The True Adventures of Nicolo Zen (13 page)

Hoyer found me a furnished flat on the Braunerstrasse, just off the Albertinaplatz, only a few blocks from his own home. It consisted of three high-ceilinged rooms and a balcony—impressive in itself, but overwhelming to a homeless Venetian boy—on the fourth floor of a large white building with a marble stairway.

“I would have you live in my house, my boy, but trust me, with the career before you, you will want your own place. Anyway, this is what Massimo requested. Twice a day I will have one of my housemaids, Gertrude, come here to clean and cook for you. She is an excellent cook. She worked for Albinoni when he lived in Vienna, and became adept at preparing Venetian dishes.”

He seemed especially pleased to inform me of this. I thanked him for securing the apartment so swiftly, and the food with which he had stocked the kitchen, and the clothes he had had me fitted for at his tailor, including a formal black suit for the performances I would give.

“It must have cost a lot of money,” I added, taking in the gleaming oak floors and the ornate mantelpiece.

“It’s nothing,” Hoyer said with a dismissive wave. “The receipts from your first recital will pay for all of this, and more. My office will draw on your account with us to pay your bills. I am in and out of Vienna these days, so when you need cash, or anything else, you should inform my assistant, Stefan, or Otto, the bookkeeper.”

Gertrude, a spry young woman with very blue eyes and perfect teeth, refused to speak to me until I first addressed her. I asked her to dispense with this formality—later on, when I was settled in, I even ordered her to—but she wouldn’t relent. In the morning she had hot chocolate and rolls on the table as soon as I was up and around. At dinner, she prepared whatever I had requested earlier in the day. (Her grilled eels with onions and currants, Venetian-style, really were excellent.) She also brewed a cup of Massimo’s burdock tea for me every night. I practiced on the clarinet every afternoon for five hours. They were my happiest hours of the day. My exploration of the latest compositions that passed through Hoyer’s office, from my distinguished fellow Venetians, Antonio Lotti and the brothers Marcello (Benedetto my favorite), to the greatest composer of the day, George Frideric Handel, who was producing masterpieces with frightening ease, to a pair of famous French composers who had recently visited
Vienna, Jean-Philippe Rameau and François Couperin. No matter how much I was abetted by my clarinet, practicing difficult compositions of this quality honed my concentration and helped me to absorb the music more deeply, interpret it more intensely, and carry its beauty inside me. Nothing had ever comforted me like music—not when I was a boy without prospects in Mazzorbo or now, when I was being groomed to be a topflight performer.

I often told Gertrude to forget her cleaning chores and instead sit and listen when I practiced. This was not because I needed an audience to feed my vanity, but rather because I felt uncomfortable about having a servant—treating someone born into my own social class, if not higher, as if I were her superior. I told myself it wasn’t an imposition to have Gertrude listen because I knew that, like so many Viennese, she loved music. And wasn’t it better for her to listen to music than scrub the kitchen that much more? The trouble was, she was so diligent that she ended up doing both. And she was so well trained, and proud of her training, that she would only go so far when I attempted to treat her as an equal; when I asked her to join me at the table for dinner, or even hot chocolate, she categorically refused.

I found a nearby coffeehouse that I frequented, and a restaurant where I ate lunch so often that, after I’d made a name for myself, the maître d’ held a corner table for me. Mostly I walked around the city, stunned by the size of the plazas, the public parks, the broad boulevards, the enormous ornate fountains with their cherubs and nymphs. Venice is a small city; its complexity makes it feel large. But one can walk from one end to the other in a couple of hours, at most. Vienna seemed to me to have no perimeters. I could feel the vastness of Europe stretching out in all
directions. Since it was the only other capital I had ever been in, I assumed that other cities that were still just names to me—Paris, Berlin, Prague—must be equally large, if not larger. And noisy! The vessels on Venetian canals are relatively silent. One will hear the flapping of a sail or the plash of an oar or the creak of a rudder, but Venice has no carriages or wagons, and the only horses, outside of the Lido, where the rich can canter along the sand, are workhorses at the loading docks in Santa Croce. As a Venetian, I was accustomed to walking, and despite its great distances, I usually made my way around Vienna on foot.

