Diversions in Sicily Part 15

"Quattro sono le cinque parti del mondo e sono le tre seguenti: Sicilia, Inghilterra."

Giovanni led the applause with shouts of "Bravo, bravo!" but before I could drink, my glory slipped off me, the stars went out and the world came to an end. I had spilt my wine. He saw my distress and at once took charge of the situation--

"Oh, che bel augurio!" he exclaimed.

I tried to apologize.

"No, no, it will bring us good fortune," and turning sorrow into joy again, he dipped his finger in the spilt wine and anointed my forehead and the back of my neck; I did the same to him; he took up the bottle, flourished it in the air, sprinkling every one of us with wine, and then flung it away empty over our heads, so that it crashed down on the pavement and the pieces skated across the piazza, bang up against the opposite house. Thus we baptized our friendship and in a fresh bottle drank to its eternal continuance. He then became Carlo Magno again and declared that I was padrone of the theatre, and that if I did not come every night to see him act, and to supper afterwards, there would be an eruption of Mount Etna and he would never speak to me again.

Presently a greasy, throaty voice began to infect the air with reminiscences of _O Sole Mio_! Nearer and nearer it came until it floated into the piazza and a drunken vagabond reeled past us and out of sight. It was a disturbance and we rose to go. I paid sevenpence for my supper, _i.e._ fourpence for the pesce stocco and bread, a penny for the wine, a penny for my share of the tocco wine and a penny for the waiter.

Giovanni was pleased with me for giving the waiter a penny. He said I had done quite right because the waiter (who had never seen me before) was very fond of me. It was now half-past two and I supposed we might be going to bed, but on the way we sat down outside a second caffe, had some more tables out and ordered coffee. _O Sole Mio_! sailed towards us again, followed by the drunken man. They wanted to send him away, but Giovanni, watching him, said--

"Let him stay. Give me a cigarette, some one"--as usual he had smoked all his own.

He handed the cigarette to the man who accepted it and stood gesticulating, trying to light it and mumbling unsteadily till he veered off and capsized in a heap, spluttering and muttering in the gutter.

I said, "You have been taking a lesson for your next drunken man."

"Of course I have," he replied.

It was past three by the time we left the second caffe, but we drifted into a third and, after liqueur, really did at last set about going seriously to bed; but what with seeing one another home, trying to find the reason why _Feudalismo_ was a better play than _La Morte Civile_ (no one had any doubt that it was, but the reason was involved in declamation and gesticulation) and one thing and another, it was past four before we separated. We were standing on the pavement outside the albergo, our numbers reduced to ten or twelve; instead of saying "Good-night" to me in the usual way, Giovanni put his hands on my shoulders and said--

"Enrico mio! Caro fratello! Io ti voglio bene a.s.sai, a.s.sai, a.s.sai!"

These were his words, but, without his voice, they can convey no idea of the great burst of emotion with which he p.r.o.nounced the "bene," or of the sobbing diminuendo with which he repeated the "a.s.sai."

Next morning there was a rehearsal at noon and plenty of work to be got through, because the tour was only beginning, and there were six new plays added to the repertoire and fifteen new performers to the company, which numbers in all forty-four persons.

Giovanni sat with the prompter at a table and the actors went through various pa.s.sages requiring consideration. He was too intent upon getting things right to waste any time by losing his temper, nor did I ever see any sign of irritation or hear him speak a hasty word. It is true he kicked Pietro off the stage one day, but he did it with the volcanic energy of Vanni kicking his wife out of the house at the end of the second act of _La Zolfara_. And Pietro was not really touched, he had acted in many unwritten dramas, understood in a moment, played up with the correct stage exit and we all laughed at the impromptu burlesque--or modificazione, as one of them called it.

If Giovanni was not satisfied, he got up and showed the actor how he wanted the pa.s.sage done. If Berto still failed to satisfy him, he was immediately replaced by Ernesto, if Ernesto could not do it, there was always Pietro who could do nearly anything. Berto was the only one of the company who had any self-consciousness in his acting or, rather, in his attempts at acting. Probably he will return to the drapery shop in which he has. .h.i.therto been an a.s.sistant, after a pleasant wanderjahr with the company. Ernesto has been some time on the stage and was formerly a barber; he is, in fact, still a barber and shaves the company, thereby adding to his salary, the greater part of which he sends every week to his wife who is at home with his two children.

