NARROW SLITS OF CANALS
Even about the Piazza, the centre of the city’s life, every free seat that is shady is occupied. So, too, are the bases of the flag-poles in front of the Loggietta and behind the Campanile. Only when something out of the common moves into the open space—like the painter with the canvas ten feet long and six feet high—do these habitués leave their seats or forsake the shelter of the arcades and stand in solemn circle. This particular painter occupies the centre of a square bounded by four chairs and some yards of connecting white ribbon,—the chairs turned in so that nobody can sit on them. He has been here for many seasons. He comes every afternoon at five and paints for an hour. The crowds, too, come every day,—the same people, I think. Yet he is not the only painter in the streets. You will find them all over Venice. Some under their umbrellas, the more knowing under short gondola-sails rigged like an awning, under which they crawl out of the blazing heat. I am one of the more knowing.
The average citizen, as I have said, almost always walks. When there are no bridges across the Grand Canal he must of course rely on the gondola. Not the luxurious gondola with curtains and silk-fringed cushions, but a gondola half worn-out and now used as a ferryboat at the traghetto. These shuttles of travel run back and forth all day and all night (there are over thirty traghetti in Venice), the fare being some infinitesimally small bit of copper. Once across, the Venetian goes on about his way, dry-shod again. For longer distances, say from the railroad station to the Piazza, the Public Garden, or the Lido, he boards one of the little steamers that scurry up and down the Grand Canal or the Giudecca and the waters of some of the lagoons—really the only energetic things in Venice. Then another bit of copper coin, this time the size of a cuff-button, and he is whirled away and landed at the end of a dock lined with more seats for the weary, and every shaded space full.
Another feature of these streets is the bric-à-brac dealer. He has many of the characteristics of his equally shrewd brethren along Cheapside and the Bowery. One in particular,—he is always on the sidewalk in front of his shop. The Professor insists that these men are the curse of Venice; that they rob poor and rich alike,—the poor of their heirlooms at one-tenth their value, the rich of their gold by reselling this booty at twenty times its worth. I never take the Professor seriously about these things. His own personal patronage must be very limited, and I suspect, too, that in the earlier years of his exile, some of his own belongings—an old clock, perhaps, or a pair of paste buckles, or some other relic of better days—were saved from the pawnshop only to be swallowed up by some shark down a back street.
But there is one particular Ananias, a smug, persuasive, clean-shaven specimen of his craft, who really answers to the Professor’s epithet. He haunts a narrow crack of a street leading from the Campo San Moisè to the Piazza. This crevice of a lane is the main thoroughfare between the two great sections of Venice. Not only the Venetians themselves, but, as it is the short cut to San Marco, many of the strangers from the larger hotels—the Britannia, the Grand, the Bauer-Grünwald, and others—pass through it night and day.
Here this wily spider weaves his web for foreign flies, retreating with his victim into his hole—a little shop, dark as a pocket—whenever he has his fangs completely fastened upon the fly’s wallet. The bait is, perhaps, a church lamp, or an altar-cloth spotted with candle-grease. There are three metres in the cloth, with six spots of grease to the metre. You are a stranger and do not know that the silk factory at the corner furnished the cloth the week before for five francs a metre, Ananias the grease, and his wife the needle that sewed it together. Now hear him!
“No, nod modern; seexteenth century. Vrom a vary olt church in Padua. Zat von you saw on ze Beazzi yesterday vas modern and vary often, but I assure you, shentleman, zat zees ees antique and more seldom. Ant for dree hundredt francs eet ees re-diklous. I bay myselluf dree hundredt an’ feefty francs, only ze beesiness is so bad, and eet ees de first dime zat I speak wis you, I vould not sell eet for fife hundredt.”
You begin by offering him fifty francs.
“Two hundredt and feefty francs!” he answers, without a muscle in his face changing; “no, shentleman, it vould be eemposseeble to—”
“No, fifty,” you cry out.