Although this group is not nearly so numerous in the novel as many others, its representatives occasionally appear. In _Fontamara_, Peppino Goriano returns to Fontamara after thirty-five years, some of them spent in a “political career” in Rome. A good man, he had been forced by starvation to become an agent _provocateur_ for the police. He had earned five lire a day plus a twenty-five lire bonus each time a job resulted in his going to the hospital. For a brief time he had been a hero after a picture of him helping to wreck a Communist newspaper office had appeared in a newspaper. But the “Hero of Porta Pia” lost the honest job he had finally found when it was decided that “fascism could no longer shelter in its bosom such delinquents as had been convicted several times for theft.” Pablo in _For Whom the Bell Tolls_ is a study in deterioration. A cruel but effective anti-Fascist at the beginning of the war, he is found by Robert Jordan to be a sotted semi-bandit who opposes Jordan’s blowing of the bridge. Having lost control of the band to his woman Pilar, Pablo tries unsuccessfully to forestall the demolition by stealing part of Jordan’s equipment. Although he leads the retreat after the bridge is blown, Pablo is no longer one of the “illusioned ones.” He is a guerrilla who retains only his violence and a dominating desire for survival. Old Zaccaria in _A Handful of Blackberries_ is a bandit first and a partisan second. He had received a decoration for a crippling encounter with a German patrol, but the source of the battle was a truckload of cheese which he intended for the black market rather than a desire to free Italy. These characters are not nearly such low forms of life as some of the members of Taddei’s _lumpenproletariat_, but they are a part of that group to be found on the fringes of most political conflicts, individuals motivated by desire for personal gain rather than by principle. =Peasants= Almost as submerged in the economic structure is the peasant class. Here too there are extra-national similarities. The _paisans_ of Silone and Taddei and the _muzhiks_ of Turgenev and Dostoyevsky have characteristics in common. Ground down by oppression and exploitation, they engage in political action only as a result of outside stimulation rather than as a result of spontaneous desire among themselves. Often they may be too devitalized even to do that. When Bazarov in _Fathers and Sons_ tells the peasants that they are the hope of Russia, he does not suspect “that in their eyes he was all the while something of the nature of a buffooning clown.” In a more subtle way Don Paolo tries to awaken the peasants of Pietrasecca in _Bread and Wine_. He has a little success with parables, but a direct attack upon issues produces nothing. When he goes to Fossa he asks the lawyer Zabaglione about peasant participation in the now disbanded Socialist Leagues. Zabaglione tells him: