The True Adventures of Nicolo Zen (5 page)

But that was the least of my worries, for soon after dinner the moment arrived that I had been dreading ever since I walked into the dormitory: I had to undress. Not only that, but I had to do so
with the ease of a girl among other girls, not revealing I was a boy while trying to keep my eyes off all the girls undressing around me. It wasn’t easy! I felt myself turn red as a beet, my nervousness obvious enough to prompt Julietta into breaking her silence. And she was so pretty I could barely avert my eyes when she unbuttoned her dress and pulled it over her head.

“You were hungry tonight, Nicolà,” she murmured, turning down her bed.

I nodded and removed my own dress, and as quickly as possible dropped my nightdress over my head. I folded the dress and tucked it into the top drawer of my chest. I had expected the chest to be empty, but as if by magic it was already filled with stockings and shifts, underthings, a white frock and a blue one, and a pair of slippers. Opposite my bed, on a hook on the wall beside a dozen other blue woolen cloaks, there was one for me. Its distinctive red hood indicated that it belonged to a member of the elite orchestra. No other residents of the Ospedale could wear such a cloak.

After Signora Marta extinguished the candles along the walls, and loudly bade us good night, I tucked my clarinet beneath my pillow and lay awake, feeling somewhat safer in the darkness. I marveled at how I had arrived at La Pietà, how the events of the previous week had alternated so easily between nightmare and dream. I began worrying that I could be expelled from the orphanage just as abruptly as I had entered it. Thus did my mind keep going round and round, but after such a long, stressful day, my weariness caught up with me. I drifted, lulled by the breathing of the girls around me, and had just crossed that hazy borderline into sleep when someone kissed me on the cheek. I thought I
caught a whiff of hyacinth, but when I sat up, straining my eyes, I saw no one. The only sound I could hear was Carita snoring softly.

I laid my head back on the pillow, not sure whether I had imagined this kiss or it was real. If it did happen, I thought, which of my new companions had kissed me, and why?

At my first rehearsal in the Church of La Pietà, I tried to position myself in the second row, directly behind the blond girl who had smiled at me the previous evening, but with whom I had yet to exchange a word. Julietta had told me her name was Adriana dalla Viola. She said Adriana was one of her closest friends and offered to introduce me to her. There was something that drew me to Adriana, and it wasn’t just her beauty, for there were any number of beautiful girls in the orchestra, including Julietta herself, who dressed and slept not four feet from me. Even in the brief time I had been around her, I saw that Adriana possessed a poise and calm I had seldom seen in an adult, much less in someone my own age. At any rate, my hope of standing close to her and speaking to her during a break was thwarted, and I was put in my place—literally—by Marina dal Violino, who was standing beside Adriana.

“You are in the back row,” Marina said sharply, “the last and least among us with your strange instrument. You had better get there before the Master arrives. We never needed a clarinet before, and I doubt we need one now. You just take direction from Genevieve dal Flauto, the Prima Flautista, ask no questions, expect no favors, and hit the right notes.”

Genevieve had black hair, knotted back severely, small ears,
and brown hawk eyes that followed me to my place. Her expression was rigid. Her skin had an icy sheen, her lips were thin and white. She and Marina were sixteen years old, only two years my senior, but at that point in my life they felt far older.

A hush descended when we heard the Master’s boots, followed by Luca’s, on the stone steps that led to the mezzanine from a chamber behind the altar. The Master entered imperiously, scanning the orchestra without allowing his eyes to linger on any one of us. He was wearing a white robe with a gold collar and the white gloves, easily seen in dim concert halls, that he always wore when conducting. His red hair caught the light of the candles. Under his arm Luca was carrying a leather folder containing a stack of sheet music, which he distributed to us.

