The Case of the Orphaned Bassoonists (6 page)

“Eighteenth-century audiences never paid attention to the plot during the performance,” Andrew told me. “They listened to the arias, but they would talk during the
recitativos
, which carried the plot along. That’s why the librettist wrote an introduction for the libretto. It could be as complicated as he and the composer wanted, yet they didn’t worry that the audience would jump up in the middle and say, ‘What’s really going on here?’”

“Vivaldi, he loved the opera,” said Marco. “Here he was, so famous as a violinist and composer at the Pietà, but he wrote many, many operas as well. About forty or eighty. It’s always very confusing though, his operas. Everybody love the somebody who is not the real somebody. Everybody is pretending:
he is my brother, not my lover
, you know. Or they find out the servant is their son or grandfather.”

“Of course,” said Andrew. “Throughout European history, children were constantly being abandoned by their true parents and brought up by others. Before the foundling hospitals in the Renaissance, people would just leave their babies in trees or by fountains and expect that someone would pick them up and take them home. It would then be a likely occurrence that people turned out to be related.”

“Yes, and sometimes in the operas,” added Marco, “the women are men and the men are women. Everybody is in disguise, and love must be secret.”

There was a slight sigh from Andrew. Some love was not that secret. In front of us were Bitten and Gunther, cooing and grunting. Marco’s father was offstage, but I could see Miss de Hoog holding her oboe somewhat awkwardly while she chatted with one of the violinists. She was wearing a sleeveless black dress that made me realize her arms were indeed quite muscular.

It was not a staged opera, of course, not in such a small space. When the lights dimmed, the soloists filed in, the women in deeply cut evening gowns. The part of Orlando, which must have been sung by a castrato in the eighteenth century, was to be sung by a mezzo. The soloists stood there during the overture, trying to look rapturous. Then the action began. Orlando was not yet furious, but hopeful, singing to his lost Angelica.

I was paying attention during the first aria or two, but sometime after that, all the music began to blend together, the way Vivaldi’s compositions often did with me. Although I thought of Vivaldi as easier on the ears than Bartók, I couldn’t always distinguish between repetition and variation in the Baroque master’s style. I began thinking about Nicky instead, wondering where she was and what she was keeping from me. I didn’t think she was in any danger, but so far she’d been less than forthcoming. There was a mystery here that was not just about a missing bassoon, and it irritated me that she hadn’t confided what it was. What were we to each other, especially now that Olivia was gone?

Since Olivia’s death, Nicky had been urging me to move into one of the three bedrooms in the Hampstead house. She wouldn’t come right out and say she was lonely—“It’s ridiculous for you to hide up there in the attic when I’m rattling around in this bloody great mansion by myself”—just as I wouldn’t come out and say that the prospect of leaving my attic room was seductive but terrifying.

“You should let out the rooms,” I urged her instead. “Think of all the young musicians who’d love such a nice house to live in. After all, I’m hardly in London.”

And to prove it, shortly after Olivia’s funeral, I’d gone off first for a month to Argentina and then for an extended stay to Sydney, where I’d met Dr. Angela Notion. Translation projects hadn’t taken me to the South Seas. I said it was my romance with Angela of the Turtle Eggs, but in fact it was fear of Nicky’s need for me. And how secretly pleased I’d been when I returned to find Nicky just leaving for Venice. It had meant I could enjoy all the nice things in her house while at the same time ensconcing myself firmly in the attic so that when she returned, there’d be no question of my moving downstairs. I’d grown up with a houseful of sisters, after all, and privacy, even uncomfortable privacy, was the joy of my adulthood.

Suddenly the first act of
Orlando Furioso
was over, and I still didn’t know what he was so upset about.

“She is dreadful. This Anna de Hoog is truly dreadful,” Andrew said in a vehement voice barely disguised by the clapping around us. “Did you see the way the conductor glared at her when she hit that B flat? Why the devil did your father invite her?” he asked Marco.

Marco shrugged unhappily, as Albert excused himself and left our row. I had noticed that Marco seemed to take upon himself the weight of situations that had nothing to do with him.

“Do you play an instrument, Marco?” I asked.

