THE BATHERS
The painter laughed as he splashed into the shallows. A million crabs were idling in the linked gold of the sun, and they scurried away or burrowed frantically into the sand at his irruption among them. He waded on, catching his breath delightedly at the freshness of the rising water. The fancy came to him that he was entering a new world by this downward path: he wondered how the clouds would look from the bottom of the sea—and the stars, and the scudding bragozzi. He glanced back a moment, to the world from which he had fled. The Alps filled the horizon with pale outlines of shadow. Between them and the long spit of the Lido were shining lagoon spaces, out of which the clustered towers seemed to look wistfully over into the unpent sea. With the vividness of mirage he recalled a placid water avenue winding green between its lines of awninged palaces. Then he turned from it all, in sudden hatred of his artificial life, of the restlessness to express. He envied the fisherfolk under their butterfly sails out there where the Adriatic swept bare and blue to the east. There were the true creators! They did not copy those colours to hang on a wall. They made them—to blow in the open sea, to toss unspoiled in the rains of heaven! They did not watch. They lived.
The painter threw himself forward with a great splash, opening wide his arms and ducking his head as if in homage. He laughed as he came up. Blinking and sputtering, he swam lazily to the full extent of his limbs in the joy of finding himself in a new element, rid of the last conventionality of clothes. The content of it filled him. As he moved over green abysses, somehow hanging miraculously as he chose, he seemed to be free from even so dogging a burden as Gravity. And his whole body—not merely hands and face—was alive to poignant sensations, to the freshness and rhythm of the sea.
A long time he drifted in the slow swell, jealous to take in the tingle of sea and sun and sky through every pore. And as he idly floated there a shout suddenly startled him from behind, and a great dash of water half choked him. Then someone began to laugh, but stopped short. When at last he could breathe and see, he found a young man regarding him out of smiling eyes that tried to look grave.
“I beg your pardon,” said the newcomer, who spoke in the slow dialect of the lagoon—so different from the slippery talk of the Venetians. “I thought you were my brother. He is of the dazio here at Alberoni, and I meant to surprise him. I would not have disturbed you if I had known.”
“No matter,” replied the painter. “There is room in the sea for both of us.”
The other laughed, regarding the painter curiously.
The painter returned the gaze as frankly. With the skilled eye of his craft, yet almost as if his fancy were realised and this were the first met of a new race, he noted the clear tanned skin, the set of the neck, the turn of the sinewy arm. He wondered how they would understand each other, forgetting that they had already spoken.
“You are not from Chioggia,” said the stranger. “I know almost everybody there; and then you do not speak their language. I know the Pellestrina dialect too, and the Venetian, and the Buranello; but yours is different from them all. Where is your country? I am from Malamocco.”
The painter smiled.
“Venice is my country now,” he answered, “but I speak the Florentine dialect.” Although he had picked up the speech of the lagoon his foreign accent always betrayed him.
“Ah, Fiorenza!” exclaimed the stranger, using the beautiful old name which the Florentines themselves have discarded. “That is on the mainland, isn’t it? I have been only to places on the lagoon, like Campalto and La Rana. But I would like to see Florence, too.... You swim differently there, as well as talk differently,” he added, watching the painter’s stroke. “This is the way we swim.” He struck out hand over hand, throwing his body from one side to the other with great splashes. He made such headway that the painter could not keep up with him. “If you swam that way I think you would go faster,” he suggested politely.
“I am afraid not,” returned the painter. “I don’t swim very well.”
“Can you dive?” asked the stranger. “Let’s see who can bring up something first.” He turned a somersault and disappeared glimmering into the green depths, whence presently he shot up waving a streamer of seaweed. “Didn’t you get anything?” he asked, noting his companion’s empty hand.
“I didn’t even try,” smiled the painter. “You swim much better than I.”
“Ma!” exclaimed the other. “I have probably had more practice.” He paused, half embarrassed. “I think I will swim out a little. Will you come?”
“Thank you, but perhaps not,” replied the painter. “I have been out a good while. I am going in now.”
“Well, have you forgiven me for drowning you?” laughed the stranger. “A rivedersi!”
The painter watched till the black head was a mere dancing speck in the water.
“That was amusing,” he thought. “He wouldn’t have called me ‘thou’ if I had had my clothes on. And he is a better man than I....”