We were lined up, three deep, behind the iron grille, draped in crêpe, overlooking a wide hall where chairs would be set out for our performance the following night. The grille was intended to shield our identities, and in the sardonic words of Signora Marta, “to preserve whatever innocence you may still possess.” After breakfast, setting up in a practice room, Julietta had filled me in on the intricacies of this issue while Carita frowned and averted her gaze, pretending to be deeply absorbed in polishing her cornet. Julietta was quite the coquette, and the rippling laughter with which she punctuated her conversation emerged naturally. A tradesman’s son from the outer Lagoon, I had never been around girls like her.

“No matter what they say, I don’t know that anyone gives much thought to virtue or innocence around here. Certainly not Marta or Luca. And when the Master puts his mind to such matters, it usually pertains to the chorus, especially the mezzosopranos,”
she said archly, “and not any of us. In short, despite all the rules heaped upon us, the only real rule is: ‘Don’t get caught,’ ” she added, tuning her tiorba. “Meanwhile, you should know that when we reach the age of seventeen, we can be courted from the outside. We receive letters from gentlemen of the city requesting the company of a particular girl—with a chaperone, of course—based not on her appearance, which is supposedly unknown to them, but the quality of her playing. Even if it were true that our music seduces these men, would that make their intentions any purer?”

“Why are you filling her head with this rubbish?” Carita interjected. “She’s only been here one day.”

“She’ll soon learn a lot more than that for herself,” Julietta laughed. “We are given these letters by way of Marta, whose deafness, I should tell you, many of us doubt, having on rare occasions seen her react to sound. At any rate, we never know how many of these letters she actually receives, which ones she dispenses, which she withholds, and why.” She lowered her voice. “And of course we don’t know if, for a few coins, she doesn’t provide a particular gentleman with a physical description of, say, Carita dal Cornetto.”

“You can shut up now,” Carita snapped.

“But some of us suspect these gentlemen know a good deal more about us than how we play our instruments,” Julietta continued.

Carita grabbed her arm. “You had better watch what you say, Julietta, and who you say it to.”

Both Julietta and I were taken aback by Carita’s anger. Julietta was taller and stronger than Carita. She pulled her arm free
and leaned in close to Carita. “Don’t ever lay your hands on me again.”

“One day you’ll be sorry,” Carita hissed, and stormed off.

As I spread out my sheet music on a stand, I could see that, despite her bravado, Julietta was shaken. It was obvious she had teased Carita before, but without drawing such a sharp response.

Though I knew it might be best to remain silent, I said to Julietta, “Why is she threatening you?”

“No matter. I’m not afraid of her, or the likes of her.” She turned away, and proceeded to polish her tiorba. Then, lowering her voice, and without a trace of her usual good spirits, she addressed my question without answering it: “You have only seen the surface of this place, Nicolà. It won’t take you long to see what else is going on. Be careful who you trust.”

All through our rehearsal at the church that afternoon, I kept one eye on the score and the other on the Master’s baton. I missed none of my cues as we worked through his newest composition, a Concerto in F major. It was exhilarating for me to play with an orchestra, to be a part of this great synchronized mechanism whose volume the Master could raise or lower, whose dynamics he controlled, and whose colorations he could darken or lighten, all with a flick of his wrist. Even with the guidance of my clarinet, it was difficult for me to adjust at first, to hear the other musicians while also hearing myself; but I was grateful, for what might take a musician with a conventional clarinet several weeks, I managed in a few hours. This fact was not lost on some of the girls, every one of them with highly trained ears, after all, who cast approving glances my way. From what I heard later, they wondered if I was not a former conservatory student rather than the street
musician I claimed to be, especially since I played such an exotic instrument. Information traveled fast in that small community, and within a couple of days my history—that is, the made-up version I had presented to Luca and the Master—was general knowledge. Those who speculated, out of genuine admiration or envy, decided the story could only be true if I was a sort of prodigy, able to play any score put before me with unerring accuracy.

“Have you ever heard of such a musician playing in the streets?” Genevieve dal Flauto sniffed to Marina dal Violino by the privy, knowing I was inside (having remembered to sit while peeing, since my feet would be visible beneath the door). “And a girl, no less. I wonder where she really came from.” These two had taken such an immediate dislike to me that I asked Julietta if they were hostile to all newcomers.

