I
For centuries the painters of Venice have seized and made their own the
objects they loved most in this wondrous City by the Sea. Canaletto,
ignoring every other beautiful thing, laid hold of quays backed by
lines of palaces bordering the Grand Canal, dotted with queer gondolas
rowed by gondoliers, in queerer hoods of red or black, depending on the
guild to which they belonged. Turner stamped his ownership on sunset
skies, silver dawns, illuminations, fetes, and once in a while on a
sweep down the canal past the Salute, its dome a huge incandescent
pearl. Ziem tied up to the long wall and water steps of the Public
Garden, aflame with sails of red and gold: he is still there--was the
last I heard of him, octogenarian as he is. Rico tacks his card to
garden walls splashed with the cool shadows of rose-pink oleanders
dropping their blossoms into white and green ripples, melting into
blue. As for me--I have laid hands on a canal--the Rio Giuseppe--all of
it--from the beginning of the red wall where the sailors land, along
its crookednesses to the side entrance of the Public Garden, and so
past the rookeries to the lagoon, where the tower of Castello is ready
to topple into the sea.
Not much of a canal--not much of a painting ground really, to the
masters who have gone before and are still at work, but a truly
lovable, lovely, and most enchanting possession to me their humble
disciple. Once you get into it you never want to get out, and, once
out, you are miserable until you get back again. On one side stretches
a row of rookeries--a maze of hanging clothes, fish-nets, balconies
hooded by awnings and topped by nondescript chimneys of all sizes and
patterns, with here and there a dab of vermilion and light red, the
whole brilliant against a china-blue sky. On the other runs the long
brick wall of the garden,--soggy, begrimed; streaked with moss and
lichen in bands of black-green and yellow ochre, over which mass and
sway the great sycamores that Ziem loves, their lower branches
interwoven with zinnober cedars gleaming in spots where the prying sun
drips gold.
Only wide enough for a barca and two gondolas to pass--this canal of
mine. Only deep enough to let a wine barge through; so narrow you must
go all the way back to the lagoon if you would turn your gondola; so
short you can row through it in five minutes; every inch of its water
surface part of everything about it, so clear are the reflections; full
of moods, whims, and fancies, this wave space--one moment in a broad
laugh coquetting with a bit of blue sky peeping from behind a cloud,
its cheeks dimpled with sly undercurrents, the next swept by flurries
of little winds, soft as the breath of a child on a mirror; then, when
aroused by a passing boat, breaking out into ribbons of color--swirls
of twisted doorways, flags, awnings, flower-laden balconies,
black-shawled Venetian beauties all upside down, interwoven with strips
of turquoise sky and green waters--a bewildering, intoxicating jumble
of tatters and tangles, maddening in detail, brilliant in color,
harmonious in tone: the whole scintillating with a picturesqueness
beyond the ken or brush of any painter living or dead.
On summer days--none other for me in Venice (the other fellow can have
it in winter)--everybody living in the rookeries camps out on the quay,
the women sitting in groups stringing beads, the men flat on the
pavement mending their nets. On its edge, hanging over the water,
reaching down, holding on by a foot or an arm to the iron rail, are
massed the children--millions of children--I never counted them, but
still I say millions of children. This has gone on since I first staked
out my claim--was a part of the inducement, in fact, that decided me to
move in and take possession--boats, children, still water, and
rookeries being the ingredients from which I concoct color combinations
that some misguided people take home and say they feel better for.
If you ask me for how many years I have been sole owner of this stretch
of water I must refer you to Loretta, who had lived just five summers
when my big gondolier, Luigi, pulled her dripping wet from the canal,
and who had lived eleven more--sixteen, in all--when what I have to
tell you happened.
And yet, Loretta's little mishap, now I come to think of it, does not
go back far enough. My claim was really staked out before she was born
(I am still in possession--that is--I was last year, and hope to be
this), and her becoming part of its record is but the sticking of two
pins along a chart,--the first marking her entrance at five and the
second her exit at sixteen. All the other years of my occupation--those
before her coming and since her going--were, of course, full of the
kind of joy that comes to a painter, but these eleven years--well,
these had all of this joy and then, too, they had--Loretta.
I was in the bow of the gondola when the first of these two pins found
its place on the chart, working away like mad, trying to get the exact
shadow tones on a sun-flecked wall. Luigi was aft, fast asleep, his
elbow under his head: I never object, for then he doesn't shake the
boat. Suddenly from out the hum of the children's voices there came a
scream vibrant with terror. Then a splash! Then the gondola swayed as
if a barca had bumped it, and the next thing I knew Luigi's body made a
curve through the air, struck the water, with an enormous souse, and up
came Loretta, her plump, wet little body resting as easily on Luigi's
hand, as a tray rests on a waiter's. Another sweep with his free arm,
and he passed me the dripping child and clambered up beside her. The
whole affair had not occupied two minutes.
That was a great day for me!
Heretofore I had been looked upon as a squatter: possessing certain
rights, of course, and more or less welcome because of sundry lire
expended for the temporary use of fishing boats with sails up,--but
still an interloper. Now I became one of the thousand families and the
million children. These were all in evidence in less than ten seconds;
the peculiar quality of that scream had done it; not only from the top
story of the highest rookery did they swarm, but from every near-by
campo, and way back to the shipyards.
