The Case of the Orphaned Bassoonists (18 page)

She gazed at Giovanna, bowing beautifully. “Isn’t she divine? And her aunts! Such good cooks.”

“Speaking of plots coming together. Speaking of Andrew,” I said. “I didn’t manage to tell you before dinner that I tracked down the missing bassoon.” I told her about my visit to Graciela’s antique shop with Albert. “Albert thinks it’s Sandretti himself who stole the bassoon, for insurance reasons. Anyway, you’ll have to go over there tomorrow and identify it. Then you can tell the police, get your passport back and go home to London.”

“London?” Nicky said, as if she’d never heard of it.

“I don’t think it was Sandretti, myself,” I went on. “I suspect Andrew. I’ve suspected him all along. Albert found a magazine article of Andrew’s stuffed in the bassoon. To my mind, that’s proof.”

“Other instruments, the piano and the violin for instance, have far greater tonal range. Yet what other instrument can alternate between bittersweet lyricism and outright jocularity with such engaging finesse?”

“That’s it!”

“Load of codswallop. Andrew doesn’t have the tiniest sense of humor. What does he know about lyricism or jocularity?”

“Then you know about the article?”

“I cleaned the mouthpiece with it. Must have slipped inside when I put it back together. If only I had that old bassoon here now. I’d love to play a duet with her.”

The notes of the violin had gone all andante and Giovanna looked over at us—one of us—invitingly.

“I’ve been so lonely, Cassandra,” said Nicky.

And I suddenly realized what she meant. She’d been lonely without music in the house. Lonely without Olivia to make music with. My moving down from the attic wasn’t the solution at all. She thought she wanted company. She wanted another musician.

“The bassoon and the violin,” Nicky said dreamily. “It’s a perfect combination.”

I
T WAS NEARLY ELEVEN
when we finally arrived at the restaurant just outside the old Ghetto walls. Tables had been placed outside, on the quay along the canal, and people passed in and out of the brightly lit restaurant with drinks and plates. The klezmer concert was taking place on a barge in the canal that had been secured to the quay. Giovanna jumped onto the barge and took out her violin. She played klezmer as well as she played Vivaldi. Nicky disappeared inside and reappeared with glasses of beer for us and a few “wee tit-bits,” including plates of calamari and garlic-drenched shrimp.

The barge, rocking with drunken candles that spilled light onto the black water and against the high stone wall, was an extraordinary sight. The musicians, five of them with the addition of Giovanna, were in full swing. The soprano wail of Roberta’s clarinet matched the machine-gun sweetness of Giovanna’s violin. In a lower register throbbed the drum and bass. A saxophone came in and out of the conversation. Roberta wasn’t holding back as she had the other night in the Piazza when she played jazz; now it was as if her breath existed only to come straight through the black and silver horn. Giovanna was right with her. Her bowing arm went like an automaton’s; but the sounds were human—wrenching, delicious, delirious.

Above us the sky caught the musicians’ electricity and tossed it around in the mysterious clouds. The klezmer music somersaulted in the street, bumped up the stone wall, swan-dived into the canal. Nicky was enthralled. Almost as much as playing herself, she loved to hear others perform. Corkscrews of her hair blew in the wind. She ate shrimp with one hand and beat the table with the other.

I hadn’t noticed Francesca when we arrived, but after a few songs, I saw her standing on the bridge that led to the Campo di Ghetto Nuovo. Her hair was twisted up around her head; she was as lovely as a red-tipped lily. Though I could see she was leaning over the side of the bridge, caught up in the music Roberta made, I went toward her anyway.

“Good evening, Cassandra,” she greeted me happily. When you were her age, it was enough to be finished with work for the day and out in the night with your dreams. “It was a slow day at the shop. I managed to work on my story.” She patted her coat pocket from which a few pages protruded. “I would describe the story to you, but summaries of things often don’t sound as well.”

“Is it about music?”

“It’s about love. That’s all I can say.”

“I’d like to read it.”

“Not yet, not yet. But if I ever finish it, maybe you could translate it into English.” She was almost flirtatious with me tonight. Perhaps it was only the giddiness of finishing a good paragraph.

