Old Calabria Part 5

I asked whether he had not children to work for him.

"All dead--and health to you!" he replied, shaking his white head dolefully.

And no grandchildren?

"All Americans (emigrants)."

He spoke in dreamy fas.h.i.+on of years long ago when he, too, had travelled, sailing to Africa for corals, to Holland and France; yes, and to England also. But our dockyards and cities had faded from his mind; he remembered only our men.

"_Che bella gioventu--che bella gioventu!_" ("a st.u.r.dy brood"), he kept on repeating. "And lately," he added, "America has been discovered." He toiled fourteen hours a day, and he was 83 years old.

Apart from that creature of fiction, the peasant _in fabula_ whom we all know, I can find little to admire in this whole cla.s.s of men, whose talk and dreams are of the things of the soil, and who knows of nothing save the regular interchange of summer and winter with their unvarying tasks and rewards. None save a Cincinnatus or Garibaldi can be enn.o.bled by the spade. In spleenful moments, it seems to me that the most depraved of city-dwellers has flashes of enthusiasm and self-abnegation never experienced by this s.h.i.+fty, retrogressive and ungenerous brood, which lives like the beasts of the field and has learnt all too much of their logic. But they have a beast-virtue hereabouts which compels respect--contentment in adversity. In this point they resemble the Russian peasantry. And yet, who can pity the moujik? His cheeks are altogether too round, and his morals too superbly b.e.s.t.i.a.l; he has clearly been created to sing and starve by turns. But the Italian peasant who speaks in the tongue of Homer and Virgil and Boccaccio is easily invested with a halo of martyrdom; it is delightful to sympathize with men who combine the manners of Louis Quatorze with the profiles of Augustus or Plato, and who still recall, in many of their traits, the pristine life of Odyssean days. Thus, they wear to-day the identical "clouted leggings of oxhide, against the scratches of the thorns" which old Laertes bound about his legs on the upland farm in Ithaka. They call them "galandrine."

On occasions of drought or flood there is not a word of complaint. I have known these field-faring men and women for thirty years, and have yet to hear a single one of them grumble at the weather. It is not indifference; it is true philosophy--acquiescence in the inevitable. The grievances of cultivators of lemons and wholesale agriculturalists, whose speculations are often ruined by a single stroke of the human pen in the shape of new regulations or tariffs, are a different thing; _their_ curses are loud and long. But the bean-growers, dependent chiefly on wind and weather, only speak of G.o.d's will. They have the same forgiveness for the shortcomings of nature as for a wayward child.

And no wonder they are distrustful. Ages of oppression and misrule have pa.s.sed over their heads; sun and rain, with all their caprice, have been kinder friends to them than their earthly masters. Some day, presumably, the government will wake up to the fact that Italy is not an industrial country, and that its farmers might profitably be taken into account again.

But a change is upon the land. Types like this old man are becoming extinct; for the patriarchal system of Coriola.n.u.s, the glory of southern Italy, is breaking up.

This is not the fault of conscription which, though it destroys old dialects, beliefs and customs, widens the horizon by bringing fresh ideas into the family, and generally sound ones. It does even more; it teaches the conscripts to read and write, so that it is no longer as dangerous to have dealings with a man who possesses these accomplishments as in the days when they were the prerogative of _avvocati_ and other questionable characters. A countryman, nowadays, may read and write and yet be honest.

What is shattering family life is the speculative spirit born of emigration. A continual coming and going; two-thirds of the adolescent and adult male population are at this moment in Argentina or the United States--some as far afield as New Zealand. Men who formerly reckoned in sous now talk of thousands of francs; parental authority over boys is relaxed, and the girls, ever quick to grasp the advantages of money, lose all discipline and steadiness.

"My sons won't touch a spade," said a peasant to me; "and when I thrash them, they complain to the police. They simply gamble and drink, waiting their turn to sail. If I were to tell you the beatings _we_ used to get, sir, you wouldn't believe me. You wouldn't believe me, not if I took my oath, you wouldn't! I can feel them still--speaking with respect--here!"

These emigrants generally stay away three or four years at a stretch, and then return, spend their money, and go out again to make more.

Others remain for longer periods, coming back with huge incomes--twenty to a hundred francs a day. Such examples produce the same effect as those of the few lucky winners in the State lottery; every one talks of them, and forgets the large number of less fortunate speculators.