Back on the beach the painter abandoned himself anew to sheer sensation. He did not think. He scarcely remembered. He simply felt in every nerve the glow of the sun, the caress of the air, the pulse of the sea lapping softly at his feet. As he lay there, happy and languid in the warm sand, the sound of splashing in the shallows came like an intrusion. But opening his eyes he saw the young man of Malamocco come up from the water, seemly and sunburned and glistening in the light. It might have been a young sea-god rising from the waves. The painter smiled as he watched the dripping apparition, so in keeping with his humour. The youth caught the smile and answered it. He came and threw himself down in the sand beside the painter. They looked at one another, the smile still in their eyes.
The painter was glad he had hidden his clothes. He felt how absurd were those distinctions in the world from which he came, of nationality, of belief, of rank. They could be laid aside with one’s coat. This was another world, with other standards. He and the young man beside him—by what different roads had they travelled to this beach! But what influence in their lives had wrought upon them like that secret pre-natal influence which on separate continents, among different races, had cast them in an identical mould? Here lay the two of them together by the sea, children both of earth, without distinction or preference between them—unless that most ancient preference of earth for the fit.
“How white you are!” exclaimed the stranger. “I am all black from the sun.” He lifted his arm to show how the darkness of the lower tan shaded into tone but a trifle paler. “When we fish in the lagoon we often go like this. But even on the sea the sun burns through our clothes. I have always been black. I never saw anybody so white as you are—except perhaps women, and sick people, and the signori at the Lido.”
Shame filled the painter—shame, and a passionate envy. He looked admiringly at the young fisherman stretched out beside him, followed all the lines of the strong bronzed figure, without a curve of excess in its supple youth, and without one of deficiency. Then he glanced at his own lank white limbs. He felt the cut of being classed with women and sick people and signori! This was the only shame of nakedness—to have a body not worth looking at. Instinctively he took up handfuls of the fine sand and poured it over himself. The mockery of the life he had fled from that morning surged back over him. How he hated the imprisonment of houses, the lure of ambition, the thirst for pleasure, that had made him what he was! How he envied this fisherman his life of sun and sea, and his untroubled youth, and his unspoiled body!
“You take too little at a time,” laughed the fisherman. He sat up to scoop out great handfuls of sand, which he threw over the painter’s body until it was quite buried. Then he heaped a mound over himself, and looked inquiringly at the painter. “I know by your skin that you are not of my mestiere. But people in Venice do many things. What is your trade?”
The painter felt more comfortable under the sand, and the unsuspecting “ti” of the dialect touched him again.
“My mestiere is to paint,” he said. “I make pictures.”
“Ah, that is a nice trade! My cousin is on one of the Chioggia steamers, and he makes pictures of the bragozzi when he has taken the tickets. You should see how beautiful they are. Do you paint bragozzi?”
“Yes, and other things: houses, and gardens, and sometimes people.”
“It must be very difficult. Did you have someone to show you how?”
“Yes,” answered the painter gravely. He thought of New York, and Paris, and the great galleries.
“Ah! That is different. My cousin says faces are very hard, unless you have a master. But he does bragozzi well because he knows all about them. His father builds them. He sold one once for ten francs. Do you sell yours?”
“Sometimes. But I paint a great many more than I sell.”
“So does my cousin. He gives them to people to hang in their houses. And in the shops he buys more cheaply if he gives a bragozzo. Do you do anything else?”
It was evident that the fisherman’s conception of the picture market was based on the sale effected by his relative, and that his deductions regarding the painter’s income were therefore not dazzling.
The painter was pleased. He had feared lest a breach separate him and his companion too early in their relations.
“No,” he confessed. “I don’t know how to do anything else.”
The fisherman looked at him in surprise.
“But who knows?” he pursued encouragingly. “If you do nothing else perhaps you will come to paint big pictures with gold frames—like the ones under the procuratie in the Piazza San Marco. My cousin says the artists who paint those are signori. Then it will be a trade! I shall never be a signor at mine. Do you know how long it takes me to earn ten francs?”
The painter remembered how often he had seen fishermen in their long brown stockings and wooden shoes before the brilliant windows of the Piazza. Never before had he conceived of them otherwise than as a picturesque foil to the glitter of civilisation.
“No,” he replied. “But your mestiere is better than mine. It keeps you out of doors; and what you do is necessary to people more than what I do.”
“Ma! It is a pleasure to be on the sea in a good wind. I would not like to be shut up in a shop, or anything like that. But we make so little. And the winter! Sometimes we do not even catch enough to eat. You can make a picture whenever you want, but I can’t catch a fish whenever I want!”
“Yes, but you can eat your fish when you do catch him, while my picture is no good to me unless I sell it. I can’t eat it. And it isn’t the kind of thing that everybody wants to buy, like a fish.”
