In Maremma/Volume 1/Chapter 3

by Marie Louise de la Ramée

 

CHAPTER III.

 

ANTA TARSILLA was a dreary place midway between Telamone and Orbetello, lying low upon a shore half sand, half swamp, with aloes and sea fennel and the prickly samphire for all its vegetation, and blocks of stone and marble strewn about, some Roman, some Etruscan. There was beauty indeed on its horizon, in the luminous air where the distant snow-peaks of Corsica and the near crags of iron-bound Elba could be seen, with far Capraja and Monte Cristo, and many another island nameless to the world. But to see these it was needful to go a good way out upon the open water; from the little crooked land-locked bay there was little to be discerned save the low pale coast and low red tufa hills that locked in the harbour, where the waters were shallow, turgid, almost stagnant, choked with weed and sand, although, beyond, the Ligurian sea, blue as turquoise in some lights, blue as lapis lazuli at others, sometimes rose in fretted turbulence, and sometimes rolled in a sullen swell.

A little way inland the moors began; in grand level stretches of gorse and brushwood, covering many a buried tomb, and buried town, with the lentiscus and the rosemary waving above them. Nigh at hand were dark lines of pine forests, although their balsamic scent and resinous breath could not purify the miasma of the coast, and eastward were the still wild and scarce-trodden woodlands, stretching away to the mountain-ranges where the robber had made his lair. But wood and hill were all too far away to alter the weary monotony of the scene at Santa Tarsilla. It seemed all shore—pale barren shore; and shallow sea—sea which yet drowned so many that it seemed to the people like a graveyard.

On a narrow tongue of sandy land there was a little fort; sickly soldiers came there and guards to watch the coast. There was also a furnace-house to make the salt that was raked upon the beach; but smoke seldom issued from its chimney, though wood was to be had for the getting, and salt for the taking of it. The people had little strength and less spirit. In winter time their lives were very hard, and with the summer came the pestilence, and then ague and fever fed on them and drained their bodies, and left them scanty force to do more than sit in the shade of their boats or their walls and push out for moonlit fishing when night fell. It was the strong fellows who came down from the mountains of Pistoija and the hills of Lucca that did their work, and reaped the harvest on moor and in forest when autumn came round.

The people of the shore were nearly all dropsical, and the few soldiers and coast-guardsmen sent on duty along the shores suffered more than the native population at most times. But the Pistoiese and the Lucchese and the armies of winter-workers did not come into Santa Tarsilla itself except at rare odd times, when some of them brought, from the interior, grain or timber or charcoal to load the little coasters that were the only vessels insignificant enough to deign to remember this secluded little bay; and even to these the port dues were so heavy as to be well nigh ruinous, and the skippers, poor men of Livorno and Genoa for the most part, were scarcely able to scrape a profit from their cargoes. The port dues and shipping taxes have crippled and nearly destroyed all the commerce of the minor merchantmen of Italy, and they have struck a death-blow to the humble industries of the little Maremmano sea-towns.

Before the independence, of which the Maremma heard much but understood little, Santa Tarsilla had been very feeble, but able to get its own living; since then it had become paralysed, and was perishing off the face of the earth.

The waters teemed with fish; only looking down from the side of a boat you could see fish, by the thousand, gleaming like gold and silver in those bright transparent depths, with the feathery weeds, and the branches of coral. There was always fish indeed; but fish, though it will serve to fill your own mouth, and the mouths of your children, is of very little further use unless there be buyers for it. The waters teemed, the nets ran over, but as often as not the living spoils of the sea were thrown down and left to rot in noisome heaps upon the sands, because there was no one to purchase them and no means to carry them to other towns. Now and then they took the fish on mules to Grosseto or other places on the line of rail, but there was little sale for it; and before it could be passed through the gates of any town there was so heavy a tax on it that it paid no one to load a felucca's deck or a beast's panniers with so perishable a thing.

So Santa Tarsilla was sad and solitary always, and usually sickly enough; there was never any mirth or joviality in it; the young men grew impatient of its loneliness and poverty, and always went away as soon as they reached years enough to be their own masters. There were only a few old men, and some women and children; all the stronger folk who had been born in it were elsewhere, coral fishing in the south, doing forest work on the hills, or gone to live at Follonica where the foundries are.

Only the feeble, the old, and the very poor stayed in the little bay that had once been a great port for the galleys of Porsenna, as Joconda did, who had neither means nor strength to move away to a cooler land.

