clattering zoccoli, they lounge with wonderful ease against the wall at
the back, or against the two pillars, unconscious of the patches on
their clothes or of their bare throats, that are knotted perhaps with a
scarlet rag. Loose and abandoned, they lounge and talk, or they watch
with wistful absorption the play that is going on.
They are strangely isolated in their own atmosphere, and as if revealed.
It is as if their vulnerable being was exposed and they have not the wit
to cover it. There is a pathos of physical sensibility and mental
inadequacy. Their mind is not sufficiently alert to run with their
quick, warm senses.
The men keep together, as if to support each other, the women also are
together; in a hard, strong herd. It is as if the power, the hardness,
the triumph, even in this Italian village, were with the women in their
relentless, vindictive unity.
That which drives men and women together, the indomitable necessity, is
like a bondage upon the people. They submit as under compulsion, under
constraint. They come together mostly in anger and in violence of
destructive passion. There is no comradeship between men and women, none
whatsoever, but rather a condition of battle, reserve, hostility.
On Sundays the uncomfortable, excited, unwilling youth walks for an hour
with his sweetheart, at a little distance from her, on the public
highway in the afternoon. This is a concession to the necessity for
marriage. There is no real courting, no happiness of being together,
only the roused excitement which is based on a fundamental hostility.
There is very little flirting, and what there is is of the subtle, cruel
kind, like a sex duel. On the whole, the men and women avoid each other,
almost shun each other. Husband and wife are brought together in a
child, which they both worship. But in each of them there is only the
great reverence for the infant, and the reverence for fatherhood or
motherhood, as the case may be; there is no spiritual love.
In marriage, husband and wife wage the subtle, satisfying war of sex
upon each other. It gives a profound satisfaction, a profound intimacy.
But it destroys all joy, all unanimity in action.
On Sunday afternoons the uncomfortable youth walks by the side of his
maiden for an hour in the public highway. Then he escapes; as from a
bondage he goes back to his men companions. On Sunday afternoons and
evenings the married woman, accompanied by a friend or by a child--she
dare not go alone, afraid of the strange, terrible sex-war between her
and the drunken man--is seen leading home the wine-drunken, liberated
husband. Sometimes she is beaten when she gets home. It is part of the
process. But there is no synthetic love between men and women, there is
only passion, and passion is fundamental hatred, the act of love is
a fight.
The child, the outcome, is divine. Here the union, the oneness, is
manifest. Though spirit strove with spirit, in mortal conflict, during
the sex-passion, yet the flesh united with flesh in oneness. The phallus
is still divine. But the spirit, the mind of man, this has
become nothing.
So the women triumph. They sit down below in the theatre, their
perfectly dressed hair gleaming, their backs very straight, their heads
carried tensely. They are not very noticeable. They seem held in
reserve. They are just as tense and stiff as the men are slack and
abandoned. Some strange will holds the women taut. They seem like
weapons, dangerous. There is nothing charming nor winning about them; at
the best a full, prolific maternity, at the worst a yellow poisonous
bitterness of the flesh that is like a narcotic. But they are too strong
for the men. The male spirit, which would subdue the immediate flesh to
some conscious or social purpose, is overthrown. The woman in her
maternity is the law-giver, the supreme authority. The authority of the
man, in work, in public affairs, is something trivial in comparison. The
pathetic ignominy of the village male is complete on Sunday afternoon,
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