Vivaldi's Virgins (20 page)

My sleep was haunted by a nightmare during the many months I lived and worked in the laundry. It was always the same. The great wooden spoon slipped out of my hands. Sister Laura stood over me, crying out, “Grab it—grab it before it’s too late!” And then la Befana came up behind me and shoved me, so that both my hands went into the lye, and I knew—I knew in that moment of searing pain and horror—that I would never play music again, that it was lost to me, lost to me forever.

Dear Annina,

Where
were
you for the opening? I saw everyone else, but I couldn’t see you anywhere! When I came to the
parlatorio
and asked for you, Maestra Evelina said you weren’t receiving. Are you ill? I’m going to ask my future mother-in-law to send you a chicken.

Oh Annina, you must have heard by now that my debut was an absolute triumph—far more wonderful than even I had ever dreamed. I only had to consult the prompter a couple of times, and my voice was as strong and good as it’s ever been. And, oh, my costume! I thought I would die of happiness when they brought it to me for the dress rehearsal.

Handel’s patron, Prince Ernest of Hanover, was there. He kissed my hand when he met me, and swears he’s going to come to every
performance as long as I’m singing Poppea. And Handel says that, as far as he’s concerned, there should be a law passed to bar anyone but me from ever singing Poppea. Isn’t that sweet?

They’re really terribly shy, these Saxons—they can’t seem to just say what they want to say (no less do what they want to do!). Instead they waste one’s time and pots of ink writing poetry, or else they stand about casting sidelong glances and making faces, till one wants to ask them whether they ate something bad that gave them indigestion.

Handel has written the most divine hymn to the Virgin, “Ah!
Che troppo ineguali!”
He asked me to sing it at a private concert at the
palazzo
of the Marcello brothers. Everyone there adored it, and yet the composer couldn’t even face me when it was done—and, I kid you not, the man was wiping tears from his eyes as he hurried out of the room. Tomasso guffawed in that annoying way of his and said that
“il caro Sassone”
had better sniff up someone else’s skirts.

Tonight will be our fifteenth performance of
Agrippina.
There’s no end in sight to the enthusiasm of
la Serenissima
for this opera. People are buying up tickets and selling them for three times their price.

I adore singing on the opera stage. This is the life I was born to live—I’ve always known it. Thanks to Tomasso’s family and their riches, I am able to live it without the sordid struggles that attend the efforts of so many other
artistes.

How can it be that there is not a woman who plays in any one of the opera orchestras—and yet we are allowed to sing on the stage? It seems so unfair that the four
ospedali
are the only places in this benighted city where someone such as you can perform—hidden away, where no one can see you!

You can’t imagine how glorious it is to be seen and heard and
known! I am only truly happy when I am performing thus, with everyone’s eyes upon me. All the rest of life seems like nothing more than a collection of boring details.

I am practically brought to the theater now under lock and key. Tomasso’s mother makes a great show of protecting my virtue.

What is virtue, Annina, but a sham? Every woman among the nobility, as far as I’ve been able to see, has her lover. My future mother-in-law herself says that it’s the height of poor taste to be seen around town with one’s husband.

I’ve been able to find out one thing more since I wrote to you last. I made off with a bottle of wine after the party on opening night and stashed it in my cell here in the cloister. Making use of it later, I got my old stinky nun liquored up sufficiently to have a nice little talk with me about the history of San Francesco della Vigna and some of the odd things that have happened here over the years.

Turns out there was a group of musicians from the Pietà who came here to make their devotions, late in anno Domini 1694. One of them—a young noblewoman traveling under an assumed name—stayed behind, supposedly for a year of silent retreat. But then she was spirited away in a gondola in the dead of night some eight months after her arrival.

One story has it that she gave birth to a baby and then drowned it in the canal. They say that some of the nuns can hear its ghost on rainy nights, crying out for its mother. Another version of the story says that the young noblewoman took her baby away with her. But in each version of the story, she was a daughter of the Foscarini.

Before you get your hopes up, I think you should bear in mind that no one from Tomasso’s family would ever in a thousand years own up to such a scandal. And, anyway, dozens of girls of the Pietà could make an equally plausible claim to be the outcome of that par
ticular story. But I thought I’d better tell it to you, just the same.

