She loved him with a fierce protective love,
grounded on pain. There was such a split, a contrariety in his soul, one
part reacting against the other, which landed him always into trouble.
It was when Marco was a baby that Paolo had gone to America. They were
poor on San Gaudenzio. There were the few olive trees, the grapes, and
the fruit; there was the one cow. But these scarcely made a living.
Neither was Maria content with the real peasants' lot any more, polenta
at midday and vegetable soup in the evening, and no way out, nothing to
look forward to, no future, only this eternal present. She had been in
service, and had eaten bread and drunk coffee, and known the flux and
variable chance of life. She had departed from the old static
conception. She knew what one might be, given a certain chance. The
fixture was the thing she militated against. So Paolo went to America,
to California, into the gold mines.
Maria wanted the future, the endless possibility of life on earth. She
wanted her sons to be freer, to achieve a new plane of living. The
peasant's life was a slave's life, she said, railing against the poverty
and the drudgery.
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