And yet, the whole scene may be a figment of his
imagination - the very word Bandusia may have been coined by him. Who can
tell? Then there is the Digentia hypothesis. I know it, I know it! I
have read some of its defenders, and consider (entre nous) that they
have made out a pretty strong case. But I am not in the mood for
discussing their proposition - not just now.
Here at San Gervasio I prefer to think only of the Roman singer, so
sanely jovial, and of these waters as they flowed, limpid and cool, in
the days when they fired his boyish fancy. Deliberately I refuse to hear
the charmer Boissier. Deliberately, moreover, I shut my eyes to the
present condition of affairs; to the herd of squabbling laundresses and
those other incongruities that spoil the antique scene. Why not? The
timid alone are scared by microscopic discords of time and place. The
sage can invest this prosaic water-trough with all its pristine dignity
and romance by an unfailing expedient. He closes an eye. It is an art he
learns early in life; a simple art, and one that greatly conduces to
happiness. The ever alert, the conscientiously wakeful - how many fine
things they fail to see! Horace knew the wisdom of being genially
unwise; of closing betimes an eye, or an ear; or both. Desipere in
loco. . . .
VIII
TILLERS OF THE SOIL
I remember watching an old man stubbornly digging a field by himself. He
toiled through the flaming hours, and what he lacked in strength was
made up in the craftiness, malizia, born of long love of the soil. The
ground was baked hard; but there was still a chance of rain, and the
peasants were anxious not to miss it. Knowing this kind of labour, I
looked on from my vine-wreathed arbour with admiration, but without envy.
I asked whether he had not children to work for him.
"All dead - and health to you!" he replied, shaking his white head
dolefully.
And no grandchildren?
"All Americans (emigrants)."
He spoke in dreamy fashion of years long ago when he, too, had
travelled, sailing to Africa for corals, to Holland and France; yes, and
to England also. But our dockyards and cities had faded from his mind;
he remembered only our men.
"Che bella gioventu - che bella gioventu!" ("a sturdy brood"), he kept
on repeating. "And lately," he added, "America has been discovered." He
toiled fourteen hours a day, and he was 83 years old.
Apart from that creature of fiction, the peasant in fabula whom we all
know, I can find little to admire in this whole class of men, whose talk
and dreams are of the things of the soil, and who knows of nothing save
the regular interchange of summer and winter with their unvarying tasks
and rewards.
