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.”