LA GIUDECCA, _May_ 15,
CASA ROSA.
Not for a moment have we regretted leaving our crowded, conventional
hotel in Venice proper, for these rooms in a house on the Giudecca. The
very vision of Miss Celia Van Tyck sitting on a balcony surrounded by a
group of friends from the various Boston suburbs, the vision of Miss
Celia Van Tyck melting into delicious distance with every movement of our
gondola, even this was sufficient for Salemina’s happiness and mine, had
it been accompanied by no more tangible joys.
This island, hardly ten minutes by gondola from the Piazza of San Marco,
was the summer resort of the Doges, you will remember, and there they
built their pleasure-houses, with charming gardens at the back—gardens
the confines of which stretched to the Laguna Viva. Our Casa Rosa is one
of the few old _palazzi_ left, for many of them have been turned into
granaries.
We should never have found this romantic dwelling by ourselves; the
Little Genius brought us here. The Little Genius is Miss Ecks, who
draws, and paints, and carves, and models in clay, preaching and
practising the brotherhood of man and the sisterhood of woman in the
intervals; Miss Ecks, who is the custodian of all the talents and most of
the virtues, and the invincible foe of sordid common sense and financial
prosperity. Miss Ecks met us by chance in the Piazza and breathlessly
explained that she was searching for paying guests to be domiciled under
the roof of Numero Sessanta, Giudecca. She thought we should enjoy
living there, or at least she did very much, and she had tried it for two
years; but our enjoyment was not the special point in question. The real
reason and desire for our immediate removal was that the padrona might
pay off a vexatious and encumbering mortgage which gave great anxiety to
everybody concerned, besides interfering seriously with her own creative
work.
“You must come this very day,” exclaimed Miss Ecks. “The Madonna knows
that we do not desire boarders, but you are amiable and considerate, as
well as financially sound and kind, and will do admirably. Padrona
Angela is very unhappy, and I cannot model satisfactorily until the house
is on a good paying basis and she is putting money in the bank toward the
payment of the mortgage. You can order your own meals, entertain as you
like, and live precisely as if you were in your own home.”
The Little Genius is small, but powerful, with a style of oratory
somewhat illogical, but always convincing at the moment. There were a
good many trifling objections to our leaving Miss Van Tyck and the hotel,
but we scarcely remembered them until we and our luggage were skimming
across the space of water that divides Venice from our own island.
We explored the cool, wide, fragrant spaces of the old _casa_, with its
outer walls of faded, broken stucco, all harmonized to a pinkish yellow
by the suns and winds of the bygone centuries. We admired its lofty
ceilings, its lovely carvings and frescoes, its decrepit but beautiful
furniture, and then we mounted to the top, where the Little Genius has a
sort of eagle’s eyrie, a floor to herself under the eaves, from the
windows of which she sees the sunlight glimmering on the blue water by
day, and the lights of her adored Venice glittering by night. The walls
are hung with fragments of marble and wax and stucco and clay; here a
beautiful foot, or hand, or dimple-cleft chin; there an exquisitely
ornate façade, a miniature campanile, or a model of some ancient
_palazzo_ or _chiesa_.
The little bedroom off at one side is draped in coarse white cotton, and
is simple enough for a nun. Not a suggestion there of the fripperies of
a fine lady’s toilet, but, in their stead, heads of cherubs, wings of
angels, slender bell-towers, friezes of acanthus leaves,—beauty of line
and form everywhere, and not a hint of colour save in the riotous bunches
of poppies and oleanders that lie on the broad window-seats or stand
upright in great blue jars.
Here the Little Genius lives, like the hermit crab that she calls
herself; here she dwells apart from kith and kin, her mind and heart and
miracle-working hands taken captive by the charms of the siren city of
the world.
When we had explored Casa Rosa from turret to foundation stone we went
into the garden at the rear of the house—a garden of flowers and
grape-vines, of vegetables and fruit-trees, of birds and bee-hives, a
full acre of sweet summer sounds and odours, stretching to the lagoon,
which sparkled and shimmered under the blue Italian skies. The garden
completed our subjugation, and here we stay until we are removed by
force, or until the padrona’s mortgage is paid unto the last penny, when
I feel that the Little Genius will hang a banner on the outer ramparts, a
banner bearing the relentless inscription: “No paying guests allowed on
these premises until further notice.”
Our domestics are unique and interesting. Rosalia, the cook, is a
graceful person with brown eyes, wavy hair, and long lashes, and when she
is coaxing her charcoal fire with a primitive fan of cock’s feathers, her
cheeks as pink as oleanders, the Little Genius leads us to the kitchen
door and bids us gaze at her beauty. We are suitably enthralled at the
moment, but we suffer an inevitable reaction when the meal is served, and
sometimes long for a plain cook.
