Joseph Conrad: Nostromo

PART FIRST: THE SILVER OF THE MINE 4. CHAPTER FOUR (continued)

At her feet the hens made off in all directions, with immense
strides; if there were any engineers from up the line staying in
Sulaco, a young English face or two would appear at the
billiard-room occupying one end of the house; but at the other
end, in the cafe, Luis, the mulatto, took good care not to show
himself. The Indian girls, with hair like flowing black manes,
and dressed only in a shift and short petticoat, stared dully
from under the square-cut fringes on their foreheads; the noisy
frizzling of fat had stopped, the fumes floated upwards in
sunshine, a strong smell of burnt onions hung in the drowsy heat,
enveloping the house; and the eye lost itself in a vast flat
expanse of grass to the west, as if the plain between the Sierra
overtopping Sulaco and the coast range away there towards
Esmeralda had been as big as half the world.

Signora Teresa, after an impressive pause, remonstrated--

"Eh, Giorgio! Leave Cavour alone and take care of yourself now we
are lost in this country all alone with the two children, because
you cannot live under a king."

And while she looked at him she would sometimes put her hand
hastily to her side with a short twitch of her fine lips and a
knitting of her black, straight eyebrows like a flicker of angry
pain or an angry thought on her handsome, regular features.

It was pain; she suppressed the twinge. It had come to her first
a few years after they had left Italy to emigrate to America and
settle at last in Sulaco after wandering from town to town,
trying shopkeeping in a small way here and there; and once an
organized enterprise of fishing--in Maldonado--for Giorgio, like
the great Garibaldi, had been a sailor in his time.

Sometimes she had no patience with pain. For years its gnawing
had been part of the landscape embracing the glitter of the
harbour under the wooded spurs of the range; and the sunshine
itself was heavy and dull--heavy with pain--not like the
sunshine of her girlhood, in which middle-aged Giorgio had wooed
her gravely and passionately on the shores of the gulf of
Spezzia.