The Piccinino, Volume 2 (of 2); The last of Aldinis

by George Sand

"For a cold, perhaps a selfish man, eh, Beppa?" rejoined the artist with a melancholy air, as he sat down. "Well, I myself have at times believed that I was such a man; for I have done some reasonable things, and I have made some sacrifices to the demands of society. But when in the evening the bands of the Austrian regiments wake the echoes of our great squares and our placid canals, with airs from Der Freischutz and fragments of Beethoven's symphonies, then I find that I have tears in abundance, and that my sacrifices have been worth but little. A new sense seems to awake within me: the sadness of regret and a longing for reverie, elements which seldom enter into our southern character, find their way into my system through every pore, and I see clearly enough that our music is incomplete, and that the art which I serve is insufficient to express the impulses of my heart; that is why I am, as you see, disgusted with the stage, surfeited with the excitement of triumph, and in nowise desirous to win fresh applause by the old methods; I would like to plunge into a life full of new emotions, and find in the lyric drama an image of the drama of my whole life; but in that case I should perhaps become as gloomy and despondent as a Hamburger, and you would laugh at me without pity, Beppa! That must not be. Let us drink, my good friends! viva merry Italy and Venice the fair!"

He put his glass to his lips, then absent-mindedly replaced it on the table without swallowing a drop of wine. The abbé answered him with a sigh, Beppa pressed his hand, and after a few moments of melancholy silence, Lelio, being urged to fulfil his promise, began his narrative in these words:

I am, as you know, the son of a fisherman of Chioggia. Almost all the people along that shore have a well developed thorax and a powerful voice. Their voices would be beautiful if they did not ruin them early in life on their boats by trying to drown the roar of the sea and the wind, and by drinking and smoking beyond all reason, to avoid drowsiness and fatigue. We Chioggiotes are a fine race. It is said that a great French painter, Leopoldo Roberto, is even now engaged in commemorating our type of beauty in a picture which he allows nobody to see.

Although I am of a reasonably robust organization, as you see, my father, on comparing me with my brothers, deemed me so frail and sickly that he would not teach me either to cast the net or to sail a boat. He simply showed me how to handle the oar with both hands, to row a small boat, and sent me to Venice to earn my living as an assistant gondolier for hire. It was a great sorrow and humiliation to me, thus to go into bondage, to leave my father's house, the seashore and the honorable and perilous trade of my ancestors. But I had a fine voice, I knew a goodly number of fragments of Ariosto and Tasso. I had in me the making of an excellent gondolier, and with time and patience, I might earn fifty francs a month in the service of artists and strangers.

You do not know, Zorzi—at this point Lelio broke off his narrative and turned to me—you have no idea how rapidly the taste and appreciation of music and poetry develop among us common people. We had then and we still have—although the custom threatens to die out—our troubadours and poets, whom we call cupids; itinerant rhapsodists they are, and they bring us from the central provinces inaccurate notions of the mother-tongue, modified, I might more properly say enriched, by all the genius of the dialects of the north and south. Men of the people, like ourselves, endowed at once with memory and imaginative power, do not hesitate at all to blend their curious improvisations with the creations of the poets. Forever picking up and dropping as they pass some novel turn of phrase, they embellish their speech and the text of their authors with a most extraordinary confusion of idioms. We might say that they preserve the instability of the language in the frontier provinces and along the coast. In our ignorance we accept as decisive the decisions of this itinerant academy; and you have often had occasion to admire, sometimes the energy, sometimes the grotesqueness of the Italian of our ports as rendered by the singers of the lagoons.

