HOUSEKEEPING IN VENICE.
I hope that it is by a not unnatural progress I pass from speaking of
dinners and diners to the kindred subject of the present chapter, and I
trust the reader will not disdain the lowly-minded muse that sings this
mild domestic lay. I was resolved in writing this book to tell what I
had found most books of travel very slow to tell,--as much as possible
of the everyday life of a people whose habits are so different from our
own; endeavoring to develop a just notion of their character, not only
from the show-traits which strangers are most likely to see, but also
from experience of such things as strangers are most likely to miss.
The absolute want of society of my own nation in Venice would have
thrown me upon study of the people for my amusement, even if I had cared
to learn nothing of them; and the necessity of economical housekeeping
would have caused me to live in the frugal Venetian fashion, even if
I had been disposed to remain a foreigner in every thing. Of bachelor
lodgings I had sufficient experience during my first year; but as most
prudent travelers who visit the city for a week take lodgings, I need
not describe my own particularly. You can tell the houses in which
there are rooms to let, by the squares of white paper fastened to the
window-shutters; and a casual glance as you pass through the streets,
gives you the idea that the chief income of the place is derived from
letting lodgings. Carpetless, dreary barracks the rooms usually are,
with an uncompromising squareness of prints upon the wall, an appalling
breadth of husk-bed, a niggardness of wash-bowl, and an obduracy of
sofa, never, never to be dissociated in their victim’s mind from the
idea of the villanous hard bread of Venice on which the gloomy landlady
sustains her life with its immutable purposes of plunder. Flabbiness
without softness is the tone of these discouraging chambers, which are
dear or not according to the season and the situation. On the sunlit
Riva during winter, and on the Grand Canal in summer, they are costly
enough, but they are to be found on nearly all the squares at reasonable
rates. On the narrow streets, where most native bachelors have them,
they are absurdly cheap.
As in nearly all places on the Continent, a house in Venice means a
number of rooms, including a whole story in a building, or part of it
only, but always completely separated from the story above and below, or
from the other rooms on the same floor. Every house has its own entrance
from the street, or by a common hall and stairway from the ground-floor,
where are the cellars or store-rooms, while each kitchen is usually on
a level with the other rooms of the house to which it belongs. The
isolation of the different families is secured (as perfectly as where
a building is solely appropriated to each), either by the exclusive
possession of a streetdoor, [Footnote: Where the street entrance is in
common, every floor has its bell, which being sounded, summons a servant
to some upper window with the demand, most formidable to strangers,
“_Chi xe?_” (Who is it?) But you do not answer with your name. You
reply, “_Amici!_” (Friends!) on which comforting reassurance, the
servant draws the latch of the door by a wire running upward to her
hand, and permits you to enter and wander about at your leisure till you
reach her secret height. This is, supposing the master or mistress of
the house to be at home. If they are not in, she answers your “_Amici!_”
with “_No ghe ne xe!_” (Nobody here!) and lets down a basket by a
string outside the window, and fishes up your card.] or by the unsocial
domestic habits of Europe. You bow and give good-day to the people whom
you meet in the common hall and on the common stairway, but you rarely
know more of them than their names, and you certainly care nothing about
them. The sociability of Europe, and more especially of Southern Europe,
is shown abroad; under the domestic roof it dwindles and disappears. And
indeed it is no wonder, considering how dispiriting and comfortless most
of the houses are. The lower windows are heavily barred with iron; the
wood-work is rude, even in many palaces in Venice; the rest is stone
and stucco; the walls are not often papered, though they are sometimes
painted: the most pleasing and inviting feature of the interior is the
frescoed ceiling of the better rooms. The windows shut imperfectly,
the heavy wooden blinds imperviously (is it worth while to observe that
there are no Venetian blinds in Venice?); the doors lift slantingly from
the floor, in which their lower hinges are imbedded; the stoves are of
plaster, and consume fuel without just return of heat; the balconies
alone are always charming, whether they hang high over the streets, or
look out upon the canals, and, with the gayly painted ceilings, go far
to make the houses habitable.
It happens in the case of houses, as with nearly every thing else in
Italy, that you pay about the same price for half the comfort that you
get in America. In Venice, most of the desirable situations are on the
Grand Canal; but here the rents are something absurdly high, when taken
in consideration with the fact that the city is not made a place of
residence by foreigners like Florence, and that it has no commercial
activity to enhance the cost of living. Househunting, under these
circumstances, becomes an office of constant surprise and disconcertment
to the stranger. You look, for example, at a suite of rooms in a
tumble-down old palace, where the walls, shamelessly smarted up with
coarse paper, crumble at your touch; where the floor rises and falls
like the sea, and the door-frames and window-cases have long lost all
recollection of the plumb. Madama la Baronessa is at present occupying
these pleasant apartments, and you only gain admission to them after
an embassy to procure her permission. Madama la Baronessa receives
you courteously, and you pass through her rooms, which are a little
in disorder, the Baronessa being on the point of removal. Madama la
Baronessa’s hoop-skirts prevail upon the floors; and at the side of the
couch which her form lately pressed in slumber, you observe a French
novel and a wasted candle in the society of a half-bottle of the wine of
the country. A bedroomy smell pervades the whole suite, and through the
open window comes a curious stench explained as the odor of Madama la
Baronessa’s guinea-pigs, of which she is so fond that she has had their
sty placed immediately under her window in the garden. It is this garden
which has first taken your heart, with a glimpse caught through the
great open door of the palace. It is disordered and wild, but so much
the better; its firs are very thick and dark, and there are certain
statues, fauns and nymphs, which weather stains and mosses have made
much decenter than the sculptor intended. You think that for this
garden’s sake you could put up with the house, which must be very cheap.
