Part 8

If one has been a devoted patron of the opera or student of music, one has an Italian vocabulary to begin with. This, if accompanied by the proper gestures (for it is vain to speak without liberal movements, of the hands, shoulders, and eyebrows), this, I maintain, will deceive all the English-speaking persons who may be seated near your table in a foreign café.

The very first evening after our arrival, Jack Copley asked Salemina and me to dine with him at the best restaurant in Venice. Jack Copley is a well of nonsense undefiled, and he, like ourselves, had been in Italy only a few hours. He called for us in his gondola, and in the row across from the Giudecca we amused ourselves by calling to mind the various Italian words or phrases with which we were familiar. They were mostly titles of arias or songs, but Jack insisted, notwithstanding Salemina’s protestations, that, properly interlarded with names of famous Italians, he could maintain a brilliant conversation with me at table, to the envy and amazement of our neighbours. The following paragraph, then, was our stock in trade, and Jack’s volubility and ingenuity in its use kept Salemina quite helpless with laughter:—

Guarda che bianca luna—Il tempo passato—Lascia ch’ io pianga—Dolce far niente—Batti batti nel Masetto—Da capo—Ritardando—Andante—Piano—Adagio—Spaghetti—Macaroni— Polenta—Non è ver—Ah, non giunge—Si la stanchezza—Bravo—Lento—Presto—Scherzo—Dormi pura—La ci darem la mano—Celeste Aïda—Spirito gentil—Voi che sapete—Crispino e la Comare—Pietà, Signore—Tintoretto—Boccaccio—Garibaldi—Mazzini—Beatrice Cenci—Gordigiani—Santa Lucia—Il mio tesoro—Margherita—Umberto—Vittoria Colonna—Tutti frutti—Botticelli—Una furtiva lagrima.

No one who has not the privilege of Jack Copley’s acquaintance could believe with what effect he used these unrelated words and sentences. I could only assist, and lead him to ever higher flights of fancy.

We perceive with pleasure that our mother tongue presents equal difficulties to Italian manufacturers and men of affairs. The so-called mineral water we use at table is specially still and dead, and we think it may have been compared to its disadvantage with other more sparkling beverages, since every bottle bears a printed label announcing, “To Distrust of the mineral waters too foaming, since that they do invariable spread the Stomach.”

We learn also by studying another bottle that “The Wermouth is a white wine slightly bitter, and parfumed with who leso me aromatic herbs.” Who leso me we printed in italics in our own minds, giving the phrase a pure Italian accent until we discovered that it was the somewhat familiar adjective “wholesome.”

In one of the smaller galleries we were given the usual pasteboard fans bearing explanations of the frescoes:—

ROOM I. In the middle. The sin of our fathers.

On every side. The ovens of Babylony. Möise saved from the water.

ROOM II. In the middle. Möise who sprung the water.

On every side. The luminous column in the dessert and the ardent wood.

ROOM III. In the middle. Elia transported in the heaven.

On every side. Eliseus dispansing brods.

ROOM IV. The wood carvings are by Anonymous. The tapestry shows the multiplications of brods and fishs.

VII

CASA ROSA, May 30.

We have had a battle royal in Casa Rosa—a battle over the breaking of a huge blue pitcher valued at eight francs, a pitcher belonging to the Little Genius.

The room that leads from the dining-room to the kitchen is reached by the descent of two or three stone steps. It is always full, and is like the orthodox hell in one respect, that though myriads of people are seen to go into it, none ever seem to come out. It is not more than twelve feet square, and the persons most continuously in it, not counting those who are in transit, are the Padrona Angela; the Padrona Angela’s daughter, Signorina Rita; the Signorina Rita’s temporary suitor; the suitor’s mother and cousin; the padrona’s great-aunt; a few casual acquaintances of the two families, and somebody’s baby: not always the same baby; any baby answers the purpose and adds to the confusion and chatter of tongues.

This morning, the door from the dining-room being ajar, I heard a subdued sort of Bedlam in the distance, and finally went nearer to the scene of action, finding the cause in a heap of broken china in the centre of the floor. I glanced at the excited company, but there was nothing to show me who was the criminal. There was a spry girl washing dishes; the fritter-woman (at least we call her so, because she brings certain goodies called, if I mistake not, frittoli); the gardener’s wife; Angelo, the gondolier; Peppina, the waiting-maid; and the men that had just brought the sausages and sweetmeats for the gondolier’s ball, which we were giving in the evening. There was also the contralto, with a large soup-ladle in her hand. (We now call Rosalia, the cook, “the contralto,” because she sings so much better than she cooks that it seems only proper to distinguish her in the line of her special talent.)

