we stand and look at the sunset. It is all terrible, taking place beyond
the knotted, serpent-crested hills that lie, bluey and velvety, beyond
the waste lagoons. Dark, sultry, heavy crimson the west is, hanging
sinisterly, with those gloomy blue cloud-bars and cloud-banks drawn
across. All behind the blue-gloomy peaks stretches the curtain of
sinister, smouldering red, and away to the sea. Deep below lie the
sea-meres. They seem miles and miles, and utterly waste. But the
sand-bar crosses like a bridge, and has a road. All the air is dark, a
sombre bluish tone. The great west burns inwardly, sullenly, and gives
no glow, yet a deep red. It is cold.
We go down the steep streets, smelly, dark, dank, and very cold. No
wheeled vehicle can scramble up them, presumably. People live in one
room. Men are combing their hair or fastening their collars in the
doorways. Evening is here, and it is a feast day.
* * * * *
At the bottom of the street we come to a little bunch of masked youths,
one in a long yellow frock and a frilled bonnet, another like an old
woman, another in red twill. They are arm in arm and are accosting the
passers-by. The q-b gives a cry, and looks for escape. She has a terror
of maskers, a terror that comes from childhood. To say the truth, so
have I. We hasten invisibly down the far side of the street, and come
out under the bastions. Then we go down our own familiar wide, short,
cold boulevard to the sea.
At the bottom, again, is a carriage with more maskers. Carnival is
beginning. A man dressed as a peasant woman in native costume is
clambering with his great wide skirts and wide strides on to the box,
and, flourishing his ribboned whip, is addressing a little crowd of
listeners. He opens his mouth wide and goes on with a long yelling
harangue of taking a drive with his mother--another man in old-woman's
gaudy finery and wig who sits already bobbing on the box. The would-be
daughter flourishes, yells, and prances up there on the box of the
carriage. The crowd listens attentively and mildly smiles. It all seems
real to them. The q-b hovers in the distance, half-fascinated, and
watches. With a great flourish of whip and legs--showing his frilled
drawers--the masker pulls round to drive along the boulevard by the
sea--the only place where one can drive.
* * * * *
The big street by the sea is the Via Roma. It has the cafes on one side
and across the road the thick tufts of trees intervening between the sea
and us. Among these thick tufts of sea-front trees the little steam
tram, like a little train, bumps to rest, after having wound round the
back of the town.
The Via Roma is all social Cagliari. Including the cafes with their
outdoor tables on the one side of the road, and the avenue strand on the
other, it is very wide, and at evening it contains the whole town. Here,
and here alone carriages can spank along, very slowly, officers can
ride, and the people can promenade "en masse."
We were amazed at the sudden crowd we found ourselves amongst--like a
short, dense river of people streaming slowly in a mass. There is
practically no vehicular traffic--only the steady dense streams of human
beings of all sorts, all on a human footing. It must have been something
like this in the streets of imperial Rome, where no chariots might drive
and humanity was all on foot.
Little bunches of maskers, and single maskers danced and strutted along
in the thick flow under the trees. If you are a mask you don't walk like
a human being: you dance and prance along extraordinarily like the
life-size marionettes, conducted by wires from above. That is how you
go: with that odd jauntiness as if lifted and propelled by wires from
the shoulders. In front of me went a charming coloured harlequin, all in
diamond-shaped colours, and beautiful as a piece of china. He tripped
with the light, fantastic trip, quite alone in the thick crowd, and
quite blithe. Came two little children hand in hand in brilliant scarlet
and white costumes, sauntering calmly. They did not do the mask trip.
After a while a sky-blue girl with a high hat and full skirts, very
short, that went flip-flip-flip, as a ballet dancer's, whilst she
strutted; after her a Spanish grandee capering like a monkey. They
threaded among the slow stream of the crowd. Appeared Dante and
Beatrice, in Paradise apparently, all in white sheet-robes, and with
silver wreaths on their heads, arm in arm, and prancing very slowly and
majestically, yet with the long lilt as if hitched along by wires from
above. They were very good: all the well-known vision come to life,
Dante incorporate, and white as a shroud, with his tow-haired,
silver-crowned, immortal Beatrice on his arm, strutting the dark
avenues. He had the nose and cheek-bones and banded cheek, and the
stupid wooden look, and offered a modern criticism on the Inferno.
