on his great day of liberation, when he is accompanied home, drunk but
sinister, by the erect, unswerving, slightly cowed woman. His drunken
terrorizing is only pitiable, she is so obviously the more
constant power.
And this is why the men must go away to America. It is not the money. It
is the profound desire to rehabilitate themselves, to recover some
dignity as men, as producers, as workers, as creators from the spirit,
not only from the flesh. It is a profound desire to get away from women
altogether, the terrible subjugation to sex, the phallic worship.
The company of actors in the little theatre was from a small town away
on the plain, beyond Brescia. The curtain rose, everybody was still,
with that profound, naïve attention which children give. And after a few
minutes I realized that _I Spettri_ was Ibsen's _Ghosts_. The peasants
and fishermen of the Garda, even the rows of ungovernable children, sat
absorbed in watching as the Norwegian drama unfolded itself.
The actors are peasants. The leader is the son of a peasant proprietor.
He is qualified as a chemist, but is unsettled, vagrant, prefers
play-acting. The Signer Pietro di Paoli shrugs his shoulders and
apologizes for their vulgar accent. It is all the same to me. I am
trying to get myself to rights with the play, which I have just lately
seen in Munich, perfectly produced and detestable.
It was such a change from the hard, ethical, slightly mechanized
characters in the German play, which was as perfect an interpretation as
I can imagine, to the rather pathetic notion of the Italian peasants,
that I had to wait to adjust myself.
The mother was a pleasant, comfortable woman harassed by something, she
did not quite know what. The pastor was a ginger-haired caricature
imitated from the northern stage, quite a lay figure. The peasants never
laughed, they watched solemnly and absorbedly like children. The servant
was just a slim, pert, forward hussy, much too flagrant. And then the
son, the actor-manager: he was a dark, ruddy man, broad and thick-set,
evidently of peasant origin, but with some education now; he was the
important figure, the play was his.
And he was strangely disturbing. Dark, ruddy, and powerful, he could not
be the blighted son of 'Ghosts', the hectic, unsound, northern issue of
a diseased father. His flashy Italian passion for his half-sister was
real enough to make one uncomfortable: something he wanted and would
have in spite of his own soul, something which fundamentally he did
not want.
It was this contradiction within the man that made the play so
interesting. A robust, vigorous man of thirty-eight, flaunting and
florid as a rather successful Italian can be, there was yet a secret
sickness which oppressed him. But it was no taint in the blood, it was
rather a kind of debility in the soul. That which he wanted and would
have, the sensual excitement, in his soul he did not want it, no, not at
all. And yet he must act from his physical desires, his physical will.
His true being, his real self, was impotent. In his soul he was
dependent, forlorn. He was childish and dependent on the mother. To hear
him say, '_Grazia, mamma!_' would have tormented the mother-soul in any
woman living. Such a child crying in the night! And for what?
For he was hot-blooded, healthy, almost in his prime, and free as a man
can be in his circumstances. He had his own way, he admitted no
thwarting. He governed his circumstances pretty much, coming to our
village with his little company, playing the plays he chose himself. And
yet, that which he would have he did not vitally want, it was only a
sort of inflamed obstinacy that made him so insistent, in the masculine
way. He was not going to be governed by women, he was not going to be
dictated to in the least by any one. And this because he was beaten by
his own flesh.
His real man's soul, the soul that goes forth and builds up a new world
out of the void, was ineffectual. It could only revert to the senses.
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