On a Sunday at noon, after high mass, in the public square of Chioggia, or in the evening, in the wine-shops on the shore, these rhapsodists, by their recitations interspersed with bits of singing and declamation, hold spellbound large and enthusiastic audiences. Ordinarily the cupid stands on a table, and from time to time plays a prelude or a finale of his own composition on some sort of an instrument; one on the Calabrian bagpipe, another on the Bergamo viol, others on the violin, flute or guitar. The Chioggians, outwardly phlegmatic and cold, listen at first with an impassive and almost contemptuous air, smoking vigorously; but at the mighty lance-thrusts of Ariosto's heroes, at the death of the paladins, at the adventures of damsels delivered and giants run through, the audience is roused, takes fire, shouts and works itself into such a frenzy that glasses and pipes are shivered, tables and chairs smashed, and often the cupid, on the point of falling a victim to the excitement aroused by himself, is forced to fly, while the enthusiasts scatter through the fields, in pursuit of an imaginary ravisher, shouting: "Amazza! amazza! kill the monster! kill the rascal! death to the brigand! bravo, Astolphe! courage, my good fellow! forward! forward! kill! kill!"—And so the Chioggians, drunk with tobacco smoke, wine and poetry, rush aboard their boats and declaim to the waves and the winds scattered fragments of those soul-stirring epics.

I was the least noisy and the most attentive of these enthusiasts. As I was very regular in my attendance at the performances, and as I always went away silent and thoughtful, my parents concluded that I was a docile, simple-minded youth, desirous but incapable of learning the noble arts. They considered my voice pleasant to hear; but, as my tendency was toward purer accentuation and less frenzied declamation than the cupids and their imitators, they decreed that, as a singer no less than as a boatman, I was good for the city—thus reversing your French saying with respect to things of small value: good for the country.

I promised to tell you of two episodes only, not the whole story of my life. So I will not detail all the sufferings through which I passed before attaining the age of fifteen years and a very moderate degree of skill as a gondolier, having subsisted meanwhile on rice and water and blows of the oar across my shoulders. The only pleasure I had was in listening to the serenaders; and, when I had a moment's leisure, I would run after the musicians and follow them all over the city. That pleasure was so intense that, even if it did not prevent my sighing for my father's house, it would have prevented me from returning to it. However, my passion for music had reached the point of sympathetic enjoyment only, not of a personal inclination; for my voice was just changing and seemed to me so unpleasant when I ventured timidly to try it, that I looked forward to no other future than that of beating the water of the lagoons all my life, at the service of the first comer.

My master and I often occupied the traghetto, or gondola stand, on the Grand Canal in front of the Aldini Palace, near the image of Saint Zandegola—a patois contraction of San Giovanni Decollato. While we were waiting for customers, my master always slept, and it was my duty to watch and offer to passers-by the service of our oars. Those hours, which were often most uncomfortable in the scorching days of summer, were delightful to me under the walls of the Aldini palace, because of a superb female voice, accompanied by a harp, which I could hear distinctly. The window through which those divine sounds came forth was directly over my head, and the protruding balcony served me as a protection against the heat of the sun. That little nook was my Eden, and I never pass the place without a thrill at my heart as I remember those modest joys of my boyhood. A silk curtain shaded the square balcony of white marble, darkened by centuries and covered with convolvulus and climbing plants, carefully tended by the fair hostess of that palatial abode. For she was fair; I had caught a glimpse of her sometimes on the balcony, and I had heard other gondoliers say that she was the most amiable and most courted woman in Venice. I was then hardly sensible of her beauty, although in Venice men of the lower classes have eyes for women of the highest rank, and vice versa, so I am told. For my own part, I was all ears; and when she appeared my heart beat fast with joy, because her presence led me to hope that I might soon hear her sing.

I had also heard the gondoliers on that stand say that the instrument with which she accompanied herself was a harp, but their descriptions were so confused that it was impossible for me to form a clear idea of that instrument. Its tones enchanted me, and I was consumed with the longing to see it rather than her. I drew a fanciful picture of it in my mind, for I had been told that it was of pure gold and larger than I was, and my master Masino had seen one decorated with the bust of a beautiful woman who seemed about to fly away, for she had wings. So I saw the harp in my dreams, sometimes in the shape of a siren, sometimes in that of a bird; sometimes I fancied that I saw a beautiful boat decked out with flags pass by, its silk cordage giving forth melodious sounds. Once I dreamed that I found a harp among the reeds and the seaweed; but, just as I put them aside to seize it, I woke with a start and could never remember its shape distinctly.