Sicilians do not like being separated from their families and, as travelling expenses are paid, if the husband and wife are both employed in the theatre, it costs no more to bring the children than to leave them at home. The princ.i.p.al lady is the wife of one of the young actors and they have brought the baby. The brother of this lady is chief stage carpenter and property-man, and is married to another lady of the company. One of the under-carpenters is stepson of the chief comic who was formerly a fruit seller and is a little fellow of inexhaustible drollery with a flavour of Dan Leno in his method.

I dined one day with the actor who does old priests, respectable commissaries of police, chief peasants and anything of that kind, a man of about forty who formerly kept a shop and sold grain. His wife, the daughter of artists, is about the same age and does comic mothers, women who know a thing or two and won't stand any nonsense, garrulous duennas and so on. They had brought four of their children and occupied a fairly large room with a kitchen, which they had taken for the week. The children also act if required; one of them, Lola, a girl between five and six, was on the stage all through the first act of one of the plays; she had only a few words to speak, and all the rest of the time was moving about; she tried the rocking-chair, she stood irresolute on the side of one foot leaning against a table with a finger to her mouth, she found a ball, tossed it up, missed it and ran after it, she climbed up to a table, got a piece of bread and ate it. She had not been taught any of this business. They had merely said to her, "Play about, Lola," and, being the daughter of artists, she had played about with an unconscious spontaneity that was startling. Had there been an irritable uncle on the scene he must have exclaimed--

"For goodness' sake, do send that child to bed."

Lola was at home upon the stage and was acting accordingly, if it can properly be called acting, at any rate she was playing. What was Giovanni doing at supper? Is Giovanni only an actor when on the stage and when everything he says and does has been thought out? Is he a great actor by virtue of producing the illusion of being a Lola? And is Lola not really an actress at all, because she has not prepared what she is doing and is not even trying to produce any illusion? What is acting?

And what is realism? Here are more problems for discussion at supper under the stars and on the way to bed at four o'clock in the morning--problems not easily solved by a company of gesticulating freebooters who are for ever making raids, first into stage-land, then into real life, and lifting incidents across the border into that buffer-state where they lead a joyous life between the two.

CHAPTER XVIII--A YOUNG CRITIC

One day after rehearsal I had an appointment with a young man whose acquaintance I had made the previous evening behind the scenes. He was sitting on a packing-case, exchanging compliments with the head fireman, and inquired whether I was looking for anything; finding I wanted a seat he took me under his protection, scoured the theatre for a chair, and put it for me in a corner with a view of the stage. There was only room for one chair, so he sat on my knee and put his arm round my neck to keep himself in place. He was absorbed by the performance, but, while the curtain was down, had leisure to tell me that his name was Domenico, that he was nearly thirteen years old and brother to one of the ladies of the company; he was at school in the town and his sister had got him a week's holiday and taken him to stay with her.

"And so they call you Domenico," said I, just to keep things going.

"No," he replied, "they call me Micio."

"Why do they do that if your name is Domenico?"

"Because they are all very fond of me. Domenico is my name as I said, but Micio is a caress."

"I see; then may I also call you Micio?"

"Of course you may, and I hope you will."

He was very fond of reading and wanted me to lend him a story-book, but _Tristram Shandy_, which was the nearest approach to a story-book I had with me, was in English, so that would not do. Then he began searching my pockets for chocolate, but there, again, he was disappointed. It was to give me an opportunity of remedying these deficiencies in my equipment that we made our appointment, and he was to do the bargaining. During rehearsal I consulted his sister, which I suppose would have been the correct thing to do in England, but she only shook her finger at him, and he only laughed and played at hiding his fresh brown face and his curly black head in her white skirts; she might as well have shaken her finger at the scirocco.

The child put his hand in mine and avoiding the glare of the big streets, led me through narrow lanes to one of the gates of the town. There had been a storm the previous night, so sudden that our supper had been spoilt before we could get it under cover and we had to begin again inside the restaurant. The clouds had all cleared away and the panorama, as seen from the gate, was at its best with the sun beating down on the slopes of the mountain-side and sprinkling sapphires all over the sea.

Micio, however, had not come to admire the view; he turned from it to the books that were laid out on a shady ledge of the town-wall and began to consider those with the ill.u.s.trated covers. He wanted them all, not simultaneously but one after the other. He paused before _Uno Strano Delitto_ but, the crime being too strange to be comprehensible, we pa.s.sed on to _Guirlanda Sanguinosa_, a lady dressed in bridal attire but, doubtless through exposure to the weather, the blood had faded off the wreath of orange blossoms, so we took up another. _Il Bacio del Cadavere_ was about a lady in evening dress who had got out of cab No.