What is the price of the rooms? you ask of the smiling landlord. He
answers, without winking, “If taken for several years, a thousand
florins a year.” At which you suppress the whistle of disdainful
surprise, and say you think it will not suit. He calls your attention to
the sun, which comes in at every side, which will roast you in summer,
and will not (as he would have you think) warm you in winter. “But there
is another apartment,”--through which you drag languidly. It is empty
now, being last inhabited by an English Ledi,--and her stove-pipes
went out of the windows, and blackened the shabby stucco front of the
villanous old palace.
In a back court, upon a filthy canal, you chance on a house, the
curiously frescoed front of which tempts you within. A building which
has a lady and gentleman painted in fresco, and making love from balcony
to balcony, on the façade, as well as Arlecchino depicted in the act of
leaping from the second to the third story, promises something. Promises
something, but does not fulfill the promise. The interior is fresh,
clean, and new, and cold and dark as a cellar. This house--that is to
say, a floor of the house--you may have for four hundred florins a year;
and then farewell the world and the light of the sun! for neither will
ever find you in that back court, and you will never see any body but
the neighboring laundresses and their children, who cannot enough admire
the front of your house.
_E via in seguito!_ This is of house keeping, not house-hunting. There
are pleasant and habitable houses in Venice--but they are not cheap, as
many of the uninhabitable houses also are not. Here, discomfort and ruin
have their price, and the tumble-down is patched up and sold at rates
astonishing to innocent strangers who come from countries in good
repair, where the tumble-down is worth nothing. If I were not ashamed
of the idle and foolish old superstitions in which I once believed
concerning life in Italy, I would tell how I came gradually to expect
very little for a great deal; and how a knowledge of many houses to let,
made me more and more contented with the house we had taken.
It was in one corner of an old palace on the Grand Canal, and the window
of the little parlor looked down upon the water, which had made friends
with its painted ceiling, and bestowed tremulous, golden smiles upon
it when the sun shone. The dining-room was not so much favored by the
water, but it gave upon some green and ever-rustling tree-tops,
that rose to it from a tiny garden-ground, no bigger than a pocket
handkerchief. Through this window, also, we could see the quaint,
picturesque life of the canal; and from another room we could reach
a little terrace above the water. We were not in the _appartamento
signorile_, [Footnote: The noble floor--as the second or third story
of the palace is called.]--that was above,--but we were more snugly
quartered on the first story from the ground-floor, commonly used as a
winter apartment in the old times. But it had been cut up, and suites of
rooms had been broken according to the caprice of successive landlords,
till it was not at all palatial any more. The upper stories still
retained something of former grandeur, and had acquired with time more
than former discomfort. We were not envious of them, for they were
humbly let at a price less than we paid; though we could not quite
repress a covetous yearning for their arched and carven windows, which
we saw sometimes from the canal, above the tops of the garden trees.
The gondoliers used always to point out our palace (which was called
Casa Falier) as the house in which Marino Faliero was born; and for a
long time we clung to the hope that it might be so. But however
pleasant it was, we were forced, on reading up the subject a little, to
relinquish our illusion, and accredit an old palace at Santi Apostoli
with the distinction we would fain have claimed for ours. I am rather at
a loss to explain how it made our lives in Casa Falier any pleasanter to
think that a beheaded traitor had been born in it, but we relished the
superstition amazingly as long as we could possibly believe in it. What
went far to confirm us at first in our credulity was the residence, in
another part of the palace, of the Canonico Falier, a lineal descendant
of the unhappy doge. He was a very mild-faced old priest, with a white
head, which he carried downcast, and crimson legs, on which he moved but
feebly. He owned the rooms in which he lived, and the apartment in the
front of the palace just above our own. The rest of the house belonged
to another, for in Venice many of the palaces are divided up and sold
among different purchasers, floor by floor, and sometimes even room by
room.
But the tenantry of Casa Falier was far more various than its
proprietorship. Over our heads dwelt a Dalmatian family; below our feet
a Frenchwoman; at our right, upon the same floor, an English gentleman;
under him a French family; and over him the family of a marquis in exile
from Modena. Except with Mr. ----, the Englishman, who was at once our
friend and landlord (impossible as this may appear to those who know
any thing of landlords in Italy), we had no acquaintance, beyond that of
salutation, with the many nations represented in our house. We could not
help holding the French people in some sort responsible for the
invasion of Mexico; and, though opportunity offered for cultivating the
acquaintance of the Modenese, we did not improve it.