“That is so. But if people don’t like your picture you can ask them what they do like, and sit down and paint it for them. Ecco! And in the winter you can stay comfortably by the hearth in the kitchen, and make your pictures of boats and flowers and summer and what else do I know, while outside it snows. But I have to go into the sea to get my fish, if I get shipwrecked for it.”
The painter smiled, still envying the strong brown body buried in the sand beside him. And then he suddenly asked:
“Have you ever been shipwrecked?”
“Only once,” answered the fisherman, as if it were an every-day matter.
“Tell me about it,” demanded the painter eagerly, turning on his elbow to eye this person who had been through shipwrecks and thought nothing of it.
“Ma! I was small then,” began the fisherman apologetically, as if he would be less awkward now. “It was in my grandfather’s bragozzo, one night in March. We were blown on to the Punta dei Sabbioni, and the boat broke in two.” He stopped as if there were nothing more to say.
“Well, what happened? How did you get ashore?”
“God knows,” replied the fisherman. “We fell into the water, and after a while I woke up with men rubbing me. My grandfather was there, too. My father and my brother were drowned.”
“And then?”
“What was there to do then? We went home.”
The picture of this common little seashore drama flared up in the painter’s imagination. He was impatient that it should be told him so barely. He wanted a hundred details, and he could not think how to bring them out.
“What did your mother do?” he asked, desperate.
“What do women do? She cried.”
“Did they find your father and brother?”
“My father, yes; but not my brother. This makes one feel sleepy after being in the water, doesn’t it?” He closed his eyes, turning a little his head from the sun.
The painter stared. In the life back there among the sculptured palaces these were things read, things far away as Olympus and the Crusades—not things seen. He felt like a child in the presence of one who has come back scarred from the wars.
Feeling the power of eyes upon him, the fisherman finally opened his own.
“How warm it is here, eh? It is better than that time at the Sabbioni. Ee-ee that was cold!” He drew up his shoulders as if to shiver, and the sand ran from him in rivulets. “I love the summer. I wish it would never end. We often come to this same place to pull in our nets; but it is not always so nice as this.”
The painter was full of curiosity about a life to him so romantic.
“Do you come here in a bragozzo?” he asked, with the respect due to a superior, fearful of offending by too many questions.
“Oh, no,” answered the fisherman. “It is too shallow. We come in a caorlina, about ten of us, and plant the nets, and afterwards drag them up on the sand.”
“Oh, yes!” cried the painter. “I have seen it at Sant’ Elisabetta—three or four men hauling at each rope, and then the net squirming with fish! And afterwards they beach the boats, and build fires on the sand, and have their breakfast.” He had often sketched the bare-legged men and boys tugging at the ropes, and had thought how good their fresh fish and polenta must be in the morning air on the edge of the sea.
“Yes, we go there often. But the nets are not always squirming with fish. Sometimes we get nothing but crabs, cast after cast.”
“Do you anything else besides go in the caorlina?” asked the painter.
“Hoo-oo!” exclaimed the fisherman in a high singing interjection, with an amused smile. “I go oftener in my uncle’s bragozzo. We have none, because ours was lost when my father was drowned and we have never been able to get another. They cost more than the painted ones! We generally leave in the afternoon and stay out all night, so as to get the fish to the Rialto early in the morning. That is good—to lie on the deck after the nets are down, and watch the stars playing behind the sail, and the light-houses here and at Cavallino winking their eyes. And then to run in when the sun comes up all wet and cool out of the sea, and the wind begins to blow! But in winter it is another affair, and when there are storms. Two or three boats are lost in every Bora.”
The painter’s humility grew, as he inwardly compared the vicissitudes of studio life with this adventuring upon the deep.
“But you would rather live on the water than in a shop, didn’t you say?”
“Ma! Now, yes—when the nights are a delizia and we have enough to eat. But in winter! Then it is another story.” He propped himself up on his elbows and began excavating a reservoir, into which the water rose slowly. “No, I would not like to be in a shop. But I would like to be a signor, and have plenty of money without working, and eat meat every day, and in the winter always have a fire in the kitchen, and go as often as I liked to the inn. And I would like to go to other places, to see Florence, and all the countries in the world. That is what I would like the best of all. Sometimes steamers pass us in the sea at night, with lamps in all their little round windows, and people singing on the deck—high over the top of our mast—and it makes me sad. They pass so quickly, with the water white behind them, and their lights grow small and small in the dark, and disappear. Where do they go, the ships? I want to know, and go with them to the countries at the end of the sea.” He looked across the painter toward the breakwater, where the sails of a pilot boat were bobbing up and down and where, far away, the sea ran blue to the sky. “But I never shall. I have to catch fish for my family. They would not have enough if I went away.... A boy I knew went to America, and now he sends home money to his mother—a great deal. He won a terno at the lottery, enough to pay for the steamer and then to keep him till he found a place. But I am not lucky. And even if I could go I could not take my wife, and my mother might have nothing to eat long before I could send her money. They speak another language there—and many things. Have you been to America?” He asked it nonchalantly, tracing arabesques in the damp sand of his reservoir, much as one might inquire, “Have you been to the moon?”
