Chapter 33

Spent an hour teaching Filomena her large letters up to N, and making her say them by rote, and with that end in view have divided them into three portions--ABCD--EFG--ILMN. She manages all right, except that she always jumps E and L. Lesson closed: "Were you at church to-day, Filomena?" "No, I have nothing to confess." "Did you go to church last Sunday?" "No, I have not been for six weeks now. I have committed no sin. What wrong do I do? I have no love affair, nothing." "What used you to confess?" "A few bad words, which had slipped out. Now I do nothing wrong." "But one can go wrong, without committing any sin, when one is high-minded, for instance." "I am not high-minded. If you, on the other hand, were to imagine yourself better than the friends who come to visit you, that would be quite natural; for you are better."

* * * * *

The day has been long. This evening the girl had errands to do for me. She came in here after her Sunday walk in the Campagna. I said: "Shall we read?" (Just then a band of young people passed along the street with a harmonica and a lot of castanets, and commenced a song in honour of Garibaldi. With all its simplicity, it sounded unspeakably affecting; I was quite softened.) She replied: "With pleasure." I thought to myself: "Now to see whether she remembers a word of what I said to her yesterday." But she went on at once: "Signore, I have been industrious." She had bought herself an ABC and had taught herself alone not only all the large letters, but also all the little ones, and had learnt them all off by heart as well. I was so astonished that I almost fell back in the bed. "But what is this, Filomena? Have you learnt to read from someone else?" "No, only from you yesterday. But for five years my only wish has been to learn to read, and I am so glad to be able to." I wanted to teach her to spell. "I almost think I can a little." And she was already so far that--without spelling first--she read a whole page of two-letter spellings, almost without a mistake. She certainly very often said: "Da--ad," or read _fo_ for _of_, but her progress was amazing. When she spells, she takes the words as a living reality, not merely as words, and adds something to them, for instance, _s--a, sa; l--i, li; r--e, re; salire alle scale_, (jump down the stairs.) "Filomena, I could teach you to read in three weeks." _She_: "I have always thought it the greatest shame for a man or woman not to be able to read." I told her something about the progress of the human race, that the first men and women had been like animals, not at all like Adam and Eve. "Do you think I believe that Eve ate an apple and that the serpent could speak? _Non credo mente_. Such things are like _mal'occhi_ (belief in the evil eye)." And without any transition, she begins, _sempre allegra_, as she calls herself--to sing a gay song. Just now she is exceedingly delighted with a certain large red shawl. There came a pedlar to the door; she sighed deeply at the sight of the brilliant red; so I gave it her.

She is a great lover and a connoisseur of wine, like myself. We taste and drink together every dinner-time. As she always waits upon me, I often give her a little cake and wine while I am eating. Now we have begun a new wine, white Roman muscat. But I change my wine almost every other day. Filomena had taken the one large bottle and stacked up newspapers round it on the table, so that if K.B. came he should not see it. It so happened that he came to-day, whilst I was dining and she eating with me. There was a ring; she wanted to go. "Stay; perhaps it is not for me at all; and in any case, I do not ask anyone's permission for you to be here." He came in, and said in Danish, as he put his hat down: "Oh, so you let the girl of the house dine with you; I should not care for that." Filomena, who noticed his glance in her direction, and his gesture, said, with as spiteful a look, and in as cutting a voice as she could muster: "_Il signore prende il suo pranzo con chi lui pare e piace._" (The gentleman eats with whomsoever he pleases.) "Does she understand Danish?" he asked, in astonishment. "It looks like it," I replied. When he had gone, her _furia_ broke loose. I saw her exasperated for the first time, and it sat very comically upon her. "Did you ask him whom _he_ eats with? Did he say I was ugly? Did you ask him whether his _ragazza_ was prettier?" (She meant a Danish lady, a married woman, with whom she had frequently met K.B. in the street.)