* * * * *
It had become quite dark, the lamps were lighted. We crossed the road to
the Cafe Roma, and found a table on the pavement among the crowd. In a
moment we had our tea. The evening was cold, with ice in the wind. But
the crowd surged on, back and forth, back and forth, slowly. At the
tables were seated mostly men, taking coffee or vermouth or aqua vitae,
all familiar and easy, without the modern self-consciousness. There was
a certain pleasant, natural robustness of spirit, and something of a
feudal free-and-easiness. Then arrived a family, with children, and
nurse in her native costume. They all sat at table together, perfectly
easy with one another, though the marvellous nurse seemed to be seated
below the salt. She was bright as a poppy, in a rose-scarlet dress of
fine cloth, with a curious little waistcoat of emerald green and purple,
and a bodice of soft, homespun linen with great full sleeves. On her
head she had a rose-scarlet and white head-dress, and she wore great
studs of gold filigree, and similar ear-rings. The feudal-bourgeois
family drank its syrup-drinks and watched the crowd. Most remarkable is
the complete absence of self-consciousness. They all have a perfect
natural "sang-froid," the nurse in her marvellous native costume is as
thoroughly at her ease as if she were in her own village street. She
moves and speaks and calls to a passer-by without the slightest
constraint, and much more, without the slightest presumption. She is
below the invisible salt, the invisible but insuperable salt. And it
strikes me the salt-barrier is a fine thing for both parties: they both
remain natural and human on either side of it, instead of becoming
devilish, scrambling and pushing at the barricade.
* * * * *
The crowd is across the road, under the trees near the sea. On this side
stroll occasional pedestrians. And I see my first peasant in costume.
He is an elderly, upright, handsome man, beautiful in the
black-and-white costume. He wears the full-sleeved white shirt and the
close black bodice of thick, native frieze, cut low. From this sticks
out a short kilt or frill, of the same black frieze, a band of which
goes between the legs, between the full loose drawers of coarse linen.
The drawers are banded below the knee into tight black frieze gaiters.
On his head he has the long black stocking cap, hanging down behind. How
handsome he is, and so beautifully male! He walks with his hands loose
behind his back, slowly, upright, and aloof. The lovely
unapproachableness, indomitable. And the flash of the black and white,
the slow stride of the full white drawers, the black gaiters and black
cuirass with the bolero, then the great white sleeves and white breast
again, and once more the black cap--what marvellous massing of the
contrast, marvellous, and superb, as on a magpie.--How beautiful
maleness is, if it finds its right expression.--And how perfectly
ridiculous it is made in modern clothes.
There is another peasant too, a young one with a swift eye and hard
cheek and hard, dangerous thighs. He has folded his stocking cap, so
that it comes forward to his brow like a phrygian cap. He wears close
knee breeches and close sleeved waistcoat of thick brownish stuff that
looks like leather. Over the waistcoat a sort of cuirass of black, rusty
sheepskin, the curly wool outside. So he strides, talking to a comrade.
How fascinating it is, after the soft Italians, to see these limbs in
their close knee-breeches, so definite, so manly, with the old
fierceness in them still. One realises, with horror, that the race of
men is almost extinct in Europe. Only Christ-like heroes and
woman-worshipping Don Juans, and rabid equality-mongrels. The old,
hardy, indomitable male is gone. His fierce singleness is quenched. The
last sparks are dying out in Sardinia and Spain. Nothing left but the
herd-proletariat and the herd-equality mongrelism, and the wistful
poisonous self-sacrificial cultured soul. How detestable.
But that curious, flashing, black-and-white costume! I seem to have
known it before: to have worn it even: to have dreamed it. To have
dreamed it: to have had actual contact with it. It belongs in some way
to something in me--to my past, perhaps. I don't know. But the uneasy
sense of blood-familiarity haunts me. I _know_ I have known it before.
It is something of the same uneasiness I feel before Mount Eryx: but
without the awe this time.
* * * * *
In the morning the sun was shining from a blue, blue sky, but the
shadows were deadly cold, and the wind like a flat blade of ice. We went
out running to the sun. The hotel could not give us coffee and milk:
only a little black coffee. So we descended to the sea-front again, to
the Via Roma, and to our cafe. It was Friday: people seemed to be
bustling in from the country with huge baskets.
