Vivaldi's Virgins (6 page)

The opera’s composer walked out into a storm of applause. And then the music started and the curtain parted, revealing a set so rich and clever that the audience gasped and then cheered even louder. The diva, looking most annoyed at the shift of attention away from her, stood there tapping her foot and fussing with her wig of waist-length black curls.

Finally the audience calmed down. The diva collected herself and began to sing.

In the Carnival season of anno Domini 1704, the governors arranged for the
figlie di coro
to visit the opera. I was so young that my memories of it became entwined with the stories everyone told about it later on, until I could scarce sort out the reality from the dream. For all of us, though, it was an experience that awoke the most intense emotions. Several of the girls ended
up in the infirmary suffering from hysterics afterward, so great was the impression that performance made on them—and the experiment was not repeated. But tales continued to be told and musical phrases repeated and scenes acted out by candlelight in our dormitories over the years. Opera—both the music and the event of going to the opera and being seen there—was the setting for many an orphan’s most delicious fantasies.

Although now I know that the diva of that evening’s performance at the Sant’ Angelo was probably a second-rate singer compared with those who sang at Venezia’s bigger theaters, she seemed like no less than a goddess to Marietta and me. We had never heard anything like this before. The agility required for the trills and tremolos was very much like music created for the violin. But whereas Vivaldi was always urging us to make our instruments sing with human voices, here was a human voice that sang with the intricacy and ornamentation of a violin.

We had never been given the chance to perform such music, apart from the secondhand and half-remembered versions we sang in our nightgowns. Old Gasparini—our
maestro di coro
and Vivaldi’s boss then—worn down by our begging and cajoling, found ways to smuggle certain elements of opera into our sacred oratorios. But these were still only a pale shadow of a real opera, as I now saw. The costumes! The scenery! The strutting and posturing of the singers!

I tore my eyes away from the diva to look at Marietta: she was trembling. We had both lifted our masks to see better—but then I shut my eyes so that I could more fully comprehend the sound, undistracted by the diva’s popping eyes and glistening teeth behind which her tongue flicked like a snake in its cavern.

I was roused from my dream by a fight that broke out among some gondoliers sitting behind us. And then a chess piece went flying by my nose, hitting the back of the head of the man sit
ting in front of me, who leapt up and waved his fist to a flurry of imprecations. I lowered my mask, but not before another man—this one sitting hard by me—reached out and pinched me on the cheek, making kissing noises. He said in a gravelly, garlicky voice in my ear,
“Una bella mozzarella!”

I turned to Marietta and saw that she’d not only let her mask drop to the floor but had half-unbuttoned her tunic as well, exposing her neck and much of her shoulders. Her lips were parted and her eyes glittered. Her hand, when I touched it, was icy cold. She flicked my hand away as if it were a fly, never removing her gaze from the diva.

And then another scribbled tribute, this one weighted, it would seem, by a rock rather than a flower, hit the singer on the foot during the final note of her aria. Everyone could see her stop singing and shake her fist in the direction of the missile. And yet her note—an impressive A above high C—still shimmered in the air with ever more beauty and force and even more passion than before.

The audience laughed and cheered, and I looked in horror at Marietta, who had taken up the abandoned note and stood now, eyes closed, singing it with a sweet and shattering volume.

The diva stopped swearing, squinted into the footlights, and then opened her mouth in great embarrassment to take up the note again.

In the instant of recognizing what Marietta had done, I retrieved the cast-off mask and shook her arm, urging her away.

She opened her eyes like a sleepwalker who wakes to find herself in a strange place, far from the safety of her own bed.

“Oh
Dio!
” she groaned. “What have I done?”

I felt a heavy hand on my shoulder and turned to see two of the Inquisitor’s officers. Marietta tried to put her mask and hat back on, but, of course, it was far too late.

“A nice bit of pastry here! Should we take them back to the Ghetto,” said one of the guards, “or take them to jail?”

“Leave off your joking,” said the other. “Can’t you see they’re scared out of their skins?”

I let my own mask fall, covered my eyes, and hung my head in misery and shame.