As for our Dalmatian friends, we met them and bowed to them a great
deal, and we heard them overhead in frequent athletic games, involving
noise as of the maneuvering of cavalry; and as they stood a good deal
on their balcony, and looked down upon us on ours, we sometimes enjoyed
seeing them admirably foreshortened like figures in a frescoed ceiling.
The father of this family was a little man of a solemn and impressive
demeanor, who had no other occupation but to walk up and down the city
and view its monuments, for which purpose he one day informed us he had
left his native place in Dalmatia, after forty years’ study of Venetian
history. He further told us that this was by no means worth the time
given it; that whereas the streets of Venice were sepulchres in point
of narrowness and obscurity, he had a house in Zara, from the windows
of which you might see for miles uninterruptedly! This little gentleman
wore a black hat, in the last vivid polish of respectability, and I
think fortune was not his friend. The hat was too large for him, as the
hats of Italians always are; it came down to his eyes, and he carried a
cane. Every evening he marched solemnly at the head of a procession of
his handsome young children, who went to hear the military music in St.
Mark’s Square.
The entrance to the house of the Dalmatians--we never knew their
names--gave access also to a house in the story above them, which
belonged to some mysterious person described on his door-plate as “Co.
Prata.” I think we never saw Co. Prata himself, and only by chance
some members of his family when they came back from their summer in the
country to spend the winter in the city. Prata’s “Co.,” we gradually
learnt, meant “Conte,” and the little counts and countesses, his
children, immediately on their arrival took an active part in the
exercises of the Dalmatian cavalry. Later in the fall, certain of the
count’s vassals came to the _riva_ [Footnote: The gondola landing-stairs
which descend to the water before palace-doors and at the ends of
streets.] in one of the great boats of the Po, with a load of brush and
corncobs for fuel--and this is all we ever knew of our neighbors on the
fourth floor. As long as he remained “Co.” we yearned to know who and
what he was; being interpreted as Conte Prata, he ceased to interest us.
Such, then, was the house, and such the neighborhood in which two little
people, just married, came to live in Venice.
They were by nature of the order of shorn lambs, and Providence,
tempering the inclemency of the domestic situation, gave them Giovanna.
The house was furnished throughout, and Giovanna had been furnished with
it. She was at hand to greet the new-comers, and “This is my wife, the
new mistress,” said the young _Paron_ [Footnote: _Padrone_ in Italian.
A salutation with Venetian friends, and the title by which Venetian
servants always designate their employers.] with the bashful pride
proper to the time and place. Giovanna glowed welcome, and said, with
adventurous politeness, she was very glad of it.
“_Serva sua!_”
The _Parona_, not knowing Italian, laughed in English.
So Giovanna took possession of us, and acting upon the great truth that
handsome is that handsome does, began at once to make herself a thing of
beauty.
As a measure of convenience and of deference to her feelings, we
immediately resolved to call her G., merely, when speaking of her
in English, instead of Giovanna, which would have troubled her with
conjecture concerning what was said of her. And as G. thus became the
centre around which our domestic life revolved, she must be somewhat
particularly treated of in this account of our housekeeping. I suppose
that, given certain temperaments and certain circumstances, this would
have been much like keeping play-house anywhere; in Venice it had, but
for the unmistakable florins it cost, a curious property of unreality
and impermanency. It is sufficiently bad to live in a rented house; in
a house which you have hired ready-furnished, it is long till your life
takes root, and Home blossoms up in the alien place. For a great while
we regarded our house merely as very pleasant lodgings, and we were slow
to form any relations which could take from our residence its temporary
character. Had we but thought to get in debt to the butcher, the baker,
and the grocer, we might have gone far to establish ourselves at once;
but we imprudently paid our way, and consequently had no ties to bind us
to our fellow-creatures. In Venice provisions are bought by housekeepers
on a scale surprisingly small to one accustomed to wholesale American
ways, and G., having the purse, made our little purchases in cash,
never buying more than enough for one meal at a time. Every morning,
the fruits and vegetables are distributed from the great market at the
Rialto among a hundred greengrocers’ stalls in all parts of the city;
bread (which is never made at home) is found fresh at the baker’s; there
is a butcher’s stall in each campo with fresh meat. These shops are
therefore resorted to for family supplies day by day; and the poor lay
in provisions there in portions graduated to a soldo of their ready
means. A great Bostonian whom I remember to have heard speculate on the
superiority of a state of civilization in which you could buy two cents’
worth of beef to that in which so small a quantity was unpurchasable,
would find the system perfected here, where you can buy half a cent’s
worth. It is a system friendly to poverty, and the small retail prices
approximate very closely the real value of the stuff sold, as we
sometimes proved by offering to purchase in quantity. Usually no
reduction would be made from the retail rate, and it was sufficiently
amusing to have the dealer figure up the cost of the quantity we
proposed to buy, and then exhibit an exact multiplication of his retail
rate by our twenty or fifty. Say an orange is worth a soldo: you get no
more than a hundred for a florin, though the dealer will cheerfully go
under that number if he can cheat you in the count. So in most things
we found it better to let G. do the marketing in her own small Venetian
fashion, and “guard our strangeness.”
