Vivaldi's Virgins (19 page)

“And then, when the War for Candia was lost, and the fortunes of the Republic waned, greater and greater taxes were levied against the Jews. All of us in the Ghetto—even such men as my father—found it increasingly hard to provide the basic necessities of life for their families, to say nothing of the luxury of music lessons.

“We met as a family—because my father knew that his decision would affect all of us equally. We met and decided to use Mother’s jewelry to pay for Rachel’s music lessons. She had a few fine pieces, and Father told us that—one piece at a time, if Don Spada would accept them—they would allow Rachel to continue her studies, and we would get a better rate of exchange this way than if we pawned them.

“None of us had even a moment’s hesitation. What is a bauble compared with a gift such as Rachel’s? She had greatness, Signorina, just as you do. And she lived for music.”

Are all lives such a complicated puzzle? Maybe it’s only in Venezia—in this place where everyone’s role is so strictly and
precisely defined—that the cracks between the puzzle pieces tell as much a story as the pieces themselves. Each piece, seen in isolation, makes no sense at all—a corner of this, a limb of that; a leaf, a shadow, a section of water or sky. The meaning only becomes clear when all the pieces are fitted together.

Rebekkah held one piece of the puzzle, and I held another—two small pieces in a large, complex picture as richly detailed as any canvas by Canaletto. I had been sifting through all the pieces for a match to mine—and now she was holding it up before me, and it glittered. It was the coin in which she’d pay me for playing that night in the
campo
. But I knew that it was also her gift to me.

“Silvio asked me if I knew anything of a certain locket that had come into your possession. I could hardly believe my ears when he described it to me. There is no other piece precisely like it, as far as I know. It was made by a master goldsmith in Poland, over two hundred years ago. Yes, I know the provenance of your locket, Anna Maria. But I don’t understand how or why it found its way to you.”

I begged her to tell me whatever she knew.

“This same locket was given by my father to Bonaventura Spada as payment for Rachel’s violin lessons.”

I took this in, and yet it made no sense to me. “Do you think Don Spada sold it?”

“Perhaps. He was a very peculiar kind of man, Don Spada, although he was a priest. He won everyone’s trust with his soft voice and soulful brown eyes that seemed to look deep inside one’s heart. Both men and women loved him. And he loved them back. He won my parents’ trust even as he stole my sister’s virtue—and gave us Silvio!”

Silvio! There it was, the secret of his parentage, without any searching on his part—no combing through the books of the
scaffetta
. No hunt for clues or friends sent out to spy for him. And yet it was rather awful news.

I looked with renewed tenderness and sympathy at Silvio, my darling friend—that betwixt and between—the child of a priest and a Jewess, and a sodomite besides! How much more of an outcast could anyone possibly be?

Rebekkah had also turned to gaze at Silvio, who sat there looking perfectly comfortable with himself and not a tiny bit distressed. “When I look at him,” said Rebekkah, “I see the eyes and smile and hands of the sister who was the sun and moon to me.”

“But how,” I said, when I’d recovered enough to pose a question, “how was your sister’s child ever brought to be raised at the Pietà?”

“Yes, tell her,
Zietta!
”

Rebekkah sighed. “My father, in his grief and anger, disowned Rachel, who was no child but a woman of twenty-eight at the time—a woman, my father raved, who should have known better. He wanted to bring a lawsuit against Spada. But the only result of his inquiries was to bring the baby to the attention of the Council of Ten. When our Silvio was only a month old, and Rachel was already ill, the Cattaveri came and took him away to be baptized, raised as a Christian at the foundling home.

“Some of our neighbors, and even some of our family, agreed with them. Why leave a half-Christian baby to be raised in the direst conditions of poverty and hopelessness, here in the Ghetto, when the Ospedale della Pietà could provide food and shelter, a good education, and a future?

“After Rachel died, my father was inconsolable. He wanted to get his grandson back. But the most he could negotiate was a contract that gave me the right to mend and make the choir robes for the Pietà. I would be able to look in on Silvio and make sure
he was faring well. My father’s friends had their own friends, in turn, on the Board of Governors, who allowed that Silvio could become my apprentice when he came of age—although he would retain the rights and privileges of an ordinary citizen of
la Serenissima
. It was, in short, a Jewish conspiracy.”

I turned to Silvio. “So you
knew
all this time?”

“I only knew that I had someone from the outside who seemed to care for me, who brought me sweets from time to time, and told me I was a good boy. I counted myself lucky.”

Rebekkah leaned over and kissed him on the cheek.

“So you knew that day on the island!”

“I didn’t know yet. The story only came out when I asked Rebekkah—and with great trepidation, I might add—if she knew anything about your locket. And, as you’ve heard, she knew everything about it.”

“I know nothing about it after it ceased to be the property of Don Spada. I had always believed that my sister’s teacher loved her just as much as she, to her eternal misfortune, loved him. And so it pained me to think that he would have gambled or given away the one token he had of her, apart from the son he couldn’t claim without losing both his honor and his livelihood.

