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.”