“Oh, come on ducky,” the first guard said in a completely sympathetic tone. “The padre said we’re to get you back to the orphanage lickety-split.”

I shot a look over to where Vivaldi sat in the front ranks of the orchestra. He merely raised his eyebrows at me, but I saw an expression of humor there. In fact, he looked like his old self again.

Marietta blew kisses at the audience before the guards led us off to the water entrance of the theater, where a gondola was waiting.

I had never been in a gondola before, although I had spent my life watching them from my window. I was so entranced with the sensation of gliding silently along the canal that I didn’t give any thought to the punishment that awaited us. I couldn’t stop looking at the stars. It was as if the celestial blue of the Virgin’s robe were showing through pinholes pricked in the black velvet sky.

I know the nighttime well now. But I have never ceased to be entranced when I find myself beneath the starry sky. In the state I was in that night—filled with the sounds and sights of the opera—the stars seemed too magical to be part of the real world. I gazed at them and thought I must be dreaming.

On Feast Days, when I was still a very young child, I walked through Venezia in sunlight and rain with the other boys and girls of the Pietà, all of us in our red robes, invoking the saints and singing psalms. One of the Sisters walked at the front, ringing the bell and calling,
“Per pieta!”
while a child—a pretty one
was always chosen—held out the alms basket to every passerby.

Once our bodies began to grow womanly enough for gondoliers to throw us kisses and mutter compliments as we passed, we were barred from going out.

Of course, I had stared at the stars and moon from my window, but then I had seen only a scrap of all the glory I now beheld above my head, framed by the silhouettes of the
palazzi
along the Grand Canal.

The sky on a clear night is a living, pulsating thing. The stars are like musical notes turned to light, and, like notes, they shimmer and swell and fade and fall. The painters have never captured it—but they never will until some painter teaches his colors to dance.

When I stole a look backward at the gondolier, he winked at me. They are sworn to an oath of silence in their profession. None of them will ever give up a secret he has overheard while plying his trade, whether it concerns love or murder. If I ever run away from the Pietà, I told myself, I will do so in a gondola.

We arrived at the water gate of the orphanage all too soon, and only then did I think with dread about the consequences of what we’d done. Girls had been demoted from the
coro
to the
comun
for far less serious infractions. I pictured myself in one of the workshops, making lace or spinning silk for the rest of my life instead of making music, and I hated Marietta then. I hated her for what she’d made me do, even while my heart warmed to her for giving me one of the most wonderful experiences I’d ever had.

One of the guards had a fat tip—no doubt, courtesy of the Red Priest—to give the
portinara
. Maestra Bettina was nowhere to be seen by the time we’d climbed out of the gondola and stepped across the threshold. I wouldn’t have thought that these guardians of our portals—always the oldest and most pious and often
the meanest among our keepers—could be bought. But of course I’ve learned since then that all people have their price.

Barefoot and unmasked, Marietta and I ran up the stairs and through the dark hallways. We tiptoed with the utmost caution past the snoring form of Sister Giovanna, who sat propped up in a chair, perhaps dreaming of the life she might have had if she, instead of her sibling, had been the better favored of the two. We threw off our men’s clothes and pulled on our nightgowns. Then, exchanging a glance but without a word, we stuffed the clothes given to us by Marietta’s mother through the grille of the window. We could just hear the splash as they dropped into the Rio della Pietà and the evidence of our adventure was carried away to sea. I smiled at Marietta, feeling for the first time that night a bond of true friendship and a surge of respect for her.

My head no sooner touched my pillow than I, too, was sucked down into the obliterating waters of sleep, till I felt a hand on my mouth and woke to see Bernardina looking down upon me with her one good eye and the other with which she always swore she could see the future.

“Not a sound!” she whispered. And then, slowly, she pulled the covers down and pulled my nightgown up. The moon had set by then, but I’m sure she could still see all of me in the light from the stars and the faint glow from the sconce in the hallway. Her eye gleaming, she reached down and touched the almond of my sex with one long finger of her free hand—just a quick touch, as if it were hot. Then she smiled and put my clothes and my blanket to rights again.

