If the joke of the door-keeper at the Farnesina was not so delicate in
any sense as some other jokes, it had, at least, the merit of being
voluntary. In fact, it is the only voluntary joke which I remember
hearing in the Tuscan tongue from the Roman mouth during a stay of three
months in the Eternal City. This was very disappointing, for I had
always thought of the Italians as gay and as liking to laugh and to make
laugh. In Venice, where I used to live, the gondoliers were full of
jokes, good, bad, and indifferent, and an infection of humor seemed to
spread from them to all the lower classes, who were as ready to joke as
the lower classes of Irish, and who otherwise often reminded one of
them. The joking habit extended as far down as Florence, even as Siena,
and at Naples I had found cabmen who tempered their predacity with
_bonhomie._ But the Romans were preferably serious, at least with the
average American, though, if I had tried them in their English instead
of my Italian, it might have been different. At times I thought, they
felt the weight of being Romans, as it had descended to them from
antiquity, and that the strain of supporting it had sobered them. In any
case, though there was shouting by night, and some singing of not at all
the Neapolitan quality and still less the Neapolitan quantity, there was
no laughing, or, as far as I could see, smiling by day.
Yet one day there was a tragedy in front of the hotel next ours which
would have made a dog laugh, as the saying is, unless it was a Roman
dog. It was a quarrel, more or less murderous, between a fat, elderly
man and an agile stripling of not half his age or girth, of whom the
tumult about them permitted only fleeting glimpses. By these the elder
seemed to be laboriously laying about him with a five-foot club and the
younger to be making wild dashes at him and then escaping to the skirts
of the cabmen, mounted and dismounted, who surrounded them. Now and then
a cabman drove out of the mellee very excitedly, and then turned and
drove excitedly back into the thick of it. All the while the dismounted
cabmen pressed about the combatants with their hands on one another's
backs and their heads peering carefully over one another's shoulders.
On the very outermost rim of these, more careful than any, was one
of those strange images whom you see about Italian towns in couples,
with red-braided swallowtail coats and cocked hats, those carabinieres
--namely, who are soldiers in war and policemen in times of peace. Any
spectator from a foreign land would have thought it the business of such
an officer of the law to press in and stop the fighting; but he did not
so interpret his duty. He gingerly touched the shoulders next him with
the tips of his fingers, and now and then lifted himself on the tips of
his toes to look if the fight had stopped of itself or not.
At last the fat, elderly man, whom his friends--and all the throng
except that one wicked youth seemed his friends--were caressing in
untimely embraces and coaxing in tones of tender entreaty, burst from
them, and, aiming at the head of his enemy, flung his club, to the
imminent peril of all the bystanders, and missed him. Then he frankly
put himself in the hands of his friends, who lifted him into a cab,
where one of them mounted with him and stayed him on the seat, while the
cabman drove rapidly away. The wicked youth had vanished in unknown
space; but the carabiniere, attended by a group of admirers, marched
boldly up the middle of the street, and the crowd, with whatever
reluctance, persuaded itself to disperse, though the cabmen, to the
number of ten or twenty, continued to drive around in concentric circles
and irregular ellipses. In five minutes not an eye-witness of the fray
remained, such being the fear of the law, not so much in those who break
it as in those who see it broken, and who dread incurring the vengeance
of the culprit, if he is acquitted, or of his family if he is convicted
on their testimony. The quarrel had gone on a full quarter of an hour,
but the concierge of the hotel in front of which it had raged professed
to have known nothing of it, having, he said, been in-doors all the
time. A cabman whom we eliminated from the hysterical company of his
fellows and persuaded to drive us away to see a church attempted to
ignore the whole affair when asked about it. With difficulty he could be
made to recollect it, and then he dismissed it as a trifle. “Oh,” he
said, “chiacchiere di donnicciuole,” which is something like “Clatter
of little old women,” a thing not worth noticing. He had, if we could
believe him, not cared to know how it began or ended, and he would not
talk about it.
Later, still interested by the action of the carabiniere in guarding the
public security in his own person, I asked an Italian gentleman, who
owned to have seen the affair, why the officer did not break through the
crowd and arrest the fighters. “They had knives,” he explained, and it
seemed a good reason for the carabiniere's forbearance, as far as it
went; but I thought of the short work the brute locust of an Irish
policeman at home would have made of the knives. My friend said he had
himself gone to one of the municipal police who was looking on at a
pleasant remove and said, “Those fellows have knives; they will kill
each other,” and the municipal policeman had answered, with the calm of
an antique Roman sentinel on duty in time of earthquake, “Let them
kill.”
I could not approve of so much impartiality, but afterward it seemed to
me I had little to be proud of in the shorter and easier method of our
own police, as contrasted with the caution of that Roman carabiniere who
left the combatants to the mild might of their friends' moral suasion.
