Part 24

“What has happened”—you ask some enormous individual—“to your adversary at law?”

“To which one of them?”

“Oh, Signor M——, the timber merchant.”

“L’abbiamo mangiato!” (I have eaten him.)

Beware of the fat Neapolitan. He is fat from prosperity, from, dining off his leaner brothers.

Which reminds me of a supremely important subject, eating.

The feeding here is saner than ours with its all-pervading animal grease (even a boiled egg tastes of mutton fat in England), its stock-pot, suet, and those other inventions of the devil whose awful effects we only survive because we are continually counteracting or eliminating them by the help of (1) pills, (2) athletics, and (3) alcohol. Saner as regards material, but hopelessly irrational in method. Your ordinary employé begins his day with a thimbleful of black coffee, nothing more. What work shall be got out of him. under such anti-hygienic conditions? Of course it takes ten men to do the work of one; and of course all ten of them are sulky and irritable throughout the morning, thinking only of their luncheon. Then indeed—then they make up for lost time; those few favoured ones, at least, who can afford it.

I once watched a young fellow, a clerk of some kind, in a restaurant at midday. He began by informing the waiter that he had no appetite that morning—sangue di Dio! no appetite whatever; but at last allowed himself to be persuaded into consuming a hors d’ oeuvres of anchovies and olives. Then he was induced to try the maccheroni, because they were “particularly good that morning”; he ate, or rather drank, an immense plateful. After that came some slices of meat and a dish of green stuff sufficient to satisfy a starving bullock. A little fish? asked the waiter. Well, perhaps yes, just for form’s sake—two fried mullets and some nondescript fragments. Next, he devoured a couple of raw eggs “on account of his miserably weak stomach,” a bowl of salad and a goodly lump of fresh cheese. Not without a secret feeling of envy I left him at work upon his dessert, of which he had already consumed some six peaches. Add to this (quite an ordinary repast) half a bottle of heavy wine, a cup of black coffee and three glasses of water—what work shall be got out of a man after such a boa-constrictor collation? He is as exasperated and prone to take offence as in the morning—this time from another cause. . . .

That is why so many of them suffer from chronic troubles of the digestive organs. The head of a hospital at Naples tells me that stomach diseases are more prevalent there than in any other part of Europe, and the stomach, whatever sentimentalists may say to the contrary, being the true seat of the emotions, it follows that a judicious system of dieting might work wonders upon their development. Nearly all Mediterranean races have been misfed from early days; that is why they are so small. I would undertake to raise the Italian standard of height by several inches, if I had control of their nutrition for a few centuries. I would undertake to alter their whole outlook upon life, to convert them from utilitarians into romantics—were such a change desirable. For if utilitarianism be the shadow of starvation, romance is nothing but the vapour of repletion.

And yet men still talk of race-characteristics as of something fixed and immutable! The Jews, so long as they starved in Palestine, were the most acrimonious bigots on earth. Now that they live and feed sensibly, they have learnt to see things in their true perspective—they have become rationalists. Their less fortunate fellow-Semites, the Arabs, have continued to starve and to swear by the Koran—empty in body and empty in mind. No poise or balance is possible to those who live in uneasy conditions. The wisest of them can only attain to stoicism—a dumb protest against the environment. There are no stoics among well-fed people. The Romans made that discovery for themselves, when they abandoned the cheese-paring habits of the Republic.

In short, it seems to me that virtues and vices which cannot be expressed in physiological terms are not worth talking about; that when a morality refuses to derive its sanction from the laws which govern our body, it loses the right to exist. This being so, what is the most conspicuous native vice?

Envy, without a doubt.

Out of envy they pine away and die; out of envy they kill one another. To produce a more placid race, to dilute envious thoughts and the acts to which they lead, is at bottom a question of nutrition. One would like to know for how much black brooding and for how many revengeful deeds that morning thimbleful of black coffee is responsible.

By placid I do not mean peace-loving and pitiful in the Christian sense. That doctrine of loving and forgiving one’s enemies is based on sheer funk; our pity for others is dangerously akin to self-pity, most odious of vices. Catholic teaching—in practice, if not in theory—-glides artfully over the desirability of these imported freak-virtues, knowing that they cannot appeal to a masculine stock. By placid I mean steady, self-contained.

The very faces one sees in the streets would change. Envy is reflected in all too many of those of the middle classes, while the poorest citizens are often haggard and distraught from sheer hunger—hunger which has not had time to be commuted into moral poison; college-taught men, in responsible positions, being forced to live on salaries which a London lift-boy would disdain. When that other local feature, that respect for honourable poverty—the reverse of what we see in England where, since the days of the arch-snob Pope, a slender income has grown to be considered a subject of reproach.

And yet another symptom of the south——

Enough! The clock points to 6.20; it is time for an evening walk—my final one—to the terrace of S. M. del Castello.

XVII OLD MORANO

This Morano is a very ancient city; Tufarelli, writing in 1598, proves that it was then exactly 3349 years old. Oddly enough, therefore, its foundation almost coincides with that of Rossano. . . .

There may be mules at Morano; indeed, there are. But they are illusive beasts: phantom-mules. Despite the assistance of the captain of the carbineers, the local innkeeper, the communal policeman, the secretary of the municipality, an amiable canon of the church and several non-official residents, I vainly endeavoured, for three days, to procure one—flitting about, meanwhile, between this place and Castrovillari. For Morano, notwithstanding its size (they say it is larger than the other town) offers no accommodation or food in the septentrional sense of those terms.

