Vivaldi's Virgins (21 page)

Flowers still arrive here for me sometimes. But my adoring public, for the moment, has forgotten me, now that
Agrippina
has come to the end of its glorious run: twenty-seven performances, each one hailed as a triumph for all of us involved.

Don’t lose hope, Annina! I’m going to work on getting Papa Foscarini to use his influence to see you reinstated in the
coro
even while I talk you up to Tomasso’s loutish friends. Believe me, if I have anything to say about it at all, you will not be stuck in the
comun
much longer.

For now, I’ve sent a chicken and two gold coins. I will not abandon you,
cara,
although all the rest of the world has.

Sending you
baci ed abbracci,
Mariett a

L
ate that September, I was called before the Prioress. I registered her look of surprise when I walked in. “Sit down, dear—you look so tired!” The passage of time seemed to have softened the edges of her anger toward me. She looked, if anything, quite sympathetic—and yet I was wary. “The governors met yesterday, Anna Maria, and took several decisions.”

I thanked her and sat down. I did not know if I had changed or if everything around me had changed. Balestra’s “Annunciation” seemed almost a different painting to me. The Virgin’s eyes had the look of someone betrayed.

The Prioress waited until I was looking at her again. “In spite of the numerous and dire problems facing the Ospedale della Pietà, the governors took time at their meeting to consider the
case of your demotion. I want you to know that I myself wrote a letter to them on your behalf, as did several of the other
maestre
.”

I braced myself for the bad news. I knew I was about to be consigned to spend the rest of my life in the
comun
.

The Prioress of those days is dead now. Although she was the cause of so much pain for me, I have come to understand, over the years, how good she was at her job. She was harsh, but she was honest. I truly believe now that she based all her decisions on the evidence before her, and that she did her best to provide the governors with an unbiased view of the daily goings-on at the Pietà.

She looked at me in silence for a moment, and then spoke again. “Just before their meeting was adjourned, the governors voted to reinstate you as a
figlia di coro
.”

It took me a few moments to take this in. And then I wept freely. My pride was gone. My anger and despair were gone. All I felt was gratitude.

She let me cry, and then she spoke again. “Further, I think it will interest you to know that the governors voted to reinstate Don Vivaldi as our
maestro di violin.
He has been authorized to look for suitable new instruments for several of you. Until Maestro Vivaldi finds just the right violin for you, you may use the violin that belonged to Sister Laura. It’s a fine instrument, as you know. She would have wanted that, I’m quite sure. Here, child—stop that! Here’s a handkerchief. There’s one thing more.”

The Prioress stood up and unlocked a little drawer in her credenza. She took out a sealed letter and handed it to me. “Normally, I would have read this first to ascertain that there was nothing in it that would harm you. However, Sister Laura asked me very specifically to give it to you without breaking the seal. I am sure that, since it comes from her, there can only be
good in it. She loved you well, Anna Maria. You were her favorite student, and she always had the greatest hopes for you. I know you’ll do your best to see those hopes fulfilled.”

The Prioress pressed my hand as she gave me the letter, and I realized in that moment that she was also fond of me, though I had never known it before. “If Sister Laura was ever harsh with you, it was only because she wanted for you what she felt that she herself failed to achieve. She was always her own harshest critic. Let us both remember Sister Laura in our prayers and hope that she has, at last, found peace.”

Figlia mia,

I have ached with every particle of my being to say these words to you and have you hear the truth in them.

My dearest daughter, my only child, born of a love that should never have been. Pray for me, my daughter! Pray that the flames of Purgatory will burn away the sin I visited upon us both!

Figlia mia.
Finally you can know how I have treasured the letters you wrote me. You made paper and quill into yet another musical instrument that sprang to life beneath your fingers.

I have felt pride where I should have felt shame. Watching you, helping you, guiding you in any small way I could, I have never been able to make myself feel the remorse that could cleanse me of the sin of making you.

I had some small talent as a violinist, but you have the divine spark in you. And if the Creator chose to place it there, how can I doubt that He smiles upon your existence?

I heap sin upon sin.

How I longed to claim you! Yes, it’s strange to write these words knowing that I will be dead when you read them. I have seen how the doctor looks at me—how they have isolated me from the others, and how they have given up hope. I’ve seen others with this illness,
and I do not expect it to go any differently with me. My life is ebbing. Even now, I can only write a little while before I have to stop and rest.

I’ve read and relished those words in your letters that I knew I could never hear you say,
“Madre mia carissima.”

It’s a hard thing to fathom, Annina. Death. We sing of it, we’re taught to fear it. And yet it’s truly difficult to believe that it will ever come. That this body we know so well—these hands, these eyes, these ears—will cease to contain us. Our hands will open, our souls will fly out, and our eyes and ears will close forever.