But there were some things which must be brought to the house by the
dealers, such as water for drinking and cooking, which is drawn from
public cisterns in the squares, and carried by stout young girls to all
the houses. These _bigolanti_ all come from the mountains of Friuli;
they all have rosy cheeks, white teeth, bright eyes, and no waists
whatever (in the fashionable sense), but abundance of back. The cisterns
are opened about eight o’clock in the morning, and then their day’s
work begins with chatter, and splashing, and drawing up buckets from the
wells; and each sturdy little maiden in turn trots off under a burden
of two buckets,--one appended from either end of a bow resting upon the
right shoulder. The water is very good, for it is the rain which
falls on the shelving surface of the campo, and soaks through a bed of
sea-sand around the cisterns into the cool depths below. The bigolante
comes every morning and empties her brazen buckets into the great
picturesque jars of porous earthenware which ornament Venetian kitchens;
and the daily supply of water costs a moderate family about a florin a
month.
Fuel is likewise brought to your house, but this arrives in boats. It is
cut upon the eastern shore of the Adriatic, and comes to Venice in small
coasting vessels, each of which has a plump captain in command, whose
red face is so cunningly blended with his cap of scarlet flannel that it
is hard on a breezy day to tell where the one begins and the other ends.
These vessels anchor off the Custom House in the Guidecca Canal in the
fall, and lie there all winter (or until their cargo of fuel is sold), a
great part of the time under the charge solely of a small yellow dog of
the irascible breed common to the boats of the Po. Thither the smaller
dealers in firewood resort, and carry thence supplies of fuel to all
parts of the city, melodiously crying their wares up and down the
canals, and penetrating the land on foot with specimen bundles of fagots
in their arms. They are not, as a class, imaginative, I think--their
fancy seldom rising beyond the invention that their fagots are beautiful
and sound and dry. But our particular woodman was, in his way, a gifted
man. Long before I had dealings with him, I knew him by the superb song,
or rather incantation, with which he announced his coming on the Grand
Canal. The purport of this was merely that his bark was called the
Beautiful Caroline, and that his fagots were fine; but he so dwelt upon
the hidden beauties of this idea, and so prolonged their effect upon the
mind by artful repetition, and the full, round, and resonant roar with
which he closed his triumphal hymn, that the spirit was taken with the
charm, and held in breathless admiration. By all odds, this woodman’s
cry was the most impressive of all the street cries of Venice. There
may have been an exquisite sadness and sweetness in the wail of the
chimney-sweep; a winning pathos in the voice of the vender of roast
pumpkin; an oriental fancy and splendor in the fruiterers who cried
“Melons with hearts of fire!” and “Juicy pears that bathe your
beard!”--there may have been something peculiarly effective in the song
of the chestnut-man who shouted “Fat chestnuts,” and added, after a
lapse in which you got almost beyond hearing, “and well cooked!”--I do
not deny that there was a seductive sincerity in the proclamation of
one whose peaches could _not_ be called beautiful to look upon, and were
consequently advertised as “Ugly, but good!”--I say nothing to detract
from the merits of harmonious chair-menders;--to my ears the shout
of the melodious fisherman was delectable music, and all the birds of
summer sang in the voices of the countrymen who sold finches and larks
in cages, and roses and pinks in pots;--but I say, after all, none
of these people combined the vocal power, the sonorous movement, the
delicate grace, and the vast compass of our woodman. Yet this man, as
far as virtue went, was _vox et praeterea nihil_. He was a vagabond of
the most abandoned; he was habitually in drink, and I think his sins
had gone near to make him mad--at any rate he was of a most lunatical
deportment. In other lands, the man of whom you are a regular purchaser,
serves you well; in Italy he conceives that his long service gives him
the right to plunder you if possible. I felt in every fibre that this
woodman invariably cheated me in measurement, and, indeed, he
scarcely denied it on accusation. But my single experience of the
more magnificent scoundrels of whom _he_ bought the wood originally,
contented me with the swindle with which I had become familiarized. On
this occasion I took a boat and went to the Custom House, to get my fuel
at first hand. The captain of the ship which I boarded wished me to pay
more than I gave for fuel delivered at my door, and thereupon ensued the
tragic scene of bargaining, as these things are conducted in Italy. We
stood up and bargained, we sat down and bargained; the captain turned
his back upon me in indignation; I parted from him and took to my boat
in scorn; he called me back and displayed the wood--good, sound, dryer
than bones; he pointed to the threatening heavens, and declared that it
would snow that night, and on the morrow I could not get wood for twice
the present price; but I laughed incredulously. Then my captain took
another tack, and tried to make the contract in obsolete currencies, in
Austrian pounds, in Venetian pounds, but as I inexorably reduced these
into familiar money, he paused desperately, and made me an offer which
I accepted with mistaken exultation. For my captain was shrewder than I,
and held arts of measurement in reserve against me. He agreed that
the measurement and transportation should not cost me the value of his
tooth-pick--quite an old and worthless one--which he showed me. Yet I
was surprised into the payment of a youth whom this man called to assist
at the measurement, and I had to give the boatman drink-money at the
end. He promised that the measure should be just: yet if I lifted my eye
from the work he placed the logs slantingly on the measure, and threw
in knotty chunks that crowded wholesome fuel out, and let the daylight
through and through the pile. I protested, and he admitted the wrong
when I pointed it out: “_Ga razon, lu!_” (He’s right!) he said to
his fellows in infamy, and throwing aside the objectionable pieces,
proceeded to evade justice by new artifices. When I had this memorable
load of wood housed at home, I found that it had cost just what I paid
my woodman, and that I had additionally lost my self-respect in being
plundered before my face, and I resolved thereafter to be cheated
in quiet dignity behind my back. The woodman exulted in his restored
sovereignty, and I lost nothing in penalty for my revolt.