An almost absolute silence reigned there, only broken by the booming of millions of mosquitoes, and the tinkling now and then of the one feeble church bell. The many pedlars that travel through Maremma did not very often give an hour to Santa Tarsilla, unless their way lay most directly over the Tombolo or sandy shore. Now and then one came with needles and pins, tapes and kerchiefs, and a hundred other small articles of merchandise, packed in the wooden or leathern case upon his back; and when he did come, there was much gossip but few pence for him, for every one was poor in the forlorn forgotten town, which would have been no more than a village had it not been for its coastguard and its church.

By June, when the harvest was reaped, the labourers fled; a few fisher-folk remained, sallow and lean with weakness, or swollen with the dropsy common to the coast. Its very priests were sent to Santa Tarsilla as a penitence; and its military were stationed as a chastisement; of late years, even the little garrison of soldiers had been withdrawn by the Government, and there were none nearer than Orbetello. The little fort was falling to decay, and even the coastguardsmen dwelt not at Santa Tarsilla itself, but in a tower on the coast a mile away.

Nothing could be sadder than this place, or seem more forgotten of God and man.

Joconda sometimes, sitting at her door in the heavy parching summer heats, thought with a dull agony of remembrance of the mountain home of her birth.

In these unhealthy places of Maremma, where no one ever stays who can get away, and nearly all who remain are ague-stricken and fever-worn, young children not seldom thrive well enough. The poisoned air, so hot, so damp, so laden with seeds of disease, seems to have mercy sometimes on these young open lips, and bare, soft, uncertain limbs, and in six years' time from the capture of the brigand of Santa Fiora, there was the lithe figure of a beautiful child, bright as a rose, erect as a palm, on the pallid sands under the sultry skies.

This child that was Saturnino's throve, and grew without ailment, without accident, without a flaw anywhere, in feature, or limb, or body.

When Joconda had come down the hills with the weight of Saturnmo's legacy in her arms, she had pondered long and anxiously as to whether she would tell the people of Santa Tarsilla that it was the daughter of their hero whom she was about to take beneath her roof. She had turned the matter over long and anxiously in her thoughts, as the public waggon had rumbled on its way down the long stony roads, and at length had decided with herself not to let them know it. Joconda was a woman more truthful than the rest; that is to say, she saw no harm whatever in an untruth if it were necessary and injured nobody, a distinction that in Italy is rarely drawn; but she did not think a lie the natural answer to, and legitimate offspring of, a question, as most of her neighbours did, and she preferred to tell the simple truth when she could, which is esteemed in the country generally as but poor dull work, showing great lack of invention in whosoever is content with it.

At last, as she had lain the night through wide awake, disturbed by the presence and the thought of Saturnino's offspring, she had resolved that it would be best not to tell the truth here. The people would make an idol of their hero's offspring, and the child, as she grew older, would be restless and perturbed if she heard that her father had been sent by his judges to pass his life as a galley-slave on Gorgona.

Joconda feared no scorn and unkindness on the score of her birth for the child, if that birth were known; on the contrary, she feared the vanity and the evil passions that, with the knowledge of the blood of the Mastarna in her veins, might by public sentiment be engendered in her.

She would be the child of a hero, almost of a martyr, in the esteem of Maremma. She would hear no account made of his crimes; she would only hear of his valour; and if she lived she would grow up to think of her father as a sufferer by the law's injustice.

To the cooler, sturdier, northern sense of right and wrong which abode in the mountain-born spirit of the woman of Savoy, this prospect carried a fatal future to give to any child; and she resolved within herself to keep the secret of the baby's paternity from all, save, of course, her confessor. To him she told the truth.

To the rest of the shore people she said merely that it was a friend's child come from over the other side of Monte Labbro, and she, being a close and resolute woman, was impenetrable to the curiosity of her neighbours.

They were not very curious either.

A child was no rare treasure, and there was nothing strange in a lone one being placed with a lone woman who was known to have a little money secured and hidden somewhere. Plenty of people along the coast would have been willing and glad to let Joconda adopt their children, would she have taken them. So without more comment or inquiry the child and the dog were domiciled at the old stone house by the pier in Santa Tarsilla, and there grew and throve, as they best might, in an air that to many was death.

Joconda's first care was to have her friend and director, the priest, baptise the infant, and wash away in holy water the sins of its fathers from its soul. She knew not what it had ever been called, or if it had ever been called anything, but the name of the saint on whose day she had found it, she gave to it, as on the mountain side she had resolved to do. By the sad recluse of Syria the little large-eyed rose-cheeked child of Saturnino and Serapia was named, and Joconda saw a storm-swallow fly beyond the grated casement of the church, and said to herself that it was a dove. She was not a superstitious woman, but still, if such things once had been, why not again?