I had heard from Hoyer, and then seen for myself, all the damage inflicted on the city in the recent past. Like Naples, and Venice in my grandfather’s day, Vienna had been hit hard by the plague. Beginning in 1680, the epidemic came in waves, killing thousands of people, emptying entire villages in the outlying countryside. For twenty years, whole neighborhoods were abandoned, overrun by vermin, destroyed by the elements. What the plague spared, the Turks destroyed when the Ottoman army laid siege to the city, lobbing mortars and firing cannonballs over the fortifications. Gradually the Turks were beaten back, never to return, and by the time I arrived in the city, the last breakout of the plague had ended and the rebuilding of the city was under way. In fact, there was a burst of new, large-scale building, much of it originating in the blueprints of Italian architects hired at great cost.

Exploring the city nearly every afternoon, I inevitably gravitated to these construction sites. There was the enormous Belvedere Palace, built for Prince Eugene of Savoy, the hero of the Turkish Wars, who was universally hailed as the savior of Vienna.
And the Palais Kinsky, its stone blindingly white in the midday sun. And, most poignant for me, the great Karlskirche Cathedral on the Karlsplatz, commissioned by the Emperor Karl VI two years earlier. I often stood for hours at the edge of the work site, watching the stonecutters, carpenters, and masons on the high scaffolds and thinking of my father. The men were so small against the blue sky, kneeling or stretching on the narrow planks, chiseling limestone and laying mortar. The icy wind was blowing right through my heavy woolen coat and gloves, and I imagined how numb those men’s hands must be, how heavy their tools felt, how much colder and swifter the wind must be three hundred feet off the ground. I said a silent prayer that none of these men would fall as my father had, and through all the days the Karlskirche rose up before my eyes, no man did.

In late afternoon I liked to visit the long park that wound along the western bank of the Danube. Having always lived on the water, I sometimes felt trapped, spending most of my time at the center of a landlocked city. Wide as the Giudecca Canal, choppy and green, with screaming terns circling overhead, the Danube made me feel at home. In the hour before sunset, I liked to sit on a bench by the riding trail and watch the Danube turn deep blue. Barges from Germany and Romania sailed by, and fishing boats casting their nets for bass and sturgeon. Couples pulled up in carriages and strolled under the trees. On the opposite bank, flocks of geese pecked at the grass.

On a day that Gertrude informed me was the coldest in years, I saw blocks of ice floating down the Danube, refracting the light like huge diamonds. It had been snowing for two days, and men in white coats were shoveling the main streets. At dusk I started
walking home. I stopped to buy cheese and apples from a stall in the Kohlmarkt. I walked up the four flights to my flat and unlocked the door. Gertrude must have just left: birch logs were burning in the fireplace and a casserole of sausages and potatoes was on the table. I hung my wet coat by the fire. Though the room wasn’t dark, it felt so, and I lit more candles. Then I cut a thick slice from the loaf of freshly baked bread and sat down to eat. Only after I had bathed and put on my robe, and settled before the fire to practice for another hour on my clarinet, did I open the plain brown package Gertrude had left for me on the coffee table.

Though I had insisted to her that I could barely read German, she was convinced that anyone who could play music as I did must know the language of Vienna. She had picked up enough Italian to get by from Albinoni and the numerous Italian musicians who visited him, but I told her that if she really wanted to help me learn German, she must speak it to me at all times, pointing to objects and using sign language, if necessary. She accommodated me in this. Inside the package was an Italian-German lexicon that Stefan, at Hoyer’s office, had obtained for me. I had quickly learned the German for “clarinet,”
die Klarinette
, and “prodigy,”
das Wunderkind
. I learned the phrases that enabled me to order a meal or ask for basic directions on the street. But late one night I realized that there were words I wanted to know for myself, in German as well as Italian, even if I never used them with anyone else.
Einsam
, for example, and
verloren
, and
heimwehkrank
. The first two, “lonely” and “lost,” should not have been surprising; but I hadn’t expected to seek out the third word, “homesick.” I honestly didn’t think I could feel homesick when I no longer had
a home, or at least a home of the kind I had known, however humble. This was doubly confusing when, at the same time, I now had a home all my own, which was highly unusual for a boy my age, Austrian or Venetian. The word in Italian was more beautiful,
nostalgico
, but when I woke alone in the middle of the night,
heimwehkrank
sounded more the way I felt.

