Raggle-Taggle (1933)/Chapter 2
Chapter II
Fiddling my Way
ONE day in July 1929 I set out on my gypsying expedition from my house at Masone in the Ligurian highlands. It was no easy task to convince my family of my sanity in wishing to follow the raggle-taggle Gypsies. My wife, who is an Italian, possesses the traditional Italian good sense and she has always looked with grave misgivings on my periods of Gypsy wanderings with a fiddle. She has always tried to build up in me a seriousness of purpose such as befits the father of a family. The vagabond side of my personality is an element of discord entering to destroy the solemn harmony of a life well spent in a scholar’s toil. My father-in-law, a professor of the old school, a friend of Carducci, preferred to read of Gypsies in the literature of the mid-nineteenth century, but not to frequent and especially not to smell them. My escapade seemed to his Latin mind one other instance of the mad, inconsequential attitude towards life of the Northern Europeans who have always been incorrigible nomads. “Any-how, my dear boy,” said he, “I’ll give you two gifts to take away with you: a camera and a tin of ‘Flit’.”
The only member of the family who approved of my venture and secretly envied me was my little son aged six. He had been fascinated by the ragged Zingari who sometimes camped in a lane near the house when they were on their way to Genoa. One day I had even caught him in the act of bartering some of our household provisions for beads and trinkets. Gypsies for him meant a roving life of unwashed freedom and he tearfully begged me to take him away with me.
A contadino who worked in our garden gave me his rough costume and boots. It was very important not to be too well dressed if one wanted to follow the calling of a vagabond minstrel and avoid the appearance of an ordinary tourist. I must not be a tourist if I can help it, for then it would be adieu to the tramps and vagabonds who live by their wits. What is the definition of a tourist? A tourist is a bloated snail, a traveller with his household goods on his back, crawling on his belly through the world. In peasant costume I shall not awaken the suspicions of the birds of prey who lie in wait for tourists.
And so with violin-case under my arm and rucksack on my back I set out early in the morning on foot over the mountains for Genoa. A grilling day found me cooped up in a smelly third-class carriage on my way to Venice. I wish to stress the word smelly, for during my career as a vagabond in Europe I have always found that smells are the leading motives, as a Wagnerian would say, of wandering. Whenever I look back on certain adventures I remember the smell that accompanied them. At one moment I dream of Naples and at once deep within me I seem to hear, as it were, the ceaseless throbbing note of garlic mixed with heavy Tuscan cigars and a faint odour of musk. And then Venice echoes through my mind again and again, for the simple reason that I had known a girl there called Giovanna who used to perfume her clothes with a subtle scent that whipped up my senses. She herself was not beautiful, but the recollection of her perfume met me chasing her in imagination over hill over dale as if she was the most ravishing houri in all the paradise of the Orient.
To-day in the train the smells were of various assortments. First of all there was salame, an Italian variety of sausage which on a hot day forms a ground bass to the rest of the harmony of smells. Mixed with onion and fish it became an aggressive motif. Then there was the strange and subtler scent of tin trunks with rather musty clothes within them, mingled with moth-balls and camphor. Above all, the smoke of the cigars which, like incense in a cathedral, kills the odour of the faithful and enables you to be serene.
“Lei é musicista?” said a ragged son of the soil, pointing to my violin which was on the rack above my head.
“Of course, my dear sir, I am a musician—a wandering minstrel: what shall I play for you?—the Canzone del Grappa if you are an Apino, the Bells of San Giusto if you are a Triestino, or ‘O Sole Mio’ if you come from Naples.” He was an old soldier and had fought on the glorious mountain, so my playing of the spirited melody extracted a lira from him in grateful remembrance.
At Venice I halted just the time necessary to catch the train for Trieste, Postumia and Rakek, the first town on the Serbian border. As a minstrel I was in luck, for the folk in the carriage wanted music. Playing the violin in a train is an exciting experience because you sway about from one side to the other and your bow menaces the faces of the audience. Then, too, the rhythm of the wheels is more suited to the wild, untamed music of Hungary, which drives you on in vertiginous course, than to the elegiac songs of Italy. Most of the passengers seemed to be talking Italian and so I went up to a hatchet-faced man in a corner and repeated my refrain: “What shall I play for you?—the Canzone del Grappa if you are an Alpino, the Bells of San Giusto if you are a Triestino.” The man looked at me and scowled. “What have I done?” thought I. Then I remembered that I was approaching Ljubljana and that the man was a full-blooded Serb. I hastened to play a Serbian Gypsy dance I knew, but then a chorus of voices from the other side of the train called out for “Cavalleria Rusticana,” so I subsided again into Italian music. At the end of my performance I did not have to pass my hat around, for five or six men came up and put coins in my violin-case and others drew out bottles of wine to toast the minstrel. I made three lire, five dinars and one pengö before I reached Kotor. “This money I offer to thee, oh Aradia, goddess of vagabonds: may it appease the anger thou dost feel against me, a fat member of the middle class who has come as an interloper into thy bands.” I hope the goddess, patron of the Minions of the moon, heard me in her witches’ cave, for my purpose is to meet the tramps and Gypsies who dwell on the outskirts of civilization and prey on honest men owing to their knowledge of the strange music and dancing that sets their senses on fire and drives them crazy.
I wonder do vagabonds have passports? Mine was perfectly in order with its visas for Hungary and Roumania. “All the tramps and Gypsies in the world will not get you through if your passport is not in order,” said the Roumanian consul at Genoa to me when I was paying him his ten-shilling fee in English money (he would accept no other). On one visa I noticed the words inserted—the bearer undertakes not to earn any money while he 1s in Hungary. “A petty proviso,” thought I, “and hardly one to encourage the penniless foreign musician.” However, I consoled myself with the thought that in the village public-houses and the peasant huts and along the roads of Hungary there would not be any Trades Unions of tramps or Gypsies.
Anyhow, on this journey no Trades Unions were going to take away the money I had made and I expended some dinars on a ham sandwich and a cup of creamy coffee before settling down to sleep on the unsympathetic wooden seats.