Meanwhile the land suffers. The carob-tree is an instance. This beautiful and almost eternal growth, the "hope of the southern Apennines" as Professor Savastano calls it, whose pods const.i.tute an important article of commerce and whose thick-cl.u.s.tering leaves yield a cool shelter, comparable to that of a rocky cave, in the noonday heat, used to cover large tracts of south Italy. Indifferent to the scorching rays of the sun, flouris.h.i.+ng on the stoniest declivities, and sustaining the soil in a marvellous manner, it was planted wherever nothing else would grow--a distant but sure profit. Nowadays carobs are only cut down. Although their produce rises in value every year, not one is planted; n.o.body has time to wait for the fruit. [Footnote: There are a few laudable exceptions, such as Prince Belmonte, who has covered large stretches of bad land with this tree. (See Consular Reports, Italy, No.

431.) But he is not a peasant!]

It is nothing short of a social revolution, depopulating the country of its most laborious elements. 788,000 emigrants left in one year alone (1906); in the province of Basilicata the exodus exceeds the birthrate.

I do not know the percentage of those who depart never to return, but it must be considerable; the land is full of chronic gra.s.s-widows.

Things will doubtless right themselves in due course; it stands to reason that in this acute transitional stage the demoralizing effects of the new system should be more apparent than its inevitable benefits.

Already these are not unseen; houses are springing up round villages, and the emigrants return home with a disrespect for many of their country's inst.i.tutions which, under the circ.u.mstances, is neither deplorable nor unjustifiable. A large family of boy-children, once a dire calamity, is now the soundest of investments. Soon after their arrival in America they begin sending home rations of money to their parents; the old farm prospers once more, the daughters receive decent dowries. I know farmers who receive over three pounds a month from their sons in America--all under military age.

"We work, yes," they will then tell you, "but we also smoke our pipe."

Previous to this wholesale emigration, things had come to such a pa.s.s that the landed proprietor could procure a labourer at a franc a day, out of which he had to feed and clothe himself; it was little short of slavery. The roles are now reversed, and while landlords are impoverished, the rich emigrant buys up the farms or makes his own terms for work to be done, wages being trebled. A new type of peasant is being evolved, independent of family, fatherland or traditions--with a sure haven of refuge across the water when life at home becomes intolerable.

Yes; a change is at hand.

And another of those things which emigration and the new order of affairs are surely destroying is that ancient anthropomorphic way of looking at nature, with its expressive turns of speech. A small boy, whom I watched gathering figs last year, informed me that the fig-tree was _innamorato delle pietre e cisterne--_enamoured of stones and cisterns; meaning, that its roots are searchingly destructive to masonry and display a fabulous intuition for the proximity of water. He also told me, what was news to me, that there are more than two or three varieties of figs. Will you have his list of them? Here it is:

There is the _fico arnese,_ the smallest of all, and the _fico santillo,_ both of which are best when dried; the _fico vollombola,_ which is never dried, because it only makes the spring fruit; the _fico molegnano,_ which ripens as late as the end of October and must be eaten fresh; the _fico coretorto ("_ wry-heart "--from its shape), which has the most leathery skin of all and is often destroyed by grubs after rain; the _fico troiano;_ the _fico arzano;_ and the _fico vescovo,_ which appears when all the others are over, and is eaten in February (this may be the kind referred to in Stamer's "Dolce Napoli" as deriving from Sorrento, where the first tree of its kind was discovered growing out of the garden wall of the bishop's palace, whence the name). All these are _neri--_black.

Now for the white kinds. The _fico paradiso_ has a tender skin, but is easily spoilt by rain and requires a ridiculous amount of sun to dry it; ihe _fico vottato_ is also better fresh; the _fico pezzottolo_ is often attacked by grubs, but grows to a large size every two or three years; the _fico pascarello_ is good up till Christmas; the _fico natalino;_ lastly, the _fico ----_, whose name I will not record, though it would be an admirable ill.u.s.tration of that same anthropomorphic turn of mind.

The _santillo_ and _arnese,_ he added, are the varieties which are cut into two and laid lengthwise upon each other and so dried (Query: Is not this the "duplex ficus" of Horace?).