The assembled company were all talking and gesticulating at once. There was a most delicate point of justice involved, for, as far as I could gather, the sweetmeat-man had come in unexpectedly and collided with the sausage-man, thereby startling the fritter-woman, who turned suddenly and jostled the spry girl: hence the pile of broken china.

The spry girl was all for justice. If she had carelessly or wilfully dropped the pitcher, she would have been willing to suffer the extreme penalty,—the number of saints she called upon to witness this statement was sufficient to prove her honesty,—but under the circumstances she would be blessed if she suffered anything, even the abuse that filled the air. The fritter-woman upbraided the sweetmeat-man, who in return reviled the sausage-vender, who remarked that if Angelo or Peppina had received the sausages at the door, as they should, he would never have been in the house at all; adding a few picturesque generalizations concerning the moral turpitude of Angelo’s parents and the vicious nature of their offspring.

The contralto, who was divided in her soul, being betrothed to the sausage-vender, but aunt to the spry girl, sprang into the arena, armed with the soup-ladle, and dispensed injustice on all sides. The feud now reached its height. There is nothing that the chief participants did not call one another, and no intimation or aspersion concerning the reputation of ancestors to the remotest generation that was not cast in the others’ teeth. The spry girl referred to the sausage-vender as a generalissimo of all the fiends, and the compliments concerning the gentle art of cookery which flew between the fritter-woman and the contralto will not bear repetition. I listened breathlessly, hoping to hear one of the party refer to somebody as the figure of a pig (strangely enough the most unforgettable of insults), for each of the combatants held, suspended in air, the weapon of his choice—broken crockery, soup-ladle, rolling-pin, or sausage. Each, I say, flourished the emblem of his craft wildly in the air—and then, with a change of front like that of the celebrated King of France in the Mother Goose rhyme, dropped it swiftly and silently; for at this juncture the Little Genius flew down the broad staircase from her eagle’s nest. Her sculptor’s smock surmounted her blue cotton gown, and her blond hair was flying in the breeze created by her rapid descent. I wish I could affirm that by her gentle dignity and serene self-control she awed the company into silence, or that there was a holy dignity about her that held them spellbound; but such, unhappily, is not the case. It was her pet blue pitcher that had been broken—the pitcher that was to serve as just the right bit of colour at the evening’s feast. She took command of the situation in a masterly manner—a manner that had American energy and decision as its foundation and Italian fluency as its superstructure. She questioned the virtue of no one’s ancestors, cast no shadow of doubt on the legitimacy of any one’s posterity, called no one by the name of any four-footed beast or crawling, venomous thing, yet she somehow brought order out of chaos. Her language (for which she would have been fined thirty days in her native land) charmed and enthralled the Venetians by its delicacy, reserve, and restraint, and they dispersed pleasantly. The sausage-vender wished good appetite to the cook,—she had need of it, Heaven knows, and we had more,—while the spry girl embraced the fritter-woman ardently, begging her to come in again soon and make a longer visit.

VIII

CASA ROSA, June 10

I am saying all my good-byes—to Angelo and the gondola; to the greedy pigeons of San Marco, so heavy in the crop that they can scarcely waddle on their little red feet; to the bees and birds and flowers and trees of the beautiful garden behind the casa; to the Little Genius and her eagle’s nest on the house-top; to “the city that is always just putting out to sea.” It has been a month of enchantment, and although rather expensive, it is pleasant to think that the padrona’s mortgage is nearly paid.

It is a saint’s day, and to-night there will be a fiesta. Coming home to our island, we shall hear the laughter and the song floating out from the wine shops and the caffès; we shall see the lighted barges with their musicians; we shall thrill with the cries of “Viva Italia! viva el Re!” The moon will rise above the white palaces; their innumerable lights will be reflected in the glassy surface of the Grand Canal. We shall feel for the last time “the quick silent passing” of the only Venetian cab.

“How light we move, how softly! Ah, Were life but as the gondola!”

To-morrow we shall be rowed against the current to Padua. We shall see Malcontenta and its ruined villa: Oriago and Mira and the campanile of Dolo. Venice will lie behind us, but she will never be forgotten. Many a time on such a night as this we shall say with other wandering Venetians:—