When the show has had its run, I will find a way to slip out
in maschera.
I’ll come get you, and the two of us, you and I, will see, hear, and taste the best of what Venezia has to offer. We’ll both dress up as soldiers or something equally rakish and fun.

By the by, the wench who serves my future mother-in-law—a priceless gossip—let slip that she carries letters almost daily to and from the Pietà. And now I’m wondering if that great oaf, Tomasso, is courting another girl there. Wouldn’t that be just like him to have a spare virgin for when he grows tired of me!

Please try—try your hardest—to come hear me sing. I’m sure Matteo would help you, if all else fails.

Baci ed abbracci,
Marietta

I
t was, naturally, Paolina who gave me Marietta’s letter—although I noticed a reticence on her part and even a note of resentment that I had no coins to give her for her trouble.

I failed to make any new friends in the
comun
. All of the girls there knew where I came from, and they delighted, I think, in witnessing my fall from grace. Paolina was always cordial, but I rarely got to see her, as the pressing room is at the opposite end of the building from the soap works.

I carried Marietta’s unopened letter inside my chemise for a day and a half before I found a time and a place where I could read it without being seen. And then I read and reread it so many times that I committed it to memory.

For every day that I measured ashes and stirred the vat of lye over the fire, I felt the flame of my own life dying away.

It is not only food that feeds us, and it is not only prayer that lets us walk in God’s light.

I saw the autumn turn to winter while living like a ghost among the
figlie di comun
. I went with them to the church at Christmastime to hear the oratorio performed by my peers. It reminded me of that night on the balcony of the Ca’ Foscarini, when the heavenly sounds of the
coro
wafted up to me and I looked down upon them as a spirit looks down upon the living from the land of the dead. Only when I ceased to be Anna Maria dal Violin did I come to understand exactly who I was and how I was meant to live—but it was too late. That life was lost to me as I labored and languished in the soap works of the
ospedale
.

Unlike many of the others, who had worked in the laundry since the age of ten, I was closely watched by the mistress in charge, who had no greater love for me than the girls who worked under her. The door was barred at night, and the
portinare
who guarded it seemed content to sit there, gossip with tradesmen or servants, and bark at any of their less privileged fellow inmates of the Pietà who tried to steal a look at the world outside.

In the refectory, very soon after my arrival, I asked Paolina whether she could carry a letter for me, if I managed to find a way to write one. But she only looked offended and shook her head no.

I wanted to ask Silvio if he could help me—but to do what? How far would I get if I ran away? Without the locket, I had nothing of value to buy my passage or pay for bread.

I wondered what had become of the locket and the small collection of private things I’d kept under my bed—the quills and ink, the sealing wax and sand, the seal with my initials. I wondered, too, what the other girls had been told. Gross insubordination was usually kept a secret, lest it encourage others to rebel. Maybe they thought I was ill or that, like Giulietta, I’d run away. Maybe they thought I was dead.

I felt bad that I hadn’t been able to give the locket to Silvio, as I’d intended. Did another girl have it now? It made my guts writhe to think of it clutched in Bernardina’s freckled fist. Had it been confiscated by the Prioress? For all Silvio knew, I’d made it back safely to my room. He might be sending me messages even now—messages that would never reach me.

I wondered if Marietta might be able to help me, but I also knew that all her thoughts were on the opera and her upcoming marriage, and I firmly believed then that she was not a person to risk her own well-being in the service of someone else.

Thoughts of Franz were always with me, but I knew there was scant hope, in the real world, of ever seeing him again.

As the days turned into weeks, and the weeks to months, all my desires were distilled into a single wish: to hold my violin again and make it sing. I no longer wondered who my parents were or what different kind of life I could have if I found them. I wanted my old life back. I wanted only to be, once again, Anna Maria dal Violin.

I lived and breathed despair. I felt sure I would be there forever among the
figlie di comun
, sifting ashes and stirring fat and lye until I was too maimed to work or simply died of sorrow. With my friends gone, and with Sister Laura turned against me, I was sure as well I’d been forgotten. Even the maestro would have found another violinist who could try out new compositions as he wrote them, whose name he would scrawl in his florid hand across the top of the page. God had spurned me because I had squandered the gifts He’d given me.

I had to ask for paper, ink, and a pen half a dozen times before they were granted me. And then I wrote both to the Prioress and the governors, swearing that I had seen the error of my ways and that all I wanted, for the rest of my life, was to be able to play music again as a sage and modest
figlia
of the Pietà.

