
artists who paint those are _signori_. Then it will be a trade! I shall
never be a _signor_ at mine. Do you know how long it takes me to earn
ten francs?”
The painter remembered how often he had seen fishermen in their long
brown stockings and wooden shoes before the brilliant windows of the
Piazza. Never before had he conceived of them otherwise than as a
picturesque foil to the glitter of civilisation.
“No,” he replied. “But your _mestiere_ is better than mine. It keeps
you out of doors; and what you do is necessary to people more than what
I do.”
“_Ma!_ It is a pleasure to be on the sea in a good wind. I would not
like to be shut up in a shop, or anything like that. But we make so
little. And the winter! Sometimes we do not even catch enough to eat.
You can make a picture whenever you want, but I can’t catch a fish
whenever I want!”
“Yes, but you can eat your fish when you do catch him, while my picture
is no good to me unless I sell it. I can’t eat it. And it isn’t the
kind of thing that everybody wants to buy, like a fish.”
“That is so. But if people don’t like your picture you can ask them
what they do like, and sit down and paint it for them. _Ecco!_ And in
the winter you can stay comfortably by the hearth in the kitchen, and
make your pictures of boats and flowers and summer and what else do I
know, while outside it snows. But I have to go into the sea to get my
fish, if I get shipwrecked for it.”
The painter smiled, still envying the strong brown body buried in the
sand beside him. And then he suddenly asked:
“Have you ever been shipwrecked?”
“Only once,” answered the fisherman, as if it were an every-day matter.
“Tell me about it,” demanded the painter eagerly, turning on his elbow
to eye this person who had been through shipwrecks and thought nothing
of it.
“_Ma!_ I was small then,” began the fisherman apologetically, as if he
would be less awkward now. “It was in my grandfather’s _bragozzo_, one
night in March. We were blown on to the Punta dei Sabbioni, and the
boat broke in two.” He stopped as if there were nothing more to say.
“Well, what happened? How did you get ashore?”
“God knows,” replied the fisherman. “We fell into the water, and after
a while I woke up with men rubbing me. My grandfather was there, too.
My father and my brother were drowned.”
“And then?”
“What was there to do then? We went home.”
The picture of this common little seashore drama flared up in the
painter’s imagination. He was impatient that it should be told him so
barely. He wanted a hundred details, and he could not think how to
bring them out.
“What did your mother do?” he asked, desperate.
“What do women do? She cried.”
“Did they find your father and brother?”
“My father, yes; but not my brother. This makes one feel sleepy after
being in the water, doesn’t it?” He closed his eyes, turning a little
his head from the sun.
The painter stared. In the life back there among the sculptured
palaces these were things read, things far away as Olympus and the
Crusades--not things seen. He felt like a child in the presence of one
who has come back scarred from the wars.
Feeling the power of eyes upon him, the fisherman finally opened his
own.
“How warm it is here, eh? It is better than that time at the Sabbioni.
Ee-ee that was cold!” He drew up his shoulders as if to shiver, and
the sand ran from him in rivulets. “I love the summer. I wish it would
never end. We often come to this same place to pull in our nets; but it
is not always so nice as this.”
The painter was full of curiosity about a life to him so romantic.
“Do you come here in a _bragozzo_?” he asked, with the respect due to a
superior, fearful of offending by too many questions.
“Oh, no,” answered the fisherman. “It is too shallow. We come in a
_caorlina_, about ten of us, and plant the nets, and afterwards drag
them up on the sand.”
“Oh, yes!” cried the painter. “I have seen it at Sant’
Elisabetta--three or four men hauling at each rope, and then the net
squirming with fish! And afterwards they beach the boats, and build
fires on the sand, and have their breakfast.” He had often sketched the
bare-legged men and boys tugging at the ropes, and had thought how good
their fresh fish and _polenta_ must be in the morning air on the edge
of the sea.
“Yes, we go there often. But the nets are not always squirming with
fish. Sometimes we get nothing but crabs, cast after cast.”
“Do you anything else besides go in the _caorlina_?” asked the painter.
“Hoo-oo!” exclaimed the fisherman in a high singing interjection, with
an amused smile. “I go oftener in my uncle’s _bragozzo_. We have none,
because ours was lost when my father was drowned and we have never been
able to get another. They cost more than the painted ones! We generally
leave in the afternoon and stay out all night, so as to get the fish to
the Rialto early in the morning. That is good--to lie on the deck after
the nets are down, and watch the stars playing behind the sail, and the
light-houses here and at Cavallino winking their eyes. And then to run
in when the sun comes up all wet and cool out of the sea, and the wind
begins to blow! But in winter it is another affair, and when there are
storms. Two or three boats are lost in every _Bora_.”
The painter’s humility grew, as he inwardly compared the vicissitudes
of studio life with this adventuring upon the deep.
“But you would rather live on the water than in a shop, didn’t you say?”
