LITMIR.BIZ

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girls—all that day. Afterwards many weeks are passing and Letterio don’t be asking to be married, he was telling always that he would not be married never, never, never; also with the suspicion that no girl would take him. Excuse me, it is like the man who was fell down from the horse and was telling that he was go down—was not fell down. And it was festa again and Letterio was drinking plenty much again and was going on the street again and was meeting a girl again and was telling: ‘Please, you, marry me very directly.’ And the girl was replying: ‘Yes.’“

      “But surely,” I exclaimed, “surely they were not so silly as to get married when he was sober, were they?”

      It seemed, however, that they were. To save the expense and avoid the chaff that would have attended a marriage in Castellinaria, they went to the next village for a couple of days and returned married.

      “But when the man,” said Peppino, “must be finding the courage in the bottle, this is not a good thing. The courage for the happy marriage must be in the heart. We know that good wine it is sincero, it makes to be speaking the truth; yes, very likely. But the wine it is sometimes traditore, it can also be telling the—what is bugia? Excuse me, it is the lie.”

      “And so Letterio is married?”

      “Look here, he was married. Now I shall tell you. Oh! what a bad woman she was! Impossible to keep her in the albergo. ‘Please go away, Letterio; I am very sorry; you and your wife also.’ And went away, to his home in Messina and his wife also. In the winter was coming the disaster, the terremoto, the earthquake, and the city was finished to be consumed and the train was bringing the fugitives all day and all night. I was down to the station, Brancaccia was making ready the beds, Carmelo was driving them up and was bringing more and then more—broken people, also whole people, all without nothing, very undressed, and the albergo was became a hospital, a refugio, and the doctors were committing operations upon them in the bedrooms and were curing them and curing them till they died and went away in the cimitero—Oh! it was very pitiful—and sometimes they were repairing them and sending them away in the train. And I was making the journey with the hopeness to un-dig Letterio. During three days was I searching the mournful ruins of Messina but I don’t be finding Letterio, nor alive nor dead, nor his wife, and I am unhappy; also Brancaccia is unhappy. This is why she was now going away with Ricuzzu.”

      “Oh! I thought probably the baby had—”

      “Yes, many times that is the explication, but this time it is other; it is that she don’t like to be hearing the story of Letterio. I shall tell you that Brancaccia is a gentle person, very tender in the heart.”

      “Yes,” I agreed, “of course she is. But are not you both making too much of this? You could not have known there would be an earthquake in Messina. If there was to be one it might have been in some other city, and they would not have been destroyed.”

      “Look here; perhaps she was not a so bad woman; perhaps some day she would be making a little Ricuzzu and would be learning to be a good woman.”

      “She might learn very slowly or not at all; and think of her poor husband all the time!”

      “Let us talk of something other. Do you remember Alfio Mascalucía?”

      “Perhaps; what did he do?”

      “You were always calling him Bellini.”

      “In the barber’s shop opposite? Of course, I remember him, but I had no idea he had such a magnificent name or I never should have dared to take liberties with it.”

      I remembered him very well. I remembered going into the shop one day and he was alone, busy writing at a table in the corner. He said he was composing a polka. He had ruled his own staves because, like Schubert, he could not afford to buy music paper; he wanted all the money he could save to pay a publisher to publish his polka—just as we do in England—and if it succeeded his fortune would be made. I felt a sinking at the heart, as though he was telling me he had been gazing on the mirage of the lottery until he had dreamt a number. He had filled about two pages and a half with polka stuff, but had not yet composed the conclusion.

      “You see, what I must do is to make it arrive there where the bars end” (he had drawn his bar lines by anticipation); “that will not be difficult; it is the beginning that is difficult—the tema. It does not much matter now what I write for the coda in those empty bars, but I must fill them all with something.”

      I said, “Yes. That, of course—well, of course, that is the proper spirit in which to compose a polka.”

      As I had shown myself so intelligent, he often talked to me about his music and his studies; he had an Italian translation of Cherubini’s Treatise, and had nearly finished all the exercises down to the end of florid counterpoint in four parts. His professor was much pleased with him, and had congratulated him upon possessing a mind full of resource and originality—just the sort of mind that is required for composing music of the highest class. He explained to me that counterpoint is a microcosm. In life we have destiny from which there is no escape; in counterpoint we have the canto fermo of which not a note may be altered. Destiny, like the canto fermo, is dictated for us by One who is more learned and more skilful than we; it is for us to accept what is given, and to compose a counterpoint, many counterpoints, that shall flow over and under and through, without breaking any of the rules, until we reach the full close, which is the inevitable end of both counterpoint and life.

      I called him Bellini because he told me that the composer of Norma had attained to a proficiency in counterpoint which was miraculous, and that he was the greatest musician the world had ever known. This high praise was given to Bellini partly, of course, because he was a native of Catania. London is a long way from Catania, and in England perhaps we rather neglect Italian music of the early part of last century. Once, at Casale-Monferrato, I heard a travelling company do I Puritani; they did it extremely well, and I thought the music charming, especially one sparkling little tune sung by Sir Giorgio to warn Sir Riccardo that if he should see a couple of fantasmas they would be those of Elvira and Lord Arturo. Alfio may have been thinking of the maxim, “Ars est celare artem,” and may have meant to say that Bellini had shown himself a more learned contrapuntist than (say) Bach, by concealing his contrapuntal skill more effectually than Bach had managed to conceal his in the Mass in B minor. While my hair was being cut I examined the polka with interest; it was quite carefully done, the bass was figured all through and the discords were all resolved in the orthodox manner; after the shop was shut he came over to the albergo and played it to us on the piano in the salon. I should say it was a very good polka, as polkas go, and certainly more in the manner of the Catanian maestro than in that of the Leipzig cantor.

      “And what about Alfio?” I asked. “Did he also marry a bad woman?”

      Then Peppino told me the story of the Figlio di Etna. He called him this because he came from a village on the slopes of the volcano, where his parents kept a small inn, the Albergo Mongibello, and where also lived his cousin Maria, to whom he was engaged. In the days when he used to talk to me about his counterpoint, Alfio was about twenty-four, and always so exceedingly cheerful and full of his music that no one would have suspected that his private life was being carried on in an inferno, yet so it was; a widow had fallen in love with him, and had insisted on his living with her. “And look here,” said Peppino, “the bad day for Alfio was the day when he went to the house of the widow.” He was too much galantuomo to resist; he had not forgotten Maria but he thought she could wait, and besides, he was at first flattered by the widow’s attentions and amused by the novelty of the situation; but he never cared for the widow, and soon his chains became unbearable. As Peppino said, “There don’t be some word to tell the infernalness it is when you are loved by the woman you hate.” He exercised his contrapuntal ingenuity by devising schemes for circumventing this troublesome passage in the canto fermo of his life without breaking any of the rules, and finally hit upon the device of running away. So many men in a similar difficulty have done the same thing, that his professor, and even the stern Cherubini himself, would have condemned the progression less on account of its harshness and irregularity than because of its lack of originality.

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