A Roman Singer | Page 6

reminds me of him and
his ways. Fourteen years he lived here with me, from child to boy and
from boy to man, and now he is gone, never to live here any more. The
end of it will be that I shall go and live with him, and Mariuccia will
take her cat and her knitting, and her Lives of the Saints back to Serveti,
to end her life in peace, where there are no professors and no singers.
For Mariuccia is older than I am, and she will die before me. At all
events, she will take her tongue with her, and ruin herself at her
convenience without ruining me. I wonder what life would be without
Mariuccia? Would anybody darn my stockings, or save the peel of the
mandarins to make cordial? I certainly would not have the mandarins if
she were gone--it is a luxury. No, I would not have them. But then,
there would be no cordial, and I should have to buy new stockings
every year or two. No, the mandarins cost less than the
stockings--and--well, I suppose I am fond of Mariuccia.
CHAPTER II
It was really not so long ago--only one year. The sirocco was blowing
up and down the streets, and about the corners, with its sickening blast,
making us all feel like dead people, and hiding away the sun from us. It
is no use trying to do anything when it blows sirocco, at least for us
who are born here. But I had been persuaded to go with Nino to the
house of Sor Ercole to hear my boy sing the opera he had last studied,
and so I put my cloak over my shoulders, and wrapped its folds over

my breast, and covered my mouth, and we went out. For it was a cold
sirocco, bringing showers of tepid rain from the south, and the drops
seemed to chill themselves as they fell. One moment you are in danger
of being too cold, and the next minute the perspiration stands on your
forehead, and you are oppressed with a moist heat. Like the prophet,
when it blows a real sirocco you feel as if you were poured out like
water, and all your bones were out of joint. Foreigners do not feel it
until they have lived with us a few years, but Romans are like dead
men when the wind is in that quarter.
I went to the maestro's house and sat for two hours listening to the
singing. Nino sang very creditably, I thought, but I allow that I was not
as attentive as I might have been, for I was chilled and uncomfortable.
Nevertheless, I tried to be very appreciative, and I complimented the
boy on the great progress he had made. When I thought of it, it struck
me that I had never heard anybody sing like that before; but still there
was something lacking; I thought it sounded a little unreal, and I said to
myself that he would get admiration, but never any sympathy. So clear,
so true, so rich it was, but wanting a ring to it, the little thrill that goes
to the heart. He sings very differently now.
Maestro Ercole De Pretis lives in the Via Paola, close to the Ponte Sant'
Angelo, in a most decent little house--that is, of course, on a floor of a
house, as we all do. But De Pretis is well-to-do, and he has a marble
door plate, engraved in black with his name, and two sitting-rooms.
They are not very large rooms, it is true, but in one of them he gives his
lessons, and the grand piano fills it up entirely, so that you can only sit
on the little black horsehair sofa at the end, and it is very hard to get
past the piano on either side. Ercole is as broad as he is long, and takes
snuff when he is not smoking. But it never hurts his voice.
It was Sunday, I remember, for he had to sing in St. Peter's in the
afternoon; and it was so near, we walked over with him. Nino had
never lost his love for church music, though he had made up his mind
that it was a much finer thing to be a primo tenore assoluto at the
Apollo Theatre than to sing in the Pope's choir for thirty scudi a month.
We walked along over the bridge, and through the Borgo Nuovo, and

across the Piazza Rusticucci, and then we skirted the colonnade on the
left, and entered the church by the sacristy, leaving De Pretis there to
put on his purple cassock and his white cotta. Then we went into the
Capella del Coro to wait for the vespers.
All sorts