'Sad,' I said in English.
'Sad I' he repeated, also in English. And he did not smile or change, only his face seemed to become more stone-like. And he only looked at me, into my eyes, with the long, pale, steady, inscrutable look of a goat, I can only repeat, something stone-like.
'Why,' I said, 'don't you marry? Man doesn't live alone.'
'I don't marry,' he said to me, in his emphatic, deliberate, cold fashion, 'because I've seen too much. Ho visto troppo.'
'I don't understand,' I said.
Yet I could feel that Paolo, sitting silent, like a monolith also, in the chimney opening, he understood: Maria also understood.
Il Duro looked again steadily into my eyes.
'Ho visto troppo,' he repeated, and the words seemed engraved on stone. 'I've seen too much.'
'But you can marry,' I said, 'however much you have seen, if you have seen all the world.'
He watched me steadily, like a strange creature looking at me.