When I had gone over the letters many times, making sure they were as perfect as I could make them, I gave them to Signora Zuana, the
carica
in charge of all of the girls and women who worked in the soap works and laundry. She looked almost kindly at me when she took the two neatly folded letters from my hand, and she said that she would see that they were delivered. I tasted hope again.

I had already gone out the door when I decided to turn back and thank Signora Zuana again for her willingness to help me. I knew that she had no cause to do so, and my heart warmed at this unwonted act of kindness.

It took me a moment to understand what I was seeing when I entered the room. Signora Zuana was kneeling down beside the vat of lye. With one hand she shielded her face from the heat, while, with the other, she fed my letters into the fire. The flames flared up, bright green at first, then yellow, till the yellow died down into a mournful display of orange sparks. I watched in helpless silence as my words and all my hopes for a reprieve were reduced to ashes.

A
SORT OF DULLNESS
set into my soul. The days stretched into weeks and the weeks into months. When I lay down to sleep, I looked at my hands and wept because they did not even seem like my hands anymore. My fingers were reddened, rough, and chapped. Especially as the weather grew colder, the fingers of my left hand felt too stiff for even Vivaldi’s slowest passages. I tried to regain the suppleness in my hands when I realized that it was gone, practicing my fingering and bowing in the air. But I was always too exhausted at night to keep this up long enough to get any good from it.

My bedmates disdained me because I had no interest in gossiping with them, so intent was I on thinking about music, hoping to keep it alive inside me. More than once I overheard them gossiping about
me
—mocking my exercises and my foolishness in thinking I would ever play music again.

In the spring, Signora Zuana told me to report to the infirmary.

“But I’m not ill,” I told her. I could never look her in the eye after that day I saw her burn my letters.

“Nonetheless, you’re wanted there.”

I came as I was, sprinkled in the ashes that nearly always covered me now, so that I looked more like a gray-haired lady than a fifteen-year-old girl. The attendant at the infirmary door led me across the main sickroom, past the coughing and quietly groaning, past the glassy-eyed patients and those who were fast
asleep. We knocked and were admitted to another, smaller room with a window that looked out over the wintry courtyard and the rain.

Sister Laura was lying in a bed there, although I hardly would have recognized her. Her face was bloated. Her skin was gray. Her blue eyes were rimmed in red, as they had been on that terrible night. And yet they lit up at the sight of me, filled with all the kindness and affection she’d always shown me. I was overcome with remorse, remembering how I’d spoken to her.

The doctor attending her took me aside. “Do you know her well?”

“She was my first teacher,” I told him, “and was ever a friend to me.” I said nothing of the last time she and I had met.

He shook his head. “You’d best say
addio
to her, and wish her Godspeed on her journey. The priest is on his way.”

“Why?” I asked him. “What has happened to her?”

“Inflammation of the lungs, fever, and delirium. Our remedies didn’t work this time. She has been asking for you.”

I knelt and took one of her hands—it was cold, as if she’d died already. “
Figlia!
” she said to me in barely a whisper before her whole frame was wracked by a fit of coughing.

I held her hand until the coughing passed and then kissed her forehead as she had once kissed mine.

Thus I knelt there, half paralyzed with dread, while other people came into the room, some of them bearing the objects needed for Last Rites: a little table covered with a white cloth, candles and incense, a bowl of water, and vessels of holy oil. These were followed by a priest—not the usual priest who heard our confessions and gave us Communion, but someone of higher rank and unknown to me.

The Prioress and several other
maestre
came in, along with a couple of noblewomen draped in black from head to toe and
heavily veiled. The priest sprinkled holy water around the room in the shape of a cross. He wiped his fingers on a piece of bread and then, dipping pieces of snowy white cloth in the oil, he anointed her, again marking the shape of the cross. And as he did this, he prayed.

“In nómine Patris, et Fílii, et Spíritus Sancti, extinguátur in te omnis virtus diáboli per impositiónem mánuum nostrárum, et per invocatiónem gloriósæ et sanctæ Dei Genitrícis Vírginis Maríæ, ejúsque ínclyti Sponsi Joseph, et ómnium sanctórum Angelórum, Archangelórum, Mártyrum, Confessórum, Vírginum, atque ómnium simul Sanctórum.”