Its situation, as you approach from Castrovillari, is striking. The white houses stream in a cataract down one side of a steep conical hill that dominates the landscape—on the summit sits the inevitable castle, blue sky peering through its battered windows. But the interior is not at all in keeping with this imposing aspect. Morano, so far as I was able to explore it, is a labyrinth of sombre, tortuous and fetid alleys, where black pigs wallow amid heaps of miscellaneous and malodorous filth—in short, the town exemplifies that particular idea of civic liberty which consists in everybody being free to throw their own private refuse into the public street and leave it there, from generation to generation. What says Lombroso? “The street-cleaning is entrusted, in many towns, to the rains of heaven and, in their absence, to the voracity of the pigs.” None the less, while waiting for mules that never came, I took to patrolling those alleys, at first out of sheer boredom, but soon impelled by that subtle fascination which emanates from the ne plus ultra of anything—even of grotesque dirtiness. On the second day, however, a case of cholera was announced, which chilled my ardour for further investigations. It was on that account that I failed to inspect what was afterwards described to me as the chief marvel of the place—a carved wooden altar-piece in a certain church.

“It is prodigious and antichissimo,” said an obliging citizen to whom I applied for information. “There is nothing like it on earth, and I have been six times to America, sir. The artist—a real artist, mind you, not a common professor—spent his whole life in carving it. It was for the church, you see, and he wanted to show what he could do in the way of a masterpiece. Then, when it was finished and in its place, the priests refused to pay for it. It was made not for them, they said, but for the glory of God; the man’s reward was sufficient. And besides, he could have remission of sins for the rest of his life. He said he did not care about remission of sins; he wanted money—money! But he got nothing. Whereupon he began to brood and to grow yellow. Money—money! That was all he ever said. And at last he became quite green and died. After that, his son took up the quarrel, but he got as little out of the priests as the father. It was fixed in the church, you understand, and he could not take it away. He climbed through the window one night and tried to burn it—the marks are there to this day—but they were too sharp for him. And he took the business so much to heart that he also soon died quite young! And quite green—like his father.”

The most characteristic item in the above history is that about growing green. People are apt to put on this colour in the south from disappointment or from envy. They have a proverb which runs “sfoga o schiatta”—relieve yourself or burst; our vaunted ideal of self-restraint, of dominating the reflexes, being thought not only fanciful but injurious to health. Therefore, if relief is thwarted, they either brood themselves into a green melancholy, or succumb to a sudden “colpo di sangue,” like a young woman of my acquaintance who, considering herself beaten in a dispute with a tram-conductor about a penny, forthwith had a “colpo di sangue,” and was dead in a few hours. A primeval assertion of the ego . . .

Unable to perambulate the streets of Morano, I climbed to the ruined fortress along the verdant slope at its back, and enjoyed a fair view down the fertile valley, irrigated by streamlets and planted with many-hued patches of culture, with mulberries, pomegranates and poplars. Some boys were up here, engaged in fishing—fishing for young kestrels in their nest above a shattered gateway. The tackle consisted of a rod with a bent piece of wire fixed to one end, and it seemed to me a pretty unpromising form of sport. But suddenly, amid wild vociferations, they hooked one, and carried it off in triumph to supper. The mother bird, meanwhile, sailed restlessly about the aether watching every movement, as I could see by my glasses; at times she drifted quite near, then swerved again and hovered, with vibrating pinions, directly overhead. It was clear that she could not tear herself away from the scene, and hardly had the marauders departed, when she alighted on the wall and began to inspect what was left of her dwelling. It was probably rather untidy. I felt sorry for her; yet such harebrained imprudence cannot go unpunished. With so many hundred crannies in this old castle, why choose one which any boy can reach with a stick? She will know better next season.

Then an old shepherd scrambled up, and sat on the stone beside me. He was short-sighted, asthmatic, and unable to work; the doctor had recommended an evening walk up to the castle. We conversed awhile, and he extracted a carnation out of his waistcoat pocket—unusual receptacle for flowers—which he presented to me. I touched upon the all-absorbing topic of mules.

“ Mules are very busy animals in Morano,” he explained. “Animali occupatissimi.” However, he promised to exert himself on my behalf; he knew a man with a mule—two mules—he would send him round, if possible.

Quite a feature in the landscape of Morano is the costume of the women, with their home-dyed red skirts and ribbons of the same hue plaited into their hair. It is a beautiful and reposeful shade of red, between Pompeian and brick-colour, and the tint very closely resembles that of the cloth worn by the beduin (married) women of Tunisia. Maybe it was introduced by the Saracens. And it is they, I imagine, who imported that love of red peppers (a favourite dish with most Orientals) which is peculiar to these parts, where they eat them voraciously in every form, particularly in that of red sausages seasoned with these fiery condiments.

The whole country is full of Saracen memories. The name of Morano, they say, is derived from moro, a Moor; and in its little piazza—an irregular and picturesque spot, shaded by a few grand old elms amid the sound of running waters—there is a sculptured head of a Moor inserted into the wall, commemorative, I was told, of some ancient anti-Saracen exploit. It is the escutcheon of the town. This Moor wears a red fez, and his features are painted black (this is de rigueur, for “Saracens”); he bears the legend Vivit sub arbore morus. Near at hand, too, lies the prosperous village Saracena, celebrated of old for its muscatel wines. They are made from the grape which the Saracens brought over from Maskat, and planted all over Sicily.