382
PARTISAN REVIEW
square, in the aura of the venerable church, is something worse than
shocking; it is because of the church, and the fountain, that he can
be.
The restaurant has become rather fancy lately and the two
musicians, who are the most talented of the kind in the city, size up
their little audiences with a brutal shrewdness that could be mistaken
for ridicule. Those knowledgeable children, after all, have not lost
anything in growing up; these men know what they are doing, and
for tourists they will play the worst of the Neapolitan repertoire as
soulfully as anybody else. The guitar player, who sings, brings a look
of longing into his big dark eyes, set in a leathery egg-shaped face,
broadest at the bottom of the cheeks, which for those five minutes
is all wistfully racked by the incapacity of any human
art
to express
such beauty as the heart perceives; the beauty of the lady at the
table is also too much; if he rested his eyes on hers for more than
the duration of one yearning middle G he would have to stop sing–
ing entirely; when business is brisk he may have to be overcome by
such sorrow twenty or thirty times in an evening, while the violinist,
who is taller and wears glasses, keeps expressionless and a little in
the rear, knowing that his face-this is
his
sorrow- is more suited
to a comedian, and not wanting it to intrude on so touching a per–
formance. The only thing is that their little routine bow at the end,
acknowledgment of the guest's superior station and extreme kindness
in listening to them, never gets quite finished; they had already
moved on when they started it.
Their real songs, and any Roman's, .are the long obscene
stornelli,
ballads with a Moorish twist and many verses rising in
detail as they go on. One is about the prison of Regina Coeli-no–
body is a true Roman who has not been there, the song says, but that
is only the beginning. One is about the fountain at Piazza Esedra
where the bronze naked ladies are kicking up their heels while the
man at the center wrestles with a dolphin:
"Oh what is he doing
with that big fish .
..."
A recent one has to do with Holy Year:
"[
sin all the year round, now
[
am making
up
my accounts for
l'anno santo.
..."
Santo
goes into a dozen or fifteen syllables, a long
spiraling, leering, eye-rolling cadenza as coarse as any of the items
that follow; the violinist is not retiring at all now; his big comedian's
face is all crackling with obscene suggestion and the moaning of the