I stood with the others in a half-circle around the bed, and we prayed for the immortal soul of Sister Laura, reciting the seven penitential psalms and the litany of the saints.

She seemed to have a surge of strength as she kissed the cross the priest held for her and he bent close to hear her confession.

When this was done, her eyes glazed over again, and the priest turned to all of us who stood around the room. “Which one of you,” he asked, “is called Anna Maria?”

He knew me by my startled look, I suppose. “She wants you to play for her. She wants this to be the last sound she hears before she passes to the next world.”

How could I play when I had not touched a violin in half a year? How could I hope to play with these hands that had been scalded and waterlogged, my calluses gone, my dexterity gone? I burned with shame at the thought of such sounds as I would make now being the last sounds that Sister Laura would hear.

Someone else was sent to fetch my violin. I knelt by my dear teacher, my kind friend, and kissed her hand. She drew my own hand to her mouth and I felt the dry touch of her lips, so burning hot that I expected to see a mark from them on my skin. She said, very softly, “
Figlia mia!
”

I wanted to say something in return, to thank her for her attentions to me throughout my girlhood. Of all the
maestre
, she had always been the one who seemed to care the most about my progress. I was crying, but not only because of Sister Laura’s misfortune, nor only because I knew that I would fail her in this final hour. I cried because I feared she would carry to her grave my last chance of finding my mother and knowing her.

I knew it was a selfish thing to ask her in this moment when surely all she wanted to do was cleanse her soul. And yet I could not help myself; I thought only about the urgency of my own need.

If there were any one moment in my life I were given the chance to do over again—to discard it as badly done, something I would consider more thoroughly, prepare for more assiduously, and then perform anew with the depth and insight it deserved—this would be the moment I would choose. But life gives us very few second chances—and death gives us none.

I put my lips close to Sister Laura’s ear and whispered, “Please, for the love of God, tell me how to find her! Take pity on me,
Zietta
!”

She looked in my eyes and murmured the same meaningless words over again. Then she turned her face to the wall.

“…in nómine Dómini: et orátio fídei salvábit infírmum, et alleviábit eum Dóminus: et si in peccátis sit, remitténtur ei; cura, quæsumus, Redémptor noster, grátia Sancti Spíritus languóres istíus infírmæ, ejúsque sana vúlnera, et dimítte peccáta, atque dolóres cunctos mentis et córporis ab ea expélle, plenámque intérius et extérius sanitátem misericórditer redde, ut, ope misericórdiæ tuæ restitúta…”

The room was close with the smell of incense, and I myself felt close to fainting.

Someone placed my violin in my hands. It was la Befana,
looking as strong and vital as Sister Laura looked weak and spent. “Play, Anna Maria!” she said to me so harshly that I winced, associating with her voice, as I did, the sting of her baton upon my flesh. I thought of the joyous shouts of the people in the Ghetto who had gathered around me, so many months ago, and I refused to look at la Befana, even though she was so close that I could feel her breath upon my ear. “Play her into the next world!”

I took the instrument from her and bought time by tuning it, even though all the notes were true. It was my old violin, and I nearly wept from the joy of merely holding it again.

I spent longer tuning than I ever had before, trying in vain to get the bow coordinated with my left hand. My two hands seemed as if they belonged to two different people, and neither of them me. It was like a nightmare. I was filled with terror at the weight of responsibility before me, and my overwhelming doubts that I could do it justice.

When I realized, from the subtle noises and movements of the people around me, that I could delay no longer, I began to play. I chose the maestro’s A-minor concerto, the
grave e sempre piano
of the middle movement, which had always been one of Sister Laura’s favorites.

The notes of the first few bars wobbled horribly, and I felt my face grow hot. La Befana was watching me. She was not rubbing her hands together, but she might as well have been, so great was her look of triumph. I willed my muscles to remember—and then something changed. It was as if the violin itself remembered for me.

I was playing again. I was myself again, the violin a part of my body.

With barely a pause, I followed the A minor with the largo from the maestro’s F-major concerto in the same series. The
music formed a bridge of sound for me: I walked across it from the world of the dead to the world of the living.