“Me? Oh no. Nor my father, either. But he was singing opera when he was younger. A tenor. Now he just organizes. Me, too. It is other people who have the talent for music.”

I’d warmed to Marco immediately, but it was hard to appreciate Andrew. He seemed to have little of the ironic self-deprecation I enjoyed so much in his fellow Canadians. But perhaps he was just insecure. He reminded me a little of a French teacher I’d had in junior high, a toupéed older man with an execrable accent (I knew this because I later reproduced it in Paris, to looks of great horror), who showed us slides of his trips to France. In these slides one or more handsome young sailors always seemed to be lurking in the background.

Gunther and Bitten turned around, two blue-eyed giants in love. The dazed expression on their faces was too much to bear in duplicate.

Andrew said to them, in real anguish, “It’s an insult to Vivaldi,” and Gunther nodded solemnly, while keeping his arm firmly around Bitten. Bitten said, “I’ve been trying to understand. Is it that the acoustics are so bad, or is it the orchestra? Surely
we
did not sound so bad as they.”

“It’s not the acoustics,” said Andrew, and I was amazed at how violent his feeling was. “The singers are really dreadful too. The whole performance is intolerable.”

I wanted to say that I didn’t think it was so bad, but I knew they wouldn’t be interested in my opinion. I was relieved to see Albert threading his way back among the returning members of the audience.

“But where is the bassoon?” Marco asked.

“I thought it best to put it in a safer place, not far from here.”

“What safer place?” Marco said, but in a lower tone, and in Italian, for that was the language Albert had addressed him in.

They murmured back and forth, but loud enough so that all of us, including Bitten and Gunther, could hear the word
Danieli
.

The Danieli was one of the poshest hotels in Venice, and it was practically right next door to the Pietà. Could Albert possibly be staying there?

The second act began with a flourish. I had, in spite of my best intentions, been unable to recall the plot, so I was soon at sea. In a Baroque vessel sailing in alternately splashy and calm waters of the human soul, yearning, restless and joyful.

Beside me, Albert and Marco listened intently, but I heard Andrew sighing in disgust, presumably at ear-bending oboe errors that I couldn’t recognize. The rest of the audience seemed quite enthralled. At least until, during a solemn moment, the sound of a cell phone trilled as demandingly as a tiny poodle wanting to be picked up.

It was Gunther’s Handy. He answered it in a low voice, at the same time rising to excuse himself. Of course he was in the middle of the row. From the set of Bitten’s shoulders, it was clear she wasn’t at all happy, and after a few minutes, just as everyone in her church pew got settled again, she popped up like an extremely large jumping jack and pushed her way out after Gunther.

The concentration of the singers and players faltered, particularly after the second interruption (for some reason Bitten felt compelled to say
Scusi
several times in a distractingly loud voice, especially after she half-fell onto the lap of an elderly man who had been snoozing), and although the musicians went on with as much verve as possible, Andrew’s critical, pained sighs increased.

At the next interval Marco got up, murmuring, “I must tell Gunther to turn off his telephone.” A moment or two later, Andrew followed him out.

Albert and I remained where we were. When the rows around us had emptied, I said, “It’s quite unusual that two bassoons should go missing at the same time, don’t you think?”

“Highly unusual,” said Albert, “and, in fact, quite untrue.”

“What do you mean, untrue?”

“It’s the same bassoon all right.”

“But Signore Sandretti…”

“One might ask oneself why.”

“Did you get the strong impression that Bitten recognized it?”

“Yes. But for some reason she didn’t want to say anything.”

“Marco thought the bassoon was the right one,” I pointed out.

“But after his father said it wasn’t, Marco immediately fell in line.”

“What about Andrew?”

“His face reveals nothing most of the time except a great eagerness to be with Marco. But no, I’m tempted to believe that he didn’t steal it. Nor did Gunther.”

“Why would Signore Sandretti…?”

“That remains to be discovered. Meanwhile the bassoon is safe.”

“At the Danieli?”

Albert smiled, but all he said was, “Ah, so you can eavesdrop in Italian too. A useful skill.”

