Twilight in Italy | Page 8

me I saw the thin, stiff neck of old San Tommaso,
grey and pale in the sun. Yet I could not get up to the church, I found
myself again on the piazza.
Another day, however, I found a broken staircase, where weeds grew in
the gaps the steps had made in falling, and maidenhair hung on the
darker side of the wall. I went up unwillingly, because the Italians used
this old staircase as a privy, as they will any deep side-passage.
But I ran up the broken stairway, and came out suddenly, as by a
miracle, clean on the platform of my San Tommaso, in the tremendous

sunshine.
It was another world, the world of the eagle, the world of fierce
abstraction. It was all clear, overwhelming sunshine, a platform hung in
the light. Just below were the confused, tiled roofs of the village, and
beyond them the pale blue water, down below; and opposite, opposite
my face and breast, the clear, luminous snow of the mountain across
the lake, level with me apparently, though really much above.
I was in the skies now, looking down from my square terrace of
cobbled pavement, that was worn like the threshold of the ancient
church. Round the terrace ran a low, broad wall, the coping of the
upper heaven where I had climbed.
There was a blood-red sail like a butterfly breathing down on the blue
water, whilst the earth on the near side gave off a green-silver smoke of
olive trees, coming up and around the earth-coloured roofs.
It always remains to me that San Tommaso and its terrace hang
suspended above the village, like the lowest step of heaven, of Jacob's
ladder. Behind, the land rises in a high sweep. But the terrace of San
Tommaso is let down from heaven, and does not touch the earth.
I went into the church. It was very dark, and impregnated with
centuries of incense. It affected me like the lair of some enormous
creature. My senses were roused, they sprang awake in the hot, spiced
darkness. My skin was expectant, as if it expected some contact, some
embrace, as if it were aware of the contiguity of the physical world, the
physical contact with the darkness and the heavy, suggestive substance
of the enclosure. It was a thick, fierce darkness of the senses. But my
soul shrank.
I went out again. The pavemented threshold was clear as a jewel, the
marvellous clarity of sunshine that becomes blue in the height seemed
to distil me into itself.
Across, the heavy mountain crouched along the side of the lake, the
upper half brilliantly white, belonging to the sky, the lower half dark

and grim. So, then, that is where heaven and earth are divided. From
behind me, on the left, the headland swept down out of a great,
pale-grey, arid height, through a rush of russet and crimson, to the olive
smoke and the water of the level earth. And between, like a blade of the
sky cleaving the earth asunder, went the pale-blue lake, cleaving
mountain from mountain with the triumph of the sky.
Then I noticed that a big, blue-checked cloth was spread on the parapet
before me, over the parapet of heaven. I wondered why it hung there.
Turning round, on the other side of the terrace, under a caper-bush that
hung like a blood-stain from the grey wall above her, stood a little grey
woman whose fingers were busy. Like the grey church, she made me
feel as if I were not in existence. I was wandering by the parapet of
heaven, looking down. But she stood back against the solid wall, under
the caper-bush, unobserved and unobserving. She was like a fragment
of earth, she was a living stone of the terrace, sun-bleached. She took
no notice of me, who was hesitating looking down at the earth beneath.
She stood back under the sun-bleached solid wall, like a stone rolled
down and stayed in a crevice.
Her head was tied in a dark-red kerchief, but pieces of hair, like dirty
snow, quite short, stuck out over her ears. And she was spinning. I
wondered so much, that I could not cross towards her. She was grey,
and her apron, and her dress, and her kerchief, and her hands and her
face were all sun-bleached and sun-stained, greyey, bluey, browny, like
stones and half-coloured leaves, sunny in their colourlessness. In my
black coat, I felt myself wrong, false, an outsider.
She was spinning, spontaneously, like a little wind. Under her arm she
held a distaff of dark, ripe wood, just a straight stick with a clutch at the
end, like a grasp of brown fingers full of a fluff of blackish, rusty fleece,
held up near her shoulder. And her