The Case of the Orphaned Bassoonists (2 page)

Standing in the study, I skimmed one of the articles by Andrew McManus. It was a pity his prose was so dull, for the ideas were quite interesting. Venice had had a long tradition of opening
ospedali
—charitable institutions for the sick and destitute—for abandoned and orphaned children. One of Venice’s
ospedali
, the Pietà, specialized in foundlings and, particularly, teaching musically talented girl foundlings to sing in the many liturgical rites required in the Venetian churches. Beginning in the 1600s, all the
ospedali
made a point of musical education and performance, and by the early 1700s they were running musical conservatories that parented girls in the city vied to attend.

The girls sang everything from soprano to bass and played every instrument in orchestras that were famous all over Europe. Over three hundred teachers, mostly male, were employed by the
ospedali
, as well as composers and choirmasters. The priest Antonio Vivaldi was perhaps the most famous of the Ospedale della Pietà’s choirmasters. He began as a violin teacher at the Pietà in 1703, and later served as Master of Concerts at that institution for most of the rest of his life, composing hundreds of musical pieces for the all-female orchestra of the Pietà.

I turned to the interview with Nicola:

Interviewer: It should be no surprise that Vivaldi, who was a brilliant violinist, composed so many pieces for the violin.

Nicola Gibbons: It’s no surprise at all. There are several hundred sonatas and concertos for the violin—solo, double, with
basso continuo
and orchestra. Hundreds. By all accounts Vivaldi must have trained young violinists by the dozen at the Pietà. So the really curious thing is that he also composed thirty-nine concertos for the bassoon.

Interviewer: That’s an unusually high number.

NG: Speaking as one who knows the bassoon repertoire, it’s an incredibly high number. Especially since his players were all women, and they don’t tend to be associated with the bassoon.

Interviewer: He obviously was drawn to something about the bassoon…And, yet, you’re right, it’s curious. Women have been more traditionally linked with the piano, the harp, the flute.

NG: Exactly! It makes you wonder whether he had one or more very stunning bassoonists whom he was working with at the Pietà. I would love to know.

Interviewer: Let’s talk about the media project you’re hoping to get off the ground. You’ve said it’s a recording of up to six CDs, Vivaldi’s complete bassoon concertos on CD-ROM, as performed by an all women’s orchestra in period dress, using period instruments. Do you worry that it might be a bit repetitious? Some people say that Vivaldi wrote the same concerto four hundred times.

NG: I don’t agree. I think the bassoon concertos would make a terrific CD-ROM program! It would be great fun to dramatize the whole thing.

Interviewer (laughs): Who would you get to play Vivaldi?

NG (laughs): Oh, Ralph Fiennes, I think. Is he at all musical?

I shook my head. Surely it was a harmless enough obsession of Nicky’s, this search for legitimate bassoon-playing foremothers. It kept her out of the kind of trouble her mother had always prophesied she’d land in. Until now, anyway.

I went into the kitchen to poke around in the lentils for the combination to the safe, and then returned to the study. I was shocked at the amount of money inside the safe. Wasn’t that why banks were invented? I was also shocked at the amount Nicky expected me to bring to her. It was one thing to say it aloud on the phone; it was another to count it out in bills and stuff it in a small paper bag. How could she possibly need this much money?

The answer might lie in the envelope marked PRIVATE, but it was firmly sealed with tape. I shook the envelope but all that seemed to be in it was paper. I put everything I’d collected into a small bag and began to turn out the lamps in the study. I was reluctant to think too much more about all this tonight. Surely Nicky would explain everything when I saw her.

When the lights were all off but one, I stopped and put on an old cassette tape of Nicky and Olivia playing a Vivaldi piece. I sat down on the couch, no longer an interloper, remembering all the years when I, the avowedly nonmusical one, would perch on the attic stairs and listen to the bassoon and violin singing together below.

O
NCE BEFORE I’D FLOWN
into Venice, on a spring morning spun of blue sky and water. I’d looked down to see the islands flung across the lagoon, had seen Venice itself through a light wash of clouds, and it had seemed to me like an ancient map, with fading blue and ochre inks charting the outlines of sea and shore. The swirl of the Grand Canal had slipped through the city like the fanciful S of an illuminated manuscript.