I remembered how I used to imagine, during nearly every performance, that my mother was in the audience. That if I played with enough sweetness and skill, she would rise up at the end, her eyes shining. She would hold out her hand to me and say, “Come away from this place, Anna Maria. It is time to go home.”

I played hoping to move Sister Laura with my music, since I had been unable to move her with my words. I played hoping that she would rally, as is sometimes the case with those who have seen the Angel of Death—that she would stir herself to live and tell me what I needed to know. I played with all the homesickness and longing that had filled my heart from the moments when I first understood how utterly alone I was in the world, and so unlovable that even my own mother, if indeed she lived, refused to know me.

I held the last note as long as I dared, not wanting to let go. When the strings were silent and, looking up, I lowered my bow, everyone in the room was crying—and Sister Laura was dead.

I
can only remember with imprecision what followed. Someone tried to take the violin from my hands, and I struggled to hold onto it. Finally, I was led away to the laundry again, where I lay in my bed, for several days, unable to take solid food. During those days I envied Sister Laura.

Paolina came to see me once while I was ill. She brought me a freshly laundered handkerchief, a bowl of soup, and a letter from Marietta.

Dear Annina,

Maestra Evelina finally told me what has happened to you.
Cara!
It seems so unfair for you to be banished to the
comun!
I hope they have not given you too odious a task there.

My God, though, how I roared when she told me how you socked la Befana!
Brava!
I didn’t think you had it in you. It was certainly time that someone punched that old bitch. My only regret is that now you have to suffer for it.

If the maestro had still been on staff, believe me, you would never have been chucked out of the
coro.
He valued you too highly ever to let you go. We’ve had no tidings of him here, except that he spends a great deal of time in Mantua.

I’m not sure how I can find you a husband now, but I’ll try to find someone who can wrench you out of that place. Tomasso has a lot of friends who are usually too drunk to care whether a girl comes from the
coro,
the
comun,
or a brothel. But I would only find you one such who would give you his name. Never fear!

The more I find out about Venezia’s nobility, the more amazed I am. They are like a perfect-looking piece of fruit that one cuts into only to discover maggots and mold.

Even the Foscarini have far worse things than Tomasso and me to feel ashamed of. In the dead of night a week ago, I was called out of my bed at the convent and told to put on a set of clothes that was brought to me, all of black silk, and a fat pearl necklace I’m only allowed to wear at family occasions. I was popped out the water gate and shoved into one of the family’s gondolas, all ablaze with candles encircling a coffin. The coffin itself was covered in red roses as if the sky had opened up and rained flowers. I tried to ask who the stiff was, but no one—not even Tomasso—would tell me.

All of them were weeping, although they tried to hide it. Mam
ma Foscarini was the one weeping hardest. Papa and all the sons and daughters I’d already met were there, and so I figured it must have been a kid they’d kept hidden away—although it wasn’t a kid-size coffin.

We went like that—with all of them crying and none of them giving me so much as a hint—all the way to the Cimitero San Michele, where all the stiffs are buried. It was highly creepy slogging half asleep through the grass to the family plot and having it dawn on me that that’s where I’ll be buried one day.

Even though whoever it was who died was being kept secret, the funeral was as full of pomp as one would expect of such a family. A cardinal officiated, plus my Lady’s private confessor, who is evil enough to be la Befana’s long-lost twin. He has twice taken time out from his prayers to touch my bottom.

Only at the very end, when everyone had thrown down their clod of earth, I heard Tomasso whimper, “Antonia!” I’m guessing it was one of his siblings. Whatever happened to this Antonia, you can bet that everyone in the family feels pretty guilty about it.

I keep sending messages to Tomasso, asking when the date will be set for our wedding. And he says that his father is making sure first that my own mother and her brood are moved away and set up in Vicenza. I don’t know how big a payment she was able to wrest from him, but I’m sure it was substantial. Rather than making her crew beg under bridges, she’s going to set up a sort of agency where matrons and their housekeepers can come and hire children to work in their household and on their lands. I’m sure my mother will consider it to be the best bargain she’s ever made. I’ve promised myself I shan’t miss her. But, in any case, I will have money enough to go visit her, if I feel the need.

I’ve been singing, of course, here among the nuns, but the rep
ertoire is even more boring than it was at the Pietà. I’d run away if my mother-in-law hadn’t promised me that I’ll be able to perform in an opera again as soon as I’m safely married.