The True Adventures of Nicolo Zen (2 page)

I reached my own home, and at the sight of it burst into tears. The house was empty. My family had indeed been buried already, and neither our one surviving neighbor, Signor Tramante, nor a grim, exhausted constable could tell me where. For an instant, I had a wild glimmer of hope that perhaps one of my sisters had also wandered off feverish, like me, and was being nursed back to health. But, no, Signor Tramante was certain he had seen the stretcher carriers take five bodies out of the house.

I had awoken to a nightmare that could not be escaped. I packed a few articles of clothing in the canvas bag my mother used to take to the market. Then I put in my father’s knife, in its leather sheath, and my clarinet, which I kept hidden under my bed. Sitting at our kitchen table for the last time, numb with grief, I suddenly felt as if I had stepped out of my own body, which was why I didn’t hear someone open the door behind me and enter the house.

It was our landlord, Signor Cardinale, a thin, hatchet-faced man with cold eyes who was suspicious of everything and everyone. Unlike any other man I encountered that day, he was shaved and neatly dressed, wearing a blue cloak and polished boots—as if nothing had changed and all was well with the world.
With no word of condolence, no gesture of solace—not even a greeting—he informed me in his high, squeaky voice that he was reclaiming our poor cottage.

“Your father was two months behind in the rent, so this was going to happen one way or the other. I am boarding up the house, and no one will be permitted inside until I rent it again. Take your things and go on your way.”

My mother, who had seldom spoken ill of anyone, detested this man, but until that moment I hadn’t known just how wicked and depraved he was.

I added her bronze bracelet to my bag, and my sister Alessandra’s wooden comb, but it was too painful for me to sift through the rest of my family’s meager possessions, especially with Signor Cardinale watching over me—as if I were a thief and this was not my own home.

Following me outside, he reached into his pocket and offered me a single zecchino. I looked into his crimped face and fixed it in my memory, a reminder that I should always beware of men whose greed feeds, not just on treasure, but cruelty. Then, without a word, I turned on my heel and walked away.

“You won’t get far in life with that attitude,” he called after me.

In fact, I got as far as I needed to that day, riding the packet boat across the Lagoon to Venice. And I will not pretend I mourned when I learned sometime later that, after repossessing countless other houses from destitute survivors of the epidemic, Signor Cardinale had contracted malaria himself and died horribly, choking on his own blood. As the boat pulled away from the dock, I sat alone in the stern, clutching my bag, and gazed back
over Mazzorbo one last time. It looked no different than before—mist rising in the forest, wild ducks navigating the reeds, light shimmering on the water—but its natural beauty was like some cruel joke to me, knowing as I did how much suffering and death had descended on the island.

It was sunset when the steeples and towers of Venice came into view, glittering gold. We sailed past the forbidding seawall that encircled the Franciscan monastery on San Michele, where the monks buried their dead one on top of the other in the crowded cemetery. I shuddered to think of my parents and sisters in a shallow grave, cold as the earth itself now. It was unbearable. But I was alive, and I imagined my mother saying that there must be a reason for this, and that I must make the most of it and live my life, not just for myself, but for them.

This was small comfort for a boy entering a city alone at nightfall, poorly dressed, hungry, with no money and no place to stay, and only two immediate choices before him: to become a thief or a beggar. Which, for me, was no choice at all.

Thus it was that, the moment I set foot in Venice, I began to beg. From the docks of the Cannaregio I followed a succession of dizzying alleys to the Grand Canal. I often lost my way in the darkness, zigzagging and backtracking, sometimes passing the same doorway two or three times. The air was pungent with smoke and the smell of cooking, which made me linger whenever I passed a tavern.

Though my family had lived just three hours away, we used to visit the city together but twice a year: in March, to be blessed on the Feast Day of San Stefano, and in September, to watch the regatta, which the Doge himself initiated. Perched on a high platform in his gold chair, his robe adorned with every type of fish in the sea, he would drop his sea-blue scarf into the crowd below and toss a medallion, minted with his own image, into the canal.

