And he only looked at
me, into my eyes, with the long, pale, steady, inscrutable look of a
goat, I can only repeat, something stone-like.
'Why,' I said, 'don't you marry? Man doesn't live alone.'
'I don't marry,' he said to me, in his emphatic, deliberate, cold
fashion, 'because I've seen too much. _Ho visto troppo._'
'I don't understand,' I said.
Yet I could feel that Paolo, sitting silent, like a monolith also, in
the chimney opening, he understood: Maria also understood.
Il Duro looked again steadily into my eyes.
'_Ho visto troppo_,' he repeated, and the words seemed engraved on
stone. 'I've seen too much.'
'But you can marry,' I said, 'however much you have seen, if you have
seen all the world.'
He watched me steadily, like a strange creature looking at me.
'What woman?' he said to me.
'You can find a woman--there are plenty of women,' I said.
'Not for me,' he said. 'I have known too many. I've known too much, I
can marry nobody.'
'Do you dislike women?' I said.
'No--quite otherwise. I don't think ill of them.'
'Then why can't you marry? Why must you live alone?'
'Why live with a woman?' he said to me, and he looked mockingly.
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