Nostromo: A Tale of the Seaboard
heads; the noisy frizzling of fat had stopped, the fumes floated upward in sunshine, a strong smell of burned 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 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 harbor under the wooded spurs of the range; and the sunshine itself was heavy and dull—heavy with pain—not like sunshine of her girlhood, in which middle-aged Giorgio had woed her
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