was solid and powerful. His eyes were blue like upper ice, beautiful. He
had been a fair-haired man, now he was almost white.
He, was strangely like the pictures of peasants in the northern Italian
pictures, with the same curious nobility, the same aristocratic, eternal
look of motionlessness, something statuesque. His head was hard and
fine, the bone finely constructed, though the skin of his face was loose
and furrowed with work. His temples had that fine, hard clarity which is
seen in Mantegna, an almost jewel-like quality.
We all loved Paolo, he was so finished in his being, detached, with an
almost classic simplicity and gentleness, an eternal kind of sureness.
There was also something concluded and unalterable about him, something
inaccessible.
Maria Fiori was different. She was from the plain, like Enrico
Persevalli and the Bersaglier from the Venetian district. She reminded
me again of oxen, broad-boned and massive in physique, dark-skinned,
slow in her soul. But, like the oxen of the plain, she knew her work,
she knew the other people engaged in the work. Her intelligence was
attentive and purposive. She had been a housekeeper, a servant, in
Venice and Verona, before her marriage. She had got the hang of this
world of commerce and activity, she wanted to master it. But she was
weighted down by her heavy animal blood.
Paolo and she were the opposite sides of the universe, the light and the
dark. Yet they lived together now without friction, detached, each
subordinated in their common relationship. With regard to Maria, Paolo
omitted himself; Maria omitted herself with regard to Paolo. Their souls
were silent and detached, completely apart, and silent, quite silent.
They shared the physical relationship of marriage as if it were
something beyond them, a third thing.
They had suffered very much in the earlier stages of their connexion.
Now the storm had gone by, leaving them, as it were, spent. They were
both by nature passionate, vehement. But the lines of their passion were
opposite. Hers was the primitive, crude, violent flux of the blood,
emotional and undiscriminating, but wanting to mix and mingle. His was
the hard, clear, invulnerable passion of the bones, finely tempered and
unchangeable. She was the flint and he the steel. But in continual
striking together they only destroyed each other. The fire was a third
thing, belonging to neither of them.
She was still heavy and full of desire. She was much younger than he.
'How long did you know your Signora before you were married?' she asked
me.
'Six weeks,' I said.
'_Il Paolo e me, venti giorni, tre settimane_,' she cried vehemently.
Three weeks they had known each other when they married. She still
triumphed in the fact. So did Paolo. But it was past, strangely and
rather terribly past.
What did they want when they came together, Paolo and she? He was a man
over thirty, she was a woman of twenty-three. They were both violent in
desire and of strong will. They came together at once, like two
wrestlers almost matched in strength. Their meetings must have been
splendid. Giovanni, the eldest child, was a tall lad of sixteen, with
soft brown hair and grey eyes, and a clarity of brow, and the same calm
simplicity of bearing which made Paolo so complete; but the son had at
the same time a certain brownness of skin, a heaviness of blood, which
he had from his mother. Paolo was so clear and translucent.
In Giovanni the fusion of the parents was perfect, he was a perfect
spark from the flint and steel. There was in Paolo a subtle intelligence
in feeling, a delicate appreciation of the other person. But the mind
was unintelligent, he could not grasp a new order. Maria Fiori was much
sharper and more adaptable to the ways of the world. Paolo had an almost
glass-like quality, fine and clear and perfectly tempered; but he was
also finished and brittle. Maria was much coarser, more vulgar, but also
she was more human, more fertile, with crude potentiality. His passion
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