Among other provisioners who come to your house in Venice, are those
ancient peasant-women, who bring fresh milk in bottles carefully packed
in baskets filled with straw. They set off the whiteness of their wares
by the brownness of their sunburnt hands and faces, and bear in their
general stoutness and burliness of presence, a curious resemblance to
their own comfortable bottles. They wear broad straw hats, and dangling
ear-rings of yellow gold, and are the pleasantest sight of the morning
streets of Venice, to the stoniness of which they bring a sense of
the country’s clovery pasturage, in the milk just drawn from the great
cream-colored cows.
Fishermen, also, come down the little _calli_--with shallow baskets
of fish upon their heads and under either arm, and cry their soles and
mackerel to the neighborhood, stopping now and then at some door to
bargain away the eels which they chop into sections as the thrilling
drama proceeds, and hand over as a denouement at the purchaser’s own
price. “Beautiful and all alive!” is the engaging cry with which they
hawk their fish.
Besides these daily purveyors, there are men of divers arts who come
to exercise their crafts at your house: not chimney-sweeps merely,
but glaziers, and that sort of workmen, and, best of all,
chair-menders,--who bear a mended chair upon their shoulders for a
sign, with pieces of white wood for further mending, a drawing-knife, a
hammer, and a sheaf of rushes, and who sit down at your door, and plait
the rush bottoms of your kitchen-chairs anew, and make heaps of fragrant
whittlings with their knives, and gossip with your serving-woman.
But in the mean time our own serving-woman Giovanna, the great central
principle of our housekeeping, is waiting to be personally presented to
the company. In Italy, there are old crones so haggard, that it is hard
not to believe them created just as crooked, and foul, and full of fluff
and years as you behold them, and you cannot understand how so much
frowziness and so little hair, so great show of fangs and so few teeth,
are growths from any ordinary human birth. G. is no longer young, but
she is not after the likeness of these old women. It is of a middle age,
unbeginning, interminable, of which she gives you the impression.
She has brown apple-cheeks, just touched with frost; her nose is of a
strawberry formation abounding in small dints, and having the slightly
shrunken effect observable in tardy perfections of the fruit mentioned.
A tough, pleasant, indestructible woman--for use, we thought, not
ornament--the mother of a family, a good Catholic, and the flower of
serving-women.
I do not think that Venetian servants are, as a class, given to
pilfering; but knowing ourselves subject by nature to pillage, we cannot
repress a feeling of gratitude to G. that she does not prey upon us. She
strictly accounts for all money given her at the close of each week, and
to this end keeps a kind of account-book, which I cannot help regarding
as in some sort an inspired volume, being privy to the fact, confirmed
by her own confession, that G. is not good for reading and writing. On
settling with her I have been permitted to look into this book, which is
all in capital letters,--each the evident result of serious labor,--with
figures representing combinations of the pot-hook according to bold
and original conceptions. The spelling is also a remarkable effort of
creative genius. The only difficulty under which the author labors in
regard to the book is the confusion naturally resulting from the effort
to get literature right side up when it has got upside down. The writing
is a kind of pugilism--the strokes being made straight out from the
shoulder. The account-book is always carried about with her in a
fathomless pocket overflowing with the aggregations of a housekeeper
who can throw nothing away, to wit: matchboxes, now appointed to hold
buttons and hooks-and-eyes; beeswax in the lump; the door-key (which
in Venice takes a formidable size, and impresses you at first sight as
ordnance); a patch-bag; a porte-monnaie; many lead-pencils in the stump;
scissors, pincushions, and the Beata Vergine in a frame. Indeed, this
incapability of throwing things away is made to bear rather severely
upon us in some things, such as the continual reappearance of familiar
dishes at table--particularly veteran _bifsteca_. But we fancy that the
same frugal instinct is exercised to our advantage and comfort in other
things, for G. makes a great show and merit of denying our charity to
those bold and adventurous children of sorrow, who do not scruple to
ring your door-bell, and demand alms. It is true that with G., as
with every Italian, almsgiving enters into the theory and practice of
Christian life, but she will not suffer misery to abuse its privileges.