I pushed her hand away from my mouth.

“Hush!” she said.

“Leave me be!” I hissed at her.

Bernardina was still smiling. “I saw what you did, the two of you—the going and the coming—with this eye,” she pointed at
the one that was sighted, “and with this eye.” She pointed then at the one that was blind. “Guard well your place as the maestro’s favorite,
bell’ Annina mia!
” She looked at me then with such unguarded hatred that had she possessed a knife, I’m sure she would have plunged it into my heart.

But her hands were empty, and she smiled again. “Sleep well,” she said, leaving me staring wide-eyed into the darkness, feeling more afraid—and more alone—than I ever had in my lifetime.

ANNO DOMIN
1709

Dearest Mother,

Clearly I need your guidance, for it seems that I am forever incurring the wrath of my keepers.

I had to crack a thin layer of ice in my water jug this morning before I could quench my thirst. It is, they say, the coldest winter in a hundred years.

La Serenissima
has been transformed, frozen in time as surely as I am stuck here in jail. The canals and even the lagoons are all turned to solid ice.

Before this winter changed the view from our windows, I never thought about how Venezia, though made of stone, is a city in which even the most solid things are always in motion. The pink and gray marble buildings break into an infinitesimal number of shimmering blocks of color on the surface of the water. And that same shimmering movement is reflected in every windowpane, while the gondolas dart back and forth like swallows.

The view from the larger windows—from my favorite window—is so familiar to me that I can see it simply by closing my eyes.

I wish I could see outside now onto the water. But the one window in this cell is far too small and set too high in the wall for me to see anything but a patch of gray sky.

The water is moved by wind and tide. The stones of the Church and the
fondamento
and the distant tower of San Giorgio Mag
giore move together and apart again across the waters in a mad dance of reflections. Nothing in this city, no matter how steady and solid it would seem, is ever truly still.

Oh, to write and write and never receive an answer! All these words. Do you ever read them? Do you live? And if you live, where do you live, and why do you hide yourself away from me? Do you look out upon this winter? Are you so cold that your fingernails have turned a pretty shade of blue? Mine have, and I can hardly write for the stiffness in my hands.

Once, in the hospital here, I tended a blind beggar woman. There were two milky white lozenges where the blue or green or brown of her eyes should have been. The ice sits in just the same way—dully, impenetrably—on the canals. Venezia, that queen who loves nothing more than mirrors, suddenly cannot see. Worst of all, she cannot see herself. And we, the foundlings of the Pietà, have been unable to play music in the presence of all that stillness, as if the notes themselves have been caught and frozen midair.

There has been such excitement over the condition of the canals. On the first day of the great freeze, girls didn’t get out of their nightclothes or go to breakfast, but stacked themselves like prayer books in the windows, feasting their eyes. Much to our delight, three of the kitchen girls emerged out on the ice wrapped in cloaks and wearing masks. They slipped and slid, their arms outstretched, their faces lifted upward.

Using her elbows to make room among us at the window, la Befana crossed herself and said it was a scandal. But we cheered anyway when one of the girls fell on her bottom and slid between the other two, who tried to stop her so that she spun round and round like a weather vane in a windstorm. We pushed and shoved to get a better view when, miracle of miracles, we saw someone drive a carriage across the Grand Canal, pulled by four white horses.

We begged to be let outside. But the
dispensiera
said there
wasn’t enough warm clothing at the Pietà to keep everyone from catching their death. And then we shouted like a lot of five-year-olds, “We will run to stay warm!”

We’d given up our pleas by the time the maestro came for our rehearsal. His cheeks and nose were as flaming red from the cold as his hair. He’d brought a porter with him—a big strapping youth who was also red in the face, but for altogether different reasons, finding himself face to face with the famous girls of the Pietà. In the wicked mood we were in, we teased him. My friend Claudia, a boarding student from Saxony, wrapped herself up to the eyes and then let her scarf fall slowly from her shoulders. The young man was so discomfited that he placed the two cello cases he carried down on the floor and fled before collecting his fee. The maestro rubbed his hands together—though whether from greed or cold, I do not know—and said, “Good work,
Fräulein.
” Claudia bowed.

