Vivaldi's Virgins (3 page)

ANNO DOMINI
1709

Dearest Mother,

Sister Laura says that I must try to calm my passions by writing to you. When I asked what I should write, she told me to tell you my history—because you would know nothing of me beyond whatever I wrote in my last letter. I told Sister Laura that if you had been interested in my history, you surely would have enquired about it before now or found a way to write back to me. I was sent to the Father Confessor then, and made to say a hundred Hail Marys upon my knees.

How can I believe in a mother who refuses me even the most basic comfort of letting me know that she lives? And yet wanting to believe that you do live—and that you are, somehow, listening—makes me willing to write. If there were even the smallest chance that these words will reach you, then wouldn’t I be a fool to abjure writing them?

I am, if truth be told, calmer now, although it does not please me to be locked in this room while all the others are eating their supper. A letter—not just a hasty letter, but a long one, filling many pages—is the only key, I am told, that will unlock this door.

I am hungry—and so I will tell you of my history and my life here.

For the first five years after I entered these walls, I had only my given name, Anna Maria. I was schooled with the hundreds of other children of the
comun.
The boys and girls take classes side by side until, at the age of ten, the boys are sent out to apprentice in a trade. The girls are kept here for further instruction as lace makers
and seamstresses, cooks, nurses, pharmacists, or maids, depending on their aptitude. The priests see to our souls, and our teachers keep us ever busy.

I liked my classes when I was a
figlia
of the
comun.
And I had good friends among the boys and girls my age. We were much given to mischief when our teachers weren’t looking.

I certainly had no expectation of being plucked out of this crowd at the age of six to participate in classes with the
coro.

In truth, I was astonished when a student teacher held me behind after Matins one day and told me to sing for her. Before I had sung more than a few scales and trills, she pulled me by my ear and brought me over to the
clavicembalo,
where Sister Laura had just finished teaching a class in solfeggio
.

I was sure I was about to be punished. The other girls, all towering above me, smirked and whispered among themselves. After Sister Laura dismissed them, she took my face in her hand and spoke to me kindly. I remember how mild and calm her eyes looked, like the summer sky that shows above the courtyard.

She had me pick some notes out from the air with my voice, and then asked me to copy what she played at the keyboard. It seemed a delightful game to me—especially since I was apparently very good at it. Then she showed me how to hold my arm and my chin and placed a violin between them.

From then on, the instrument has been both part of my name and part of my body. It is my voice.

I have studied with all the
sottomaestre
—the student teachers. Only the best among the
figlie di coro
are allowed eventually to teach classes. And the very best among these—the
privilegiate
—are allowed to take on private, paying students of their own. Thus the lessons of Maestro Vivaldi are learned by all the string players here, even if only some of us are taught by him directly.

Most recently I have been working on the maestro’s first concerto in the series he says he will call
L’Estro Armonico.
He told us that only he and we will know that he has named it thus for the way in which this entire institution hangs upon the monthly moods and bleeding of its female population—
l’estro,
for the time when female animals are in heat.

The maestro boasts that he can predict within a day when we’ll all come undone with cramps and crying fits, because two weeks before, we always play with the most fantastic frenzy and fancy—our own version of
l’estro,
as he chooses to call it. His eyes sparkle with wickedness when he says such things. And yet we know the maestro values our skill nearly as much as he values his own. Certainly because we are the only means by which his music can reach the ears of the world—and the music the world hears will only be as great as our performance of it.

Unlike the internal teachers, who see us as their wards and treat us like children, the maestro looks at us first and foremost as musicians. I don’t think he ever gives much thought at all to our age.

He has been pushing us especially hard to perfect our performance of twelve sonatas he recently finished writing. We are to play these on some as yet unspecified date for a highly exalted personage whose name the maestro refuses to divulge. To hear him speak, the entire future of his career as a composer—to say nothing of the future of the Republic—is in our hands. And we are lazy, and vain, and we laugh too much, and God will punish us if we don’t play the music as it’s meant to be played. The maestro prays and rails at us and then begs and cajoles us, and brings us sweets and pulls funny faces. But by the end of our rehearsal, he has more often than not squeezed the music out of us that he wants.

Yesterday, Bernardina—who is one of the best among the
younger violinists, despite her one blind eye—begged off rehearsal because of cramps. The maestro was in a froth of aggravation.

Taller than I by a handsbreadth, Bernardina delights in looking down on me—though I have twice won out when we have all been set to play against each other. Her freckled face turned bright red both times, and she looked as if she hoped that God would strike me dead.

I know that when my elders speak about becoming a woman they are speaking of this business of frayed tempers, cramps, and blood. It happened earlier this year to Giulietta, who is my best friend, despite Marietta’s claims to that position.

I heard Giulietta’s cries before I’d chased away the night’s dreams. “I am dying! I bleed—oh, I am wounded!” I threw back the covers and both saw and smelled the brownish red blood on the bedclothes. Although I thought we had both been wounded, I felt no pain. And then I saw with horror that the blood was coming from between Giulietta’s legs.

A few of the older girls roused themselves from their beds and then gathered round us with sponges and water and clean robes. “You are not wounded, Giulietta, you silly goose,” they told her. “You are a woman now. Say your prayers and put these rags in your knickers!” They went away to breakfast, laughing and talking as if this were something perfectly normal.

Pretty Giulietta, with her creamy skin and soft brown locks that curl all on their own, clutched her belly and said that she was sure she had been poisoned, because her insides ached so.

Every month now, Giulietta bleeds. She and all the other older girls and all of the women here who do not yet have hair on their chin. All of them bleeding at the same time. All of them, in the days just before their blood, scowling and short of temper and weeping without reason.

