Joseph Conrad: Nostromo

PART THIRD: THE LIGHTHOUSE 12. CHAPTER TWELVE (continued)

Fiercely whiskered and grave, a shade less supple in his walk,
the vigour and symmetry of his powerful limbs lost in the
vulgarity of a brown tweed suit, made by Jews in the slums of
London, and sold by the clothing department of the Compania
Anzani, Captain Fidanza was seen in the streets of Sulaco
attending to his business, as usual, that trip. And, as usual, he
allowed it to get about that he had made a great profit on his
cargo. It was a cargo of salt fish, and Lent was approaching. He
was seen in tramcars going to and fro between the town and the
harbour; he talked with people in a cafe or two in his measured,
steady voice. Captain Fidanza was seen. The generation that
would know nothing of the famous ride to Cayta was not born yet.

Nostromo, the miscalled Capataz de Cargadores, had made for
himself, under his rightful name, another public existence, but
modified by the new conditions, less picturesque, more difficult
to keep up in the increased size and varied population of Sulaco,
the progressive capital of the Occidental Republic.

Captain Fidanza, unpicturesque, but always a little mysterious,
was recognized quite sufficiently under the lofty glass and iron
roof of the Sulaco railway station. He took a local train, and
got out in Rincon, where he visited the widow of the Cargador who
had died of his wounds (at the dawn of the New Era, like Don Jose
Avellanos) in the patio of the Casa Gould. He consented to sit
down and drink a glass of cool lemonade in the hut, while the
woman, standing up, poured a perfect torrent of words to which he
did not listen. He left some money with her, as usual. The
orphaned children, growing up and well schooled, calling him
uncle, clamoured for his blessing. He gave that, too; and in the
doorway paused for a moment to look at the flat face of the San
Tome mountain with a faint frown. This slight contraction of his
bronzed brow casting a marked tinge of severity upon his usual
unbending expression, was observed at the Lodge which he attended
--but went away before the banquet. He wore it at the meeting of
some good comrades, Italians and Occidentals, assembled in his
honour under the presidency of an indigent, sickly, somewhat
hunchbacked little photographer, with a white face and a
magnanimous soul dyed crimson by a bloodthirsty hate of all
capitalists, oppressors of the two hemispheres. The heroic
Giorgio Viola, old revolutionist, would have understood nothing
of his opening speech; and Captain Fidanza, lavishly generous as
usual to some poor comrades, made no speech at all. He had
listened, frowning, with his mind far away, and walked off
unapproachable, silent, like a man full of cares.