Peppina is the second maid, and as arrant a coquette as lives in all
Italy. Her picture has been painted on more than one fisherman’s sail,
for it is rumoured that she has been six times betrothed and she is still
under twenty. The unscrupulous little flirt rids herself of her suitors,
after they become a weariness to her, by any means, fair or foul, and her
capricious affections are seldom good for more than three months. Her
own loves have no deep roots, but she seems to have the power of arousing
in others furious jealousy and rage and a very delirium of pleasure. She
remains light, gay, joyous, unconcerned, but she shakes her lovers as the
Venetian thunderstorms shake the lagoons. Not long ago she tired of her
chosen swain, Beppo the gardener, and one morning the padrona’s ducks
were found dead. Peppina, her eyes dewy with crocodile tears, told the
padrona that although the suspicion almost rent her faithful heart in
twain, she must needs think Beppo the culprit. The local detective, or
police officer, came and searched the unfortunate Beppo’s humble room,
and found no incriminating poison, but did discover a pound or two of
contraband tobacco, whereupon he was marched off to court, fined eighty
francs, and jilted by his perfidious lady-love, who speedily transferred
her affections. If she had been born in the right class and the right
century, Peppina would have made an admirable and brilliant Borgia.
Beppo sent a stinging reproof in verse to Peppina by the new gardener,
and the Little Genius read it to us, to show the poetic instinct of the
discarded lover, and how well he had selected his rebuke from the store
of popular verses known to gondoliers and fishermen of Venice:—
“_No te fidar de l’ albaro che piega_,
_Ne de la dona quando la te giura_.
_La te impromete_, _e po la te denega_;
_No te fidar de l’ albaro che piega_.”
(“Trust not the mast that bends.
Trust not a woman’s oath;
She’ll swear to you, and there it ends,
Trust not the mast that bends.”)
Beppo, Salemina, and I were talking together one morning,—just a casual
meeting in the street,—when Peppina passed us. She had a market-basket
in each hand, and was in her gayest attire, a fresh crimson rose between
her teeth being the last and most fetching touch to her toilet. She gave
a dainty shrug of her shoulders as she glanced at Beppo’s hanging head
and hungry eye, and then with a light laugh hummed, “Trust not the mast
that bends,” the first line of the poem that Beppo had sent her.
“It is better to let her go,” I said to him consolingly.
“_Si_, _madama_; but”—with a profound sigh—“she is very pretty.”
So she is, and although my idea of the fitness of things is somewhat
unsettled when Peppina serves our dinner wearing a yoke and sleeves of
coarse lace with her blue cotton gown, and a bunch of scarlet poppies in
her hair, I can do nothing in the way of discipline because Salemina
approves of her as part of the picture. Instead of trying to develop
some moral sense in the little creature, Salemina asked her to alternate
roses and oleanders with poppies in her hair, and gave her a coral comb
and ear-rings on her birthday. Thus does a warm climate undermine the
strict virtue engendered by Boston east winds.
Francesco—Cecco for short—is general assistant in the kitchen, and a good
gondolier to boot. When our little family is increased by more than
three guests at dinner, Cecco is pressed into dining-room service, and
becomes under-butler to Peppina. Here he is not at ease. He scrubs his
tanned face until it shines like San Domingo mahogany, brushes his black
hair until the gloss resembles a varnish, and dons coarse white cotton
gloves to conceal his work-stained hands and give an air of fashion and
elegance to the banquet. His embarrassment is equalled only by his
earnestness and devotion to the dreaded task. Our American guests do not
care what we have upon our bill of fare when they can steal a glance at
the intensely dramatic and impassioned Cecco taking Pina into a corner of
the dining-room and, seizing her hand, despairingly endeavour to find out
his next duty. Then, with incredibly stiff back, he extends his right
hand to the guest, as if the proffered plate held a scorpion instead of a
tidbit. There is an extra butler to be obtained when the function is a
sufficiently grand one to warrant the expense, but as he wears carpet
slippers and Pina flirts with him from soup to fruit, we find ourselves
no better served on the whole, and prefer Cecco, since he transforms an
ordinary meal into a beguiling comedy.
“What does it matter, after all?” asks Salemina. “It is not life we are
living, for the moment, but an act of light opera, with the scenes all
beautifully painted, the music charming and melodious, the costumes gay
and picturesque. We are occupying exceptionally good seats, and we have
no responsibility whatever: we left it in Boston, where it is probably
rolling itself larger and larger, like a snowball; but who cares?”
“Who cares, indeed?” I echo. We are here not to form our characters or
to improve our minds, but to let them relax; and when we see anything
which opposses the Byronic ideal of Venice (the use of the concertina as
the national instrument having this tendency), we deliberately close our
eyes to it. I have a proper regard for truth in matters of fact like
statistics. I want to know the exact population of a town, the precise
total of children of school age, the number of acres in the Yellowstone
Park, and the amount of wheat exported in 1862; but when it comes to
things touching my imagination I resent the intrusion of some laboriously
excavated truth, after my point of view is all nicely settled, and my
saints, heroes, and martyrs are all comfortably and picturesquely
arranged in their respective niches or on their proper pedestals.
When the Man of Fact demolishes some pretty fallacy like William Tell and
the apple, he should be required to substitute something equally
delightful and more authentic. But he never does. He is a useful but
uninteresting creature, the Man of Fact, and for a travelling companion
or a neighbour at dinner give me the Man of Fancy, even if he has not a
grain of exact knowledge concealed about his person. It seems to me
highly important that the foundations of Glasgow, Birmingham, Manchester,
or Spokane Falls should be rooted in certainty; but Verona, Padua, and
Venice—well, in my opinion, they should be rooted in Byron and Ruskin and
Shakespeare.