The maestro looked upon us then with a supreme expression of mischief in his eyes. “These are very special instruments, angels, procured for you at great personal cost!” He opened the cello cases—and you’ll never guess! One was filled with Carnival masks, the other with an assortment of woolen cloaks. We shrieked with pleasure before he hushed us, looking back toward the passageway and lowering his voice. “Do you think I’d allow them to keep you locked up here on this glorious day, this once-in-a-century moment for
la Serenissima,
when she has been vouchsafed the knowledge of a fourth season?”

His face was radiant as he handed out the masks and cloaks, calling each of us by name, and choosing, it seemed, our masks with special care. Mine was the one called Winter. “Listen to the way it feels!” he whispered as he first held the mask before me and then allowed me to look through its eyes. “The cold and the wind, the ice under your shoes, the way the silence roars. Listen and remember!”

Matteo, who had been guarding the door, was nowhere to be
seen (and I suspect he could have been found at some tavern or other, spending the maestro’s coins). Masked and cloaked, we ventured out the door two by two, holding hands, followed by the maestro, who was wearing the big-nosed mask of the Joker.

The cold—how can I describe the cold to you? For a moment, it was like falling into the canal: the sensation of it touched every part of us, pressed against us, as if looking for ways to get inside our bodies. We were too astonished to run around, but merely stood there watching our breaths transformed into little puffs of smoke, as if we were not girls in masks but small fire-breathing dragons.

Don Vivaldi in his silly mask ran among us then, urging us down the stairs, which were fiendishly slippery. Even the algae that covers them was glazed in ice. I’ve never felt so awkward before—and never did merely walking seem such a hazardous business to me. There was a good deal of hesitation among us, and shrieks of alarm every time someone lost her balance and grabbed at the air or the girl nearest to her.

The maestro held under his arm what looked like a rolled-up animal skin. “Careful, children—no broken bones, please. Crawl on your hands and knees if you must. But be brave—it may be another hundred years before Veneziani can walk on water again.”

We all made our way out onto the canal, holding on to one another and trying to keep our feet under us. The maestro flung the leather skin onto the ice, fur side up. “Here—sit upon it! You and you.” Two of the girls sat down on the skin, pulling their cloaks around them, so that they looked like two otherworldly birds perched on the ice. The maestro, who was far more adept than we at staying upright, pulled the skin this way and that. And then he let it go so that it slid with the girls upon it, screaming with laughter, their hands and feet in the air. “This, my angels, is what children do in wintertime. Mind your fingers, you string players—keep them under your cloaks!”

And thus we played till, despite the frigid air, we felt warm all over and our cheeks were blazing. Some of the bolder among us swooped across the ice, sliding on our boots and letting the maestro catch us in his arms on the other side.

He was more the Joker than himself, it would seem. After my turn, when he caught Claudia, he lifted her mask and kissed her, pulling her so close that her back arched like a sapling in a strong wind. It happened in an instant, so that I almost doubted the truth of what I saw. And then I looked up at the window from where la Befana had been watching before: there she stood. I prayed that she had blinked in that moment or turned away.

I wish I had not seen it myself. It does not seem right that the maestro, creator of such heavenly music, wears boots that are as soiled as those of any other
Veneziano.
I remember well what Claudia told me about all men, even priests, and their earthly preoccupations. But the maestro is made of different clay—I am sure of it. He plays with the world in the same way we play our instruments, to coax from it the sweetest harmonies, the most graceful flights of fancy. And surely there is both grace and sweetness in Claudia’s smile. Perhaps the maestro was like a bee that, finding itself so close to a flower, could not keep from tasting its nectar.

Soon afterward he herded us all inside again. We were all sweating underneath the woolen cloaks. Our teachers clucked and complained, and upbraided the maestro for exposing both himself and us to the cold. He went off coughing, but with a smile on his face. The cooks wrapped us in blankets warmed by the kitchen fire, gave us broth for dinner, and then sent us to bed.

