wife and child and his father to go to America.
'But why,' I said, 'why? You are not poor, you can manage the shop in
your village.'
'Yes,' he said. 'But I will go to America. Perhaps I shall go into the
store again, the same.'
'But is it not just the same as managing the shop at home?'
'No--no--it is quite different.'
Then he told us how he bought goods in Brescia and in Said for the shop
at home, how he had rigged up a funicular with the assistance of the
village, an overhead wire by which you could haul the goods up the face
of the cliffs right high up, to within a mile of the village. He was
very proud of this. And sometimes he himself went down the funicular to
the water's edge, to the boat, when he was in a hurry. This also
pleased him.
But he was going to Brescia this day to see about going again to
America. Perhaps in another month he would be gone.
It was a great puzzle to me why he would go. He could not say himself.
He would stay four or five years, then he would come home again to see
his father--and his wife and child.
There was a strange, almost frightening destiny upon him, which seemed
to take him away, always away from home, from the past, to that great,
raw America. He seemed scarcely like a person with individual choice,
more like a creature under the influence of fate which was
disintegrating the old life and precipitating him, a fragment
inconclusive, into the new chaos.
He submitted to it all with a perfect unquestioning simplicity, never
even knowing that he suffered, that he must suffer disintegration from
the old life. He was moved entirely from within, he never questioned his
inevitable impulse.
'They say to me, "Don't go--don't go"--' he shook his head. 'But I say I
will go.'
And at that it was finished.
So we saw him off at the little quay, going down the lake. He would
return at evening, and be pulled up in his funicular basket. And in a
month's time he would be standing on the same lake steamer going
to America.
Nothing was more painful than to see him standing there in his degraded,
sordid American clothes, on the deck of the steamer, waving us good-bye,
belonging in his final desire to our world, the world of consciousness
and deliberate action. With his candid, open, unquestioning face, he
seemed like a prisoner being conveyed from one form of life to another,
or like a soul in trajectory, that has not yet found a resting-place.
What were wife and child to him?--they were the last steps of the past.
His father was the continent behind him; his wife and child the
foreshore of the past; but his face was set outwards, away from it
all--whither, neither he nor anybody knew, but he called it America.
_Italians in Exile_
When I was in Constance the weather was misty and enervating and
depressing, it was no pleasure to travel on the big flat desolate lake.
When I went from Constance, it was on a small steamer down the Rhine to
Schaffhausen. That was beautiful. Still, the mist hung over the waters,
over the wide shallows of the river, and the sun, coming through the
morning, made lovely yellow lights beneath the bluish haze, so that it
seemed like the beginning of the world. And there was a hawk in the
upper air fighting with two crows, or two rooks. Ever they rose higher
and higher, the crow flickering above the attacking hawk, the fight
going on like some strange symbol in the sky, the Germans on deck
watching with pleasure.
Then we passed out of sight between wooded banks and under bridges where
quaint villages of old romance piled their red and coloured pointed
roofs beside the water, very still, remote, lost in the vagueness of the
past. It could not be that they were real. Even when the boat put in to
shore, and the customs officials came to look, the village remained
remote in the romantic past of High Germany, the Germany of fairy tales
and minstrels and craftsmen. The poignancy of the past was almost
unbearable, floating there in colour upon the haze of the river.
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