“Yes,” answered the painter, absently, “I have been to America.” He lay on his back, his hands under his head, looking into the sea. The gleam of its blue was curiously watered by ripples of shadow sweeping across it in shades from purple to the pallor of the sky. He wished that all evils were so calculable as winter; and he was touched by the simplicity of these ambitions, by the poetry of the lighted ships. He had not thought of a wife, the fisherman was so young. After all, had he not everything?
The fisherman turned instantly, forgetting his arabesques.
“You have been to America?” He sat up, edging nearer the painter and looking down at him with a strange and new curiosity. “You have been to America! Why didn’t you tell me before? What is it like?”
The painter was sorry. But he looked up at the eager face bent upon him, and he smiled.
“Oh, it is very much like this. There are fields and trees, and rivers run into the sea, and there is a sun every day, and sometimes there is a moon at night.”
“A sun every day!” broke in the fisherman. “Sometimes there is none for a month here! I would like that. Is it like Venice—with palazzi, and gondolas, and the campanile?”
“No,” answered the painter, “it is not like Venice. There are no gondolas and no campanile; and the palazzi are all new; and they don’t have four, five, six floors, but fifteen, twenty, twenty-five.”
“They must be as high as the campanile, then! And new! In Venice all the houses are so old. I like new things. Don’t you?”
“Well—not so much,” replied the painter. “It is hard to tell which of them will last. Old things are ones that were good enough to last.”
“Oh!” said the fisherman. “What are the people like?”
“The people? They are like you and me. Only perhaps they don’t like to lie all the afternoon in the sun, the way you and I do,” he added, stretching his arms out wide in the sand and following a gull into the sky.
“Are they good?” pursued the fisherman. Goodness as applied to character has come in Italian to mean compliance rather than the sterner moral qualities expected in the North.
“Well, perhaps they are more apt to be ‘bad’ if one is from another country. I think it is because they do not understand. They speak another language, you know.”
“Can you understand it?”
“M-m-m, generally.”
“Say some!” demanded the fisherman. And after it he required a translation of the painter’s phrase. “It is strange,” he commented. “When you say those words I understand nothing; but you are saying the same things that we say in Italian!”
“Yes,” said the painter. “They do not tell you new things in other countries. At first it sounds different, and then you find out that it is really the same....”
“Why, have you been to many of them?”
“I have been to some others.”
“Tell me about them. Are they like America?”
“Yes, on the whole. Only some are a little hotter, some are a little colder. Then there are countries where the people are all black, you know—but really black, like your head. Or yellow, or red. There are countries, too, where the men dress like women; and others where they go like us, without any clothes at all. And I went once to one where it was light at night.”
The fisherman edged a little closer, his eyes fastened on the painter as if to win the secret of his strangeness and his fortune.
“If you have been so far you must have been on a steamer,” he uttered slowly.
“Yes.”
“I would like to go on a steamer, a big one, especially at night. Did you ever put your head through one of the little round windows where the lights are, and look down at the dark sea, and find a bragozzo?”
“Yes,” answered the painter, “and I have seen the light from the little windows touch the sails, and the faces of the men looking up.”
“And then you passed and left them in the night. How I wish I could have done that! But I was down in the bragozzo, and you were up in the great lighted ship, going to the countries at the end of the sea.”
The wistfulness in his face hurt the painter, to whom the sense of the superiority of that perfect body, and of the simple life from which it had won its beauty and its strength, was keener than ever. He had meant only to entertain his companion, not to sharpen in him the sharpness of desire. How could he put convincingly what he really felt? But the fisherman went on, his face hanging almost over the painter’s.
“Have you been to all the countries in the world?” he asked.
“Oh, no! Only to a few of them. And I don’t care to see the rest.”
“Why not? If I were like you, and had no one else to think about, and could do my trade in any country, I would go to see them all.”
“But why? You do not see new things when you travel. It is not worth while going on long journeys to see people who wear different clothes from ours, or have a different skin. They are always really the same. They are all born in the same way, and they all love and hate in the same way, and they all work to get bread and fish, and then they all die. These are the real things, the old things that people hide under their customs and their languages. You can see them here as well as anywhere else.”