It was better that the youth should escape, if he did, without a
vexatious criminal trial; he may have been no more to blame than the
other, who, I learned, had been carried off, in the honorable manner I
saw, to a doctor and had his stab looked to. It was not dangerous, and
the whole affair ended so. Besides, as I learned, still longer
afterward, when it was quite safe for a cabman from the same stand to
speak, the combatants were not Romans, but peasants from the Campagna,
who had come in with their market-carts and had become heated with the
bad spirits which the peasants have the habit of drinking five or six
glasses of when they visit Rome. “What we call benzine,” my cabman
explained. “We Romans,” he added from a moral height, “drink only a
glass or two of wine, and we never carry knives.”
He may have been right concerning the peacefulness of the Romans and
their sobriety, and I am bound to say that I never saw any other violent
scene during my stay. Sometimes I heard loud quarrelling among our
cabmen, and sometimes I was the subject of it, when one driver snatched
me, an impartial prey, from another. But the bad feeling, if there was
really any, quickly passed, and some other day I fell to the cabman who
had been wronged of me. I had not always the fine sense of being booty
which I had one day on coming out of a church and blundering toward the
wrong cab. Then the driver whom I had left waiting at the door seized me
from the very cab of an unjust rival with the indignant cry, “E roba
mia!” (He's my stuff!). It was not quite the phrase I would have chosen,
but I had no quarrel, generally speaking, with the cabmen of Rome. To be
sure, they have not a rubber tire among them, and their dress leaves
much to be desired in professional uniformity. Not one of them looks
like a cabman, but many of them in picturesqueness of hats and coats
look like brigands. I think they would each prefer to have a fur-lined
overcoat, which the Roman of any class likes to wear well into the
spring; but they mostly content themselves with an Astrakhan collar,
more or less mangy. For the rest, some of them will point out the
objects of interest as you pass, and they are proud to do so; they are
not extortionate, and, if you overpay them ever so little (which is
quite worth while), they will not stand upon a matter of lawful fare. A
two-cent tip contents them, one of four cents makes them your friends
for life; as for a five-cent tip, I do not know what it does, but I
advise the reader when he goes to Rome to try it and see.
One fine thing is that the cabmen are in great superabundance in Rome,
and the number of barrel-ribbed, ewe-necked, and broken-kneed horses is
in no greater proportion than in Paris. Still, the average is large,
though, if you will go to the stand, you may select any horse you please
without offence. It was a cheerful sight, verging upon gayety, to see
every morning the crowd of cabs at our stand and to hear the drivers'
talk, sometimes rising into protest and mutual upbraiding. But one
Thursday morning, the brightest of the spring, a Sunday silence had
fallen on the place, and a Sabbath solitude deepened to the eye the
mystery that had first addressed itself to the ear. Then, suddenly, we
knew that we were in the presence of that Italian conception of a
general strike which interprets itself as a _sciopero._ It is saying
very little of that two days' strike to say that it was far the most
impressive experience of our Roman winter; in some sort it was the most
impressive experience of my life, for I beheld in it a reduced and
imperfect image of what labor could do if it universally chose to do
nothing. The dream of William Morris was that a world which we know is
pretty much wrong could be put right by this simple process. The trouble
has always been to get all sorts of labor to join in the universal
strike, but in the Italian _sciopero_ of four years ago the miracle was
wrought from one end of the peninsula to the other.
In the Roman strike of last April a partial miracle of the same nature
was illustratively wrought, with the same alarming effect on the
imagination.
As with the national strike, the inspiration of the Roman strike came
from the government's violent dealing with a popular manifestation which
only threatened to be mischievous. A stone-mason was killed by falling
from a scaffolding, and his funeral was attended by so many hundreds,
amounting to thousands, of workmen that the police conceived, not quite
unjustifiably, that it was to be made the occasion of a demonstration,
especially as the proposed route of the procession lay through the
Piazza di Venezia, under the windows of the Austrian Embassy, Austria
being always a red rag to the Italian bull and peculiarly irritating
through the reservation of the Palazzo Venezia to the ancient enemy at
the cession of Venice to Italy. The mourners were therefore forbidden to
pass that way, and the police forces were drawn up in the Piazza Gesu,
before the Jesuit church, with a strong detachment of troops to support
them. Their wisdom in all this was very questionable after what
followed, for the mourners insisted on their rights and would go no way
but through the Piazza di Venezia. When the dispute was at its height
two wagons laden with bricks appeared on the scene. The mourners swarmed
upon them, broke the bricks into bats, and hurled them at the police.
They had apparently the simple-hearted expectation that the police would
stand this indefinitely, but the brickbats hurt, and in their paroxysms
of pain the sufferers began firing their revolvers at the mourners. Four
persons were killed, with the usual proportion of innocent spectators.
At night the labor unions met, and the _sciopero_ was proclaimed as an
expression of the popular indignation; but the police had been left with
the victory. Whether it was not in some sort a defeat I do not know, but
a retired English officer, whom I had no reason to think a radical, said
to me that he thought it a great mistake to have let the police oppose
the people with firearms. Soldiers should alone be used for such work;
they alone knew when to fire and when to stop, and they never acted
without orders. In fact, the troops supporting the police took no part
in the fray, as the workmen's press recognized with patriotic rejoicing.
