opened with a curious drawn blindness of the old Furies. There was
something of the cruelty of a falling mass of snow, heavy, horrible.
Maria drew away, there was a silence. Then the avalanche was finished.
They must have had some cruel fights before they learned to withdraw
from each other so completely. They must have begotten Marco in hatred,
terrible disintegrated opposition and otherness. And it was after this,
after the child of their opposition was born, that Paolo went away to
California, leaving his San Gaudenzio, travelling with several
companions, like blind beasts, to Havre, and thence to New York, then to
California. He stayed five years in the gold-mines, in a wild valley,
living with a gang of Italians in a town of corrugated iron.
All the while he had never really left San Gaudenzio. I asked him, 'Used
you to think of it, the lake, the Monte Baldo, the laurel trees down the
slope?' He tried to see what I wanted to know. Yes, he said--but
uncertainly. I could see that he had never been really homesick. It had
been very wretched on the ship going from Havre to New York. That he
told me about. And he told me about the gold-mines, the galleries, the
valley, the huts in the valley. But he had never really fretted for San
Gaudenzio whilst he was in California.
In real truth he was at San Gaudenzio all the time, his fate was riveted
there. His going away was an excursion from reality, a kind of
sleep-walking. He left his own reality there in the soil above the lake
of Garda. That his body was in California, what did it matter? It was
merely for a time, and for the sake of his own earth, his land. He would
pay off the mortgage. But the gate at home was his gate all the time,
his hand was on the latch.
As for Maria, he had felt his duty towards her. She was part of his
little territory, the rooted centre of the world. He sent her home the
money. But it did not occur to him, in his soul, to miss her. He wanted
her to be safe with the children, that was all. In his flesh perhaps he
missed the woman. But his spirit was even more completely isolated since
marriage. Instead of having united with each other, they had made each
other more terribly distinct and separate. He could live alone
eternally. It was his condition. His sex was functional, like eating and
drinking. To take a woman, a prostitute at the camp, or not to take her,
was no more vitally important than to get drunk or not to get drunk of a
Sunday. And fairly often on Sunday Paolo got drunk. His world remained
unaltered.
But Maria suffered more bitterly. She was a young, powerful, passionate
woman, and she was unsatisfied body and soul. Her soul's satisfaction
became a bodily unsatisfaction. Her blood was heavy, violent, anarchic,
insisting on the equality of the blood in all, and therefore on her own
absolute right to satisfaction.
She took a wine licence for San Gaudenzio, and she sold wine. There were
many scandals about her. Somehow it did not matter very much, outwardly.
The authorities were too divided among themselves to enforce public
opinion. Between the clerical party and the radicals and the socialists,
what canons were left that were absolute? Besides, these wild villages
had always been ungoverned.
Yet Maria suffered. Even she, according to her conviction belonged to
Paolo. And she felt betrayed, betrayed and deserted. The iron had gone
deep into her soul. Paolo had deserted her, she had been betrayed to
other men for five years. There was something cruel and implacable in
life. She sat sullen and heavy, for all her quick activity. Her soul was
sullen and heavy.
I could never believe Felicina was Paolo's child. She was an
unprepossessing little girl, affected, cold, selfish, foolish. Maria and
Paolo, with real Italian greatness, were warm and natural towards the
child in her. But they did not love her in their very souls, she was the
fruit of ash to them. And this must have been the reason that she was so
self-conscious and foolish and affected, small child that she was.
<<BackPagesTo menuForward>>