Five Women Read online

  When they were well in the valley, they came to a fantastic place. It hung on the slope of a hill. The bridle-path that had brought them now began sheerly to leap from one huge flat boulder to the next, and flowing away from it, like streams meandering downhill, were a few short, steep lanes disappearing into the meadows. Standing on the bridle-path, one saw only forlorn and ramshackle cottages; but if one looked upward from the meadows below it was as though one had been transported back into a pre-historic lake-village built on piles, for the front of each house was supported on tall beams, and the privies floated out to one side of them like litters on four slender poles as tall as trees. Nor was the surrounding landscape without its oddities. It was a more than semicircular wall of high, craggy mountains sweeping down steeply into a crater in the centre of which was a smaller wooded cone, and the whole thing was like a gigantic empty pudding-mould with a little piece cut out of it by a deep-running brook, so that there it yawned wide open against the high flank of the slope on which the village hung. Below the snow-line there were corries, where a few deer strayed in the scrub, and in the woods crowning the round hill in the centre the blackcock were already displaying. The meadows on the sunny side were flowered with yellow, blue, and white stars, as big as thalers emptied out of a sack. But if one climbed another hundred feet or so beyond the village, one came to a small plateau covered with ploughed fields, meadows, hay-barns and a sprinkle of houses, with a little church, on a bastion that jutted over the valley, gazing out over the world that on fine days lay far beyond the valley like the sea beyond the mouth of a river: one could scarcely tell what was still the golden-yellow distance of the blessed plain and where the vague cloud-floors of the sky had begun.

  It was a fine life they led there. All day one was up in the mountains, working at old blocked mine-shafts, or driving new ones into the mountainside, or down at the mouth of the valley where a wide road was to be built: and always one was in gigantic air that was already soft, pregnant with the imminent melting of the snow. They poured out money among the people and held sway like gods. They had something for them all to do, men and women alike. The men eyth organised into working parties and sent them up the mountains, where they had to spend the week; the women they used as porters, sending them in columns up the almost impassable mountainside, bringing provisions and spare parts. The stone schoolhouse was turned into a depot where their stores were kept and whence they were distributed. There a commanding male voice rapped out orders, summoning one by one the women who stood waiting and chattering, and the big basket on each woman's back would be loaded until her knees gave and the veins in her neck swelled. When one of those pretty young women had been loaded up, her eyes stared and her lips hung open; then she took her place in the column and, at a sign, these now silent beasts of burden slowly began to set one foot before the other up the long, winding track into the heights. But it was a rare and precious burden that they bore, bread, meat, and wine, and there was no need to be too scrupulous about the tools either, so that besides their wages a good deal that was useful found its way to their own households, and therefore they carried the loads willingly and even thanked the men who had brought these blessings into the mountains. And it was wonderful to feel: here one was not, as everywhere else in the world, scrutinised to see what sort of human being one was—whether one was reliable, powerful and to be feared, or delicate and beautiful—but whatever sort of human being one was, and no matter what one's ideas about life and the world were, here one met with love because one had brought blessings. Love ran ahead like a herald, love was made ready everywhere like a bed freshly made up for the guest, and each living being bore gifts of welcome in their eyes. The women could let that be freely seen, but sometimes as one passed a meadow there might be an old peasant there, waving his scythe like Death in person.

  There were, indeed, peculiar people living at the head of this valley. Their forefathers had come here from Germany, to work in the mines, in the times when the bishops of Trent were mighty, and they were still like some ancient weathered German boulder flung down in the Italian landscape. They had partly kept and partly forgotten their old way of life, and what they had kept of it they themselves probably no longer understood. In the spring the mountain torrents wrenched away the earth from under them, so that there were houses that had once stood on a hill and were now on the brink of an abyss; but nobody lifted a finger to contend with the danger, and by a reverse process the new age was drifting into their houses, casting up all sorts of dreadful rubbish. One came across cheap, shiny cupboards, oleographs, and humorous postcards. But sometimes too there would be a saucepan that their forbears might well have used in Luther's time. For they were Protestants; but even though it was doubtless no more than this dogged clinging to their beliefs that had prevented their being Italianised, they were certainly not good Christians. Since they were poor, almost all the men left their wives shortly after marrying and went to America for years on end; when they came back, they brought with them a little money they had saved, the habits learned in urban brothels, and the irreligion, but not the acuity, of civilisation.