"Of course there are other kinds," he said, "but I don't remember them just now." When I asked whether he could tell these different fig-trees apart by the leaves and stems alone and without the fruit, he said that each kind, even in winter, retained its peculiar "faccia" (face), but that some varieties are more easy to distinguish than others. I enquired into the mysteries of caprification, and learned that artificial ripening by means of a drop of oil is practised with some of them, chiefly the _santillo, vollombola, pascarello_ and _natalino._ Then he gave me an account of the prices for the different qualities and seasons which would have astonished a grocer.

All of which proves how easy it is to misjudge of folks who, although they do not know that Paris is the capital of France, yet possess a training adapted to their present needs. They are specialists for things of the grain-giving earth; it is a pleasure to watch them grafting vines and olives and lemons with the precision of a trained horticulturist.

They talk of "governing" _(governare)_ their soil; it is the word they use in respect to a child.

Now figs are neither white nor black, but such is the terminology.

Stones are white or black; prepared olives are white or black; wine is white or black. Are they become colour-blind because impregnated, from earliest infancy, with a perennial blaze of rainbow hues--colour-blinded, in fact; or from negligence, attention to this matter not bringing with it any material advantage? Excepting that sign-language which is profoundly interesting from an artistic and ethnological point of view--why does not some scholar bring old lorio's "Mimica degli Antichi" up to date?--few things are more worthy of investigation than the colour-sense of these people. Of blue they have not the faintest conception, probably because there are so few blue solids in nature; Max Mueller holds the idea of blue to be quite a modern acquisition on the part of the human race. So a cloudless sky is declared to be "quite white." I once asked a lad as to the colour of the sea which, at the moment, was of the most brilliant sapphire hue.

He pondered awhile and then said:

"Pare come fosse un colore morto" (a sort of dead colour).

Green is a little better known, but still chiefly connected with things not out of doors, as a green handkerchief. The reason may be that this tint is too common in nature to be taken note of. Or perhaps because their chain of a.s.sociation between green and gra.s.s is periodically broken up--our fields are always verdant, but theirs turn brown in summer. Trees they sometimes call yellow, as do some ancient writers; but more generally "half-black" or "tree-colour." A beech in full leaf has been described to me as black. _"Rosso"_ does not mean red, but rather dun or dingy; earth is _rosso._ When our red is to be signified, they will use the word "turco," which came in with the well-known dye-stuff of which the Turks once monopolized the secret. Thus there are "Turkish" apples and "Turkish" potatoes. But "turco" may also mean black--in accordance with the tradition that the Turks, the Saracens, were a black race. Snakes, generally greyish-brown in these parts, are described as either white or black; an eagle-owl is half-black; a kestrel _un quasi bianco._ The mixed colours of cloths or silks are either beautiful or ugly, and there's an end of it. It is curious to compare this state of affairs with that existing in the days of Homer, who was, as it were, feeling his way in a new region, and the propriety of whose colour epithets is better understood when one sees things on the spot. Of course I am only speaking of the humble peasant whose blindness, for the rest, is not incurable.

One might enlarge the argument and deduce his odd insensibility to delicate scents from the fact that he thrives in an atmosphere saturated with violent odours of all kinds; his dullness in regard to finer shades of sound--from the shrieks of squalling babies and other domestic explosions in which he lives from the cradle to the grave. That is why these people have no "nerves"; terrific bursts of din, such as the pandemonium of Piedigrotta, stimulate them in the same way that others might be stimulated by a quartette of Brahms. And if they who are so concerned about the ma.s.sacre of small birds in this country would devote their energies to the invention of a noiseless and yet cheap powder, their efforts would at last have some prospects of success. For it is not so much the joy of killing, as the pleasurable noise of the gun, which creates these local sportsmen; as the sagacious "Ultramontain"

observed long ago. "Le napolitain est pas-sionne pour la cha.s.se," he says, "parce que les coups de fusil flattent son oreille." [Footnote: I have looked him up in Jos. Blanc's "Bibliographic." His name was C.

Haller.] This ingenuous love of noise may be connected, in some way, with their rapid nervous discharges.