My father traveled to Venice more frequently and, as I grew older, brought me along. We usually went first to a bacaro on the Calle Bartolomeo where he drank raboso wine from the barrel with a group of masons who were once his coworkers. Then I accompanied him to the boatyard on the Rio di San Trovaso where he bought a keg of tar that was sent to him in Mazzorbo. Once he took me to the Church of Santi Apostoli on the Strada Nuova, where he’d had his fateful accident one frigid morning, falling from a scaffold. In the coming days, I would revisit that church many times, sitting in the courtyard and gazing up at the steeple,
one of the tallest in the city, knowing some of its limestone blocks had been hewn and mortared by my father’s hands when he still had two good arms.

But that night, as the wind grew colder and the darkness deepened, on my own for the first time in my life, I found the city far stranger and more forbidding. My warm memories of my family and our former home already felt like part of another life, which I could never reenter. Though I had few possessions, in my grief and sadness I felt as if I were carrying a tremendous weight. If we’re all allotted a certain amount of happiness in this life, I was certain that, despite my youth, I had used up all of mine and had only to look forward to a maze of fearful shadows and dead ends, resembling the maze of alleys I was trying to negotiate.

Finally I saw the lights of the Doge’s Palace and the Campanile, whose bells were just striking ten o’clock. Skirting San Marco, where watchmen were making their rounds with swinging lanterns, and the Palace Guard in black capes marched around the perimeter, I made my way along the Riva degli Schiavoni and stopped just beyond the Rio dei Greci, where I began to beg. The dark waters of the Grand Canal glittered and the rooms of the great palazzi glowed with candlelight. The silhouettes of gentlemen in tall hats and ladies with mountainous hair glided back and forth. Streams of people swarmed past me, gaily dressed, talking and laughing. Scents of expensive powder and cologne filled my nostrils. Crowds gathered at the piers from which traghetti carried them across the canal to the Dorsoduro. Through the mist the windows of the Customs House were lit up, even at that hour, and on the roof, atop a golden ball, the bronze figure of
Fortune
served as a weather vane, moving this way and that in the wind.

Once I had caught my breath, I attempted to emulate the gestures and demeanor of the professional beggars I had seen on Burano on market days, when the lacemakers and potters peddled their wares. But I soon realized I could collect far more coins by playing my clarinet with my cap at my feet than by holding out an empty hand and wearing a doleful expression. I also needed to take myself to a quieter—though not too quiet—thoroughfare where I would not be lost in the throng. So I made my way along the canal to San Samuele and began to play my clarinet. Within a half hour, my hat was filled with enough soldi and denari—and a single zecchino—to buy a meal, and even a proper coat the following day. But not enough to pay for a place to sleep, so for two nights, after playing for nearly sixteen straight hours, I curled up on a bench in the Campo San Vio, my head tucked into my coat and a bowl of hot soup in my stomach. Both nights, an old man was lying on another bench with his back to me, a tattered blanket barely covering him. The soles of his boots hung loose and his hands were nearly blue, like a dead man’s. The second night, I found him in exactly the same position, and I feared he might have died. I watched him for a long while, hoping he would stir, and when he did finally, shifting one of his feet, I felt relieved, though I knew he surely had little time remaining on this earth.

By my third day in Venice, I had accumulated enough money to pay for a bed in a room with two others in a ramshackle boardinghouse on the Calle Bontini, near the boatyard. The smell of boiling tar reminded me of my father, and my first night there I wept. But I kept my guard up, too, for I was sharing the room with two grown men, shabbily dressed, and I knew enough to be wary when the fat one, named Filippo, blew out the candles
as we got into our beds. Especially after the scrawny one, Giorgio, with ferret teeth and blotched cheeks, told me I had “pretty hair, like a girl.”

This kept me from a good night’s sleep, but it also planted the seed—which might never have blown into my head on its own—that would come to fruition two days later when Luca stopped to hear me play before a knot of people by the Palazzo Dandolo. I had replaced my wool cap with a floppy black hat, from which my hair flowed, and a long coat that concealed my figure. Luca listened until I finished the piece—a Scarlatti sonata—then nodded approvingly.

When I stooped to pick the coins from my bag, he asked me my age.

“Fourteen,” I replied softly, and because my voice was naturally high, and yet to acquire timbre, I could make it very soft indeed.

“And what is that you’re playing—a chalumeau?”

“No, sir, a clarinet.”

“Where do you live?”

“I lived on Mazzorbo, sir, until a few days ago, when the epidemic carried off my family and the landlord took away our house.”