I lay awake for a long time, thinking about all I’d felt and seen. Knowing that the maestro would be standing at the
clavicembalo,
transforming the sensations of the cold, the excitement, and even the kiss into music. And knowing he’d reserve the most difficult and expressive passages for his instrument and mine.

What I would do for one of those heated blankets now!

The next morning, half asleep, I thought I felt his arms around me. And then I woke with a start, and realized that it was Claudia who embraced me.

I turned and saw that she was also awake. I tried to imagine her married, with a horde of children—with a grand house and servants, jewels and silk dresses, and a husband who might be years older even than the maestro.

Claudia let me rest in her arms while my thoughts drifted. I think I had just fallen asleep when she spoke to me. “I know where I came from,” she said in a very soft voice, as if speaking to herself. “And I know exactly where I will go and what I will become. But you, Anna Maria—you have a special destiny in this world.”

If only I knew how to unlock this destiny of mine!

I wish I could turn now to see your face and feel your hand upon my shoulder. Your eyes would be my book of answers.

I pray for a warm blanket, a window to the world outside, and the end to all illusions. I pray for light.

Your loving daughter,
Anna Maria dal Violin,
Student of Maestro Vivaldi

A
n end to all illusions! I lived by illusions, mixing them with every mouthful of bread, every bite of meat, every sip of wine, and every measure of ink I used to write those letters.

In the week before Epiphany of that year in which my life would change forever, Vivaldi unveiled his plan to dedicate the new set of violin sonatas to King Frederick IV of Denmark and Norway. This was the grandee the maestro had told us about without, at first, divulging his name. But now it was common
knowledge—even among the cloistered
figlie
of the
coro
—that the king was traveling incognito in Venezia as the Duke of Olemberg.

It was an odd thing in the season of masks for him to be traveling thus with one identity hidden inside another. It puts me in mind of those nesting Russian dolls Rebekkah used to carry with her to distract the youngest girls while they waited their turn to be measured and pinned for their choir robes. What seemed a solid, elaborately painted doll could be worked open along a hidden center line; and there was another, perfectly painted doll fit inside her. Work this one open, and there was yet another—and so forth, until there was the tiniest doll at the center, no bigger than a bean.

We gave a grand concert in honor of the masked duke that held a king inside him—and I wonder now what sort of bean there was at his center.

Vivaldi so inflamed us with his desire to please the king that we played better than we ever had before. It was a joy to see the maestro’s face suffused with love for us when the so-called duke announced his intention to pay a second visit to the Pietà—and this time, he said by way of his messenger, he hoped to hear us play in a more intimate setting than that afforded by the church.

King Frederick was not the first rich, powerful, or otherwise famous man who was judged to merit a command performance in which we were neither hidden behind the grille of the choir lofts nor veiled like little brides of God. Some of the governors themselves were complicit on occasion in thus bending the rules. But this time, Vivaldi acted on his own. Intent on dazzling the king’s eyes as well as his ears, he selected a small group of us from among the youngest players who would still make a good musical impression. Some of the most accomplished instru
mentalists of the
coro
—women well past their youth who were nonetheless at the height of their virtuosity—did a good deal of what I now see to have been justifiable grumbling.

But Giulietta, Bernardina, Claudia, and I were bursting with our own good fortune. Giulietta was lovely in all ways, as well as being a fine cellist. Bernardina, my rival throughout those years, was tall and slim and had pretty hair. Her one blind eye would not be noticeable if she was placed (as Vivaldi was careful to place her) at an angle. Claudia, as a
figlia di spesa,
was not even a member of the
coro
. But the king was not privy to such fine distinctions. She was a good enough player, and her youthful beauty had long before caught the maestro’s eye.

Marietta was sick with envy, and regaled us in the dormitory with her curses of the maestro for not having written an oratorio instead so that the singers—especially she—could share in this opportunity to shine before such a person as the king of Denmark and Norway. Marietta was not alone in believing that if she could only be heard and seen at the same time, she would be plucked out of the
coro
and made a princess.