'She is a love child?' said the sacristan, as he gave her back to Joconda's arms, weighted henceforward with the name of the Syrian Magdalene. 'A child of crime,' said Joconda; for she had not the indulgence to the sins of Saturnino Mastarna that the Maremma had. She was a northern woman.

When the old priest died a dozen years later on, Joconda did not tell his successor of the child's parentage.

'They are good as good can be, the holy men,' she said to herself, 'and of course they never tell anything out of confessional—no—but still, when their housekeeper gets gossiping over a nice bit of fried liver, or their cappellano comes in with some new wine, they are but human, and they may mix up a little that they hear in the street with what they hear in the chapel. Why not? A man must talk, even when he is a holy one; that stands to reason.'

So she, who did not feel the necessity to talk, kept her own counsel.

She said to herself that it would be better the child should never have known that her father dwelt on that stony face of Medusa. What good could it do? As the child would grow older the thought would torment and fester in her, and lead her to evil, so she thought; and being a woman with a strong power of silence, the silence of one who has long lived alone with God, she never breathed the secret to any living soul.

Slowly the memory of Saturnino would die away, she knew, when he should be no more a living wonder on the hills, to feed their fancies with fresh legends of violence and romance. Saturnino was caged upon that isle whose strange shape lies on the blue waves, carved like a woman's head, with hair out-floating on the deep, and blank eyes staring up at Heaven. Costa has painted it so, and its name of Gorgon is old as the rocks are old.

There, galley-slaves (keeping their old name also) are mewed in a bitter company, and every now and then one escapes, and most likely is drowned, or shot, as he struggles in the waves; and every now and then strangers, curious and indifferent, come over the water to see these caged gallows-birds, and stare at them blankly.

There are Italian children who look as though they had stepped down from a predella or a tryptich; they are like the singing children of Angelico, the light-bearing angels of Filippino, the pages of Vittorio Carpaccio, the winged boys of the Siennese masters. The old type is there still in all its purity; the oval face, the level brows, the curling hair, the spiritual eyes, the roselike, smiling, yet serious mouth which the painters of those happier times saw around them in the streets and in the fields.

There are so many Italian children still, looking on whom one thinks at once of dim rich altars, of gold-starred vaulted niches, of lunettes glowing in the dusk like jewels, of vaulted roofs that are borne up by the wings of sculptured angels.

This child, born from a mountain robber and named from the anointed penitent, was like one of these children who, in the works of the early masters, stand with chalice, or lyre, or dove of the Holy Spirit, about the feet of martyrs or around the throne of Mary. Only in the eyes of this creature, who was called a penitent ere she had sinned any sin, there was a rebellious light, and in the arched mouth there was a resolute scorn that the masters did not put into their young servitors of God.

In feature she was strangely like the Angel of Annunciation of Carlo Dolce. It is the mode nowadays to deride Carlo Dolce, as it is the mode to deride melody in music; but let them chatter as they will, none can take away the lovely living light on his Gesu's infant face, nor deny the exquisite beauty of that angel who has all the yearning of humanity and all the grandeur of heaven in that perfect face which bends beneath its cloud of nimbus'd hair.

I pity those who can look unmoved on that angel where the painting hangs in the forsaken bed-chamber of the Pitti, whilst, beyond, there are the sweet still sunshine and the sounds of the falling waters of the gardens. Who can do so, may have the jargon of art on his tongue; he has not its secret in his soul. I would almost give up even the divine visions of Raffaelle to have that herald of Christ for ever before my eyes.

There was a bad feeble copy of this seraphic thing in the Church of Santa Tarsilla, but a copy of Carlo Dolce's own time, and therefore one made with reverence and tenderness; and Joconda would look at it where it hung above a side altar, and would think to herself, 'If it were not profane, how like the child of Saturnino!'

This likeness grew more and more strongly visible as she grew up to girlhood, and when her hair blew in the sea-wind of autumn, and the sun found the gold in its bronze, then had she an aureole too, and she had the light, the strength, the power, the mystery that are in Carlo's angel's face.

'Almost one looks to see wings spread from your shoulders!' said old Andreino to her, meaning only that she was like the sea-swallow in her swiftness and her faith in the sea; but Joconda, hearing him, thought, 'Have you too seen that likeness in her to Carlo's angel?'

But he had not; his eyes were always on the fish and the nets.

