The country was marvelous. When I think of Italy, it seems to me immediately that there is no country in the world I prefer; but never until then had she appeared to me of such captivating grace. Many charming paths, disappearing into the folds of the mountains, led to villages not too distant that each offered some surprising specialty. It was harvest time; an unusual gaiety animated all the peasants; when I passed by them, they held out to me the bunch of grapes they had just picked from the arbor, or that they were gathering, either in the little handcart they were pulling, or in the basket they carried on their backs to take the harvest to the wine-press; round about the villages, the heady perfume of must was already filling the air. Amidst laughing and singing, young men, barefooted and barearmed, crushed the grapes in the vats, as one can see it done at Campo Santo di Pisa, in the fresco of Benozzo Gozzoli. I tarried near them until evening. The narrow valley was then filling up with shadows and haze. Above, and by contrast no doubt, the air was becoming, it seemed, more sonorous, more limpid, more crystalline, and from one village to the next, long, joyous calls reechoed. Ah! How far I felt myself from Paris, and how little I wished to go back!
But what kept me at Acquasanta, more than the beauty of the country and the perfume of the harvest, was the child with whom I had fallen in love. I met him only at the baths; and before speaking of him, I must describe the pool. In this post season it was frequented only by the natives of the country who had free access to it after the first of September; poor people who had the right to be sick too. But some, and among them Bernardino, took baths for the pleasure of it. As for me, I had decided that, having missed a season of sea baths, a cure in the sulphur pools would cure me of any future ills. Foreigners had to have a medical authorization, but the obliging doctor discovered, at my request, an indisposition that only the waters of Acquasanta could combat.
The pool? It was a subterranean lake — it was a little lake that my memory magnifies — not very deep, of which the sun reached only the right bank and which, under a shady vault, spread out, stretched out wide at first, then continued to narrow as it got farther from the light up to the steep wall in the background, that on entering one could scarcely see. There, in the very back, flowed out, in an abundant cascade, the thermal waters; they did not burst directly from the rock but were carried from a distant point by a channel half way up the wall which one could scale, it was said, but where I never dared risk myself, for in the depths of the lake the heat was already suffocating. Engirdling the lake, a continuous row of benches had been cut into the stone, so one could sit down there while keeping his head out of the water. This water was of an indescribable color, bluish-green and milky at the same time (I imagined just like it the color of sirens’ milk), completely opaque; the bodies disappeared entirely, which permitted bathing without a costume.
No matter how soon I arrived at the pool in the morning, Bernardino had always gotten there first. From the first day I had noticed him, the only child among the bathers. He might have been fourteen years of age, perhaps fifteen. His dark hair, of medium length, half covered his slightly pug-nosed face; through the disorderly matted locks that the water carried forward, his eyes shone; the least smile immediately revealed his teeth. One would have said a triton had escaped the voluptuous cortege of Amphitrite, and the water seemed his element. His extraordinarily rapid swimming was like a dance, divided between the crawl and the mazurka, but it recalled still more the capering behaviour of the seals and dolphins that, even in the calmest water, seem now buoyed up by an imaginary wave, now to fall pirouetting into the billows; and the bound that brought him up uncovered his delicate shoulder for an instant. The first day I spoke to him, I was astonished at all I could find to say to him with the few words of Italian I knew. But I am only a wretched swimmer and, when we swam together, got out of breath quickly and let myself be outdistanced at once. If, when he let me catch up with him, I tried to seize him, he swam away with a ringing laugh, diving suddenly, and I didn’t see him reappear until he was far away. However, he answered my questions as good-naturedly as possible and seemed to take pleasure in chatting. I learned that he was the oldest of a rather large family; his father was cobbler and cultivator at the same time. But Bernardino refused to let me know where he lived, as well as to permit me to meet him any place except at the pool, protesting in addition that his parents would not tolerate his taking up with a stranger; and on saying this, he affected a filial submission and veneration so excessive that he could not keep himself from smiling at it immediately, as if to let me understand that malice and challenge entered into his reticence. Then he questioned me: What had I come to do there, in this post season when no one met anyone any more? And I got all mixed up in a sentence trying to tell him that his society was enough for me and that it pleased me much more than that of the people of high society. How long would I stay? Then I felt my glance become tender and told him that, near him, I could not dream of leaving.
I would have liked to see him leave the pool; but in vain I prolonged my baths, in vain I watched for him to come out. The way in which he escaped me remained incomprehensible, with the result that there entered into that lover’s chase a little challenge. In the afternoon, all the charm of the walks was needed to distract my thought from him a little. But when, in the evening, I tried to return to Milton, I thought I would have done just as well to bring Virgil with me.
However Bernardino did not fail to be impressed by my constancy, and all the more as he saw very well that I spoke to no one except him. Twelve days had already fled and I was thinking with gloom and distress of all that was soon going to recall me to France.…
On that day, the thirteenth of my stay (I have always been favored by the thirteenth), as I had, in swimming, reached the deepest shade of the grotto, Bernardino, without my having called him, came to join me. I sat down on the stone bench near the cascade. And suddenly Bernardino was in my lap, hugging me with his charming arms, putting his chin on my shoulder, hiding his eyes against my neck and pressing his forehead to my cheek. How light that little body was!
And at first I wasn’t worried, thinking that he owed his lack of weight to the old law of Archimedes. My hands were still lagging behind feeling his back; ah! how my heart turned over suddenly when my caress as it descended, discovered that his left leg stopped at the beginning of his thigh; the slim member over which my hand was preparing to slip lovingly was only a stump.
Poor Bernardino! At once I understood your retreats, your flights, your strange swimming, your well-being in the opaque waters, protectors of your secret; and now your confusion, and, pressed against my shoulder your face that you did not want to raise any more.…
To how many kisses did I have to have recourse, to how many caresses, to have confidence finally come liven up his eyes, and a smile, once more to his trembling lips! How many protestations and oaths before convincing him that his painful deformity did not repel my love too much! A great tenderness now filled my heart, and I persuaded myself that I loved him all the more; but that tenderness immediately made me understand how painfully he would be wounded by an alteration, a change to pity, in my desires. Pity, to be sure! Commiseration, that’s what he met everywhere along his road and that sort of charitable love that hovers over misfortune. (Later he informed me that his parents loved him dearly, that they were sympathetic with him in the village, that he had received care and help from public relief.) Everything with which they flooded him always reminded him of his misfortune. But that anyone could still fall in love with his beauty, his charm, that he could awaken desire, in spite of everything, that is what opened a new heaven to him by reconciling him to himself. No, Bernardino, it is not pity I offer you, but ardor.