She said to me yesterday: "There is one thing I can do, sir, that you cannot. I can carry 200 pounds' weight on my head. I can carry two _conchas_, or, if you like to try me, all that wood lying there." She has the proud bearing of the Romans.

Read with Filomena for an hour and a half. She can now spell words with three letters fairly well. This language has such a sweet ring that her spelling is like music. And to see the innocent reverence with which she says _g-r-a, gra_,--it is what a poet might envy me. And then the earnest, enquiring glance she gives me at the end of every line. It is marvellous to see this complete absorption of a grown-up person in the study of _a-b, ab_, and yet at the same time there is something almost great in this ravenous thirst for knowledge, combined with incredulity of all tradition. It is a model such as this that the poets should have had for their naïve characters. In Goethe's _Roman Elegies_, the Roman woman's figure is very inconspicuous; she is not drawn as a genuine woman of the people, she is not naïve. He knew a Faustina, but one feels that he afterwards slipped a German model into her place. Filomena has the uncompromising honesty and straightforwardness of an unspoilt soul. Her glance is not exactly pure, but free--how shall I describe it? Full, grand, simple. With a _concha_ on her head, she would look like a caryatid. If I compare her mentally with a feminine character of another poet, Lamartine's Graziella, an Italian girl of the lower classes, like herself, I cannot but think Graziella thin and poetised, down to her name. The narrator, if I remember rightly, teaches her to read, too; but Graziella herself does not desire it; it is he who educates her. Filomena, on the contrary, with her anxiety to learn, is an example and a symbol of a great historic movement, the poor, oppressed Roman people's craving for light and knowledge. Of Italy's population of twenty-six millions, according to the latest, most recent statistics, seventeen millions can neither read nor write. She said to me to-day: "What do you really think, sir, do you not believe that the Holy Ghost is _una virtù_ and cannot be father of the child?" "You are right, Filomena." "That is why I never pray." "Some day, when you are very unhappy, perhaps you will pray." "I have been very unhappy; when I was a child I used to suffer horribly from hunger. I had to get up at five o'clock in the morning to work and got eight _soldi_ for standing all day long in a vineyard in the sun and digging with a spade, and as corn was dear and meat dear, we seven children seldom had a proper meal. Last year, too, I was hungry often, for it was as the proverb says: 'If I eat, I cannot dress myself, and if I dress myself I cannot eat.' (What a sad and illuminating proverb!) Sir, if there were any Paradise, you would go there, for what you do for me. If I can only read and write, I can earn twice as much as I otherwise could. Then I can be a _cameriera_, and bring my mistress a written account of expenditure every week."

Filomena knows that Saredo is a professor at the University. But she does not know what a professor or a University is. She puts her question like this: "Probably my idea of what a university is, may not be quite correct?"

No one comes now. An invalid is very interesting at first, and arouses sympathy. If he continue ill too long, people unconsciously think it impossible for him to get well, and stay away. So the only resource left me all day is to chat with Filomena, to whom Maria has entrusted the nursing of me. Every evening I read with her; yesterday she had her fourth lesson, and could almost read straight off. Her complexion and the lower part of her face are like a child's; her undeveloped mental state reveals itself, thus far, in her appearance. I told her yesterday, as an experiment, that there were five continents and in each of them many countries, but she cannot understand yet what I mean, as she has no conception of what the earth looks like. She does not even know in what direction from Rome her native village, Camerino, lies. I will try to get hold of a map, or a globe. Yesterday, we read the word _inferno_. She said: "There is no hell; things are bad enough on earth; if we are to burn afterwards, there would be two hells." "Good gracious! Filomena, is life so bad? Why, you sing all day long." "I sing because I am well; that is perfectly natural, but how can I be content?" "What do you wish for then?" "So much money (_denari_) that I should be sure of never being hungry again. You do not know how it hurts. Then there is one other thing I should like, but it is impossible. I should like not to die; I am so horribly afraid of death. I should certainly wish there were a Paradise. But who can tell! Still, my grandmother lived to be a hundred all but three years, and she was never ill for a day; when she was only three years from being a hundred she still went to the fields like the rest of us and worked, and was like a young woman (_giovanotta_). Mother is forty-two, but although she is two years older than my aunt, she looks quite young. _Chi lo sa!_ Perhaps I may live to be a hundred too, never be ill--I never have been yet, one single day,--and then go in and lie down on the bed like she did and be dead at once."