Fifteen years ago, my own mother and her Confessor made me swear on your immortal soul that I would never, as long as I lived, make myself known to you. Only that promise would buy me the right to live near you and watch over you, rather than abandoning you to the care of strangers. Only my lies about who fathered you made this possible—my lies and the complicity of the one other—Maestra Meneghina—who knew the truth and kept it safe. Never for a moment did she allow me to forget that she did it for love of him and not for me.

When you read these words, my promise will no longer bind me.

I have loved you, Anna Maria, more than I have ever loved anyone or anything. More than I have loved music. More than I have loved God.

I watched with fear as you became more and more beautiful. I watched over your maestro in the hours he spent teaching you and your friends. And I felt such relief to know that his eyes were too fixed on his own success to ever fix them on you. I praised God for Vivaldi’s selfishness and Vivaldi’s ambition.

I noted as well the influence that Marietta had upon you. Marietta, a conjuror if ever I saw one, more skilled than any other girl I have ever known—either here or on the outside—in bending other
people to her will. Marietta who will soon be, if she is not already, your aunt.

But perhaps she will make as good a wife as any woman could ever be to that foolish middle brother of mine, who is as gullible and profligate as our brother Marco is learned and wise.

When Marietta duped Tomasso—and you unwittingly helped her—I could hardly contain my outrage. It was my mother who argued the wisdom of allowing Marietta’s scheme to be fulfilled.

She is no fool, your grandmother—and I am hoping that she may yet be of some service to you in your life and career.

I was so afraid that you would run away with nothing but the clothes on your back and your violin. I have lain awake at night, thinking of you at the mercy of the world and with no means to pay your way. I encouraged the Prioress to lock you up as often and as long as possible. I exaggerated your trespasses in my struggle to keep you safe.

The locket was the one thing of value I had that had not come to me through my family. It was mine and mine alone, although I was naturally not allowed to keep it with me at the Pietà. Still, it was mine to give away, and it would not lead you back to me and thus imperil your soul. How I seethed when I found out that Tomasso had stolen it!

I have been such a fool. My mother could not protect me from love, even locked up in this place with no men around but men of God.

Figlia mia,
forgive me for betraying you that early dawn. I could not bear the thought of you sacrificing your tremendous talent on the altar of love. And now I cannot forgive myself for the result of my act of betrayal. I have pleaded with the Prioress to let you return to the
coro.
And she has promised me now that it will be done.

All men are inconstant, Anna Maria. They believe everything
they say, and yet they will say it another time to someone else and believe it anew. I believed that my lover loved me. And yet he turned to me only after he was spurned by another who loved him and yet had the strength to resist him.

I have realized, lying here for such long hours in this bed, that you are a woman now—and, as a woman, you will make your own choices. I cannot tell you what to do with the gifts you have: that is between you and God.

Of course, I pray that you will make good choices.

I never abandoned you, Anna Maria. I have always been with you, and I will ever be with you.

I will sign this letter as you signed your letters to me, with a thousand kisses.

Your loving mother,
Antonia Laura Foscarini

M
adre mia carissima,

I had to write those words one last time.

How different is it, after all, writing this letter and knowing that it will never reach you? I had no certainty about the other letters I wrote you—and yet you read them. Perhaps, my dearest teacher, my dearest mother, you will have found some magic beyond the grave for hearing me speak my heart, even as you found that magic pathway while you lived.

I will not dwell on my misfortune in losing you—because I had you all along. I know that now. I know that it was love for me that made you keep your secret all these years.

I am angry, but not at you. I feel cheated, but not by you. And both these troubled feelings are well smoothed over by my sense of feeling rewarded.

I used to ask myself what it was that allowed you to always be so calm and serene and kind within your cloistered existence here, when you could well imagine that other life you might have had, living in a
palazzo,
surrounded by everything lovely the world has to offer a well-married
zentildonna nobile.
And now I know: I was the reason. Being close to me—helping me, teaching me, guiding me like the best of mothers—was enough for you. You didn’t require credit or recognition for doing so. The simple fact of my existence made you happy.

Knowing this has changed everything for me.

I suspect that it is just as easy to be unhappy in a big place as
a small one, or to feel fettered while blessed with a thousand freedoms. For a winged creature to feel earthbound—for a bird to fail to see that the door to its cage is open.

It would have been easy for me to become such a creature. But instead, because of you, I feel my wings and see the open door. I feel my strength, and I will fly if it suits me. For now, though, for now I can think of no higher calling than to be music’s hand-maiden here.

I know that my life brought you happiness—and this does much to comfort me for my failure, at the end of your life and the beginning of mine, to see what was right before my eyes.

