Foreign News: Love in the Sun

This is a 20th Century story about a little man who did no harm, saved his money, lived in the sun and fell in love with a steam roller.

A Nice Guy. Giuseppe Dolce, a stonecutter, came from the small town of Dronero, in the Italian Piedmont. When he was 19, he went to France and got a job with a road construction company which was elegantly called La Société du Cylindrage du Littoral. He kept the job for 20 years. He was a stocky, dark man with a round face, high cheekbones and thin lips. He never smiled; neither did he grumble. His bosses liked him because he was.always the first on the job, the last to leave. The other workers in his gang liked him too and called him gentil garçon (nice guy) even though he never joined them at the bistro. Giuseppe did not drink. He had no family and no friends. He had no girl—women frightened him. Nor did he have a God. His fellow workers called him a “devourer of books.” He lived alone in a shack on wheels which he moved with him from job to job about the south of France.

Three years ago, Giuseppe was promoted to drive the steam roller.

Giuseppe, who had never had anything to love, loved it as a hunter loves his dog or a rider his horse, or perhaps just as a man (in the 20th Century) loves his machine. When the day’s work was done, Giuseppe would drive his steam roller around to his shack, and putter about, oiling and cleaning it. Sometimes at work Giuseppe would set the huge machine rolling and get down in the road to stare at it as it marched on alone, slowly and steadily crushing the gravel beneath its bland power.

One day Giuseppe’s gang stopped repairing war-wrecked roads and started to build a new one, the Road of the Sea, running from Cros-de-Cagnes to Antibes. The Riviera was very gay again. Giuseppe settled his shack near the swank restaurant Rallye; at night he could hear the sounds of the jazz band.

“Just Thinking.” One day last week, in the early afternoon sun, Giuseppe stood staring at his steam roller. “Well, Giuseppe, what are you doing there?” asked a worker, one Tomaso Sonnino. “Nothing. Just thinking,” said Giuseppe. “Wondering what would happen if nobody could stop this thing. This one and all the others, just rolling on forever.”

Tomaso shook his head and walked on. Suddenly a shadow came abreast of him. It was the steam roller, slow, driverless. Tomaso saw that there were dark stains on the white rollers. They were bloodstains. Fifty yards behind, three-year-old Rose Delauney, playing with her doll on the sidewalk, cried: “Come quick, papa. Come quick. Monsieur bleeds.”

From the position of the body it was clear that Giuseppe had lain down on his side, his back turned toward the oncoming machine, his head turned out to the sea.

Said Jean Cresta, installed as the new driver. “He always seemed alone when he was with us. Alone with his steam roller.”

Cresta seemed confident that the steam roller would not seduce him.