"She really is sweet!" said R. this evening. The word does not fit. Her laugh, her little grimaces, her witticisms, quaint conceits and gestures are certainly very attractive, but her mode of expression, when she is talking freely, is very unreserved, and if I were to repeat some of her remarks to a stranger, he would perhaps think her coarse or loose. "We shall see what sort of a girl you bring home to us when you are well again, and whether you have as good taste as our Frenchman. Or perhaps you would rather visit her? I know how a fine gentleman behaves, when he visits his friend. She is often a lady, and rich. He comes, knocks softly at the door, sits down, and talks about difficult and learned things. Then he begs for a kiss, she flings her arms round his neck; _allora, il letto rifatto, va via."_ She neither blushes nor feels the slightest embarrassment when she talks like this. "How do you know such things, when you have no experience?" "People have told me; I know it from hearsay. I myself have never been in love, but I believe that it is possible to love one person one's whole life long, and never grow tired of him, and never love another. You said the other day (for a joke?) that people ought to marry for a year or six months; but I believe that one can love the same person always."

In such chat my days pass by. I feel as though I had dropped down somewhere in the Sabine Mountains, been well received in a house--Maria is from Camarino, too,--and were living there hidden from the world among these big children.

Yesterday, Uncle had his National Guard uniform on for the first time. He came in to show himself. I told him that it suited him very well, which delighted him. Filomena exhibited him with admiration. When Maria came home later on, she asked the others at once: "Has the _signore_ seen him? What did he say? Does not he want to see him again?"

Written down a score of ritornellos; I have chosen the best of them. Many of them are rather, or very, indecent. But, as Filomena says: "You do not go to Hell for singing _canzone_; you cannot help what they are like." The indecent ones she will only say at a terrific rate, and not a second time. But if one pay attention, they are easy to understand. They are a mixture of audacity and simple vulgarity. They all begin with flowers. She is too undeveloped to share the educated girl's abhorrence of things that are in bad taste; everything natural, she thinks, can be said, and she speaks out, quite unperturbed. Still, now she understands that there are certain things--impossible things--that I do not like to hear her say.

I was sitting cutting a wafer (to take powders with) into oblates. _She_: "You must not cut into consecrated things, not even put the teeth into it. The priest says: 'Thou shalt not bite Christ.'" Unfortunately, she has not any real impression of religion, either of its beauty or its underlying truth. None of them have any idea of what the New Testament is or contains; they do not know its best-known quotations and stories. Religion, to them, is four or five rigmaroles, which are printed in our _Abecedario_, the Creed, the Ave Maria, the various Sacraments, etc., which they know by heart. These they reject, but they have not the slightest conception of what Christianity is. If I quote a text from the New Testament, they have never heard it.

But they can run the seven cardinal virtues, and the seven other virtues, off by rote. One of these last, that of instructing the ignorant, is a virtue which the priesthood (partly for good reasons) have not practised to any remarkable extent in this country.

Yesterday Maria came home in a state of great delight, from a _trattoria_, where a gentleman had spoken _tanto bene, tanto bene_ against religion and the Pope and the priests; there were a few _Caccialepri_ present (a derogatory expression for adherents of the priests), who had just had to come down a peg or two. When she had finished, to my astonishment, she said to me, _exactly this_: "It is Nature that is God, is it not so?"