  Right at the beginning Homo heard a story that interested him extraordinarily. Not long before—it might have been some fifteen years previously—a peasant who had been away for a long time came home from America and bedded with his wife again. For a while they rejoiced because they were reunited, and they lived without a care until the last of his cash had melted away. Then, when the rest of his savings, which had been supposed to come from America, still failed to arrive, the peasant girded himself up and—as all the peasants in this district did—went out to earn a living as a peddler, while his wife continued to look after the unprofitable smallholding. But he did not come back. Instead, a few days later, on a smallholding some distancefrom the first, the peasant returned from America, reminded his wife how long it had been, exactly to the day, asked to be given a meal exactly the same as that they had had on the day he left, remembered all about the cow that no longer existed, and got on decently with the children sent him by Heaven during the years when he was away. This peasant too, after a period of relaxation and good living, set off with peddler's wares and did not return. This happened a third and a fourth time in the district, until it was realised that this was a swindler who had worked with the men over there and questioned them thoroughly about their life at home. Somewhere he was arrested and imprisoned, and none of the women saw him again. This, so the story went, they all were sorry about, for each of them would have liked to have him for a few days more and to have compared him with her memories, in order not to have to admit she had been made a fool of; for each of them claimed to have noticed something that did not quite correspond to what she remembered, but none of them was sufficiently sure of it to raise the matter and make difficulties for the husband who had returned to claim his rights.

  That was what these women were like. Their legs were concealed by brown woollen skirts with deep borders of red, blue, or orange, and the kerchiefs they wore on their heads and crossed over the breast were cheap printed cotton things with a factory-made pattern, yet somehow, too, something about the colours or the way they wore these kerchiefs suggested bygone centuries. There was something here that was much older than any known peasant costume; perhaps it was only a gaze, one that had come down through the ages and arrived very late, faint now and already dim, and yet one felt it clearly, meeting one's own gaze as one looked at them. They wore shoes that were like primitive dug-out canoes, and because the tracks were so bad they had knife-sharp iron blades fitted into the soles, and in their blue or brown stockings they walked on these as the women walk in Japan. When they had to wait, they sat down, not on the edge of the path, but right on the flat earth of the path itself, pulling up their knees like Negroes. And when, as sometimes happened, they rode up the mountains on their donkeys, they did not sit on their skirts, but rode astride like men, their thighs insensitive to the sharp wooden edges of the baggage-saddles, their leg
s again raised indecorously high and the whole upper part of the body faintly swinging with the animal's movement.

  And they had, besides, a bewilderingly frank friendliness and kindliness. "Do you come in," they would say, with all the dignity of great ladies, if one knocked at their rustic doors. Or if one stood chatting with them for a while in the open air, one of them might suddenly ask with extreme courtesy and reserve: "Shall I not hold your coat for you?" Once, when Homo said to a charming fourteen-year-old girl: "Come in the hay"—simply because ‘the hay' suddenly seemed as natural to him as fodder is to cattle—the childish face under the pointed, ancestral kerchief showed not the slightest dismay : there was only a mirthful puffing and flashing, a tipping this way and that on the rocking shoe-boats, and almost a collapse on to her little bottom, with her rake still on her shoulder, the whole performance conveying, with winsome clumsiness, comic-opera astonishment at the man's intensity of desire.

  Another time he asked a tall, Valkyrie-like peasant woman: "Well, and are you still a virgin?" and chucked her under the chin—this time, too, merely because such jests need a touch of virile emphasis.

  But she let her chin rest quietly on his hand and answered solemnly : "Yes, of course...."

  Homo was taken aback. "You're still a virgin!" he repeated, and laughed.

  She giggled.

  "Tell me!" he said, drawing closer and playfully shaking her chin.

  Then she blew into his face and laughed. "Was once, of course!"

  "If I come to see you, what can I have?" he went on with his cross-examination.

  "Whatever you want."

  "Everything I want?"

  "Everything."

  "Really everything?"

  "Everything! Everything!" and her passion was so brilliantly and passionately acted, that the theatrical quality of it, up here, nearly 5,000 feet above sea-level, left him quite bewildered.

  After this he could not rid himself of the feeling that this life, which was brighter and more highly spiced than any life he had led before, was no longer part of reality, but a play floating in the air.

  Meanwhile summer had come. When he had received the first letter and recognised his ailing little boy's childish handwriting, the shock of happiness and secret possession had flashed right through him, down to the soles of his feet. Their knowing where he was seemed to give everything tremendous solidity. He was here: oh, now everything was known and he had no more need to explain anything. All white and mauve, green and brown, there were the meadows around him. He was no phantom. A fairy-tale wood of ancient larches, feathery with new green, spread over an emerald slope. Under the moss there might be living crystals, mauve and white. The stream in the midst of the wood somewhere ran over a boulder, falling so that it looked like a big silver comb. He no longer answered his wife's letters. Here, amid the secrets of Nature, their belonging together was only one secret more. There was a tender scarlet flower, one that existed in no other man's world, only in his, and into earthly cares and comforts. He loved his child, but just as the boy would outlive them, so too the boy had earlier killed the other-worldly part of them. And suddenly he flushed hot with a new certainty. He was not a man inclined to religious belief, but at this moment he was illumined within. Thoughts cast as little light as smoky candles in this great radiance of emotion that he experienced; it was all simply one glorious word blazing with the light of youth: Reunion. He was taking her with him for all eternity, and in the moment when he yielded to this thought, the little blemishes that the years had wrought in his beloved were taken from her and all was, eternally, the first day of all. Every worldly consideration vanished, and every possibility of tedium and of unfaithfulness, for no one will sacrifice eternity for the sake of a quarter of an hour's frivolity. And for the first time he experienced love beyond all doubt as a heavenly sacrament. He recognised the Providence that had guided his life into this solitude and felt the ground with its gold and jewels beneath his feet no longer as an earthly treasure, but as an enchanted world ordained for him alone.

