There are three village beauties—you have seen them all. There are four village beaux—of the very first water! So much the better for the girls, they think! Pietro Mazzacane shall serve us for a type.
If, from the church, you take the straight road that has led you before to the home of Marrina, the sempstress, and if, instead of following your shadow, you turn to its right, and cross the river upon those odd old stepping-stones, if you do this of an evening after work hours, and climb the opposite hill till you reach the hamlet in front of you, maybe you may find Pietro smoking a clay pipe on the doorstep, whilst he devours a goodly bowl of the home minestra. He is a tall man, not heavily built, not even very broad-shouldered; as he lounges, one leg bent, one arm upraised behind his head, consolation’s emblem in clay between his lips, as he appears now, propping his manly form against the grey stone of the cottage wall, you might scarcely believe him to be strong or even a good labourer. His crisp black hair vies with the tendrils of his own vines in curly, wayward beauty; his dark, deep eyes tell of fire that can swiftly be roused, of love tales that can sweetly be told; his lips are ruddy, his limbs have the subtle shape which should be theirs. All this you will allow: even of his yellow skin you will graciously say ‘it harmonises with the rest.’ But still you doubt that that man can ever labour with the stern strength that labour demands: he does not look like it. And you are right. Put him to till your ground, to dig your trenches, to plant your potatoes, and his long lazy limbs will achieve not a whit more than you gave them credit for, though his clay pipe will work busier than ever, and his siestas be the more frequent as also his merry jokes and his friendly conversations.
But do not judge our Pietro’s powers from your trenches. Get up some day, when the steaming land bids men know how brazen will be the mid-day’s heat—get up when Pietro, when Nettina, and when Bianca get up: at three o’clock in the morning. The sky is grey. Perhaps there is not a cloud, and yet it is grey with a solemn greyness, and one would scarcely dare to hope for the rosy young light that will steal over it before long to flush it slowly into warm and fulsome life.
The mountains seem very near; their peaks and cones look very tall as they stand out of the morning mists that creep around their girth and wind themselves away into the hollows of the hills. Perhaps you find it almost cold. So does not Pietro. Only the sack in which he is to carry down a load from the mountain is wound round his shoulders above his linen shirt, but the keen exercise stands in place of covering, for an hour’s hearty lung-labour has brought him out upon the cone of Monte Marzo, some five hundred feet above the placid valley of his home. Bianca has driven the cows to pasture upon the slopes just below, but the village swain has only time for one shout in far-off greeting now; it is his own business that he is about, and his own corn must not rot, nor his own land lie fallow for want of a good day’s swing of the pickaxe. What say you now? Are not his muscles tough, and is that arm not mighty that hurls the zappa above his head and brings it down again into the stiff clay to dig up his field?
Look around you off this mountain-top. Behind you lies Monte Stella, before you the range of the Polcevera hills, to your right Antola with her great stretching shoulder and heavy-browed summit; below you are valleys, where meadows lie and waters flow and fall and trickle; and everywhere on high hills and descending slopes there is cultivation. It is no lazy race of men that has notched those mountain-sides with terraces the better to train the vines towards the sun, that has planted them with corn and maize, with peas and beans and potatoes, with fruit trees of every kind, that has trained the gourds and the vines, that has utilised every strip and corner of land upon the steeps, that has quarried the stone, and fed and tended the silk-worms. ‘Per Bacco, the Lord Himself could do no more,’ Pietro would tell you as he shoulders his huge pickaxe and, beneath the chestnut wood hard by, gathers and crowds into his sack no mean load of the first fallen leaves to strew beneath the cattle in cattle-sheds. One does not go down the mountain empty-handed, even after a hard day’s work, and no one could say that Pietro does not show to advantage running down the steep with faggots on his shoulders and over his head—running to keep his balance on the rough and rapid incline. Though Bianca would laugh if you found anything to admire in him at such a moment! ‘A young man not amiss, I grant you, but with a load of foglia on his head—Dio, what a taste!’
No, Bianca likes him better on the days when, he being somebody else’s brother working with her own father, she can go with ‘somebody else’ to take the meal to them at midday; better still on the days when he is threshing with all the neighbours on her father’s threshing-floor, and comes to eat a cena of her own preparing in her own home; best of all, when there is a fair at Ponte Novo or Bossola, and she, who is going to buy conche, can walk by his side, who is going to buy cattle.
Yes, those are fine days! One goes to see a friend the evening before, and gets one’s hair plaited in a beautiful resca di pesce for the morrow’s adventure. [It does not get tossed as you might fancy; the sleep of the just is sweet and sound.] Then to rise with the daybreak, to don one’s best bordato dress, to fold one’s yellow kerchief, and tie one’s heavy shoes, that all ‘goes without saying’ for a girl. That would be done for mere pride’s sake, whether one’s gallante lives in Genoa, as Bianca’s does, or no.
And is it not the merest chance that Pietro, sauntering up the hill with two or three other young fellows abreast, all of them with hands in their pockets, and pipes in their mouths, and carnation in their soft felt hats, is it not the funniest thing that Pietro should just meet ‘Bianca bella’ upon the bend of the rising ground, where the town first comes to sight, and just have been making a joke about her to Giovanni, too? Well, well, at all events, Pietro has a very bright red scarf to gird up his loins, and a very specially handsome carnation, and quite a remarkable blue cravat, besides wearing his hat a little more to one side than the rest. He looks quite as well as if he had been dressed in Genoa; one cannot be expected not to see that, though one has a lover in the town! And Pietro knows that Bianca has seen it, and is as pleased as he need be.