The Cafe Roma had coffee and milk, but no butter. We sat and watched the
movement outside. Tiny Sardinian donkeys, the tiniest things ever seen,
trotted their infinitesimal little paws along the road, drawing little
wagons like handcarts. Their proportion is so small, that they make a
boy walking at their side look like a tall man, while a natural man
looks like a Cyclops stalking hugely and cruelly. It is ridiculous for a
grown man to have one of these little creatures, hardly bigger than a
fly, hauling his load for him. One is pulling a chest of drawers on a
cart, and it seems to have a whole house behind it. Nevertheless it
plods bravely, away beneath the load, a wee thing.
They tell me there used to be flocks of these donkeys, feeding half wild
on the wild, moor-like hills of Sardinia. But the war--and also the
imbecile wantonness of the war-masters--consumed these flocks too, so
that few are left. The same with the cattle. Sardinia, home of cattle,
hilly little Argentine of the Mediterranean, is now almost deserted. It
is war, say the Italiana.--And also the wanton, imbecile, foul
lavishness of the war-masters. It was not alone the war which exhausted
the world. It was the deliberate evil wastefulness of the war-makers in
their own countries. Italy ruined Italy.
* * * * *
Two peasants in black-and-white are strolling in the sun, flashing. And
my dream of last evening was not a dream. And my nostalgia for something
I know not what was not an illusion. I feel it again, at once, at the
sight of the men in frieze and linen, a heart yearning for something I
have known, and which I want back again.
It is market day. We turn up the Largo Carlo-Felice, the second wide gap
of a street, a vast but very short boulevard, like the end of something.
Cagliari is like that: all bits and bobs. And by the side of the
pavement are many stalls, stalls selling combs and collar-studs, cheap
mirrors, handkerchiefs, shoddy Manchester goods, bed-ticking,
boot-paste, poor crockery, and so on. But we see also Madame of Cagliari
going marketing, with a servant accompanying her, carrying a huge
grass-woven basket: or returning from marketing, followed by a small
boy supporting one of these huge grass-woven baskets--like huge
dishes--on his head, piled with bread, eggs, vegetables, a chicken, and
so forth. Therefore we follow Madame going marketing, and find ourselves
in the vast market house, and it fairly glows with eggs: eggs in these
great round dish-baskets of golden grass: but eggs in piles, in mounds,
in heaps, a Sierra Nevada of eggs, glowing warm white. How they glow! I
have never noticed it before. But they give off a warm, pearly
effulgence into the air, almost a warmth. A pearly-gold heat seems to
come out of them. Myriads of eggs, glowing avenues of eggs.
And they are marked--60 centimes, 65 centimes. Ah, cries the q-b, I must
live in Cagliari--For in Sicily the eggs cost 1.50 each.
This is the meat and poultry and bread market. There are stalls of new,
various-shaped bread, brown and bright: there are tiny stalls of
marvellous native cakes, which I want to taste, there is a great deal of
meat and kid: and there are stalls of cheese, all cheeses, all shapes,
all whitenesses, all the cream-colours, on into daffodil yellow. Goat
cheese, sheeps cheese, Swiss cheese, Parmegiano, stracchino,
caciocavallo, torolone, how many cheeses I don't know the names of! But
they cost about the same as in Sicily, eighteen francs, twenty francs,
twenty-five francs the kilo. And there is lovely ham--thirty and
thirty-five francs the kilo. There is a little fresh butter too--thirty
or thirty-two francs the kilo. Most of the butter, however, is tinned in
Milan. It costs the same as the fresh. There are splendid piles of
salted black olives, and huge bowls of green salted olives. There are
chickens and ducks and wild-fowl: at eleven and twelve and fourteen
francs a kilo. There is mortadella, the enormous Bologna sausage, thick
as a church pillar: 16 francs: and there are various sorts of smaller
sausage, salami, to be eaten in slices. A wonderful abundance of food,
glowing and shining. We are rather late for fish, especially on Friday.
But a barefooted man offers us two weird objects from the Mediterranean,
which teems with marine monsters.
The peasant women sit behind their wares, their home-woven linen skirts,
hugely full, and of various colours, ballooning round them. The yellow
baskets give off a glow of light. There is a sense of profusion once
more. But alas no sense of cheapness: save the eggs. Every month, up
goes the price of everything.
"I must come and live in Cagliari, to do my shopping here," says the
q-b. "I must have one of those big grass baskets."
We went down to the little street--but saw more baskets emerging from a
broad flight of stone stairs, enclosed. So up we went-and found
ourselves in the vegetable market. Here the q-b was happier still.
