There were lovers all about us: girls from the glass-factories in white dresses, bareheaded, with tasseled black shawls; sailors from the Arsenal with keen bronzed faces and silky mustaches. Venice was taking a day off and giving us a lesson in happiness. The self-consciousness of the Anglo-Saxon, which makes the expression of pleasure bad taste and distressing, was absent. Each was occupied with him or herself, sublimely unconscious of spectators.
“Haven’t I been nice?”
She patted my hand, entirely the woman now. “You’ve been trying to be correct. Why can’t you be your own dear self?”
Taking the tram across the island, we came to the Stabilimento dei Bagni. We walked through the arcade and down on to the terrace. The sea rolled in flashing, green and silver, in a long slow swell. Leaning over the side, we watched the bathers. Men, with costumes unfastened at the shoulders, sifted golden sand through their fingers on to their naked chests. Women lay beside them, buried in the sand, laughing and chatting.
I noticed a blond young giant standing at the water’s edge. His face kindled. I followed the direction in which he was looking. A dark-eyed girl had come out of her cabin. She wore a single-piece, tight-fitting suit of stockingette, which displayed her figure in all its splendid curves. Her face was roguish and vivid as that of Carmen. On her head she wore a scarlet turban. Her costume was sky blue.
The men who had been lying on their backs, turned over and regarded her with lazy admiration of her physical loveliness. Seemingly unaware of the interest she aroused, she came tripping daintily to the water’s edge, her white limbs flashing. The man held out his hand. With little birdlike exclamations she ran to him; then drew back and shivered as the first wave rippled about her feet. He encouraged her with tender, quickly spoken words. Her timidity was all a pretty pretense and they both knew it; but it gave them a chance to be charming to one another. He seized her hand again; she hung back from him laughing. Then they waded out together, hand-in-hand, splashing up diamonds as they went. They seemed to see no one but each other; they eyed one another innocently, unabashed. When they came to the deeper water, she clasped her arms about his neck; he swam out toward the horizon with her riding on his back. He was like a young sea-god capturing a land-maiden.
A stab of envy shot through me. I felt indignant with my inherited puritanism. It would not permit me simply to enjoy myself. I must be forever analyzing motives, and lifting the lid off the future to search for consequences.
I looked at Fiesole. Her eyes were starry. They seemed to mock me and plead with me saying, “Oh, Dannie, why can’t we be like that?”
I glanced down at the beach. The bathers were rising up and shaking off the sand. I noticed that only the women who had no beauty hid themselves behind bathing-skirts. The Italian standard of modesty!—you only need be modest when you have something to be ashamed of. I accepted the standard.
Fiesole broke the silence, clapping her hands, crying “Wasn’t she perfect!” Then she took hold of my face in childish excitement and turned my head. “Oh, look there!”