“_Ma!_ Now, yes--when the nights are a _delizia_ and we have enough to
eat. But in winter! Then it is another story.” He propped himself up on
his elbows and began excavating a reservoir, into which the water rose
slowly. “No, I would not like to be in a shop. But I would like to be a
_signor_, and have plenty of money without working, and eat meat every
day, and in the winter always have a fire in the kitchen, and go as
often as I liked to the inn. And I would like to go to other places, to
see Florence, and all the countries in the world. That is what I would
like the best of all. Sometimes steamers pass us in the sea at night,
with lamps in all their little round windows, and people singing on the
deck--high over the top of our mast--and it makes me sad. They pass so
quickly, with the water white behind them, and their lights grow small
and small in the dark, and disappear. Where do they go, the ships? I
want to know, and go with them to the countries at the end of the sea.”
He looked across the painter toward the breakwater, where the sails
of a pilot boat were bobbing up and down and where, far away, the
sea ran blue to the sky. “But I never shall. I have to catch fish for
my family. They would not have enough if I went away.... A boy I knew
went to America, and now he sends home money to his mother--a great
deal. He won a _terno_ at the lottery, enough to pay for the steamer
and then to keep him till he found a place. But I am not lucky. And
even if I could go I could not take my wife, and my mother might have
nothing to eat long before I could send her money. They speak another
language there--and many things. Have you been to America?” He asked
it nonchalantly, tracing arabesques in the damp sand of his reservoir,
much as one might inquire, “Have you been to the moon?”
“Yes,” answered the painter, absently, “I have been to America.” He
lay on his back, his hands under his head, looking into the sea. The
gleam of its blue was curiously watered by ripples of shadow sweeping
across it in shades from purple to the pallor of the sky. He wished
that all evils were so calculable as winter; and he was touched by the
simplicity of these ambitions, by the poetry of the lighted ships. He
had not thought of a wife, the fisherman was so young. After all, had
he not everything?
The fisherman turned instantly, forgetting his arabesques.
“You have been to America?” He sat up, edging nearer the painter and
looking down at him with a strange and new curiosity. “You have been
to America! Why didn’t you tell me before? What is it like?”
The painter was sorry. But he looked up at the eager face bent upon
him, and he smiled.
“Oh, it is very much like this. There are fields and trees, and rivers
run into the sea, and there is a sun every day, and sometimes there is
a moon at night.”
“A sun every day!” broke in the fisherman. “Sometimes there is none for
a month here! I would like that. Is it like Venice--with _palazzi_, and
gondolas, and the _campanile_?”
“No,” answered the painter, “it is not like Venice. There are no
gondolas and no _campanile_; and the _palazzi_ are all new; and they
don’t have four, five, six floors, but fifteen, twenty, twenty-five.”
“They must be as high as the _campanile_, then! And new! In Venice all
the houses are so old. I like new things. Don’t you?”
“Well--not so much,” replied the painter. “It is hard to tell which of
them will last. Old things are ones that were good enough to last.”
“Oh!” said the fisherman. “What are the people like?”
“The people? They are like you and me. Only perhaps they don’t like
to lie all the afternoon in the sun, the way you and I do,” he added,
stretching his arms out wide in the sand and following a gull into the
sky.
“Are they good?” pursued the fisherman. Goodness as applied to
character has come in Italian to mean compliance rather than the
sterner moral qualities expected in the North.
“Well, perhaps they are more apt to be ‘bad’ if one is from another
country. I think it is because they do not understand. They speak
another language, you know.”
“Can you understand it?”
“M-m-m, generally.”
“Say some!” demanded the fisherman. And after it he required a
translation of the painter’s phrase. “It is strange,” he commented.
“When you say those words I understand nothing; but you are saying the
same things that we say in Italian!”
“Yes,” said the painter. “They do not tell you new things in other
countries. At first it sounds different, and then you find out that it
is really the same....”
“Why, have you been to many of them?”
“I have been to some others.”
“Tell me about them. Are they like America?”
“Yes, on the whole. Only some are a little hotter, some are a little
colder. Then there are countries where the people are all black, you
know--but really black, like your head. Or yellow, or red. There are
countries, too, where the men dress like women; and others where they
go like us, without any clothes at all. And I went once to one where it
was light at night.”
The fisherman edged a little closer, his eyes fastened on the painter
as if to win the secret of his strangeness and his fortune.
“If you have been so far you must have been on a steamer,” he uttered
slowly.
“Yes.”
“I would like to go on a steamer, a big one, especially at night. Did
you ever put your head through one of the little round windows where
the lights are, and look down at the dark sea, and find a _bragozzo_?”
“Yes,” answered the painter, “and I have seen the light from the little
windows touch the sails, and the faces of the men looking up.”
“And then you passed and left them in the night. How I wish I could
have done that! But I was down in the _bragozzo_, and you were up in
the great lighted ship, going to the countries at the end of the sea.”
The wistfulness in his face hurt the painter, to whom the sense of the
superiority of that perfect body, and of the simple life from which it
had won its beauty and its strength, was keener than ever. He had meant
only to entertain his companion, not to sharpen in him the sharpness
of desire. How could he put convincingly what he really felt? But the
fisherman went on, his face hanging almost over the painter’s.
“Have you been to all the countries in the world?” he asked.
“Oh, no! Only to a few of them. And I don’t care to see the rest.”