The next morning a signal silence prevailed throughout the city, where
not a wheel stirred or the sound of a hoof broke the hush of the
streets. We had noted already that there were seven Sundays every week
in Rome, as was fit in the capital of the Christian religion, but this
Thursday was of an intenser Sabbath stillness than any first day of the
week that we had yet known. There was the clack of passing feet in the
street under our windows, but we looked out upon a yawning void where
the busy cabs had clustered, and the cabmen had socially chaffed and
quarrelled, and entreated the stranger in the cabman's superstition that
a stranger never knows when he wants a cab. Now he could have walked all
over Rome without being once invited to drive. Except for here and there
a private carriage, or the coupe evidently of a doctor, the streets were
empty, and the tourists had to join the citizens in their pedestrian
exercise.
The shopkeepers had been notified to close their places of business on
the tacit condition of having their windows broken for non-compliance,
but in the early forenoon they were still slowly and partially putting
up their shutters. You could get in through the darkened doors up till
noon; after that it was more and more difficult. But it would be hard to
say how far and how deep the _sciopero_ went. In our hotel we knew of it
only the second day through the failure of the morning rolls, for there
had been no baking overnight. Most of the in-door service was of Swiss
or other foreign extraction, and the mechanism of our comfort, our
luxury, was operated as usual. Our floor _facchino,_ or porter, went to
the meeting of the unions in the evening, being an Italian. Otherwise
the strike fell especially on the helpless and guiltless foreigner, who
might be, and very often was, in sympathy with the strikers. He had to
walk to the ruins, the galleries, the gardens, the churches, if he
wanted anything of them; he could not get a carriage even from a stable.
Between the hotels and the station the omnibus traffic was suspended.
The railroads being national, push-carts manned by the government
employes carried the baggage to and fro, but if one wanted to arrive or
depart one had to do it on foot. Tragical scenes presented themselves in
relation to this fact. In the afternoon, as I walked up the street
toward the great railroad station, I saw coming down the middle of it a
strange procession of ladies and gentlemen of every age, gray-haired
elders and children of tender years, mixed with porters and push-carts,
footing it into the region of the fashionable hotels. They were all
laden according to their strength, and people who had never done a
stroke of work in their lives were actually carrying their own
hand-bags, rugs, and umbrella-cases. It was terrible.
It was terrible for what it was, and terrible for what it suggested, if
ever that poor dull beast of labor took the bit permanently into its
teeth, or, worse yet, hung back in the breeching and inexorably balked.
What would then become of us others, us ladies and gentlemen who had
never done a stroke of work and never wished to do one? Should we be
forced to the hard necessity of beginning? Could we remain in the
comfortable belief that we gave work, or must we be made to own
distastefully that it had always been given to us? Should we be able to
flatter ourselves with the notion that we had once had dependents
because we had money, or should we realize that we had always been
dependents because of our having money?
These were the hateful doubts which the Roman strike suggested to the
witness, or, at least, one of the witnesses, who has here the pleasure
of unburdening himself upon the reader. Yet there was something amusing
in the situation; there was a joke--that rarest of all things in
Rome--latent in it, which one suspected only from the amiable, the
all-but-smiling behavior of the strikers. There was not the slightest
disorder during the two days that the strike lasted. When it was called
off at a meeting of the unions on Saturday night, one of the seven
Sundays of the Roman week dawned upon an activity at the neighboring
cab-stand no peacefuller and not much gayer than the silence and
solitude of the mornings previous. As for the general effect in the
city, you would hardly have known that particular Sunday from those
which had gone by the names of Friday and Saturday. Throughout Italy
there is now a Sunday-closing law whose effect in a land once of joyous
Sabbaths strikes some such chill to the heart as pierces it in Boston on
that day, or in the farther eastern or western avenues of New York, when
the Family Entrances are religiously locked.
The Italian state has, in fact, so far taken the matter in charge as to
have established a secular holiday, coming once a week, which has almost
disestablished the holidays of the Church, formerly of much more
frequent occurrence. This secular holiday, which every workman has a
right to, he may neither give nor sell to his master. He may not even
loaf it away in the place where he works, lest he should be
clandestinely employed. He must go out of the shop or house or factory
or foundry, and spend his ten hours where he cannot be suspected of
employing them in productive industry for hire. This law has been
enacted in accordance with the will of the unions and no doubt in
correction of great abuses. Neither masters nor men now recognize the
old-fashioned _festa_ as they once did. Whether the men like the new
holiday so well, I did not get any of them explicitly to say. Of course,
they cannot all take it at once; they must take it turn about, and they
may not find their enforced leisure so lively as the old voluntary
saints' days, when their comrades were resting, too. As for the masters,
one of the employers of labor, whom I found filling his man's place,
would merely say: “It is the new law. No doubt we shall adjust ourselves
to it.” He did not complain.