An expression almost symbolical of the ignorance and credulity of the Romans is their constant axiom, _Chi lo sa?_ (Who knows?) I said to Maria the other day, after she had said it for the fourth time in a quarter of an hour: "My good Maria! The beginning of wisdom is not to fear God, but to say _Perche_? (why?), instead of _Chi lo sa_?"

Yesterday, while I was eating my dinner, I heard Filomena's story. She came to Rome last December: "You think I came because Maria wanted to help mother. I came to Rome because there was a man who wanted to marry me." "What was his name?" "His name was Peppe." _"Lo mi' amore, che si chiama Peppe."_... "Ah, I do not love him at all. No, the thing is that at Camerino all the men beat their wives. My sister, for instance, has always a black eye, and red stripes on her back. My friend Marietta always gets beaten by her husband, and the more he beats her, the more she loves him: sometimes she goes away from him for a few days to her sister, but she always goes back again." "What has that to do with our friend Peppe?" "Well, you see, mother knew that Peppe's brother beat his wife all day and all night; so she would not give me to him." "Yes, it was bad, if it were a family failing." "So one evening father said to me: 'Your aunt has written to us from Rome, to ask whether you will pay her a visit of a few days.' And he showed me a false letter. Aunt cannot write and knew nothing about any letter. I did not want to, much, said I would not, but came here all the same, and found that I was to stay here, and that mother did not want me to have Peppe. So I began to cry, and for five whole days I cried all the time and would neither eat nor drink. Then I thought to myself: It is all over between Peppe and me. Shall I cry myself to death for a man? So I left off crying, and very soon forgot all about him. And after a week's time I did not care anything about the whole matter, and sang and was happy, and now I want to stay in Rome always."

Last night I got up for a little, read with Filomena, and determined to go in and have supper with the family in their little room. Filomena opened the door wide, and called out along the corridor: _"Eccolo!"_ and then such a welcome as there was for the invalid, now that he had at last got up! and I was obliged to drink two large beer-glasses of the home-grown wine. First Maria told how it was that I had always had everything so punctually whilst I was ill. It was because Filomena had made the little boy from the _café_ believe that I was going to give him my watch when I got well, if he never let anything get cold. So the boy ran as though possessed, and once fell down the stairs and broke everything to atoms. "He is delirious," said Filomena one day, "and talks of nothing but of giving you his watch." "How can he be so ill," said the boy suspiciously, "when he eats and drinks?" "Do you want the watch or not?" said Filomena, and off the lad ran. I let the others entertain me. Maria said: "You told Filomena something yesterday about savages; I know something about them, too. Savage people live in China, and the worst of all are called Mandarins. Do you know what one of them did to an Italian lady? She was with her family over there; suddenly there came a Mandarin, carried her off, and shut her up in his house. They never found her again. Then he had three children by her; but one day he went out and forgot to shut the door; she ran quickly out of the house, down to the water, and saw a ship far away. Do you know what the mandarin did, sir, when he came home and found that his wife was gone? He took the three children, tore them through the middle, and threw the pieces out into the street." It reminded one of Lucidarius, and other mediaeval legends. Then our good _zio_, the honest uncle, began, and told Maria and Filomena the history of Napoleon I., fairly correctly. He had heard it from his master Leonardo, who taught him his trade; the man had taken part in five of the campaigns. The only egregious mistake he made was that he thought the Austrians had gradually poisoned the Duke of Reichstadt, because he threatened to become even more formidable than his father. But that the old grenadier might easily have believed. The thing that astonished me was that the narrative did not make the slightest impression upon either Maria or Filomena. I asked Filomena if she did not think it was very remarkable. But she clearly had a suspicion that it was all lies, besides, what has happened in the world before her day is of as little importance to her as what goes on in another planet; finally, she abominates war. _Zio_ concluded his story with childlike self-satisfaction: "When I learnt about all this, I was only an apprentice; now I am _mastro Nino_."