She has no hesitation, however, in bringing certain objects of
compassion to our notice, and she procures small services to be done for
us by many lame and halt of her acquaintance. Having bought my boat (I
come, in time, to be willing to sell it again for half its cost to me),
I require a menial to clean it now and then, and Giovanna first calls
me a youthful Gobbo for the work,--a festive hunchback, a bright-hearted
whistler of comic opera. Whether this blithe humor is not considered
decent, I do not know, but though the Gobbo serves me faithfully, I find
him one day replaced by a venerable old man, whom--from his personal
resemblance to Time--I should think much better occupied with an
hourglass, or engaged with a scythe in mowing me and other mortals down,
than in cleaning my boat. But all day long he sits on my riva in the
sun, when it shines, gazing fixedly at my boat; and when the day is
dark, he lurks about the street, accessible to my slightest boating
impulse. He salutes my going out and coming in with grave reverence,
and I think he has no work to do but that which G.’s wise compassion has
given him from me. Suddenly, like the Gobbo, the Veccio also disappears,
and I hear vaguely--for in Venice you never know any thing with
precision--that he has found a regular employment in Padua, and again
that he is dead. While he lasts, G. has a pleasant, even a sportive
manner with this poor old man, calculated to cheer his declining years;
but, as I say, cases of insolent and aggressive misery fail to touch
her. The kind of wretchedness that comes breathing woe and _sciampagnin_
[Footnote: Little champagne,--the name which the Venetian populace gave
to a fierce and deadly kind of brandy drunk during the scarcity of wine.
After the introduction of coal-oil this liquor came to be jocosely known
as _petrolio_.] under our window, and there spends a leisure hour in the
rehearsal of distress, establishes no claim either upon her pity or her
weakness. She is deaf to the voice of that sorrow, and the monotonous
whine of that dolor cannot move her to the purchase of a guilty
tranquillity. I imagine, however, that she is afraid to deny charity to
the fat Capuchin friar in spectacles and bare feet, who comes twice a
month to levy contributions of bread and fuel for his convent, for
we hear her declare from the window that the master is not at home,
whenever the good brother rings; and at last, as this excuse gives out,
she ceases to respond to his ring at all.
Sometimes, during the summer weather, comes down our street a certain
tremulous old troubadour with an aged cithern, on which he strums
feebly with bones which remain to him from former fingers, and in a thin
quivering voice pipes worn-out ditties of youth and love. Sadder music
I have never heard, but though it has at times drawn from me the sigh of
sensibility without referring sympathy to my pocket, I always hear the
compassionate soldo of Giovanna clink reproof to me upon the pavement.
Perhaps that slender note touches something finer than habitual charity
in her middle-aged bosom, for these were songs she says that they used
to sing when she was a girl, and Venice was gay and glad, and different
from now--_veramente, tutt’ altro, signor!_
It is through Giovanna’s charitable disposition that we make the
acquaintance of two weird sisters, who live not far from us in Calle
Falier, and whom we know to this day merely as the Creatures--_creatura_
being in the vocabulary of Venetian pity the term for a fellow-being
somewhat more pitiable than a _poveretta_. Our Creatures are both well
stricken in years, and one of them has some incurable disorder which
frequently confines her to the wretched cellar in which they live with
the invalid’s husband,--a mild, pleasant-faced man, a tailor by trade,
and of batlike habits, who hovers about their dusky doorway in the
summer twilight. These people have but one room, and a little nook of
kitchen at the side; and not only does the sun never find his way into
their habitation, but even the daylight cannot penetrate it. They pay
about four florins a month for the place, and I hope their landlord is
as happy as his tenants. For though one is sick, and all are wretchedly
poor, they are far from being discontented. They are opulent in the
possession of a small dog, which they have raised from the cradle, as it
were, and adopted into the family. They are never tired of playing
with their dog,--the poor old children,--and every slight display of
intelligence on his part delights them. They think it fine in him to
follow us as we go by, but pretend to beat him; and then they excuse
him, and call him ill names, and catch him up, and hug him and kiss him.
He feeds upon their slender means and the pickings that G. carefully
carries him from our kitchen, and gives to him on our doorstep in spite
of us, while she gossips with his mistresses, who chorus our appearance
at such times with “_I miei rispetti, signori!_” We often see them in
the street, and at a distance from home, carrying mysterious bundles of
clothes; and at last we learn their vocation, which is one not known
out of Italian cities, I think. There the state is Uncle to the
hard-pressed, and instead of many pawnbrokers’ shops there is one large
municipal spout, which is called the Monte di Pietà, where the needy
pawn their goods. The system is centuries old in Italy, but there are
people who to this day cannot summon courage to repair in person to the
Mount of Pity, and, to meet their wants, there has grown up a class of
frowzy old women who transact the business for them, and receive a small
percentage for their trouble. Our poor old Creatures were of this class,
and as there were many persons in impoverished, decaying Venice who had
need of the succor they procured, they made out to earn a living when
both were well, and to eke out existence by charity when one was ill.