And all because Eve bit into that apple so long ago! I feel sure
that if Eve had only a hint of the grief she would visit upon her daughters, she would never have allowed herself to be tempted to that first bite, but would have foresworn apples forever.

I do not look forward with gladness to my womanhood. Just last week, Prudenza—one of the older, prettier members of the
coro
and one of the most celebrated sopranos of all the
ospedali
—was brought to the
parlatorio
of the orphanage for the sort of interview each one of us both dreads and dreams of.

The
parlatorio
is the great vaulted room where you would come to visit me, if you came to visit. It’s much the same, I’m told, as the visiting room of any convent. Divided from the rest of the
ospedale
by a lacelike metal grille, it is our window to the outside world. We can see and be seen there, but touching is forbidden.

Having learned that she had relatives at the convent of San Francesco della Vigna, Prudenza petitioned the governors last year for permission to take vows. None of us believed they’d let her go. She is a well-known singer whose presence accounts for the rental of many chairs at our concerts—and her beauty is so fabled that many in the audience come in hopes of catching a glimpse of her as much as to hear us perform.

The Prioress herself brought Prudenza to the visitors’ side of the
parlatorio
through a secret door. There she was unveiled before a masked stranger, an obviously ancient gentleman with bent shoulders and silver hair.

The governors had decided to grant Prudenza’s request. But then one of them—Signor Giovanni Battista Morotti—thought that perhaps he would offer the Pietà’s star singer a different kind of veil. While this graybeard looked on from a distance, his entourage of female family members told Prudenza to turn this way and that, examined her hair, and even pried her lips open to look at her teeth before the gentleman finally bowed and thanked her.

We heard the whole story whispered in between mouthfuls, and interleaved with the day’s sacred text, during supper. Yesterday the Prioress called Prudenza to her office and presented her with an offer of marriage from Signor Morotti. If she wishes to keep the dowry of two hundred ducats provided for each of us who marries, both Prudenza and her aged bridegroom—who is noble but not particularly rich—must give their signed promise that she’ll never again perform.

I swear to you that I would sooner promise to cut off my hands. It is beyond my understanding how any one of us could make such a promise. Who will Prudenza be without her golden voice? How will God hear her?

Giulietta thinks my first blood is coming, and that is what gnaws at me. But it is the second movement of the maestro’s new concerto that crawls through my belly like the serpent who tempted Eve.

After the maestro had shamed us with his talk of monthly bleeding, I made a solemn oath to the Virgin to learn to play my part with skill that would keep him from ever again speaking of us in the same breath as animals.

The first movement went beautifully well, the notes yielding, sweetening as my fingers found their hiding places and called them into the air. They followed my bow as if I were the leader of a great army of musician warriors: I made them sing.

That was the first three days, one blurring into the next. I only knew it had been three days because Sister Laura said I had better stop and do something else for a while. She urged me to come into the courtyard, where Signora Olivia’s peonies have begun to bloom. The sun hurt my eyes. I did not want to smell flowers or play badminton. I longed to be inside the echoing stone walls again. I wanted to work on the largo.

Again, I felt the strength to fulfill my promise to the Virgin. It
was as if my fingers, not my eyes, were reading the flurry of notes that danced across the page, scrawled in haste in one of the maestro’s fits of inspiration. Only someone like myself, well used to reading his hand, could make out the notes from the blots of ink where he’d broken his quill.

Giulietta and I saw him composing this concerto in the sacristy. We had been spying on the maestro, because he is so odd and amusing to watch while he composes. He pulls his cap off and buries his fingers in his red hair and sometimes weeps as if it were as hot as its color and he were a martyr in the flames. He writes and writes, dipping his pen and wiping his eyes, a great stack of quills before him, the broken ones flying over his shoulder as if flying back to the birds they came from. He coughs, especially in the months of fall or spring, clutching at his chest with one hand while writing with the other. Then he stands before the
clavicembalo,
picking out the notes he has written with the most terrible look on his face, like a prisoner who is about to get a beating. And then something happens, something invisible to us but very real to him, by the look in his eyes. It is as if the invisible jailor has unlocked the chains binding the maestro to his prison walls. As if Christus himself has reached out His hand and touched the maestro’s tears. He weeps again, but this time for joy. Then he picks up the violin, closes his eyes and plays.

Of course it is hateful to him if we do not play the music the way he has heard it, whispered to him by angels. The color drains from his face. He mutters things, terrible things, about
fanciulle,
virgin girls. How can a gaggle of cloistered virgins possibly understand music that springs from the loins of a man? We know it is a sin for him, a priest, to speak this way. And yet I know he speaks without knowing how he wounds us. “Virgins!” he shouts, looking heavenward and sweeping out of the room, his black robes like a storm cloud racing across the sky, bringing rain.

And there we are, the famous orphan musicians of the Pietà, not daring to look at one another. Ashamed that we have failed him yet again.

It was because of my solemn oath to the Virgin that I kept trying and trying to play the third movement, the allegro, as an angel might play it. An angry angel. I played until the pain in my bowing arm was so great that tears spilled out of my eyes. I saw them, like drops of rain, on the beautiful wood of the violin. I think it was Giulietta who went to call Sister Laura, who gently but very firmly unclasped my hand from the neck of the instrument and took it away from me. “But the allegro—I have not found it yet!” I cried, as mad as the maestro himself.

Again, I could not sleep that night, last night. There was the pain in my shoulder that kept me awake. But more than this, there was a sense of—I don’t have any words to describe the sensations that kept me from sleep. Demons, perhaps. A sense of unworthiness so staggering that I could not keep myself upright under its weight. And yet I could not sleep.