Peasant women, sometimes barefoot, sat in their tight little bodices and
voluminous, coloured skirts behind the piles of vegetables, and never
have I seen a lovelier show. The intense deep green of spinach seemed to
predominate, and out of that came the monuments of curd-white and
black-purple cauliflowers: but marvellous cauliflowers, like a
flower-show, the purple ones intense as great bunches of violets. From
this green, white, and purple massing struck out the vivid rose-scarlet
and blue crimson of radishes, large radishes like little turnips, in
piles. Then the long, slim, grey-purple buds of artichokes, and dangling
clusters of dates, and piles of sugar-dusty white figs and
sombre-looking black figs, and bright burnt figs: basketfuls and
basketfuls of figs. A few baskets of almonds, and many huge walnuts.
Basket-pans of native raisins. Scarlet peppers like trumpets:
magnificent fennels, so white and big and succulent: baskets of new
potatoes: scaly kohlrabi: wild asparagus in bunches, yellow-budding
sparacelli: big, clean-fleshed carrots: feathery salads with white
hearts: long, brown-purple onions and then, of course pyramids of big
oranges, pyramids of pale apples, and baskets of brilliant shiny
mandarini, the little tangerine orange with their green-black leaves.
The green and vivid-coloured world of fruit-gleams I have never seen in
such splendour as under the market roof at Cagliari: so raw and
gorgeous. And all quite cheap, the one remaining cheapness, except
potatoes. Potatoes of any sort are 1.40 or 1.50 the kilo.
"Oh!" cried the q-b, "If I don't live at Cagliari and come and do my
shopping here, I shall die with one of my wishes unfulfilled."
* * * * *
But out of the sun it was cold, nevertheless. We went into the streets
to try and get warm. The sun was powerful. But alas, as in southern
towns generally, the streets are sunless as wells.
So the q-b and I creep slowly along the sunny bits, and then perforce
are swallowed by shadow. We look at the shops. But there is not much to
see. Little, frowsy provincial shops, on the whole.
But a fair number of peasants in the streets, and peasant women in
rather ordinary costume: tight-bodiced, volume-skirted dresses of
hand-woven linen or thickish cotton. The prettiest is of
dark-blue-and-red, stripes-and-lines, intermingled, so made that the
dark-blue gathers round the waist into one colour, the myriad pleats
hiding all the rosy red. But when she walks, the full-petticoated
peasant woman, then the red goes flash-flash-flash, like a bird showing
its colours. Pretty that looks in the sombre street. She has a plain,
light bodice with a peak: sometimes a little vest, and great full white
sleeves, and usually a handkerchief or shawl loose knotted. It is
charming the way they walk, with quick, short steps. When all is said
and done, the most attractive costume for women in my eye, is the tight
little bodice and the many-pleated skirt, full and vibrating with
movement. It has a charm which modern elegance lacks completely--a
bird-like play in movement.
* * * * *
They are amusing, these peasant girls and women: so brisk and defiant.
They have straight backs, like little walls, and decided, well-drawn
brows. And they are amusingly on the alert. There is no eastern
creeping. Like sharp, brisk birds they dart along the streets, and you
feel they would fetch you a bang over the head as leave as look at you.
Tenderness, thank heaven, does not seem to be a Sardinian quality. Italy
is so tender--like cooked macaroni--yards and yards of soft tenderness
ravelled round everything. Here men don't idealise women, by the looks
of things. Here they don't make these great leering eyes, the inevitable
yours-to-command look of Italian males. When the men from the country
look at these women, then it is Mind-yourself, my lady. I should think
the grovelling Madonna-worship is not much of a Sardinian feature. These
women have to look out for themselves, keep their own back-bone stiff
and their knuckles hard. Man is going to be male Lord if he can. And
woman isn't going to give him too much of his own way, either. So there
you have it, the fine old martial split between the sexes. It is tonic
and splendid, really, after so much sticky intermingling and
backboneless Madonna-worship. The Sardinian isn't looking for the "noble
woman nobly planned." No, thank you. He wants that young madam over
there, a young stiff-necked generation that she is. Far better sport
than with the nobly-planned sort: hollow frauds that they are. Better
sport too than with a Carmen, who gives herself away too much, In these
women there is something shy and defiant and un-get-atable. The defiant,
splendid split between the sexes, each absolutely determined to defend
his side, her side, from assault. So the meeting has a certain wild,
salty savour, each the deadly unknown to the other. And at the same
time, each his own, her own native pride and courage, taking the
dangerous leap and scrambling back.