Fed on black bread and dried fish, with rarely anything else, for milk there was none, and fruit there was none, and meat was ever scarce, except when a lamb or kid was killed from some shepherd's passing flock, she grew erect, strong, bold, bright, handsome; with a clear, colourless skin; and brown, lustrous, astonished eyes, and bright bronze-hued hair that Joconda brushed back from her brow in rippling masses, and cut short at the throat.

In summer she was clothed in the grey homespun linen that Joconda made, and in winter she was clad in blue or white woollen stuff instead; both short, straight little garments, very like in form to those of the Florentine choristers of Luca della Robbia.

In all weathers it was her delight to cast this off, and plunge into the sea and float there, indifferent to wind or sun; and this passion for the water got for her in her fourth year a popular name in Santa Tarsilla, which quite displaced and effaced the saintly one she had been baptised by; she was always called by the people—the few sickly suffering people, to whom the sea was but a breeding bed for fish—the velia, or sea-cull, that larus marinus, with plumage white as his native snows, which came from the northern ocean as soon as the north wind blew.

'C'è una velia!' an old man had said once, seeing the child in the sea on a stormy day, when she looked no bigger than a seabird on the crest of foam; and from that time she was known by that word chiefly, and also as the Musoncella.

'Musoncella!' the other children yelled after her; for in the songs that are sung in the Maremma, round the charcoal burner's fires in the forest, and on the decks of the fishing feluccas on the sea, and behind the driven buffaloes in the reedy swampy plains, the girl that turns her face away is always twitted with this epithet.

Far il muso is to be scornful of, and sullen to, your kind: to have the black dog on your back as northerns phrase it.

It troubled Joconda to have that good name of Maria Penitente so utterly put aside and abandoned. It seemed as if the saints rejected the child of Saturnino, she thought. But when a popular tide of feeling rises high, no one can change it, even when it only sets toward a trick of speech in a fishing village, and Velia or Musoncella, the child was called by one and all, even by Joconda, who could not get out of the contagion of the nicknames.

She would not play with others; she played with the sails, with the surf, with the crystals of the salt, with anything rather than with the children, who, compared with her, were very timid, and were afraid of her, they could not have well told why, except that once, when one of them, twice her age, had worried Leone, she had darted into the hut and rushed out of it with a burning brand, which she would have hurled into the face of the boy who had hurt the dog if the women had not flung themselves on her.

When Joconda, who was absent that day, returned and heard, she trembled again. 'She is of Saturnino's blood,' she thought with fear. She was herself so old; she felt unequal to the task of training this lion-cub to lie down amidst the folded lambs.

The child certainly was not tender, and could be very fierce.

She liked best to be alone and to be always in movement; she never cared to be still, except in the church when there was a requiem or a choral mass, and the sounds went floating away into the dark dimly lit place and mingled with the sounds of the seas and the winds without. Then she would sit motionless, and sometimes her voice would come out of her and rise far above her ken and hover in the air like a bird, and then the people would hold their breath to listen and mutter to one another, 'there must be a saint that thinks about her after all.'

For herself, she did not want any saint. The religion of Santa Tarsilla went past her; it never reached her, still less did it ever enter into her. They had taught her the usual formula, and she had had the priestly benison on her dusky head like other children; but it all went by her as the wind did; it never took hold upon her. 'And yet Saturnino was a true believer,' said the good Priore of Santa Tarsilla, to whom alone Joconda had told the truth. Yes, the murderer and robber had believed devoutly, and had been a true Christian, so far as faith and fear could make him so, but this child was a heathen.

'I do not care for them;' that was all she answered to the priest when he strove to make her love Christ and the saints.

She cared more for a fish with jewel-like eyes, when she could steal it away from the overflowing net, and let it glide back into the sea, and watch its fins stir, and its languid life quicken, till with a rush and a dash it vanished into the lustrous silent depths where it had its being.

The child's desire to set all things free gave often a sharp pang to Joconda's heart.

'What would she say if she knew of her father on those rocks up yonder?' she would mutter now and then to the Priore, who would answer: 'There is no reason that she should ever know of him. It could do no good. She would think him a hero, as Maremma has done.'

'She would try to set him free, too, if she swam all night and all day to reach him,' said Joconda.

And as she grew older, and age with its many infirmities made her weaker both in brain and body, she began to be afraid, nervously afraid—calm, strong woman though she was—that anyone or anything should ever tell the child of that galley-slave at Gorgona.