  From this day onward he was released from a bondage, as though rid of a stiff knee or a heavy rucksack. It was the bondage of wanting to be alive, the horror of dying. It did not happen to him as he had always thought it would, when in the fullness of one's strength one seems to see one's end approaching, so that one drinks more deeply of life, savours it more intensely. It was merely that he felt no longer involved, felt himself buoyed up by a glorious lightness that made him supreme lord of his own existence.

  Although the mining operations had not progressed according to plan it was indeed a gold-digger's life they were leading. A lad had stolen wine, and that was a crime against the community, the punishment of which could count on general approval. The lad was brought in with his wrists thus God had ordered things, wholly as a wonder. There was a place in the body that was kept hidden away, and no one might see it lest he should die: only one man. At this moment it seemed to him as wonderfully senseless and unpractical as only profound religious feeling can be. And only now did he realise what he had done in cutting himself off for this summer and letting himself drift on his own tide, this tide that had taken control of him. Among the trees with their arsenic-green beards he sank down on one knee and spread out his arms, a thing he had never done before in all his life, and it was as though in this moment someone lifted him out of his own embrace. He felt his beloved's hand in his, her voice sounded in his ear, and it was as though even now his whole body were answering to a touch, as though he were being cast in the mould of some other body. But he had invalidated his life. His heart had grown humble before his beloved, and poor as a mendicant; only a little more, and vows and tears would have poured from his very soul. And yet it was certain that he would not turn back, and strangely there was associated with his agitation an image of the meadows in flower round about these woods, and despite all longing for the future a feeling that here, amid anemones, forget-me-not, orchids, gentian, and the glorious greenish-brown sorrel, he would lie dead. He lay down and stretched out on the moss. "How am I to take you across with me?" he asked himself. And his body felt strangely tired, was like a rigid face relaxing into a smile.

  Here he was, having always thought he was living in reality—but was there anything more unreal than that one human being should for him be different from all other human beings?—that among innumerable bodies there was one on which his inmost existence was almost as dependent as on his own body?—whose hunger and fatigue, hearing and seeing, were linked with his own? As the child grew older, this had grown—as the secrets of the soil grow into a sapling- bound. Mozart Amadeo Hoffingott gave orders that he should constitute a warning to others by being tied upright to a tree for a day and a night. But when the foreman came with the rope, in jest portentously swinging it and then hanging it over a nail, the lad began to tremble all over in the belief that he was about to be hanged. And it was always just the same—although this was hard to explain—when horses arrived, either fresh horses from beyond the valley or some that had been brought down for a few days' rest: they would stand about on the meadow, or lie down, but would always group themselves somehow, apparently at random, in a perspective, so that it looked as if it were done accordingly to some secretly agreed aesthetic principle, just like that memory of the little green, blue, and pink houses at the foot of Mount Selvot. But if they were up above, standing around all night tethered in some high corrie in the mountains, three or four at a time tied to a felled tree, and one had started out in the moonlight at three in the morning and now came past the place at half-past four, they would all look round to see who was passing, and in the insubstantial dawn light one felt oneself to be a thought in some very slow-thinking mind. Since there was some thieving, and various other risks as well, all the dogs in the district had been bought up to serve as guards. The patrols brought them along in whole packs, two or three led on one rope, collarless. By now there were as many dogs as men in the place, and one might well wonder which was ac
tually entitled to feel he was master in his own house on this earth and which was only adopted as a domestic companion. There were pure-bred gun-dogs among them, Venetian setters such as a few people in this district still kept, and snappy mongrels like spiteful little monkeys. They too would stand about in groups that had formed without anyone's knowing why, and which kept firmly together, but from time to time the members of a group would attack each other furiously. Some were half starved, some refused to eat. One little white dog snapped at the cook's hand as he was putting down a plate of meat and soup for it, and bit one finger off.

  At half-past four in the morning it was already broad daylight, though the sun was not yet up. When one passed the grazing-land high up on the mountain, the cattle were still half asleep. In big, dim, white, stony shapes they lay with their legs drawn in under them, their hindquarters drooping a little to one side. They did not look at the passer-by, nor after him, but imperturbably kept their faces turned towards the expected light, and their monotonously, slowly moving jaws seemed to be praying. Walking through the circle of them was like traversing some twilit, lofty sphere of existence, and when one looked back at them from above, the line formed by the spine, the hind legs, and the curving tail made them seem like a scattering of treble-signs.