These last few days that I have been able to stumble about the room a little, I have had a feeling of delight and happiness such as I have hardly experienced before. The very air is a fête. The little black-haired youngsters, running about this picturesquely steep street, are my delight, whenever I look out of the window. All that is in front of me: the splendours of Rome, the Summer, the art of Italy, Naples in the South, Venice in the North, makes my heart beat fast and my head swim. I only need to turn round from the window and see Filomena standing behind me, knitting, posed like a living picture by Küchler to feel, with jubilation: I am in Rome. Saredo came to-day at twelve o'clock, and saw me dressed for the first time. I had put on my nicest clothes. I called Filomena, had three dinners fetched, and seated between him and her, I had my banquet. I had just said: "I will not eat any soup to-day, unless it should happen to be _Zuppa d'herba_." Filomena took the lid off and cried: _"A punto."_ This is how all my wishes are fulfilled now. I had a fine, light red wine. It tasted so good that if the gods had known it they would have poured their nectar into the washtub. Filomena poured it out, singing:

L'acqua fa mare, Il vino fa cantare; Il sugo della gresta Fa gira' la testa.

(Water is bad for one; Wine makes one sing; The juice of the grape Makes the head swim.)

To-morrow I may go out. After Sunday, I shall leave off dining at home. On Sunday Filomena goes to Camerino.

SECOND LONGER STAY ABROAD

(_Continued_)

Reflections on the Future of Denmark--Conversations with Giuseppe Saredo--Frascati--Native Beauty--New Susceptibilities--Georges Noufflard's Influence--The Sistine Chapel and Michael Angelo--Raphael's Loggias--A Radiant Spring.

I

Saredo said to me one day: "I am not going to flatter you--I have no interest in doing so; but I am going to give you a piece of advice, which you ought to think over. Stay in Italy, settle down here, and you will reach a far higher position than you can possibly attain in your own country. The intellectual education you possess is exceedingly rare in Italy; what I can say, without exaggeration, is that in this country it is so extraordinary that it might be termed an active force. Within two years you would be a power in Italy, at home, you will never be more than a professor at a University. Stay here! Villari and I will help you over your first difficulties. Write in French, or Italian, which you like, and as you are master of the entire range of Germanic culture, which scarcely any man in Italy is, you will acquire an influence of which you have not the least conception. A prophet is never honoured in his own country. We, on the other hand, need you. So stay here! Take Max Müller as an example. It is with individuals as with nations; it is only when they change their soil that they attain their full development and realise their own strength."

I replied: "I am deaf to that sort of thing. I love the Danish language too well ever to forsake it. Only in the event of my settlement in Denmark meeting with opposition, and being rendered impossible, shall I strap on my knapsack, gird up my loins, and hie me to France or Italy; I am glad to hear that the world is not so closed to me as I had formerly believed."

My thoughts were much engaged on my sick-bed by reflections upon the future of Denmark. The following entry is dated March 8, 1871:

What do we mean by _our national future_, which we talk so much about? We do not purpose to extend our borders, to make conquests, or play any part in politics. For that, as is well comprehensible, we know we are too weak. I will leave alone the question as to whether it is possible to live without, in one way or another, growing, and ask: What do we want? _To continue to exist_. How exist? We want to get Slesvig back again, for as it is we are not _existing_; we are sickening, or else we are living like those lower animals who even when they are cut in pieces, are quite nimble; but it is a miserable life. We are in a false position with regard to Germany. The centripetal force that draws the individual members of one nationality together, and which we in Denmark call Danishness, that which, further, draws nationalities of the same family together, and which in Denmark is called _Scandinavianism_, must logically lead to a sympathy for the merging of the entire race, a kind of _Gothogermanism_. If we seek support from France, we shall be behaving like the Poles, turning for help to a foreign race against a nation of our own. I accuse us, not of acting imprudently, but of fighting against a natural force that is stronger than we. We can only retard, we cannot annihilate, the attraction exerted by the greater masses on the lesser. We can only hope that we may not live to feel the agony.