“Maybe,” I said. “I have so many projects, already.” I pulled the two Latin American novels out of my satchel.
Lovers and Virgins
balanced on the railing like a bloated sacrificial lamb, while
Bashō in Lima
was as austerely thin as an Asian ascetic. The music weaving around us had so much more vibrancy than either of these two books. “I can’t decide which one to translate. I don’t care much for either of them, but I don’t know why.”

“What should a novel have for you to wish to translate it?” asked Francesca.

I started to list some of what I considered to be the attributes of good fiction: transporting liveliness, sheer glory in language, characters with heart, and a mingled sense of life’s majesty and terror, its silliness and joy. But it came to me that these qualities were only important to me when I read a book. I could happily translate a second-rate novel if I cared about it, if it became, in some way,
mine
.

“I can’t quite explain,” I said, now filled with wonder at the simplicity of it. “When I translate a book, it must become
my
book for the time I’m working on it. So I suppose what draws me to a book is some glimmer of whether it could become mine.”

“But how can that be?” asked Francesca. “It’s the author’s. The author wrote it. It can never become yours.”

“No, you’re wrong in that,” I said. “It becomes mine while I’m working on it. It becomes my English book, for it’s my English that makes it.”

“Translation is just substitution,” Francesca said, but a little uncertainly. “You find an English word for my Italian word—that’s all, isn’t it?”

“In basic translation, yes, perhaps, but not when it has to do with literature. I must read the text and have the feeling and then describe the feeling. I can’t have the feeling in Italian; I must have it in the middle of the two languages, but be able to describe it in English.”

“Now I’m confused.”

“Say in Italian, I
’m in love
.” She did so. “Now feel it.” She blushed. I took her hand. “Now say,
I’m in love
in English.” She said,
I am in love
with a charming accent, but then pulled away, disturbed as well as flattered. Her eyes rested on Roberta.

“I think I understand a little better now what you mean…about translation,” she said. “You know, Roberta and I were speaking this evening about how glad we are to have met you, and Nicola too. Because you are so much older than we are, you can be our role models. I said to Roberta, ‘It is as if they are our mothers, but so much better, so much more wise and understanding.’”

“Thank you,” I said weakly. “I’ll pass that on to Nicky.”

Francesca touched my arm and then walked over the bridge down to the quay where she joined Nicky. The two of them waved at me, and Nicky laughed. I didn’t think that Francesca had yet paid her the compliment of admiring her elderly wisdom.

I took off my beret and let the wind blow through my hair. No need to cover the gray now. I regarded my two books. At least I’d finally defined the trouble. Neither of them was mine; neither of them would ever become mine. It was as simple as that. It was useless to debate the question of which one I should translate. The answer was neither.

I gave a push to
Lovers and Virgins
. The book fell like a stone and sank without a murmur, with hardly a splash.
Bashō in Lima
gave a wistful flutter as it sailed down toward the canal. This book didn’t sink, but rested lightly on the surface of the dark water like a seagull preening its feathers. Then the current took the little volume and carried it under the bridge. I rushed to the other side to see it.
Bashō
was taking passage through the wind-rippled surface of the canal, as if she had a destination in mind, as if she thought it necessary to visit the lagoon. She was a pilgrim of a book, no doubt about it.

“One might think,” said Anna de Hoog, suddenly appearing at my side on the bridge, “that we were watching a concert by the girls of one of the
ospedali
.”

“If they’d been allowed to set foot outside the Pietà,” I said. “If they’d been allowed to come to the Ghetto. If the Jewish girls had been allowed to play music like the Christians. If. If. If.”

Anna smiled. She seemed slightly out of breath. She was still wearing jeans, and a tweed jacket that made her look bulkier around the torso. Running shoes too. She seemed ready for action tonight. Had she run all the way over here?

“I gather you got the note I left with Marco,” I said. “I wanted to ask you…”

“Shhh…” she said, taking my arm. “Don’t spoil the mood. All in good time I’ll answer your questions. If I can.” The sky above threw off darts of light. The storm was almost upon us.