But this time, a humid twilight was falling and I could see little as the plane descended into Marco Polo Airport. I’d meant to read through the articles from Nicky’s files on the flight. I’d also meant to give a serious look at
Bashō in Lima
and a couple of the other books I’d brought with me, if only to get them firmly out of the way and off the list. Instead I’d become thoroughly engrossed in the first chapters of
Lovers and Virgins
. I could see I was going to have trouble resisting its headlong plot. The characters might be pasteboard, the dialogue stiff and romantic, and the narrative as ridiculous as anything that the author’s mentor Gloria de los Angeles, the queen of magic realism, had ever devised. All the same, I was hooked. What would happen to the four girls in the Venezuelan colonial family? I’d had hints from the reviews. Lourdes saw visions. Mercedes loved books. Maria would be deflowered by a handsome stable boy, and Isabella was her mother’s right hand. Which of the sisters would become nuns and which lovers? Like many ex-Catholics, I had never lost my secret fascination with nuns and what they really did under those voluminous robes.

I took the airport bus to the Piazzale Roma and then a
vaporetto
down the Grand Canal. There is always a sense of magic and disorientation when arriving in Venice. Your mind panics a little, tells you,
Flooded. The streets are flooded
. But your imagination, so much closer to the dreaming state, murmurs,
Yes, and isn’t this how life should be? Simply stepping onto boats instead of buses or cars, gliding easily between tiny ports of call
? Tonight Venice was wet and trembling. Explosions of thunder came from all directions—sometimes far away, sometimes right overhead, as if the city were being demolished. I half expected, when lightning scoured the face of an ancient
palazzo
, that the thunder following would break it to dust and rubble.

I stepped off the
vaporetto
at the Accademia stop, in the Dorsoduro district, just as it began to pour. My sore hip slowed me down, but, pulling my luggage behind me like a rectangular dog, I began to make my way through the streaming little streets to the address Nicky had given me. It had been a long while since I’d been in Venice, and, in any case, it’s not the kind of city whose map is easy to recall from one visit to the next. The spring I’d been here, I’d been content to wander without paying attention to my itinerary.

Within minutes I was lost, of course. Narrow passages opened into empty squares with a dozen exits. Canals forced streets to dead-end, and bridges multiplied with bewildering complexity. I hadn’t remembered to bring an umbrella (I was going south, after all) and was soon soaked. The wind carried the salty smell of the Adriatic.

It wasn’t until I’d crossed the width of the Dorsoduro and come out on the Záttere, the promenade that faces the island of Giudecca, that I could see where I was. I read the map again, asked for directions at a café, and plunged back into the maze of streets. In the strange way of things, I found the address easily this time, perhaps because I halted awkwardly when I saw a pair of lovers taking shelter in a doorway, and in my confusion looked away from them and saw the number Nicky had given me on a large house across the canal.

The
palazzo
was in a garden full of dripping trees and rain-darkened statues. Up a few marble steps was a huge door with peeling paint and a knocker in the shape of a lion’s head. I knocked and heard footsteps echoing off a tile floor in the manner of a gothic novel. I expected an aging manservant in threadbare golden livery to open the door, but it was Nicky.

“Good! You’re finally here,” she said, not bothering to give me more than a cursory kiss on the cheek. “I’ve been through hell.”

She didn’t look it. Or rather, she looked as if hell agreed with her. Even though I’d known Nicky for twenty years, the forcefulness of her appearance could still surprise me, especially if I ran into her anywhere outside her house in Hampstead. Her London residence contained her, accommodated her. When you saw her at home in the kitchen wearing her lipstick-red satin dressing gown, you didn’t think,
What a gigantic force of nature the woman is
. You merely thought,
Here’s Nicky having her morning cuppa
.

Now she seemed to fill the doorway in a long maroon tunic reminiscent of the latter days of the Roman Empire, though a shawl around her shoulders and reading glasses pushed up into her spiraling auburn curls lent a more domestic look. As usual she was wearing expensive and somewhat complicated shoes; Nicky was proud of her well-shaped ankles.