None of our friends returned for the opening of Act Three, a truancy I’m sure the performers appreciated. Perhaps it was the absence of a critical voice next to me, but from the opening strains I began to hear and feel the music this time. In spite of the hard pews and less than perfect acoustics, the singing began to penetrate my bones with intense sweetness. Festive, sober, giddy, tragic, the music floated me down rivers and danced with me in mirrored reception rooms. I closed my eyes, and when I opened them again, I glimpsed for just a second a world other than the superficial and tawdry one I lived in. It was not a perfect place, of course, for it was created by human beings who loved intrigue, complexity, luxury and revenge. Emotionally, it was not a simpler world, but it was one that was livelier and more dignified. I opened my eyes and saw a richly intricate Guardi painting superimposed over the church scene. Instead of a motley collection of tourists dressed in T-shirts and jeans, I saw silk dresses, velvet capes, embroidered breeches and stockings. I smelled sweat and heavy perfume, candle wax and damp stone. Behind the latticed balconies, the voices of the chorus poured out like water. And the orchestra of women below was filled with beautiful orphaned musicians looking pale and monastic. Like Francesca.

The presentation was over and everyone took a bow, many more bows, actually, than necessary. As Albert and I got up to go, I saw Bitten in a side pew, alone. Outside the church we found Marco and Andrew leaning against a balustrade. Marco was having a nervous smoke and didn’t meet my eyes. I hadn’t seen him smoke before.

“Where’s Gunther?” Bitten asked Marco, coming up behind us. “Didn’t he come back yet?”

“Come back from where?” Albert asked.

“Oh, he took a walk. He was feeling rather restless,” Bitten said, after a pause in which she seemed to take hold of herself. “I’m sure he’ll meet us soon.”

If that was the case, then why did she suddenly sound so nervous?

I was eager to dump the bassoonists after the concert, but they insisted on clumping together like amoebas under a microscope. No one spoke. As we walked away from the Pietà, Bitten kept looking around for Gunther, and Andrew and Marco seemed suddenly shy with each other. I wondered if Andrew had gotten a little of what he wanted. At the door of the Hotel Danieli, one of the doormen gave a respectful wave to Albert. So he
was
staying there.

Albert swung along beside me, bowler low on his forehead, trousers too short above black boots that caught the shine of the street light above. He whistled a tune between his teeth, but it wasn’t from the Vivaldi opera we’d just heard. It was
Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea
, and it echoed the clarinet solo we were heading toward. He moved to take my arm, and although I shuddered slightly at his touch, I allowed it. Not for the first time did I wonder about Albert’s sexual proclivities. He was such an enigmatic blend of innocence and cunning, he could turn out to be either chaste or polymorphously dissolute. The only thing I didn’t believe about Albert was that he was happily married and lived with a wife and two children in the bucolic English countryside.

The air was still humid, and the sky was heavy and moonless; each breath I took tasted of musty salt, of old wood and damp stone. As I had in the Pietà, I closed my eyes and opened them again, imagining myself in an earlier time, when masked women in wide cloaks stepped into gondolas, the gondolas that now rode emptily in their moorage in the wide basin to our left.

Marco caught up to me and Albert. He seemed worried that we were headed in the direction of Piazza San Marco and in the direction of the clarinet.

“We take the
vaporetto
over to Accademia,” he reminded me. “A nightcap, yes?”

“You can do what you like. I don’t believe I’m under any sort of obligation to spend all my time with you lot.”

“No, of course not,” murmured Marco unhappily as we arrived at the square.

“How the heck should I know where he is?” Andrew was now saying under his breath to Bitten. “You’re the ones who had the lovers’ quarrel.”

“We…”

“Bitten, I
heard
you two arguing.”

“Where?”

But then they both noticed I had stopped abruptly and seemed to be listening to them.

I did hear them, but I had stopped for quite another reason. I had seen, alone at an outdoors café table, a figure with red-gold hair in a dark coat that was pulled tightly around her shoulders. She was enthralled by the trio directly in front of her, especially by the young woman who was similar enough to Marco to be his twin. Roberta Sandretti. The same straight nose, decisive brows, dark curly hair. But she radiated a kind of energy that made her brother look like a low-wattage light bulb. Her eyes flashed the intelligence of their father, along with the joyful controlled abandon of a real musician.