I doubt whether intermediate convulsions have left much purity of Greek blood in south Italy, although emotional travellers, fresh from the north, are for ever discovering "cla.s.sic h.e.l.lenic profiles" among the people. There is certainly a scarce type which, for want of a better hypothesis, might be called Greek: of delicate build and below the average height, small-eared and straight-nosed, with curly hair that varies from blonde to what Italians call _castagno chiaro._ It differs not only from the robuster and yet fairer northern breed, but also from the darker surrounding races. But so many contradictory theories have lately been promulgated on this head, that I prefer to stop short at the preliminary question--did a h.e.l.lenic type ever exist? No more, probably, than that charming race which the artists of j.a.pan have invented for our delectation.

Strains of Greek blood can be traced with certainty by their track of folklore and poetry and song, such as still echoes among the vales of Sparta and along the Bosphorus. Greek words are rather rare here, and those that one hears--such as _sciusciello, caruso, crisommele,_ etc.--have long ago been garnered by scholars like De Grandis, Moltedo, and Salvatore Mele. So Naples is far more h.e.l.lenic in dialect, lore, song and gesture than these regions, which are still rich in pure latinisms of speech, such as surgere (to arise); scitare (excitare--to arouse); e (est--yes); fetare (foetare); trasete (transitus--pa.s.sage of quails); t.i.tillare (to tickle); craje (cras--to-morrow); pastena (a plantation of young vines; Ulpian has "pastinum inst.i.tuere"). A woman is called "muliera," a girl "figliola," and children speak of their fathers as "tata" (see Martial, epig. I, 101). Only yesterday I added a beautiful latinism to my collection, when an old woman, in whose cottage I sometimes repose, remarked to me, "Non avete virtu oggi "--you are not _up to the mark_ to-day. The real, antique virtue! I ought to have embraced her. No wonder I have no "virtue" just now. This savage Vulturnian wind--did it not sap the Roman virtue at Cannae?

All those relics of older civilizations are disappearing under the standardizing influence of conscription, emigration and national schooling.

And soon enough the _Contranome-_system __will become a thing of the past. I shall be sorry to see it go, though it has often driven me nearly crazy.

What is a _contranome?_

The same as a _sopranome._ It is a nickname which, as with the Russian peasants, takes the place of Christian and surname together. A man will tell you: "My name is Luigi, but they call me, by _contranome,_ O'Canzirro. I don't know my surname." Some of these nicknames are intelligible, such as O'Sborramurella, which refers to the man's profession of building those walls without mortar which are always tumbling down and being repaired again; or O'Sciacquariello (acqua--a leaking--one whose money leaks from his pocket--a spendthrift); or San Pietro, from his saintly appearance; O'Civile, who is so uncivilized, or Cristoforo Colombo, because he is so very wideawake. But eighty per cent of them are quite obscure even to their owners, going back, as they do, to some forgotten trick or incident during childhood or to some pet name which even in the beginning meant nothing. Nearly every man and boy has his contranome by which, and _by which alone,_ he is known in his village; the women seldomer, unless they are conspicuous by some peculiarity, such as A'Sbirra (the spy), or A'Paponnessa (the fat one)--whose counterpart, in the male s.e.x, would be O'Tripone.

Conceive, now, what trouble it entails to find a man in a strange village if you happen not to know his contranome (and how on earth are you to discover it?), if his surname means nothing to the inhabitants, and his Christian name is shared by a hundred others. For they have an amazing lack of inventiveness in this matter; four or five Christian names will include the whole population of the place. Ten to one you will lose a day looking for him, unless something like this takes place:

You set forth your business to a crowd of villagers that have collected around. It is simple enough. You want to speak to Luigi So-and-so. A good-natured individual, who seems particularly anxious to help, summarizes affairs by saying:

"The gentleman wants Luigi So-and-so."

There is evidently some joke in the mere suggestion of such a thing; they all smile. Then a confused murmur of voices goes up:

"Luigi--Luigi. . . . Now which Luigi does he mean?"

You repeat his surname in a loud voice. It produces no effect, beyond that of increased hilarity.

"Luigi--Luigi. . . ."

"Perhaps O'Zoccolone?"

"Perhaps O'Seticchio?"

"Or the figlio d' O'Zibalocchio?"

The good-natured individual volunteers to beat the surrounding district and bring in all the Luigis he can find. After half an hour they begin to arrive, one by one. He is not among them. Dismissed with cigars, as compensation for loss of time.

Meanwhile half the village has gathered around, vastly enjoying the fun, which it hopes will last till bedtime. You are getting bewildered; new people flock in from the fields to whom the mysterious joke about Luigi must be explained.