IX
BLACK MAGIC AND WHITE—WITCH’S NIGHT
Palazzo Rusticucci, Rome, March 16, 1899.
Letters from Maine and New Hampshire give accounts of dreadful freshets and blizzards. We read them with some surprise, and then go up to the terrace and pick our pansies and violets. We have some fine spirea and lilacs coming on fast! The wall flowers are already in bloom, and the roses make occasional little gifts, but it is far too early for these dear ones to give their perfect blossoms. Rose week—rose madness—in Rome comes at the end of April.
The strangest thing about life in Rome is that you not only do as the Romans do, but end by thinking as the Romans think, feeling as the Romans feel! Take, for example, the feeling most of the foreign residents have about the evil eye, the malocchio or jettatura, as it is indifferently called. I never knew an Italian who did not hold to this superstition more or less. Americans who have lived long in Rome either reluctantly admit that “there does seem to be something in it,” or if they are Roman born, quietly accept it as one of those things in heaven and earth that philosophy fails to take account of. In some things the Italian is free from superstition compared with the Celt or the Scot: for instance, the fear of ghosts or spirits is so rare that I have never met with it; on the other hand, the belief in the value of dreams as guides to action is deep rooted and widespread. The dreambook in some families is hardly second in importance to the book of prayer. The Italian’s eminently practical nature makes him utilize his dreams in “playing the lotto,” as the buying of lottery tickets is called. To dream of certain things indicates that you will be lucky and should play. The choice of the number is the chief preoccupation of the hardened lottery player. It is decided by the oddest chance,—the number on a banknote which one has lost and found again, the number of a cab which has brought one home from some delightful festivity. The number must always be associated with something lucky. I remember in Venice once calling on a friend who lives in a noble old palace on the Canale Grande. The pali, the dark posts rising out of the green water for the mooring of gondolas, bear the heraldic colors of the owner of the palace, and the doge’s cap, showing that the family gave a doge to Venice. Stepping from my gondola to the water-worn marble stair, I was helped by one of the servants, an old man with the suave, sympathetic manners that make the Italians the best servants in the world. I put him down as a majordomo of the old school whom my friends probably had taken over with the palace, the library, and the historic murder that goes with them. I had brought some flowers, which he insisted upon carrying. He led the way across a square courtyard to an outer stairway with a wonderful carved marble balustrade, lions rampant at the top and bottom. Suddenly he stopped and whispered to me:
“Signora,—a thousand excuses for the liberty,—but will you have the inexpressible gentility to tell me your age?”
The question was so startling that he got the right answer before my inevitable counter-question, “Why do you wish to know?” which he pretended not to hear, drowned in a flood of gratitude.
“You have conferred an immense benefit on me. The signora is expecting you.”
He had my wrap off and the drawing-room door open in a twinkling. That was not fair play; he had his answer: I would have mine. I put my question to his mistress. She laughed indulgently.
“Beppino is up to his old tricks. I told him this morning I was expecting a lady he did not know; he was on the lookout for you. When a stranger comes to the house for the first time it is the greatest possible luck to play in the lotto the figures which make up his age.”
Our servants all play regularly, sometimes winning small sums, always imagining that they will win the quaterno. The lottery and the Monte di pietà—somehow one associates them together—are now under government control, as they were formerly under the control of the Church. It is assumed as a foregone conclusion that men will gamble, that men will pawn their goods; therefore it is expedient that these inevitable concomitants of city life should be administered by the government, in order that the accruing profits should return to the people by helping to pay the expenses of their government. The lottery always appears to me like a tax offered to the citizens in the form of a gilded pill.