“Not all. Genevieve is threatened by you because the Master put you among the flutes, rather than the oboes, and obviously believes he can adapt the flute parts to your clarinet. Marina is mean-spirited, but not always so obvious about it. Something about you has gotten under her skin. But I like you, Nicolà. And I trust you.” She embraced me, and I delighted in the warmth of her body against mine.

Despite that, and my pleasure in playing my clarinet at the rehearsal, I couldn’t get Julietta’s earlier words out of my head, and I wondered what it was she was warning me about at the Ospedale.

The following evening before dinner, Julietta and I were sitting on one of the stone benches in the Ospedale’s courtyard. She had told me she had a surprise for me. A sea breeze blowing in from the Lido stirred the poplars. The marigolds and zinnias in flowerbeds shone like gems, yellow and gold, in the fading light. Deep shadows were lengthening on the cobblestones. Across the courtyard, through a low archway, I could see Bartolomeo Cattaglia, the cook, picking lettuce and radishes from the garden that supplied his kitchen. He was a broad-shouldered, ham-handed man with a grizzled beard and a curly mass of brown hair, graying around the ears. He had one eye and one good leg, the result of serving in the Republic’s Navy in the Genoese and Sardinian Wars. He lost his eye to an arrow and his left leg below the knee to a cannonball. He himself had been a cannoneer on the admiral’s flagship, but once he had to depend on a wooden leg, he found another way to serve by becoming a cook. That meant learning to transform the potatoes, onions, and salted fish that were the staples of seafaring galleys into tasty soups and stews. He was especially adept at preparing
sarde in saor
, the favored dish of Venetian sailors for centuries: layers of marinated sardines alternating with a paste of onions, raisins, and pine nuts. When he left the Navy finally, a highly decorated veteran, he took charge of the kitchens at the
Ospedale on the recommendation of the admiralty office. He set the place up like a ship’s galley, pots and pans, highly polished, hooked to a broad beam, all utensils within reach, the butcher block scrubbed down daily with salt and sprinkled with olive oil, the oak floor swept clean, and the barrels in the storeroom neatly labeled. A number of cooks worked under him, feeding hundreds of girls, but Bartolomeo still tended to details like the vegetable garden himself, and he personally oversaw the meals served to the forty members of the
privilegiate di coro
. I was immediately drawn to him, I suppose, because, of all the men who worked at the Ospedale—Luca, Carmine, the thin high-strung porter, and of course the Master—Bartolomeo had far more in common with the men I had grown up around, my father and his fellow workers. Like my father, he came out of the laboring class, but had a much tougher background, having grown up in the back alleys of Santa Croce, notorious for its bare-knuckle boxers and knife fighters. It was no accident that the Navy conscripted most of its wartime sailors there. Ducal police sometimes rounded up a dozen men in a single tavern and sent them directly to the naval barracks on the Isola di San Pietro. Bartolomeo, however, was a volunteer, and proud of it.

In fact, my first interchange of sorts with him occurred that very evening as he limped back to the kitchen, his black cane clicking loudly and a basket of vegetables tucked under his other arm. He paused at the sight of Julietta and me.

“Good evening, Julietta,” he called out. “And you must be the new girl among the
privilegiate
.”

“Yes, sir,” I replied. “Nicolà dal Clarinetto.”

“Welcome. Here is something for you both, to save for dessert.” He reached into his pocket and produced two apricots, which he tossed to us in quick succession.

Julietta caught hers with both hands, but when mine sailed wide and high, I leaped up and dived for it, catching it with one hand and tumbling headfirst into the flowerbed. Julietta laughed with surprise when I jumped up, brandishing the apricot and brushing the dirt from my skirt, but Bartolomeo wasn’t laughing. He took two steps toward us, squinting at me in the twilight.