as semi-transparent rock, as a substance in moonlight. He seemed like a
crystal that has achieved its final shape and has nothing more
to achieve.
That night he slept on the floor of the sitting-room. In the morning he
was gone. But a week after he came again, to graft the vines.
All the morning and the afternoon he was among the vines, crouching
before them, cutting them back with his sharp, bright knife, amazingly
swift and sure, like a god. It filled me with a sort of panic to see him
crouched flexibly, like some strange animal god, doubled on his
haunches, before the young vines, and swiftly, vividly, without thought,
cut, cut, cut at the young budding shoots, which fell unheeded on to the
earth. Then again he strode with his curious half-goatlike movement
across the garden, to prepare the lime.
He mixed the messy stuff, cow-dung and lime and water and earth,
carefully with his hands, as if he understood that too. He was not a
worker. He was a creature in intimate communion with the sensible world,
knowing purely by touch the limey mess he mixed amongst, knowing as if
by relation between that soft matter and the matter of himself.
Then again he strode over the earth, a gleaming piece of earth himself,
moving to the young vines. Quickly, with a few clean cuts of the knife,
he prepared the new shoot, which he had picked out of a handful which
lay beside him on the ground; he went finely to the quick of the plant,
inserted the graft, then bound it up, fast, hard.
It was like God grafting the life of man upon the body of the earth,
intimately conjuring with his own flesh.
All the while Paolo stood by, somehow excluded from the mystery, talking
to me, to Faustino. And Il Duro answered easily, as if his mind were
disengaged. It was his senses that were absorbed in the sensible life of
the plant, and the lime and the cow-dung he handled.
Watching him, watching his absorbed, bestial, and yet godlike crouching
before the plant, as if he were the god of lower life, I somehow
understood his isolation, why he did not marry. Pan and the ministers of
Pan do not marry, the sylvan gods. They are single and isolated in
their being.
It is in the spirit that marriage takes place. In the flesh there is
connexion, but only in the spirit is there a new thing created out of
two different antithetic things. In the body I am conjoined with the
woman. But in the spirit my conjunction with her creates a third thing,
an absolute, a Word, which is neither me nor her, nor of me nor of her,
but which is absolute.
And Faustino had none of this spirit. In him sensation itself was
absolute--not spiritual consummation, but physical sensation. So he
could not marry, it was not for him. He belonged to the god Pan, to the
absolute of the senses.
All the while his beauty, so perfect and so defined, fascinated me, a
strange static perfection about him. But his movements, whilst they
fascinated, also repelled. I can always see him crouched before the
vines on his haunches, his haunches doubled together in a complete
animal unconsciousness, his face seeming in its strange golden pallor
and its hardness of line, with the gleaming black of the fine hair on
the brow and temples, like something reflective, like the reflecting
surface of a stone that gleams out of the depths of night. It was like
darkness revealed in its steady, unchanging pallor.
Again he stayed through the evening, having quarrelled once more with
the Maria about money. He quarrelled violently, yet coldly. There was
something terrifying in it. And as soon as the matter of dispute was
settled, all trace of interest or feeling vanished from him.
Yet he liked, above all things, to be near the English signori. They
seemed to exercise a sort of magnetic attraction over him. It was
something of the purely physical world, as a magnetized needle swings
towards soft iron. He was quite helpless in the relation. Only by
mechanical attraction he gravitated into line with us.
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