3402 which was waiting for her in the moonlight while she conversed with the porter at the gates of the cemetery; Micio's anxiety to ascertain whether the interview was preliminary or subsequent to the corpse's kiss was not acute enough to induce him to buy the book. There was another about a kiss, _Bacio Infame_, on which a lady with a stiletto was defending herself from a bad man. All these were enticing, but we hoped to do better, and I began to blush for the somewhat thin plot of _Tristram Shandy_ and to be thankful that my copy was not in Italian.

Finally he took _La Mano del Defunto_: at the back of a sepulchral chamber in a violated coffin, from which the lid had been removed, lay the body of a woman, shockingly disarranged, over the edge hung her right arm, the hand had been cut off and was being carried away by a city gent in tall hat, unb.u.t.toned frock coat, jaunty tie, yellow boots and streaky trousers; he had a dark lantern with the help of which he had committed the sacrilege--very horrible which attracted Micio, and only twenty-five centimes which attracted me. We might possibly have done better, but we should have had to search a long time. So we bought it and thought we might take something else as well. Now, it seemed to me, was the time for _Carlo Magno and the Paladins_ or the _Life of Musolino_, or _Robinson Crusoe_, or _Don Quixote_, or _The Three Musketeers_, but he had read them all, years ago. _The Arabian Nights_ was new to him, but it was marked ten francs. In voluble Sicilian he expressed my views by telling the bookseller it was ridiculously too expensive and that he could give no more than two francs fifty centimes--he never gave more for a book. The man held out for five francs. The boy laughed at him. They declaimed and gesticulated and swore at each other until, at last, Micio, a baffled paladin, wiped his brow wearily as though there was no doing anything with these people, and told me to take three francs out of my purse and give them to the brigand, who politely wrapped up our purchases and we strolled off.

"Now," said Micio as we approached the chocolate shop, "we did rather well over the _Arabian Nights_--saved seven francs--do you think it would be extravagant if we were to have an ice to restore us after our struggles?"

Of course I agreed, though I had not myself done any struggling, and, as we sat at our little table eating our ices, we talked about the theatre.

I said I had never seen such acting; leaving Giovanni out of consideration, all the company knew how to produce the illusion of reality even down to Lola. Micio had no opinion of Lola. She was not to be considered seriously as an actress; she might become one some day, but she was only a child. All the children of artists can do as well as she, but no one can really act who has not suffered. He himself used to act quite as well as Lola, but had not appeared on the stage for a long while--not since he had been at school. He could do better now.

"When I see the others acting," he said, "I am not moved, it is like reading an index. But when I see Giovanni, it is all different, it is like reading a romance and it makes me cry."

He found fault with some of the plays for not being worthy of the actor.

Too many of them were little more than disconnected incidents, strung together to provide opportunities for effects, but with no more plot than the doings of the paladins in the marionette theatres. They were like the Pietro Longo play, which I had told him about, and he said that, if that was really all of it, it began with one story and ended with another and cried aloud for a third act to hold it together.

"Pietro must escape from prison," said Micio; "he must return home and we must know whether his sister died or went into a convent or married the policeman."

"What is the stupid fellow to do?" I inquired, "the play was made for him."

"He must escape too, Pietro will help him because they will become friends; besides, any one can escape from a stage prison, especially if the knives are not taken away from the convicts. And then he can do whatever the author likes.

"But it is always so in life," he continued, with a sigh, "we must not be discontented because the best we can get is not the best we can imagine.

I am still young, but not too young to have kn--- Let us not talk about that. What did you think of the play last night?"

I replied that it was a fine play.

He agreed, saying it was "strepitosamente bello." It opened with a state of things easily comprehensible and of great interest. There were no tedious explanatory speeches, but plenty of action leading naturally to a catastrophe which was at once seen to be inevitable, though no one could have predicted precisely that. And the conclusion sent the audience away feeling that something tremendous had happened, and that the state of things existing at the beginning could never exist again.

"That is how a play should be," said Micio.

I took a leaf out of Giovanni's book and patted him on the back.

"Bravo, Micio, bravo! No one has yet said anything like that at supper.

This is the second time this morning that you have expressed my thoughts for me. We must get your sister to let you sit up with us one of these evenings. You would keep us straight."