They were harmless neighbors, and I believe they regretted our removal,
when this took place, for they used to sit down under an arcade
opposite our new house, and spend the duller intervals of trade in the
contemplation of our windows.
The alarming spirit of nepotism which Giovanna developed at a later
day was, I fear, a growth from the encouragement we gave her charitable
disposition. But for several months it was merely from the fact of a boy
who came and whistled at the door until Giovanna opened it and reproved
him in the name of all the saints and powers of darkness, that we knew
her to be a mother; and we merely had her word for the existence of
a husband, who dealt in poultry. Without seeing Giovanna’s husband, I
nevertheless knew him to be a man of downy exterior, wearing a canvas
apron, thickly crusted with the gore of fowls, who sat at the door of
his shop and plucked chickens forever, as with the tireless hand of
Fate. I divined that he lived in an atmosphere of scalded pullet;
that three earthen cups of clotted chickens’ blood, placed upon his
window-shelf, formed his idea of an attractive display, and that he
shadowed forth his conceptions of the beautiful in symmetrical rows of
plucked chickens, presenting to the public eye rear views embellished
with a single feather erect in the tail of each bird; that he must be,
through the ethics of competition, the sworn foe of those illogical
peasants who bring dead poultry to town in cages, like singing birds,
and equally the friend of those restaurateurs who furnish you a meal of
victuals and a feather-bed in the same _mezzo-polio arrosto_. He turned
out on actual appearance to be all I had prefigured him, with the
additional merit of having a large red nose, a sidelong, fugitive gait,
and a hangdog countenance. He furnished us poultry at rates slightly
advanced, I think.
As for the boy, he turned up after a while as a constant guest, and
took possession of the kitchen. He came near banishment at one time for
catching a large number of sea-crabs in the canal, and confining them in
a basket in the kitchen, which they left at the dead hour of night, to
wander all over our house,--making a mysterious and alarming sound of
snapping, like an army of death-watches, and eluding the cunningest
efforts at capture. On another occasion, he fell into the canal before
our house, and terrified us by going under twice before the arrival of
the old gondolier, who called out to him “_Petta! petta!_” (Wait!
wait!) as he placidly pushed his boat to the spot. Developing other
disagreeable traits, Beppi was finally driven into exile, from which he
nevertheless furtively returned on holidays.
The family of Giovanna thus gradually encroaching upon us, we came
also to know her mother,--a dread and loathly old lady, whom we would
willingly have seen burned at the stake for a witch. She was commonly
encountered at nightfall in our street, where she lay in wait, as it
were, to prey upon the fragrance of dinner drifting from the kitchen
windows of our neighbor, the Duchess of Parma. Here was heard the voice
of cooks and of scullions, and the ecstasies of helpless voracity in
which we sometimes beheld this old lady were fearful to witness. Nor did
we find her more comfortable in our own kitchen, where we often saw
her. The place itself is weird and terrible--low ceiled, with the stone
hearth built far out into the room, and the melodramatic implements of
Venetian cookery dangling tragically from the wall. Here is no every-day
cheerfulness of cooking-range, but grotesque andirons wading into the
bristling embers, and a long crane with villanous pots gibbeted upon it.
When Giovanna’s mother, then (of the Italian hags, haggard), rises to
do us reverence from the darkest corner of this kitchen, and croaks her
good wishes for our long life, continued health, and endless happiness,
it has the effect upon our spirits of the darkest malediction.
Not more pleasing, though altogether lighter and cheerfuler, was
Giovanna’s sister-in-law, whom we knew only as the Cognata. Making her
appearance first upon the occasion of Giovanna’s sickness, she slowly
but surely established herself as an habitual presence, and threatened
at one time, as we fancied, to become our paid servant. But a happy
calamity which one night carried off a carpet and the window curtains
of an unoccupied room, cast an evil suspicion upon the Cognata, and she
never appeared after the discovery of the theft. We suspected her of
having invented some dishes of which we were very fond, and we hated
her for oppressing us with a sense of many surreptitious favors.
Objectively, she was a slim, hoopless little woman, with a tendency to
be always at the street-door when we opened it. She had a narrow, narrow
face, with eyes of terrible slyness, an applausive smile, and a demeanor
of slavish patronage. Our kitchen, after her addition to the household,
became the banqueting-hall of Giovanna’s family, who dined there every
day upon dishes of fish and garlic, that gave the house the general
savor of a low cook-shop.
As for Giovanna herself, she had the natural tendency of excellent
people to place others in subjection. Our servitude at first was
not hard, and consisted chiefly in the stimulation of appetite to
extraordinary efforts when G. had attempted to please us with some
novelty in cooking. She held us to a strict account in this respect; but
indeed our applause was for the most part willing enough. Her culinary
execution, first revealing itself in a noble rendering of our ideas of
roast potatoes,--a delicacy foreign to the Venetian kitchen,--culminated
at last in the same style of _polpetti_ [Footnote: I confess a
tenderness for this dish, which is a delicater kind of hash skillfully
flavored and baked in rolls of a mellow complexion and fascinating
appearance.] which furnished forth the table of our neighbor, the
Duchess, and was a perpetual triumph with us.