“Your parents are dead?”

I nodded. “And my sisters. I was the youngest girl,” I added.

“And you have no home?”

“No, sir. I have only my clarinet and these pennies you see in my bag.”

He scrutinized me closely. “And your name?”

“Nicolà,” I replied after a moment’s hesitation.

That moment was to alter the course of my entire life.

You see, I had recognized Luca. The previous evening, I had gone to the Ospedale della Pietà to hear the orchestra of orphan girls play. The usher had allowed me to stand in the back. The girl musicians performed in a gallery above the altar, partially concealed from the audience behind an iron grille. The Master conducted them with a fierce energy. And Luca sat in a box above, surveying them with a critical eye. I knew that a good number of these girls, when they came of age, were recruited into professional orchestras, not only in Venice, but Padua, Ravenna, and other cities. There were good musical ensembles in some of the city’s other ospedali—especially the Mendicanti and the Incurabiliti, on the Zattere—but none compared to the Pietà’s. As I listened to the girls, I thought how wonderful it must be to be one of them, and to play such music. And all at once I hatched a scheme. I saw an opportunity, not only to fulfill my father’s grand prophesy that one day I would become a famous musician, but also to attend to the far more mundane and urgent need to get myself off the street, out of danger, with a secure roof over my head. It was a wild, desperate chance that would require plenty of luck, but I had nothing to lose.

So it was no accident that the next morning, disguising my gender as best I could, I chose a spot not fifty yards from the Ospedale della Pietà to play my clarinet, hoping Luca or the Master or someone who worked for them would hear me. How lucky I was, indeed, that it turned out to be Luca himself.

I was an orphan, but there was no orphanage for boys comparable to the Ospedale della Pietà, and certainly none with its own
orchestra. The local orphanages for boys were in a woeful state, some just a step up from dungeons. The best of them was a warren of overcrowded rooms in a run-down annex of the Dominican seminary, whose monks were reputed to take pleasure in punishing the inmates. The wards who survived these grim establishments were sent into the world when they turned sixteen to do thankless work as oarsmen on commercial galleys or night laborers in the bowels of the Arsenal, assisting the shipbuilders. Only a fortunate few were apprenticed to prosperous tradesmen. With due respect to his memory, I did not want to follow my father’s path in life, doing backbreaking work at the mercy of overseers and living in constant fear of poverty.

Now I had my chance at something better—even if I had to begin as an impostor. Having grown up with three beloved sisters—Carla, Rhea, and Alessandra—I knew a few things about how girls dressed, carried themselves, and spoke. I had even learned some of their more private habits, living as we did in three small rooms with a wooden bathtub and an outdoor privy. My sisters and I shared the same bedroom, which had two beds. Until the age of eight, I slept beside Carla, the youngest, who was ten, and dressed with all of them; only when Rhea was twelve and Alessandra thirteen did my mother sling a hammock for me near the fireplace in the kitchen, where I was also expected to dress.

Luca told me the Master was about to conduct auditions, open to “outsiders,” who of course must be orphans, for two places in the orchestra that had been vacated unexpectedly.

“Can you read music?”

“Yes, sir. I learned in the church choir.”

“Good. Those who are chosen in the auditions will become residents of the Ospedale as well as members of the orchestra. Consider this an invitation to attend.”

“Thank you, sir.”

“Get yourself a clean dress, Nicolà,” he said, dropping two soldi into my bag and glancing disapprovingly at my rough shirt and pantaloons. “And be on time. Friday, at noon.”

I did not like the idea of dressing up as a girl—really dressing up, not just hiding behind a greatcoat—but I swallowed my pride and stuck to my plan. When I wavered, I had only to remind myself of the alternatives: playing on the street for coins and sharing a room with the likes of Filippo and Giorgio, or entering a boys’ orphanage.

I bought my dress that afternoon at a cluttered shop off the Campo San Polo. It cost me everything I had in my pocket, including Luca’s contribution, so I had no supper that night, and the following day ate only some discarded produce—an overripe apple, a turnip, and some carrot greens—that I found at the market by the Rialto Bridge. I told myself it didn’t matter that, waiting for Friday to come, I was too nervous to eat, anyway—and maybe I was. At the same time, I didn’t want to faint from hunger at the audition.