Paolo had come back from America a year before she was born--a year
before she was born, Maria insisted. The husband and wife lived together
in a relationship of complete negation. In his soul he was sad for her,
and in her soul she felt annulled. He sat at evening in the
chimney-seat, smoking, always pleasant and cheerful, not for a moment
thinking he was unhappy. It had all taken place in his subconsciousness.
But his eyebrows and eyelids were lifted in a kind of vacancy, his blue
eyes were round and somehow finished, though he was so gentle and
vigorous in body. But the very quick of him was killed. He was like a
ghost in the house, with his loose throat and powerful limbs, his open,
blue extinct eyes, and his musical, slightly husky voice, that seemed to
sound out of the past.
And Maria, stout and strong and handsome like a peasant woman, went
about as if there were a weight on her, and her voice was high and
strident. She, too, was finished in her life. But she remained unbroken,
her will was like a hammer that destroys the old form.
Giovanni was patiently labouring to learn a little English. Paolo knew
only four or five words, the chief of which were 'a'right', 'boss',
'bread', and 'day'. The youth had these by heart, and was studying a
little more. He was very graceful and lovable, but he found it difficult
to learn. A confused light, like hot tears, would come into his eyes
when he had again forgotten the phrase. But he carried the paper about
with him, and he made steady progress.
He would go to America, he also. Not for anything would he stay in San
Gaudenzio. His dream was to be gone. He would come back. The world was
not San Gaudenzio to Giovanni.
The old order, the order of Paolo and of Pietro di Paoli, the
aristocratic order of the supreme God, God the Father, the Lord, was
passing away from the beautiful little territory. The household no
longer receives its food, oil and wine and maize, from out of the earth
in the motion of fate. The earth is annulled, and money takes its place.
The landowner, who is the lieutenant of God and of Fate, like Abraham,
he, too, is annulled. There is now the order of the rich, which
supersedes the order of the Signoria.
It is passing away from Italy as it has passed from England. The peasant
is passing away, the workman is taking his place. The stability is gone.
Paolo is a ghost, Maria is the living body. And the new order means
sorrow for the Italian more even than it has meant for us. But he will
have the new order.
San Gaudenzio is already becoming a thing of the past. Below the house,
where the land drops in sharp slips to the sheer cliff's edge, over
which it is Maria's constant fear that Felicina will tumble, there are
the deserted lemon gardens of the little territory, snug down below.
They are invisible till one descends by tiny paths, sheer down into
them. And there they stand, the pillars and walls erect, but a dead
emptiness prevailing, lemon trees all dead, gone, a few vines in their
place. It is only twenty years since the lemon trees finally perished of
a disease and were not renewed. But the deserted terrace, shut between
great walls, descending in their openness full to the south, to the lake
and the mountain opposite, seem more terrible than Pompeii in their
silence and utter seclusion. The grape hyacinths flower in the cracks,
the lizards run, this strange place hangs suspended and forgotten,
forgotten for ever, its erect pillars utterly meaningless.
I used to sit and write in the great loft of the lemon-house, high up,
far, far from the ground, the open front giving across the lake and the
mountain snow opposite, flush with twilight. The old matting and boards,
the old disused implements of lemon culture made shadows in the deserted
place. Then there would come the call from the back, away above:
'_Venga, venga mangiare_.'
We ate in the kitchen, where the olive and laurel wood burned in the
open fireplace. It was always soup in the evening. Then we played games
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