No one did, and the child but rarely wondered whence she came; she took existence as a matter of course, like all ignorant creatures; it was no stranger that she should be alive than that the fish should be so in the water and the birds in the air. Culture alone sets before the baffled brain the cruel problem: why are we?

Musa, as she was now oftenest called, was absolutely ignorant. But ignorance is not always stupidity; and she was full of a restless, though dormant, intelligence which was always groping about blindly for knowledge. Of the arts she knew nothing, not so much as their names, but she had an instinct towards the love of them; the lore of books was unknown to her, but she caught eagerly at all fragments of legend and tradition that came to her from the mouths of the old men and women around her; that earth and sky were lovely no one had ever told her, but their beauty was full of vague delight to her. 'A strange child,' said the people of Santa Tarsilla always, because she would sit for hours quite still, with her dreamy eyes fastened on the stars of a summer night or the sea of an autumn day.

Once a fisher-lad, thinking to please her, had given her a branch of coral. Musa had taken it in silence. 'You can sell it,' said another girl of her age. 'It is a brave piece and of rare colour'. 'When you grow bigger, and go in with the mule to the town,' said another, 'you can have it cut into beads to wear; it is a brave piece.'

Musa had said nothing, but she got old Andrea's boat, that day, and rowed out to where the water was deep, and purple in colour, yet transparent as glass in its great depth; and there, being all alone, leaned over the boat's side and dropped the coral into the water, and watched it sink down, down, down, and join the other coral that grew there, far below.

'It will be happier,' she had said to herself; 'it is not where it came from, I dare say, but it is the best I can do.'

It had seemed to her that the coral would be so glad to be once more in those calm, cool and shadowy deeps where never burned the sun, and never sound was heard.

When she had reached land afterwards and met all the other children, and the giver of the coral amongst them, and they asked her for it, she had answered, 'I have put it back into the sea,' and they had screamed at her; and the fisher-lad sworn at her and tried to give her a blow: this was all her gratitude! they cried in offence and wrath.

Questioned, she could not very well have told why she had done it. Only she pitied everything that was taken out of that fresh free life of the deep sea, and not seldom when she got a chance slipped back from the net into the waves the shining silver of the struggling fish, caught when the moon was high. For which not seldom she got a blow too. For men and women do not like pity that interferes with their livelihood.

'Thou art a strange one!' said Joconda many a time, for the splendid, abundant, daring health and strength of the child seemed strange there, in those pale fever mists, amidst those pallid, inert populations. She was good to the child, but she was afraid of her. The crimes of the Mastarna men seemed to her fancies to hover, like a cloud of guilt, above this innocent head. The blood that coursed so buoyantly in those blue veins was the blood of an assassin and a robber. Joconda could not forget that.

When she looked at the form of the child, leaping naked in the blue waters, she could not but look over to the north where the islands blent with the golden sky, and cross herself as she thought, 'the father is there in chains!'

She was not even sure that the child cared for her; the child seemed to love nothing except Leone the dog, and the sea. She had a passion for the winds and the waters, for the open moor, for the free air, and was no more to be kept within doors than a mountain beast or sea-bird would have been; but for human creatures she did not care, and she had none of the caressing, clinging ways of childhood. The thought of her weighed heavily on Joconda; it was a burden to her, night and day.

'Does one suffer for doing good?' she muttered with a sigh to her priest.

'If one did not, where would be the merit of it?' said he.

But Joconda shook her head; the ways of the Saints were hard. Her old age had been already joyless and laborious and bare and meagre. But it had been tranquil, with no heavier care than to get provender for her mule, and bread for her own soup-pot. Now a weary apprehension, an anxious trouble, were with her always.

If the child, like the father, should offend God and man?

She knew nothing of transmitted taint and hereditary influence, but her experience told her that what is bred in the bone comes out in the flesh; and her fears made her see for ever behind the proud, bright, noble figure of the child the scarlet spectres of carnage and crime, the shadow of Saturnino Mastarna's sins.

'And I am old,' she would think; 'I may die—die soon—and what then?'

Once the child terrified both Joconda and the village. A man threw a stone at Leone and hit the dog in the eye; she flew on the man and stabbed him with the knife with which she was cleaning a gourd.

The knife only made a skin wound, and the man was appeased with wine and a little money; but the terrible fury and convulsive rage of the child scared the people of Santa Tarsilla, though they were used to dagger thrusts and long feuds.

Joconda reasoned with her, and punished her, and threatened her; but nothing that she could do could convince the little rebel that she had been wrong.

'Leone bites those who hurt me,' was all that she would say.

 

Layout 2