Down below, on the barge, Nicky had joined the klezmer group. The saxophonist stepped off for a break, and Nicky took up another clarinet that Roberta had brought along. In her student days Nicky had played the clarinet in a local jazz group, there being no great demand for bassoonists in university pubs. She was rusty, I suppose, but not to me. She caught the notes Roberta tossed her and played with them like a kitten plays with a mouse. She stayed with Roberta as long as she could and then let Roberta go, a kite in the wind. The notes flew up and lost themselves in the crackling fizz of the approaching storm.

“It’s extraordinary, when you think of it,” Anna said. “That Venice was the one place in the world, in human history perhaps, where women were not just allowed to perform as musicians in public but were encouraged to be virtuosos. Where there was even a cult around them. Where listeners came from all over Europe just to hear them.”

“They played, but they didn’t compose,” I said. “That’s why we don’t know their individual names. We have to call them
the girls
.”

“I don’t believe they didn’t compose,” said Anna. “It’s true they were not employed to write music, but I am sure that some of them composed. You don’t stop doing what you are meant to, just because someone tells you not to.”

“That’s an optimistic view of history.”

“It’s an alternative view. It sees more value in the rebel than in the mainstream.”

Gradually she had steered me off the bridge into the campo of the Ghetto. The music was fainter here, the thunder louder. We began to walk around the square.

“Rebels don’t create an oeuvre,” I said. “Marginalized and subject peoples don’t leave records, or if they do, the records are destroyed.”

“History is a matter of losing and finding, and knowing where to look,” said Anna. “Hildegard von Bingen was only a name for many centuries, but now her work is performed everywhere. Even Vivaldi’s music was more or less lost for two hundred years. There could well be great work by women composers in the archives. The
New Grove Dictionary of Women Composers
lists a dozen Venetian musicians, most from the Pietà. In fifty years, scholars may have restored to us their compositions.”

The buildings around us had taken on an air of insubstantiality in the thunderous night. Generations of Jews had lived and died here. How could Anna speak so confidently of losing and finding when so many lives had been lost and would never be found again? The victors have always been very good at erasing all trace of those they’ve destroyed.

Never as much as tonight had I felt Venice’s peculiar combination of enclosure and openness. The violent sky was huge, and the lagoon we were sinking into was almost as vast. But the city was folded and twisted in on itself like a crumpled set of ancient, now unreadable instructions.

We stood in a patch of space, open to the sky, while all around us meaning—alternative, received, rejected and recovered—multiplied like the bricks of houses fallen and rebuilt.

Anna put her arm around me, carefully, but gently pushed my hand away from her shoulder, as if guarding a wound. “Of course, to me,” she said, “the thrill is in the pursuit. I don’t like to find what I’m looking for too easily.”

I almost said, “I won’t make it too easy then,” but realized she wasn’t talking about me at all.

“When I first saw you on the bridge,” she went on. “I thought you were Nicola. With your hair blowing and the cape—it makes you look bigger than you are. It made a very dramatic picture. Then I realized that Nicola was playing in the band. I hope she’s safe with them. In some ways it might have been better if she could have kept hidden.”

“Nicky is one of those historical cases for whom hiding is not really an option, not for long anyway.”

At that moment the storm blasted down on us, as if Jehovah himself were punishing us for questioning his old male world order. Thunder rippled out in waves as lightning shredded the sky. But even through the deluge it was possible to hear screams coming from the direction of the quay and the barge.

Anna immediately dropped her arm from my waist and ran back the way we’d come. She ran holding her chest, and I realized with a start that she was probably wearing a shoulder holster.

What was she expecting to happen? Was Nicky really in danger? I ran after Anna as fast as I could. My hip complained bitterly.

When I reached the bridge, I saw that the barge had been untied or cut loose from its moorings, and that a few people were scrambling to hold onto it. Otherwise the quay was empty, the crowd having scattered for shelter.

I stood on the bridge, my cloak flapping in the wind. I couldn’t see Anna, I couldn’t see Nicky. I couldn’t see much of anything actually. I came down the steps of the bridge and, clutching my cape, moved to the shelter of the buildings as I made my way along the quay. The rain shattered against my skin. I felt like I was at the mercy of an out-of-control rain-making machine in a movie version of
Wuthering Heights
. Now for the close-up of my cloak blowing in the wind, my tear-stained, tormented look of loss:
Cathy
!