Chapter 3

Chapter 3

Opposite the Volterra gate of Monteriano, outside the city,
is a very respectable white-washed mud wall, with a coping
of red crinkled tiles to keep it from dissolution. It would
suggest a gentleman's garden if there was not in its middle
a large hole, which grows larger with every rain-storm.
Through the hole is visible, firstly, the iron gate that is
intended to close it; secondly, a square piece of ground
which, though not quite, mud, is at the same time not
exactly grass; and finally, another wall, stone this time,
which has a wooden door in the middle and two
wooden-shuttered windows each side, and apparently forms the
facade of a one-storey house.

This house is bigger than it looks, for it slides for
two storeys down the hill behind, and the wooden door, which
is always locked, really leads into the attic. The knowing
person prefers to follow the precipitous mule-track round
the turn of the mud wall till he can take the edifice in the
rear. Then--being now on a level with the cellars--he lifts
up his head and shouts. If his voice sounds like something
light--a letter, for example, or some vegetables, or a bunch
of flowers--a basket is let out of the first-floor windows by
a string, into which he puts his burdens and departs. But
if he sounds like something heavy, such as a log of wood, or
a piece of meat, or a visitor, he is interrogated, and then
bidden or forbidden to ascend. The ground floor and the
upper floor of that battered house are alike deserted, and
the inmates keep the central portion, just as in a dying
body all life retires to the heart. There is a door at the
top of the first flight of stairs, and if the visitor is
admitted he will find a welcome which is not necessarily
cold. There are several rooms, some dark and mostly
stuffy--a reception-room adorned with horsehair chairs,
wool-work stools, and a stove that is never lit--German bad
taste without German domesticity broods over that room; also
a living-room, which insensibly glides into a bedroom when
the refining influence of hospitality is absent, and real
bedrooms; and last, but not least, the loggia, where you can
live day and night if you feel inclined, drinking vermouth
and smoking cigarettes, with leagues of olive-trees and
vineyards and blue-green hills to watch you.

It was in this house that the brief and inevitable
tragedy of Lilia's married life took place. She made Gino
buy it for her, because it was there she had first seen him
sitting on the mud wall that faced the Volterra gate. She
remembered how the evening sun had struck his hair, and how
he had smiled down at her, and being both sentimental and
unrefined, was determined to have the man and the place