was too fixed in its motion, hers too loose and overwhelming.
But Giovanni was beautiful, gentle, and courtly like Paolo, but warm,
like Maria, ready to flush like a girl with anger or confusion. He stood
straight and tall, and seemed to look into the far distance with his
clear grey eyes. Yet also he could look at one and touch one with his
look, he could meet one. Paolo's blue eyes were like the eyes of the old
spinning-woman, clear and blue and belonging to the mountains, their
vision seemed to end in space, abstract. They reminded me of the eyes of
the eagle, which looks into the sun, and which teaches its young to do
the same, although they are unwilling.
Marco, the second son, was thirteen years old. He was his mother's
favourite, Giovanni loved his father best. But Marco was his mother's
son, with the same brown-gold and red complexion, like a pomegranate,
and coarse black hair, and brown eyes like pebble, like agate, like an
animal's eyes. He had the same broad, bovine figure, though he was only
a boy. But there was some discrepancy in him. He was not unified, he had
no identity.
He was strong and full of animal life, but always aimless, as though his
wits scarcely controlled him. But he loved his mother with a
fundamental, generous, undistinguishing love. Only he always forgot what
he was going to do. He was much more sensitive than Maria, more shy and
reluctant. But his shyness, his sensitiveness only made him more aimless
and awkward, a tiresome clown, slack and uncontrolled, witless. All day
long his mother shouted and shrilled and scolded at him, or hit him
angrily. He did not mind, he came up like a cork, warm and roguish and
curiously appealing. She loved him with a fierce protective love,
grounded on pain. There was such a split, a contrariety in his soul, one
part reacting against the other, which landed him always into trouble.
It was when Marco was a baby that Paolo had gone to America. They were
poor on San Gaudenzio. There were the few olive trees, the grapes, and
the fruit; there was the one cow. But these scarcely made a living.
Neither was Maria content with the real peasants' lot any more, polenta
at midday and vegetable soup in the evening, and no way out, nothing to
look forward to, no future, only this eternal present. She had been in
service, and had eaten bread and drunk coffee, and known the flux and
variable chance of life. She had departed from the old static
conception. She knew what one might be, given a certain chance. The
fixture was the thing she militated against. So Paolo went to America,
to California, into the gold mines.
Maria wanted the future, the endless possibility of life on earth. She
wanted her sons to be freer, to achieve a new plane of living. The
peasant's life was a slave's life, she said, railing against the poverty
and the drudgery. And it was quite true, Paolo and Giovanni worked
twelve and fourteen hours a day at heavy laborious work that would have
broken an Englishman. And there was nothing at the end of it. Yet Paolo
was even happy so. This was the truth to him.
It was the mother who wanted things different. It was she who railed and
railed against the miserable life of the peasants. When we were going to
throw to the fowls a dry broken penny roll of white bread, Maria said,
with anger and shame and resentment in her voice: 'Give it to Marco, he
will eat it. It isn't too dry for him.'
White bread was a treat for them even now, when everybody eats bread.
And Maria Fiori hated it, that bread should be a treat to her children,
when it was the meanest food of all the rest of the world. She was in
opposition to this order. She did not want her sons to be peasants,
fixed and static as posts driven in the earth. She wanted them to be in
the great flux of life in the midst of all possibilities. So she at
length sent Paolo to America to the gold-mines. Meanwhile, she covered
the wall of her parlour with picture postcards, to bring the outer world
of cities and industries into her house.
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