“It will be so,” said the fisherman humbly. “You know better than I. But one gets tired of just the same thing every day, every week, every month, every year. It is like a week without Sunday. You have had your festa, but I never had mine.”
“What you call festa was every day to me, and it did not make me happy.”
“Then I wish I could have had your every day.” He glanced out to sea a moment, where the fishing boats were tacking about as if to no purpose but to show off their butterfly wings. “Have you ever been hungry?” he asked, looking down at the painter again.
“No.” The painter crushed a temptation to play with double meanings, and was ashamed to count the few dinners deferred that he could remember.
“I have,” said the fisherman. “I have gone back to Malamocco on a winter morning after a night in the bragozzo, and I have had to show my empty hands to my wife who was waiting at the door. And I have hunted in the fog for the Porto di Lido, when we tacked up and down outside, afraid to run in, until we were so cold and tired that I hoped the boat would go down. And I have seen my father’s dead body washed up by the sea. These are the things that I have seen. But you——”
The painter sprang out of his lazy posture.
“What are the things I have seen to those!” he cried. “What do I know of the world, compared to you? You have seen more of life here in Malamocco than I ever did in all the strange cities I have seen! It is nothing to know how men say ‘Good-morning’ in other languages or how they look in foreign coats, if you know what they say on the decks of sinking ships, and how they look when they are washed up dead by the sea!”
For a moment the fisherman was silent, surprised by the other’s vehemence. Then he said:
“Perhaps so. But what good does it do me to know these things? I would rather have your mestiere. It is not so monotonous. It is not so hard. It is not so sad——”
The painter jumped impatiently to his feet. He wanted to prove in some palpable way the inferiority of his manner of life, so that the fisherman could not help being convinced.
“Get up!” he cried. “Wrestle with me!”
“What shall I wrestle with you for?” asked the fisherman in astonishment, sitting back with his hands propped behind him in the sand. “I want to talk about these things.”
“You shall talk about these things afterward,” laughed the painter. “Now I want to see how easily I can throw you. Get up!”
The fisherman obeyed slowly and stood, loose-jointed, waiting to see what the other would do. The painter suddenly clinched him, at which the fisherman’s muscles reacted instinctively. There was a short sharp tussle; and the painter found himself on his back in the sand, panting, the other’s knee on his chest.
“You see?” demanded the painter.
The fisherman rolled down in the sand beside him.
“Excuse me,” he said. “When I felt you catch me I didn’t think, and I put you down.”
The painter laughed.
“Now you see how much better your trade is than mine?”
“No. What have trades to do with it? One of us had to go under. Another time you would probably beat me. Let’s try again. Come!”
He started to get up, but the painter pulled him back.
“You know perfectly well that I couldn’t beat you if I tried all day! Look at that!” He held out his arm this time, and made the fisherman do the same. “And look at that!” He stretched a lean white leg beside the muscular brown one of the fisherman. The comparison made him wince, as he marked again how toil and peril had only wrought on the other’s body like surpassing sculpture. He went on: “There is no reason why I should not be as strong and as good to look at as you. I am perhaps no older, and I am not ill, and I have never been hurt. Then why are we so different? It is just this very thing—the difference between our mestieri. For when you were pulling up nets on the sand, I was making little paper sunsets for people to buy—when they could have new and better ones every day for nothing, by looking out of the window! And when you were watching the stars play behind your sail, I was sitting in stuffy rooms. Lamps are not so good for one as stars! And when you were fighting the sea in storms, I was running about the world trying to find some new thing. And so you are what you are, and I am this!” He looked down at himself and laughed bitterly.
“That may be,” said the fisherman, puzzled and a little embarrassed. “But what if I am strong? You are strong enough. You have not been prevented from enjoying. Was it worth while for me to do all those things just to be able to put you down? What difference does it make to me? I would rather have been in your place.”
“No! Outside things cannot make you happy, unless they fit with something inside. And the things which make happiness are so few and so simple that anybody can find them—like love, and sunshine. That is all the good my journeys have done me—to teach me this. I know these things, but you have them.” He stopped abruptly.
The fisherman looked at him a long time saying nothing. When finally he spoke it was humbly, as one lower to one higher.
“What you say must be true, because you understand and I do not. Still—I wish I could be once on a lighted ship at night, and go to one of the countries at the end of the sea. I have never been, and you have....”
At first the painter did not answer, his eyes on the bronzed figure beside him. But then he smiled, curiously.
“Look!” he said. “We are all covered with the sand of the sea. We must brush it off and go back into the world.”