“Come upstairs,” she said, leading the way up marble stairs to a bedroom with enormous ceilings and dusty gold drapes. A chandelier poured from above. The double bed was covered with Nicky’s clothes, and shoes were flung every which way over the flowered carpet, as if she’d been throwing them at ghosts. On the wall was a large gilt-framed School of Tiepolo painting that showed the Virgin Mary being sucked into a vortex of angels.

“Did you bring what I asked you to? Thank you, by the way.”

I handed over the bag and then perched on the edge of the bed. “A thousand pounds is a lot of money,” I ventured.

Nicky only snorted. “This whole situation is extremely annoying, to say the least. I have a concert in Birmingham tomorrow. Quite a number of people are going to be furious if I’m not there. I have no idea how long these Italians think they can keep me in Venice.”

“Why don’t you tell me what happened?”

“I got here five days ago for the symposium. There are about fifteen of us, I suppose, a combination of scholars and musicians. Some of us were put up in this house, which belongs to the man who organized the event, Alfredo Sandretti. I’ve hardly seen him by the way, except when it’s time to give a flowery speech; he makes his son do all the work.

“Anyway here we are.” Nicky paced around the room, counting off: “Me, Gunther from Germany, Andrew from Canada and Bitten from Sweden. All of us have performed Vivaldi’s bassoon concertos. Bitten Johansson is probably Scandinavia’s best-known Baroque bassoonist. Andrew isn’t the most brilliant player, but he’s made himself an expert on Vivaldi. I didn’t realize he’d begun to focus exclusively on the Pietà. He’s a professor and is just starting a sabbatical to write a book about his research here. Anyway, I suppose they put us together because they thought we’d have a lot to talk about. There’s an oboist staying here too, Dutch or something, probably because they didn’t have anywhere else to stash her.”

Nicky ran her hands through her curls, newly colored and full of life. My own hair was curly too, but frizzier and getting gray. I usually tucked it into a beret and forgot about it.

“The idea was that we would participate in seminars during the day and in the evening play music. Each day we were loaned period instruments to practice on. Then, after practicing, they’d take the instruments away again and give them back to us at the concert. Yesterday, the last day of the symposium, everything was a little more lax; we had a long lunch and then only a bit of a late rehearsal. Everyone was tired, to tell the truth. We kept the instruments with us, as it was only a few hours until the performance. I took a nap, fell deeply asleep, and when I woke up, the bassoon I’d been lent was gone.

“There was an enormous search—Sandretti, his son, the police, everybody sniffing through my knickers. I couldn’t imagine they were serious. I couldn’t
believe
anyone thought I’d taken it. And
why
would I do it before the last concert, when it would be so obvious?”

“Is it worth a lot?”

“Of course, though it could have been worse. It’s not a classic, like a Denner or Hotteterre. But it
is
one of the instruments once used by the Pietà girls. Belongs to the Sandrettis, in the family for centuries. I don’t know the price, or even if there is one. In Italy everything is millions of
lire
anyway. But how do you value something that is one of a kind?”

She stuck the money and the envelope marked PRIVATE between the mattresses without further explanation. Then she picked up the biography of the conductor and began flipping impatiently through it. I pulled off my boots. They made a sorry impression next to Nicky’s red heels. She’d tried for years to make me more fashion conscious, but I’d stuck to my black Levi’s and boots. It was one of my few consistencies.

A knock at the door interrupted Nicky’s reading, and a beautiful young man entered with a tray. Ah, the faithful retainer at last and none too soon, for I was hungry, and the sight of biscuits and cheese with a carafe of wine was particularly welcome.

“Marco Sandretti. Cassandra Reilly,” Nicky said in a clipped, even hostile manner. Since Nicky usually enjoyed the company of attractive young people, I could only surmise that she considered him to be if not an enemy, then of the enemy camp. “Why does everyone else get to go out and I have to stay here?”

“I’m very sorry,” said Marco. “My father told me for you to stay here.”

“Your father, your father!” said Nicky, pacing and eating biscuits. She looked like Maria Callas as Medea in her heavy days. “I never should have accepted his invitation to come to this symposium. Oh yes, he made it sound so lovely. A week in sunny Italy with gorgeous meals and the enchanting company of like-minded musicians. Ha!”