Luigi pushed the gondola to the quay and I lifted out the water-soaked,
blue-lipped little tot, her hair flattened against her cheeks (she was
laughing now,--"It was nothing," she said, "my foot slipped,") and
placed her in the hands of the longest-armed fishwife; and then Luigi
disappeared into a door, level with the quay, from which he reappeared
ten minutes later in a suit of dry clothes, the property of a
fisherman, and of so grotesque a fit, the trousers reaching to his
knees and the cuffs of the coat to his elbows, that he set the
population in a roar. My Luigi, you might as well know, is six feet and
an inch, with the torso of a Greek god and a face that is twin to
Colleone's, and, furthermore, is quite as distinguished looking as that
gentleman on horseback, even if he does wear a straw hat instead of a
copper helmet. After this Loretta became part of my establishment,
especially at luncheon time, Luigi hunting her up and bringing her
aboard in his arms, she clinging to his grizzled, sunburned neck. Often
she would spend the rest of the day watching me paint.
All I knew of her antecedents and life outside of these visits was what
Luigi told me. She was born, he said, in the shipyards, and at the
moment lived in the top of the rookery nearest the bridge. She had an
only sister, who was ten years older; the mother was the wife of a crab
fisherman who had died some years before; the two children and mother
were cared for by a brother crab fisherman. His son Francesco, if
report were true, was to marry the sister when she turned fifteen,
Francesco being four years older. This last reference to Francesco came
with a shake of the head and a certain expression in Luigi's eyes which
told me at once that his opinion of the prospective groom was not for
publication--a way he has when he dislikes somebody and is too polite
to express it.
"Fishes for crabs, like his father?" I asked.
"Yes, crabs and young girls," he answered with a frown. "A poor lot,
these crab catchers, Signore. Was it the charcoal or a brush you
wanted?"
Francesco did not interest me,--nor did the grownup sister; nor the
mother, over whom Luigi also shrugged his shoulders. It was Loretta's
chubbiness that delighted my soul.
Even at five she was a delightful little body, and full of entrancing
possibilities. One can always tell what the blossom will be from the
bud. In her case, all the essentials of beauty were in evidence: dark,
lustrous velvety eyes; dazzling teeth--not one missing; jet-black
hair--and such a wealth of it, almost to her shoulders; a slender
figure, small hands and feet; neat, well-turned ankles and wrists, and
rounded plump arms above the elbows.
"What do you intend to do, little one, when you grow up?" I asked her
one morning. She was sitting beside me, her eyes following every
movement of my brush.
"Oh, what everybody does. I shall string beads and then when I get big
like my sister I shall go to the priest and get married, and have a
ring and new shoes and a beautiful, beautiful veil all over my hair."
"So! And have you picked him out yet?"
"Oh, no, Signore! Why, I am only a little girl. But he will surely
come,--they always come."
These mornings in the gondola continued until she was ten years old.
Sometimes it was a melon held high in the air that tempted her; or a
basket of figs, or some huge bunches of grapes; or a roll and a broiled
fish from a passing cook-boat: but the bait always sufficed. With a
little cry of joy the beads would be dropped, or the neighbor's child
passed to another or whatever else occupied her busy head and small
hands, and away she would run to the water steps and hold out her arms
until Luigi rowed over and lifted her in. She had changed, of course,
in these five years, and was still changing, but only as an expanding
bud changes. The eyes were the same and so were the teeth--if any had
dropped out, newer and better ones had taken their places; the hair
though was richer, fuller, longer, more like coils of liquid jet, with
a blue sheen where the sky lights touched its folds. The tight, trim
little figure, too, had loosened out in certain places--especially
about the chest and hips. Before many years she would flower into the
purest type of the Venetian--the most beautiful woman the world knows.
At sixteen she burst into bloom.
I have never seen a black tulip, not a real velvet-black, but if inside
its shroud of glossy enfoldings--so like Loretta's hair--there lies
enshrined a mouth red as a pomegranate and as enticing, and if above it
there burn two eyes that would make a holy man clutch his rosary; and
if the flower sways on its stalk with the movement of a sapling
caressed by a summer breeze;--then the black tulip is precisely the
kind of flower that Loretta bloomed into.
And here the real trouble began,--just as it begins for every other
pretty Venetian, and here, too, must I place the second pin in my chart.
It all came through Francesco. The older sister had died with the first
child, and this crab catcher had begun to stretch out his claws for
Loretta. She and her mother still lived with Francesco's father, who
was a widower. The mother kept the house for all,--had done so for
Francesco and her daughter during their brief married life.
In her persecution Loretta would pour out her heart to Luigi, telling
how they bothered her,--her mother the most of all. She hated
Francesco,--hated his father,--hated everybody who wanted her to marry
the fisherman. (Luigi, poor fellow, had lost his only daughter when she
was five years of age, which accounted, I always thought, for his
interest in the girl.)
One morning she called to him and waited on the quay until he could
hail a passing barca and step from the gondola to its deck and so
ashore. Then the two disappeared through the gate of the garden.
"She is too pretty to go alone," he explained on his return. "Every day
she must pay a boy two soldi, Signore, to escort her to the lace
factory--the boy is sick today and so I went with her. But their
foolishness will stop after this;--these rats know Luigi."
From this day on Loretta had the Riva to herself.