Of course, I wish I could live those moments over again. When you whispered those words,
figlia mia,
I would have given you a daughter’s blessing instead of torturing you, in your last moments, with my selfish, stupid questions.

And yet (I have told myself this many times since reading your letter), perhaps it would have been horrible to you if I had, at the last, acknowledged our kinship. Because then all the self-restraint and discipline you’d shown over all those years would have been in vain. Your vow would have been broken, and you would have feared not only for your own immortal soul but also for mine.

Even in your last request to the padre, you were wise—because I played for my mother as you lay there dying. I think you knew that I would play for her, and thus I would play, with all my heart, for you.

I look around me here and see a thousand girls and women who have never known a mother’s love, and I feel so blessed among them. Would that I could give back, in some small way, some part of what I have myself been given. If I am made a
figlia privilegiata
someday, and am allowed to take on private students from a young age, perhaps I will be able to do so.

Your mother came to see me in the
parlatorio
soon after I was reinstated in the
coro.
She gave me the little silver casket lined with pale blue silk and filled to the brim with letters—some written on note paper and some written on music paper—tied together with a darker blue silk ribbon. She didn’t say anything about them, or even whether she had read them, but simply that she thought I should have them now.

I will seal this letter and add it to the others, and tie the ribbon again.

You will ever be in my heart, Sister Laura. I will pray for you. And I will freight every note I play with the love and strength you’ve given me.

Anna Maria

A
ll of my spare time was taken up, in the first weeks following my return, with embroidering an apron as a wedding present for Marietta. Just before it was done, I slipped the locket inside the hem and sewed it fast there. No one had disturbed the locket, or the other little things that I’d hidden under my mattress—or, more likely, no one had found them.

Marietta came to the
parlatorio
to receive her gifts on the day before her wedding. The Prioress herself was there. All of us had come down to the
parlatorio
to give our gifts to the bride. I asked for permission to give her a kiss as well, and the Prioress nodded that I might.

We bent our heads close together, with only the filigree of wire between us. “Give the apron to Silvio!” I whispered. “Do not fail me!”

Marietta’s eyes glowed green. “And what is your present to me, then, you cow?”

“This,” I said. I kissed her then.

“If you were not a girl,” she said, “I would quite fall in love with you!”

“Greedy pig!” I whispered. “You want everything!”

“And I shall have it!” laughed Marietta.

My conscience was set quite at ease, knowing that the locket would be where it belonged—and that it could be of help to Rebekkah and Silvio if they needed it. With my arms wrapped around my music and music wrapped around my heart, I knew that I would want for nothing.

B
ernardina’s lessons with me recommenced, rather to our mutual surprise, very soon after my return.

It was hard at first for both of us. As a confirmed member of the
coro
, she hated having to submit to instruction from me—unconfirmed, lately disgraced, and always her rival. As someone who had come, over the years, to regard her as my greatest enemy among all the
figlie
, I hated having to pay such close attention to her, and especially since she might—by means of my instruction—eventually surpass me in her skill.

The scrutiny of private lessons casts a powerful light on student and teacher alike. I had to learn to know Bernardina—her fears, her weaknesses, her strengths—in order to teach her well. As I learned to know her better, my antipathy for her melted away. I came to see her as just another lonely girl, like me, who had tried to find the best ways to survive in a place where love is hard to come by and everyone is plagued by the same deep fear of being, essentially, unlovable by virtue of being here.

The Prioress was wise to throw two such sworn enemies together in such a delicate relationship. If she hadn’t, I never would have become Bernardina’s ally.

For all that she resented my help and suggestions, we both
heard—everyone could hear—that her playing was becoming much lovelier and more refined as our lessons continued.

The maestro met with me sometimes, just the two of us, to speak about the methods that have worked best for him as a music teacher.

I hadn’t ever thought before about the gratification to be found in helping another person play better. I’ve always had a good set of ears, and now they served me well. But I was careful not to perpetuate the habits of my worst teachers. I always found laudatory things to say before offering any criticism. Like Vivaldi—who was ever my favorite teacher, despite his moods—I kept my expectations exceedingly high.

Perhaps it was partly competitiveness, but Bernardina played far better in my presence, and under my tutelage, than she’d ever played before. And it wasn’t just her technical performance that improved, but also her willingness to infuse the music with the range and depth of her true emotions.

Of course, like me, she was growing up—and so it’s difficult for me to say how much real influence I had upon her as a musician. We each had our share of joy and suffering, and our music was the better for it. I’d found and then lost my mother. And Bernardina—all unbeknownst to everyone but her—was slowly losing the sight in her one good eye.

