Little Novels of Italy | Page 2

seen.
Vanna had to roll up her sleeves, bend her straight young back, and
knee the board by the Ponte Navi. I have no doubt it did her good; the
work is healthy, the air, the sun, the waterspray kissed her beauty ripe;
but she got no husband because she could save no dowry. Everything
went to stay the seven crying mouths.
Then, on a day when half her twenty-first year had run after the others,
old Baldassare Dardicozzo stayed on the bridge to rest from the burden
of his pack--on a breezy March morning when the dust filled his eyes
and the wind emptied him of breath. Baldassare had little enough to
spare as it was. So he dropped his load in the angle of the bridge, with a
smothered "Accidente!" or some such, and leaned to watch the swollen
water buffeted crosswise by the gusts, or how the little mills
amid-stream dipped as they swam breasting the waves. In so doing he
became aware, in quite a peculiar way, of Vanna Scarpa.

Baldassare was old, red-eyed, stiff in the back. Possibly he was
rheumatic, certainly he was grumpy. He had a long slit mouth which
played him a cruel trick; for by nature it smiled when by nature he was
most melancholy. Smile it would and did, however cut-throat he felt: if
you wanted to see him grin from ear to ear you would wait till he had
had an ill day's market. Then, while sighs, curses, invocations of the
saints, or open hints to the devil came roaring from him, that hilarious
mouth of his invited you to share delights. You had needs laugh with
him, and he, cursing high and low, beamed all over his face. "To make
Baldassare laugh" became a stock periphrasis for the supreme degree of
tragedy among his neighbours. About this traitor mouth of his he had a
dew of scrubby beard, silvered black; he had bushy eyebrows, hands
and arms covered with a black pelt: he was a very hairy man. Also he
was a very warm man, as everybody knew, with a hoard of florins
under the flags of his old-clothes shop in the Via Stella.
Having spat into the water many times, rubbed his hands, mopped his
head, and cursed most things under heaven and some in it, Master
Baldassare found himself watching the laundresses on the shore. They
were the usual shrill, shrewd, and laughing line--the trade seems to
induce high mirth--and as such no bait for the old merchant by ordinary;
but just now the sun and breeze together made a bright patch of them,
set them at a provoking flutter. Baldassare, prickly with dust, found
them like their own cool linen hung out to dance itself dry in the wind.
Most of all he noticed Vanna, whom he knew well enough, because
when she knelt upright she was taller and more wayward than the rest,
and because the wind made so plain the pretty figure she had. She was
very industrious, but no less full of talk: there seemed so much to say!
The pauses were frequent in which she straightened herself from the
hips and turned to thrust chin and voice into the debate. You saw then
the sharp angle, the fine line of light along that raised chin, the
charming turn of the neck, her free young shoulders and shapely head;
also you marked her lively tones of ci and si, and how her shaking
finger drove them home. The wind would catch her yellow hair
sometimes and wind it across her bosom like a scarf; or it streamed
sideways like a long pennon; or being caught by a gust from below,
sprayed out like a cloud of litten gold. Vanna always joined in the

laugh at her mishap, tossed her tresses back, pinned them up (both
hands at the business); and then, with square shoulders and elbows stiff
as rods, set to working the dirt out of Don Urbano's surplice. Baldassare
brooded, chewing straws. What a clear colour that girl had, to be sure!
What a lissom rascal it was! A fine long girl like that should be married;
by all accounts she would make a man a good wife. If he were a dozen
years the better of four and fifty he might--Then came a shrug, and a
"Ma!" to conclude in true Veronese Baldassare's ruminations. Shrug
and explosion signalled two stark facts: Baldassare was fifty-four, and
Vanna had no portion.
Yet he remained watching on the bridge, his chin buried in his knotty
hands, his little eyes blinking under stress of the inner fire he had. So it
befell that La Testolina saw him, and said something shrill and saucy to
her neighbour. The wind tossed him the tone but not the sense.