“Jammo, jammo; jammo, jammo jà,” sang the loud, hoarse voices; then a tremendous scrape and twang, and the yelled-out burden, “Funiculi, funiculà; funiculi, funiculà; jammo, jammo, jammo, jammo, jammo jà.”
Then came a few cries of “Bis, Bis!” from a neighboring hotel, a brief clapping of hands, the sound of a handful of coppers rattling into the boat, and the oar-stroke of some gondolier making ready to turn away.
“Sing the Camesella,” ordered some voice with a foreign accent.
“No, no! Santa Lucia.”
“I want the Camesella.”
“No! Santa Lucia. Hi! sing Santa Lucia—d’you hear?”
The musicians, under their green and yellow and red lamps, held a whispered consultation on the manner of conciliating these contradictory demands. Then, after a minute’s hesitation, the violins began the prelude of that once famous air, which has remained popular in Venice—the words written, some hundred years ago, by the patrician Gritti, the music by an unknown composer—La Biondina in Gondoleta.
That cursed eighteenth century! It seemed a malignant fatality that made these brutes choose just this piece to interrupt me.
At last the long prelude came to an end; and above the cracked guitars and squeaking fiddles there arose, not the expected nasal chorus, but a single voice singing below its breath.
My arteries throbbed. How well I knew that voice! It was singing, as I have said, below its breath, yet none the less it sufficed to fill all that reach of the canal with its strange quality of tone, exquisite, far-fetched.