"For thirty-three years more, let us hope," said I.
"Eh! speriamo," (Let us hope so,) was the answer of the piffero, as he showed all his teeth in the broadest of smiles. Then, with a motion of his hand, he set both the young men going, he himself joining in, straining out his cheeks, blowing all the breath of his body into the little pipe, and running up and down the vents with a sliding finger, until finally he brought up against a high, shrill note, to which he gave the full force of his lungs, and, after holding it in loud blast for a moment, startled us by breaking off, without gradation, into a silence as sudden as if the music had snapped short off, like a pipe-stem.
On further conversation with my ciociari, I found that they came yearly from Sora, a town in the Abruzzi, about one hundred miles from Rome, making the journey on foot, and picking up by the way whatever trifle of copper they could. In this manner they travelled the whole distance in five days, living upon onions, lettuce, oil, and black bread. They were now singing the second novena for Natale, and, if one could judge from their manner and conversation, were quite content with what they had earned. I invited them up into my room, and there in the pleasantest way they stunned us with the noise of both their instruments, to the great delight of the children and the astonishment of the servants, for whom these common things had worn out their charm by constant repetition. At my request, they repeated the words of the novena they had been singing, and I took them down from their lips. After eliminating the wonderful m-ms of the Neapolitan dialect, in which all the words lay imbedded like shells in the sand, and supplying some of the curious elisions with which those Abruzzi Procrusteans recklessly cut away the polysyllables, so as to bring them within the rythmic compass, they ran thus:—
"Verginella figlia di Sant' Anna,
Nella ventre portasti il buon Gesù.
Si parturisti sotto la capanna,
E dov' mangiav'no lo bue e 1' asinello.
"Quel Angelo gridava: 'Venite, Santi!
'Chè andato Gesù dentro la capanna,
Ma guardate Vergine beata,
Che in ciel in terra sia nostr' avvocata!
"San Giuseppe andava in compagnia,
Si trovò al partorir di Maria.
La notte di natale è notte santa—
Lo Padre e 1' Figliolo e lo Spirito Santo.
'Sta la ragione che abbiamo cantato;
Sia a Gesù bambino rappresentata."
The sudden introduction of "Quel Angelo" in this song reminds us of a similar felicity in the romantic ballad of "Lord Bateman," where we are surprised to learn that "this Turk," to whom no allusion had been previously made, "has one lovely daughter."
The air to which this is sung is very simple and sweet, though monotonous. Between the verses and at the close, a curious little ritornello is played.
The wanderings of the pifferari are by no means confined to the Roman States. Sometimes they stray "as far away as Paris is," and, wandering about in that gay capital, like children at a fair, play in the streets for chance sous, or stand as models to artists, who, having once been to Rome, hear with a longing Rome-sickness the old characteristic sounds of the piffero and zampogna. Two of them I remember to have heard thus, as I was at work in my studio in Paris; and so vividly did they recall the old Roman time, that I called them in for a chat.
Wonderful was their speech. In the few months of their wandering, they had put into their Neapolitan dough various plums of French words, which, pronounced in their odd way, "suffered a change into something peculiarly rich and strange." One of them told me that his wife had just written to him by the hand of a scrivano, lamenting his absence, and praying him to send her his portrait. He had accordingly sent her a photograph in half-length. Some time afterwards she acknowledged the receipt of it, but indignantly remonstrated with him for sending her a picture "che pareva guardando per la fenestra" (which seemed to be looking out of the window,) as she oddly characterized a half-length, and praying to have his legs also in the next portrait. This same fellow, with his dull, amiable face, played the role of a ferocious wounded brigand dragged into concealment by his wife, in the studio of a friend next door; but, despite the savagery and danger of his counterfeited position, he was sure to be overpowered by sleep before he had been in it more than five minutes,—and if the artist's eye left him for a moment, he never failed to change his attitude for one more fitted to his own somnolent propensities than for the picture.