But G.’s spirit was not wholly that of the serving-woman. We noted in
her the liveliness of wit seldom absent from the Italian poor. She was a
great babbler, and talked willingly to herself, and to inanimate things,
when there was no other chance for talk. She was profuse in maledictions
of bad weather, which she held up to scorn as that dog of a weather. The
crookedness of the fuel transported her, and she upbraided the fagots as
springing from races of ugly old curs. (The vocabulary of Venetian
abuse is inexhaustible, and the Venetians invent and combine terms of
opprobrium with endless facility, but all abuse begins and ends with the
attribution of doggishness.) The conscription was held in the campo near
us, and G. declared the place to have become unendurable--“_proprio un
campo di sospiri!_” (Really a field of sighs.) “_Staga comodo!_” she
said to a guest of ours who would have moved his chair to let her pass
between him and the wall. “Don’t move; the way to Paradise is not wider
than this.” We sometimes lamented that Giovanna, who did not sleep in
the house, should come to us so late in the morning, but we could not
deal harshly with her on that account, met, as we always were, with
plentiful and admirable excuses. Who were we, indeed, to place our
wishes in the balance against the welfare of the sick neighbor with whom
Giovanna passed so many nights of vigil? Should we reproach her with
tardiness when she had not closed the eye all night for a headache
properly of the devil? If she came late in the morning, she stayed late
at night; and it sometimes happened that when the Paron and Parona,
supposing her gone, made a stealthy expedition to the kitchen for cold
chicken, they found her there at midnight in the fell company of the
Cognata, bibbing the wine of the country and holding a mild Italian
revel with that vinegar and the stony bread of Venice.
I have said G. was the flower of serving-women; and so at first
she seemed, and it was long till we doubted her perfection. We knew
ourselves to be very young, and weak, and unworthy. The Parona had the
rare gift of learning to speak less and less Italian every day, and fell
inevitably into subjection. The Paron in a domestic point of view was
naturally nothing. It had been strange indeed if Giovanna, beholding the
great contrast we presented to herself in many respects, had forborne to
abuse her advantage over us. But we trusted her implicitly, and I hardly
know how or when it was that we began to waver in our confidence. It is
certain that with the lapse of time we came gradually to have breakfast
at twelve o’clock, instead of nine, as we had originally appointed it,
and that G. grew to consume the greater part of the day in making our
small purchases, and to give us our belated dinners at seven o’clock.
We protested, and temporary reforms ensued, only to be succeeded by more
hopeless lapses; but it was not till all entreaties and threats failed
that we began to think seriously it would be well to have done with
Giovanna, as an unprofitable servant. I give the result, not all the
nice causes from which it came. But the question was, How to get rid of
a poor woman and a civil, and the mother of a family dependent in great
part upon her labor? We solemnly resolve a hundred times to dismiss
G., and we shrink a hundred times from inflicting the blow. At last,
somewhat in the spirit of Charles Lamb’s Chinaman who invented roast
pig, and discovered that the sole method of roasting it was to burn
down a house in order to consume the adjacent pig-sty, and thus cook
the roaster in the flames,--we hit upon an artifice by which we could
dispense with Giovanna, and keep an easy conscience. We had long ceased
to dine at home, in despair; and now we resolved to take another
house, in which there were other servants. But even then, it was a sore
struggle to part with the flower of serving-women, who was set over the
vacated house to put it in order after our flitting, and with whom
the imprudent Paron settled the last account in the familiar little
dining-room, surrounded by the depressing influences of the empty
chambers. The place was peopled after all, though we had left it, and
I think the tenants who come after us will be haunted by our spectres,
crowding them on the pleasant little balcony, and sitting down with
them at table. G. stood there, the genius of the place, and wept six
regretful tears, each one of which drew a florin from the purse of the
Paron. She had hoped to remain with us always while we lived in Venice;
but now that she could no longer look to us for support, the Lord must
take care of her. The gush of grief was transient: it relieved her,
and she came out sunnily a moment after. The Paron went his way more
sorrowfully, taking leave at last with the fine burst of Christian
philosophy: “We are none of us masters of ourselves in this world, and
cannot do what we wish. _Ma! Come si fa? Ci vuol pazienza!_” Yet he was
undeniably lightened in heart. He had cut adrift from old moorings, and
had crossed the Grand Canal. G. did not follow him, nor any of the
long line of pensioners who used to come on certain feast-days to levy
tribute of eggs at the old house. (The postman was among these, on
Christmas and New Year’s, and as he received eggs at every house, it was
a problem with us, unsolved to this hour, how he carried them all,
and what he did with them.) Not the least among the Paron’s causes for
self-gratulation was the non-appearance at his new abode of two
local newspapers, for which in an evil hour he subscribed, which were
delivered with unsparing regularity, and which, being never read, formed
the keenest reproach of his imprudent outlay and his idle neglect of
their contents.