Coi 'taliani far' l'amor._
But the next verses are so improper that I pretend not to understand.
The women, with wakened, dilated faces, are listening, listening hard,
their two faces beautiful in their attention, as if listening to
something magical, a long way off. And the men sitting round the wall
sing more plainly, coming nearer to the correct Italian. The song comes
loud and vibrating and maliciously from their reedy throats, it
penetrates everybody. The foreign women can understand the sound, they
can feel the malicious, suggestive mockery. But they cannot catch the
words. The smile becomes more dangerous on the faces of the men.
Then Maria Fiori sees that I have understood, and she cries, in her
loud, overriding voice:
'_Basta--basta._
The men get up, straighten their bodies with a curious, offering
movement. The guitars and mandolines strike the vibrating strings. But
the vague Northern reserve has come over the Englishwomen. They dance
again, but without the fusion in the dance. They have had enough.
The musicians are thanked, they rise and go into the night. The men pass
off in pairs. But the wood-cutter, whose name and whose nickname I could
never hear, still hovered on the edge of the darkness.
Then Maria sent him also away, complaining that he was too wild,
_proprio selvatico_, and only the 'quality' remained, the well-to-do
youths from below. There was a little more coffee, and a talking, a
story of a man who had fallen over a declivity in a lonely part going
home drunk in the evening, and had lain unfound for eighteen hours. Then
a story of a donkey who had kicked a youth in the chest and killed him.
But the women were tired, they would go to bed. Still the two young men
would not go away. We all went out to look at the night.
The stars were very bright overhead, the mountain opposite and the
mountains behind us faintly outlined themselves on the sky. Below, the
lake was a black gulf. A little wind blew cold from the Adige.
In the morning the visitors had gone. They had insisted on staying the
night. They had eaten eight eggs each and much bread at one o'clock in
the morning. Then they had gone to sleep, lying on the floor in the
sitting-room.
In the early sunshine they had drunk coffee and gone down to the village
on the lake. Maria was very pleased. She would have made a good deal of
money. The young men were rich. Her cupidity seemed like her
very blossom.
_6_
IL DURO
The first time I saw Il Duro was on a sunny day when there came up a
party of pleasure-makers to San Gaudenzio. They were three women and
three men. The women were in cotton frocks, one a large, dark, florid
woman in pink, the other two rather insignificant. The men I scarcely
noticed at first, except that two were young and one elderly.
They were a queer party, even on a feast day, coming up purely for
pleasure, in the morning, strange, and slightly uncertain, advancing
between the vines. They greeted Maria and Paolo in loud, coarse voices.
There was something blowsy and uncertain and hesitating about the women
in particular, which made one at once notice them.
Then a picnic was arranged for them out of doors, on the grass. They sat
just in front of the house, under the olive tree, beyond the well. It
should have been pretty, the women in their cotton frocks, and their
friends, sitting with wine and food in the spring sunshine. But somehow
it was not: it was hard and slightly ugly.
But since they were picnicking out of doors, we must do so too. We were
at once envious. But Maria was a little unwilling, and then she set a
table for us.
The strange party did not speak to us, they seemed slightly uneasy and
angry at our presence. I asked Maria who they were. She lifted her
shoulders, and, after a second's cold pause, said they were people from
down below, and then, in her rather strident, shrill, slightly bitter,
slightly derogatory voice, she added:
'They are not people for you, signore. You don't know them.'
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