in its establishment. His vision grasped a small circle. A finer nature,
a higher understanding, took in a greater circle, comprehended the
whole. So that when Paolo was in relation to a man of further vision, he
himself was extended towards the whole. Thus he was fulfilled. And his
initial assumption was that every signore, every gentleman, was a man of
further, purer vision than himself. This assumption was false. But
Maria's assumption, that no one had a further vision, no one was more
elect than herself, that we are all one flesh and blood and being, was
even more false. Paolo was mistaken in actual life, but Maria was
ultimately mistaken.
Paolo, conservative as he was, believing that a priest must be a priest
of God, yet very rarely went to church. And he used the religious oaths
that Maria hated, even _Porca-Maria_. He always used oaths, either
Bacchus or God or Mary or the Sacrament. Maria was always offended. Yet
it was she who, in her soul, jeered at the Church and at religion. She
wanted the human society as the absolute, without religious
abstractions. So Paolo's oaths enraged her, because of their profanity,
she said. But it was really because of their subscribing to another
superhuman order. She jeered at the clerical people. She made a loud
clamour of derision when the parish priest of the village above went
down to the big village on the lake, and across the piazza, the quay,
with two pigs in a sack on his shoulder. This was a real picture of the
sacred minister to her.
One day, when a storm had blown down an olive tree in front of the
house, and Paolo and Giovanni were beginning to cut it up, this same
priest of Mugiano came to San Gaudenzio. He was an iron-grey, thin,
disreputable-looking priest, very talkative and loud and queer. He
seemed like an old ne'er-do-well in priests' black, and he talked
loudly, almost to himself, as drunken people do. At once _he_ must show
the Fiori how to cut up the tree, he must have the axe from Paolo. He
shouted to Maria for a glass of wine. She brought it out to him with a
sort of insolent deference, insolent contempt of the man and traditional
deference to the cloth. The priest drained the tumblerful of wine at one
drink, his thin throat with its Adam's apple working. And he did not pay
the penny.
Then he stripped off his cassock and put away his hat, and, a ludicrous
figure in ill-fitting black knee-breeches and a not very clean shirt, a
red handkerchief round his neck, he proceeded to give great extravagant
blows at the tree. He was like a caricature. In the doorway Maria was
encouraging him rather jeeringly, whilst she winked at me. Marco was
stifling his hysterical amusement in his mother's apron, and prancing
with glee. Paolo and Giovanni stood by the fallen tree, very grave and
unmoved, inscrutable, abstract. Then the youth came away to the doorway,
with a flush mounting on his face and a grimace distorting its
youngness. Only Paolo, unmoved and detached, stood by the tree with
unchanging, abstract face, very strange, his eyes fixed in the ageless
stare which is so characteristic.
Meanwhile the priest swung drunken blows at the tree, his thin buttocks
bending in the green-black broadcloth, supported on thin shanks, and
thin throat growing dull purple in the red-knotted kerchief.
Nevertheless he was doing the job. His face was wet with sweat. He
wanted another glass of wine.
He took no notice of us. He was strangely a local, even a mountebank
figure, but entirely local, an appurtenance of the district.
It was Maria who jeeringly told us the story of the priest, who shrugged
her shoulders to imply that he was a contemptible figure. Paolo sat with
the abstract look on his face, as of one who hears and does not hear, is
not really concerned. He never opposed or contradicted her, but stayed
apart. It was she who was violent and brutal in her ways. But sometimes
Paolo went into a rage, and then Maria, everybody, was afraid. It was a
white heavy rage, when his blue eyes shone unearthly, and his mouth
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