Give me the old, salty way of love. How I am nauseated with sentiment
and nobility, the macaroni slithery-slobbery mess of modern adorations.
* * * * *
One sees a few fascinating faces in Cagliari: those great dark unlighted
eyes. There are fascinating dark eyes in Sicily, bright, big, with an
impudent point of light, and a curious roll, and long lashes: the eyes
of old Greece, surely. But here one sees eyes of soft, blank darkness,
all velvet, with no imp looking out of them. And they strike a stranger,
older note: before the soul became self-conscious: before the mentality
of Greece appeared in the world. Remote, always remote, as if the
intelligence lay deep within the cave, and never came forward. One
searches into the gloom for one second, while the glance lasts. But
without being able to penetrate to the reality. It recedes, like some
unknown creature deeper into its lair. There is a creature, dark and
potent. But what?
Sometimes Velasquez, and sometimes Goya gives us a suggestion of these
large, dark, unlighted eyes. And they go with fine, fleecy black
hair--almost as fine as fur. I have not seen them north of Cagliari.
* * * * *
The q-b spies some of the blue-and-red stripe-and-line cotton stuff of
which the peasants make their dress: a large roll in the doorway of a
dark shop. In we go, and begin to feel it. It is just soft, thickish
cotton stuff--twelve francs a metre. Like most peasant patterns, it is
much more complicated and subtle than appears: the curious placing of
the stripes, the subtle proportion, and a white thread left down one
side only of each broad blue block. The stripes, moreover, run _across_
the cloth, not lengthwise with it. But the width would be just long
enough for a skirt--though the peasant skirts have almost all a band at
the bottom with the stripes running round-ways.
The man--he is the esquimo type, simple, frank and aimiable--says the
stuff is made in France, and this the first roll since the war. It is
the old, old pattern, quite correct--but the material not _quite_ so
good. The q-b takes enough for a dress.
He shows us also cashmeres, orange, scarlet, sky-blue, royal blue: good,
pure-wool cashmeres that were being sent to India, and were captured
from a German mercantile sub-marine. So he says. Fifty francs a
metre--very, very wide. But they are too much trouble to carry in a
knapsack, though their brilliance fascinates.
* * * * *
So we stroll and look at the shops, at the filigree gold jewelling of
the peasants, at a good bookshop. But there is little to see and
therefore the question is, shall we go on? Shall we go forward?
There are two ways of leaving Cagliari for the north: the State railway
that runs up the west side of the island, and the narrow-gauge secondary
railway that pierces the centre. But we are too late for the big trains.
So we will go by the secondary railway, wherever it goes.
There is a train at 2.30, and we can get as far as Mandas, some fifty
miles in the interior. When we tell the queer little waiter at the
hotel, he says he comes from Mandas, and there are two inns. So after
lunch--a strictly fish menu--we pay our bill. It comes to sixty odd
francs--for three good meals each, with wine, and the night's lodging,
this is cheap, as prices now are in Italy.
Pleased with the simple and friendly Scala di Ferre, I shoulder my sack
and we walk off to the second station. The sun is shining hot this
afternoon--burning hot, by the sea. The road and the buildings look dry
and desiccated, the harbour rather weary and end of the world.
There is a great crowd of peasants at the little station. And almost
every man has a pair of woven saddle-bags--a great flat strip of
coarse-woven wool, with flat pockets at either end, stuffed with
purchases. These are almost the only carrying bags. The men sling them
over their shoulder, so that one great pocket hangs in front, one
behind.
These saddle bags are most fascinating. They are coarsely woven in bands
of raw black-rusty wool, with varying bands of raw white wool or hemp or
cotton--the bands and stripes of varying widths going cross-wise. And on
the pale bands are woven sometimes flowers in most lovely colours,
rose-red and blue and green, peasant patterns--and sometimes fantastic
animals, beasts, in dark wool again. So that these striped zebra bags,
some wonderful gay with flowery colours on their stripes, some weird
with fantastic, griffin-like animals, are a whole landscape in
themselves.
The train has only first and third class. It costs about thirty francs
for the two of us, third class to Mandas, which is some sixty miles. In
we crowd with the joyful saddle-bags, into the wooden carriage with its
many seats.
And, wonder of wonders, punctually to the second, off we go, out of
Cagliari. En route again.
IV.
MANDAS.