It was not six months after we’d started our lessons again that she came to me, her whole face blotchy and her one eye rimmed in red, to tell me that she would be resigning from the
coro
.

I looked at her a long time before responding, certain that she would take such a decision only for the direst reasons. “And yet, if you stay,
cara,
you are sure to become a
maestra
.” I paused, thinking, before I continued. “I do not think that life in the
comun
would suit you. You are, like I am, a
figlia di coro:
you belong here.”

She turned to face me—which meant, for Bernardina, holding her face at an angle, so that she could look at me with her good eye. “I may have once, but there will not be a place for me here before long.”

“Tell me what you mean.”

“Tell me if you’re smiling now.”

I was sitting at the spinet with my face washed in light from the window, not an arm’s length away from her. Without thinking, I crossed myself.

“I could see that,” she said. “I can see movement well enough. It is the smaller things—the expression on a face or the notes on the page—that have become increasingly difficult to read. And when the light is low, I cannot read them at all.”

We both sat in silence then, with our faces turned toward the window. I remember looking down at the gondolas and other boats with their various cargoes, brightly dressed people, and the shimmering reflections of everyone and everything on the water. I tried to make myself think about what it would be like to live in a world where everything was shrouded, all the time, in fog.

“I am your teacher, Bernardina.”

“Are you also a witch? Because, otherwise, you cannot teach me if I cannot see the music.”

It took me a while to convince her that she could learn to do it, just as I had. The sun was already setting—and we were both late for our prayers—when I’d explained to Bernardina the method I’d devised, out of desperation during my months in the soap works, for seeing music by hearing the sounds of the notes, all without having the music before me or even having an instrument in my hands. How I’d learned to construct an entire written score in my mind’s eye and then to read it there.

It was too late to begin by the time I’d talked her into at least
giving it a try before she gave up music altogether. We’d already used all the time allotted for our lesson. But it was better this way, because it gave me time to think it through and make a plan.

From then on, at all our lessons, I taught Bernardina by playing her part, phrase by phrase, until she had no need to read it and could find her way to any place in the music almost as well as any sighted member of the
coro
. I’ve used the method since then with other
figlie
who, for whatever reason, have trouble reading. But Bernardina is the one who showed the greatest gift for learning by sound alone.

Of course, it was obvious in other ways that she was going blind. But everyone except the meanest-spirited among us banded together to help her, guiding her in the hallways, lending a hand when it was needed, and keeping her from harm. There are certain advantages to living in a place with so many other people. After all, we are, in the
coro
, rarely alone. Bernardina was safe with us. And as a musician, she continued to excel.

We were both chosen to perform in a select group, along with four others—including the maestro—late that September, in a concert at San Francesco della Vigna, the convent that had lately harbored Marietta, and where I myself had gulped my very first breaths of air. It was my first time outside the walls of the Pietà since my performance in the Ghetto, and my first performance as a soloist for the
coro
, even though I still hadn’t been confirmed and had begun to doubt I ever would be.

Marietta was there at the festivities, along with her husband—now my uncle—and my mother’s parents, who ignored me.

It was an odd thing, being in that place where I was born. I had no memory of it, of course. But the sense that I had been there before was very strong, and I felt my mother’s presence in the stones of the church walls, on the marble balustrades where
she’d placed her hand, and in the empty spaces where her voice had echoed. I was filled with a sense that in this place she had first looked at me, and nursed me—and now I knew, by her own words, that she had looked at me with love, glad that I was born.

I played the better for knowing this. Bernardina played like an angel, and I felt as proud of her as I felt of myself. Everyone said that the concert was one of the most amazing they had ever heard.

We performed three of the concertos from
L’Estro Armonico,
which Vivaldi had finally published the year before, in Amsterdam, with a dedication to the Grand Prince Ferdinand III de’ Medici—one of our greatest fans and patrons of the Pietà. The Prince himself was in Venezia at the time, seated with his entourage among the other nobles in the audience.

Vivaldi played the
violino principale
for the G-major concerto. But he’d held an audition for the violin solos in the fifth concerto, the A major, and Bernardina and I had won out over all the others (probably because we had so much practice in imitating and echoing, by ear alone, solo passages of great complexity). I felt like an athlete of ancient times as we played the two allegros, with all their cadenzas and breathtaking multiple stops. The audience gave us a standing ovation.

The maestro was first
violino concertante
and I was second for the A minor. Signora Pelegrina—who had taught Giulietta—played her
violone
. Signora Maria Ricciuta, named thus for her wonderful blond curls and to distinguish her from our other Marias, played viola. And Signora Dianora sat at the cembalo. Many in the audience wept. Prince Ferdinand presented each of us with a gold
Luigi,
and God knows what riches he had already rained upon Vivaldi.