“Why not? If I were like you, and had no one else to think about, and
could do my trade in any country, I would go to see them all.”
“But why? You do not see new things when you travel. It is not worth
while going on long journeys to see people who wear different clothes
from ours, or have a different skin. They are always really the same.
They are all born in the same way, and they all love and hate in the
same way, and they all work to get bread and fish, and then they all
die. These are the real things, the old things that people hide under
their customs and their languages. You can see them here as well as
anywhere else.”
“It will be so,” said the fisherman humbly. “You know better than I.
But one gets tired of just the same thing every day, every week, every
month, every year. It is like a week without Sunday. You have had your
_festa_, but I never had mine.”
“What you call _festa_ was every day to me, and it did not make me
happy.”
“Then I wish I could have had your every day.” He glanced out to sea a
moment, where the fishing boats were tacking about as if to no purpose
but to show off their butterfly wings. “Have you ever been hungry?” he
asked, looking down at the painter again.
“No.” The painter crushed a temptation to play with double meanings,
and was ashamed to count the few dinners deferred that he could
remember.
“I have,” said the fisherman. “I have gone back to Malamocco on a
winter morning after a night in the _bragozzo_, and I have had to
show my empty hands to my wife who was waiting at the door. And I have
hunted in the fog for the Porto di Lido, when we tacked up and down
outside, afraid to run in, until we were so cold and tired that I hoped
the boat would go down. And I have seen my father’s dead body washed up
by the sea. These are the things that I have seen. But you----”
The painter sprang out of his lazy posture.
“What are the things I have seen to those!” he cried. “What do I know
of the world, compared to you? You have seen more of life here in
Malamocco than I ever did in all the strange cities I have seen! It is
nothing to know how men say ‘Good-morning’ in other languages or how
they look in foreign coats, if you know what they say on the decks of
sinking ships, and how they look when they are washed up dead by the
sea!”
For a moment the fisherman was silent, surprised by the other’s
vehemence. Then he said:
“Perhaps so. But what good does it do me to know these things? I would
rather have your _mestiere_. It is not so monotonous. It is not so
hard. It is not so sad----”
The painter jumped impatiently to his feet. He wanted to prove in
some palpable way the inferiority of his manner of life, so that the
fisherman could not help being convinced.
“Get up!” he cried. “Wrestle with me!”
“What shall I wrestle with you for?” asked the fisherman in
astonishment, sitting back with his hands propped behind him in the
sand. “I want to talk about these things.”
“You shall talk about these things afterward,” laughed the painter.
“Now I want to see how easily I can throw you. Get up!”
The fisherman obeyed slowly and stood, loose-jointed, waiting to see
what the other would do. The painter suddenly clinched him, at which
the fisherman’s muscles reacted instinctively. There was a short sharp
tussle; and the painter found himself on his back in the sand, panting,
the other’s knee on his chest.
“You see?” demanded the painter.
The fisherman rolled down in the sand beside him.
“Excuse me,” he said. “When I felt you catch me I didn’t think, and I
put you down.”
The painter laughed.
“Now you see how much better your trade is than mine?”
“No. What have trades to do with it? One of us had to go under. Another
time you would probably beat me. Let’s try again. Come!”
He started to get up, but the painter pulled him back.
“You know perfectly well that I couldn’t beat you if I tried all day!
Look at that!” He held out his arm this time, and made the fisherman do
the same. “And look at that!” He stretched a lean white leg beside the
muscular brown one of the fisherman. The comparison made him wince,
as he marked again how toil and peril had only wrought on the other’s
body like surpassing sculpture. He went on: “There is no reason why I
should not be as strong and as good to look at as you. I am perhaps no
older, and I am not ill, and I have never been hurt. Then why are we
so different? It is just this very thing--the difference between our
_mestieri_. For when you were pulling up nets on the sand, I was making
little paper sunsets for people to buy--when they could have new and
better ones every day for nothing, by looking out of the window! And
when you were watching the stars play behind your sail, I was sitting
in stuffy rooms. Lamps are not so good for one as stars! And when you
were fighting the sea in storms, I was running about the world trying
to find some new thing. And so you are what you are, and I am this!” He
looked down at himself and laughed bitterly.
“That may be,” said the fisherman, puzzled and a little embarrassed.
“But what if I am strong? You are strong enough. You have not been
prevented from enjoying. Was it worth while for me to do all those
things just to be able to put you down? What difference does it make to
me? I would rather have been in your place.”
“No! Outside things cannot make you happy, unless they fit with
something inside. And the things which make happiness are so few and
so simple that anybody can find them--like love, and sunshine. That is
all the good my journeys have done me--to teach me this. I know these
things, but you have them.” He stopped abruptly.
The fisherman looked at him a long time saying nothing. When finally he
spoke it was humbly, as one lower to one higher.
“What you say must be true, because you understand and I do not.
Still--I wish I could be once on a lighted ship at night, and go to
one of the countries at the end of the sea. I have never been, and you
have....”
At first the painter did not answer, his eyes on the bronzed figure
beside him. But then he smiled, curiously.
“Look!” he said. “We are all covered with the sand of the sea. We must
brush it off and go back into the world.”