What was it like to become a celebrated soloist in Vienna? Terrifying, thrilling, beyond anything I had imagined, much less experienced. At first it all seemed to be happening to someone else. The huge audiences; the stage that floated in the darkness like a ship, with me and a few other musicians on deck; the deference paid me by some of those musicians after they first heard me; the envy I felt from others; the ovations and encores; the glittering receptions; the postconcert banquets of lobster, caviar, sturgeon, and wild boar hosted by Vienna’s most affluent residents, bankers and barons who could not have guessed they were fêting a boy from the rough, remote island of Mazzorbo, where the finest holiday menu consisted of broiled eel and cornmeal and a salad of dandelion greens.

I performed with quintets and trios, with the Royal Orchestra at the Imperial Opera House before twelve hundred people, before the Archduke’s brother at the Hofburg Palace. I revelled in it; it was a transcendent time for me, playing fabulous music with the finest musicians. My repertoire kept expanding, fed by the vast amounts of Austrian and German music I encountered: Bach and Froberger, Kerll and Pachelbel, as well as Italians I had never heard of like Carissimi and Poglietti. When there was no clarinet part in the score, as was often the case, I assumed the musical line
assigned to the flute or trumpet, playing the high and low octaves accordingly. The sheer volume of performances Hoyer booked for me, and the quality of the musicians with whom I played, enabled me to hone my technique and achieve the subtlest effects. My interpretive skills increased tenfold. And my ability to concentrate for long stretches, shutting out the rest of the world, ensured that my clarinet never failed me. Not once.

Hoyer leased me a well-appointed coach and sent me on tour, occasionally joining me in the cities near Vienna. I performed in Linz, Pressburg, Salzburg, and Munich, as far north as Stuttgart and as far west as Zurich. Hoyer’s assistant, Stefan, a gangly young man who dressed like a deacon, was my constant companion. He kept to himself, a man of few words and fastidious habits: polishing his boots every night, trimming his beard every other day, praying aloud before every meal. Our routine seldom varied. On travel days, we rode through deep forests and vast fields of wheat and corn. Spectacular vistas opened up before us: snowcapped mountains and silver alpine lakes and enormous billowing clouds, just above the peaks and therefore closer to the earth than they would be anywhere else. We passed other coaches, lone horsemen, farmers with ox-drawn carts, and occasional platoons of Austrian soldiers as well as Bavarian stragglers making their way across the Tyrol. When we arrived in a city, we checked into one of the best hotels. I bathed and changed my clothes. Stefan attended mass at the nearest church. In the afternoon we went to the concert hall so I could rehearse with the local chamber group or orchestra with whom I would be performing. We returned to the hotel, where I dined early and took a nap. Then we went back
to the concert hall for the performance. Invariably there was a reception afterward hosted by local dignitaries. Then to bed. Stefan’s job was fourfold: keep me on schedule; see to my needs; deal with the local promoters and managers; keep track of receipts and transfer funds to Vienna.

Everything proceeded without incident until we arrived in Ulm and I got drunk for the first time in my life, on white Rhine wine. I had played eight concerts in ten days and was exhausted. It was a hot August night. We were in a hotel on a small lake. We ate on the terrace, and after dinner Stefan went up to his room and I stayed outside, listening to the crickets and gazing out over the water. The surface was silver beneath a full moon. If I closed my eyelids halfway, I could have been in Venice, in Burano maybe or at the tip of the Lido. As was his custom, Stefan had drunk two glasses of wine. Before the waiter could take away the bottle when he cleared the table, I poured myself a glass and drank it down like water. It was sweet. I drank another glass, and my stomach grew warm and my head light. All my weariness from performing and traveling seemed to seep away. I asked the waiter for another bottle and some fruit, as I had seen Hoyer do at the end of every meal. Two more glasses of wine and I found myself on the shore of the lake, weeping. I was thinking of my mother and father, of my sisters, of Julietta and Prudenza, and most of all, of Adriana. I feared I would never see her again. Never be able to explain to her what had happened during my last night at the Ospedale. I had refrained from sending her a letter, knowing Marta would intercept it, which would only make things worse for Adriana. I would have given anything to see her, knowing that if she inquired about my
whereabouts from Bartolomeo, he would tell her that I had simply disappeared without a word of farewell—or thanks. No matter how persuasively Massimo reassured him, the fact remained that I had disappeared a second time, and I was certain she would think even less of me for it.