The people of this old Orte know me so well. Right and left, up and down, through the country I have gone all the years of my life. Wherever there was fair or festa, there was I, Pipistrello, in the midst. It is not a bad life, believe me. No life is bad that has the sun and the rain upon it, and the free will of the feet and the feel of the wind, and nothing between it and heaven.
My father had led the same kind of life before me: he died at Genoa, his spine broken in two, like a snapped bough, by a fall from the trapeze before the eyes of all the citizens. I was a big baby in that time, thrown from hand to hand by the men in their spectacles as they would have thrown a ball or an orange.
My mother was a young and gentle creature, full of tenderness for her own people, with strangers shy and afraid. She was the daughter of a poor weaver. My father had found and wooed her in Etruria, and although he had never taken the trouble to espouse her before the mayor, yet he had loved her and had always treated her with great respect. She was a woman very pure and very honest. Alas, the poor soul! To-day her hair is white as the snow, and they tell me she is mad. So much the better for her if she know nothing; but I fear the mad and the imbecile know all and see all, crouching in their hapless gloom.
When my father died thus at Genoa my mother took a hatred for that manner of living, and she broke off all ties with the athletes who had been his comrades, and, taking the little money that was hers in a little leather bag, she fled away with me to the old town of Orte, where my grandmother still lived, the widow of the weaver. The troop wished to keep me with them, for, although I was but five years old, I was supple and light and very fearless, and never afraid of being thrown up in the air, a living ball, in their games and sports.
Orte was just the same then as it is now. These very aged towns I think never change: if you try to alter them you must break them up and destroy them utterly. Orte has known the Etruscans: she can very well do without modern folk. At Orte my mother and grandmother dwelt together in one room that looked over the river—a large vaulted chamber with grated casements, with thick stone walls—a chamber in what had once been a palace. My mother was then still very young and beautiful—of a pale, serious beauty, full of sadness. She smiled on me sometimes, but never once did I hear her laugh. She had never laughed since that awful day when, in the full sunlight, in the midst of the people, in the sight of the sea, in Genoa, a man had dropped from air to earth like an eagle fallen stone dead from the skies, struck by lightning.
My mother had many suitors. She was beautiful of face, as I say, like one of the Madonnas of our old painters: she was industrious, and all her little world knew very well that she would one day inherit the strip of field and the red cow that my grandmother owned outside the gates of Orte. All these pretty suitors of course made a great fuss with me, caressed me often, and brought me tomatoes, green figs, crickets in wire cages, fried fish and playthings. But my mother looked at none of them. When a woman's eyes are always looking downward on a grave, how should their tear-laden lids be lifted to see a fresh lover? She repulsed them all, always. She lived, lonely and sad, as well as she could in our great garret: we ate little, our bed was hard, and she and my grandam labored hard to get a pittance. But when a rich bailiff sought her in honest marriage, she kissed me and wept over me, and said again and again, "No, no! To your father I will be faithful, let what will chance to us."
The bailiff soon consoled himself: he married a big country wench who had a fine rope of pearls and gold bracelets, and I continued to grow up by my mother's side where the Tiber is gilded with the gold of the dawns and rolls its heavy waves under the weeping boughs of its willows. My boyish strength increased in the heat of the summers, and I grew like a young brown stalk of the tall maize. I herded the cow, cut the rushes and hewed wood, and I was always happy, even when my mother would send me to the old priest to learn things out of books. She wished to make a monk of me, but the mere idea made me shudder with fear. I loved to climb the oaks, to swing in the maples, to scale the roofs and the towers and the masts of the vessels. What had I to do with a monkish frock and a whitewashed cell? Ouf! I put my fingers in my ears and ran away whenever my poor mother talked of the cloister.
My limbs were always dancing, and my blood was always leaping, laughing, boiling merrily in my veins. A priest? What an idea! I had never wholly forgotten the glad, bright days of childhood when my father had thrown me about in the air like a ball: I had never wholly forgotten the shouts of the people, the sight of the human sea of faces, the loud, frank laugh of the populace, the sparkle of the spangled habit, the intoxication of the applause of a crowd. I had only been five years old then, yet I remembered, and sometimes in the night I cried bitterly for those dead days. I had only been a little brown thing, with curls as black as the raven's wing, and they had thrown me from one to the other lightly, laughingly, like a ripe apple, like a smooth peach. But I had known what it was to get drunk on the "hurrahs" of the multitude, and I did not forget them as I grew up here a youth in old Orte.
The son of an athlete can never rest quiet at home and at school like the children of cobblers and coppersmiths and vine-dressers. All my life was beating in me, tumbling, palpitating, bubbling, panting in me—moving incessantly, like the wings of a swallow when the hour draws near for its flight and the thirst for the south rises in it. With all my force I adored my pale, lovely, Madonna-like mother, but all the same, as I trotted toward the priest with a satchel on my back, I used to think, Would it be very wicked to throw the books into the river and run away to the fields? And, in truth, I used to run away very often, scampering over the country around Orte like a mountain-hare, climbing the belfries of the churches, pulling off their weathercocks or setting their bells a-ringing—doing a thousand and one mischievous antics; but I always returned at nightfall to my mother's side. It seemed to me it would be cruel and cowardly to leave her, for she had but me in the world.
"You promise to be sensible and quiet, Pippo?" the poor soul always murmured. And I used to say "Yes," and mean it. But can a bird promise not to fly when it feels in its instincts the coming of spring? Can a young colt promise not to fling out his limbs when he feels the yielding turf beneath his hoofs?