The wistfulness in his face hurt the painter, to whom the sense of the superiority of that perfect body, and of the simple life from which it had won its beauty and its strength, was keener than ever. He had meant only to entertain his companion, not to sharpen in him the sharpness of desire. How could he put convincingly what he really felt? But the fisherman went on, his face hanging almost over the painter’s.
“Have you been to all the countries in the world?” he asked.
“Oh, no! Only to a few of them. And I don’t care to see the rest.”
“Why not? If I were like you, and had no one else to think about, and could do my trade in any country, I would go to see them all.”
“But why? You do not see new things when you travel. It is not worth while going on long journeys to see people who wear different clothes from ours, or have a different skin. They are always really the same. They are all born in the same way, and they all love and hate in the same way, and they all work to get bread and fish, and then they all die. These are the real things, the old things that people hide under their customs and their languages. You can see them here as well as anywhere else.”
“It will be so,” said the fisherman humbly. “You know better than I. But one gets tired of just the same thing every day, every week, every month, every year. It is like a week without Sunday. You have had your festa, but I never had mine.”
“What you call festa was every day to me, and it did not make me happy.”
“Then I wish I could have had your every day.” He glanced out to sea a moment, where the fishing boats were tacking about as if to no purpose but to show off their butterfly wings. “Have you ever been hungry?” he asked, looking down at the painter again.
“No.” The painter crushed a temptation to play with double meanings, and was ashamed to count the few dinners deferred that he could remember.
“I have,” said the fisherman. “I have gone back to Malamocco on a winter morning after a night in the bragozzo, and I have had to show my empty hands to my wife who was waiting at the door. And I have hunted in the fog for the Porto di Lido, when we tacked up and down outside, afraid to run in, until we were so cold and tired that I hoped the boat would go down. And I have seen my father’s dead body washed up by the sea. These are the things that I have seen. But you——”