“But priests must also earn their bread, and a priest such as Bonaventura Spada probably had greater need of ready cash than most others. And the locket is worth a great deal.”

Rebekkah turned her gaze on me. “Silvio told me how the locket was given to you, and by whom. But I still don’t know why.”

“You’re as much in the dark about it, Signora, as I am. I was hoping you could tell me something about the proprietor of the Banco Giallo. He was the one who sent the locket to me via Herr von Regnazig, resident consul for the Archbishop of Mainz.”

“I can only tell you that the Banco Giallo is owned by a good,
reliable man. I’ve had many dealings with him.”

“Did you, Signora—” I hesitated. “Did you perhaps recommend his services to a noblewoman recently?”

“I’ve recommended his services to half a dozen noblewomen recently. I have readier access to the city than most women of the Ghetto, because of my special relationship with the Pietà, and I have many clients among the nobility.”

“Do you ever have dealings with the Foscarini?” I held my breath.

“Yes—the mother. She’s had a great deal of trouble with her children. Too much money, I think, can be nearly as bad as too little. Only the eldest one, Marco, has done her proud. People say he will be Doge one day, if he lives that long. The others have only brought her sorrow.”

She took my hand in both of hers, which were soft and stained from the cloth she handled. “It’s late—it’s nearly dawn. You’d best get back before you’re missed.”

“I’ll come back again if you want me to, and if I can get out as easily as I did tonight. I’d be glad to give lessons—in memory of your sister and Silvio’s mother. I envy both of you, even though you’ve lost her. It would mean much to me to have known someone who shares my blood.”

I looked from one to the other of them, looking for some resemblance, but I saw none. “Signora Rebekkah, did the locket ever have a key?”

“Yes, of course—a tiny key with sapphires on it, I believe. It was a pretty thing. Has that been lost along the way? What a shame!”

I couldn’t wait to get back to my room and look at the locket again in light of what I now knew about it. Where had it been since that wicked priest sold it—or perhaps he’d been forced to give it away to buy someone’s silence. I worried that Rebekkah
would resent me for possessing something so valuable—with no apparent right or reason—that had once belonged to her family.

She and Silvio covered me up, just as she’d promised the maestro, until no one—not even my mother herself—could ever have guessed my identity. Silvio also traveled
in maschera
.

Not all of the canals of Venezia go somewhere. Some simply run up against a building or an alleyway and end there. I knew so much more now than I had when I’d entered the Ghetto, only hours before. But, like a boatman who’s lost his way, I had paddled hard only to arrive at a place with no passageway to where I wanted to go.

If my mother had wanted to send some sign by giving me a token, she would surely have sent something from her own family’s treasure trove—not the family treasure of a family completely unconnected to her by kinship or tradition.

How could Rebekkah not have told Silvio in all that time that she was his aunt? I couldn’t see then why anyone would keep secret a thing that could give such joy. I didn’t yet understand how complex a thing happiness can be—nor the companionability of a well-kept secret, savored and nurtured till the time is right for its unmasking.

“You’re so quiet,” said Silvio.

“Does it not bother you?” I asked him.

“That I’m the offspring of a renegade priest and a musical Jewess? It came as no great surprise to me. I accept this heritage—I embrace it. It gives me license never to choose but to remain a traveler between the two horizons of my existence. And I have, besides, a family now—my good Rebekkah, who loves me, errant bastard that I am. She sees everything that is good in me, and forgives everything that is bad.”

The night was very still. “I wish I had a Rebekkah.”

“You have me, Annina. I will be your
zietta!
”

Silvio made such a funny face, and so like a kindly older woman, that I was laughing again when the gondolier pulled up to the steps of the water gate and I realized that we’d arrived.

I threw my arms around my sweet friend and hugged him hard. “Come again to see me soon!” I whispered. “And, Silvio—”

“What is it, little sister?”

“I want you to have the locket. It’s yours, not mine.”

“What a wealthy foundling you are, to be giving priceless jewels away!”

“I mean it. Next time we see each other, I want to give it to you.”

“If you give it to me, I’ll give it to Rebekkah.”

“Good, then—it’s settled. But if the key ever comes to you, you must promise to let me be there when you use it.”

“I promise!” He kissed me right on the lips then, just before I jumped out of the boat and picked my way carefully up the steps and into the building, which was quiet and dark. I waited in a shadowy corner till my eyes had adjusted.

The entire place was quiet with that particular stillness of the hour just before dawn. I could hear the lapping of water in the canal outside, and an almost imperceptible scurrying—but there are always rats in the basement. And yet the sound of them made me bound with unwonted speed up the stairs, to the first landing, where I ran nearly headlong into la Befana.

S
HE GRABBED ME
by the neck. “I have her!” she shouted. Others came scurrying toward us out of the darkness, carrying lamps. I saw Sister Laura.

“Please,
Zietta
!” I tried to say more, but la Befana had my throat in the crook of her arm and I could hardly breathe.

I will never forget the look that Sister Laura gave me then—never had she looked at me in such a way before, with an expression of rage I’d only ever seen in la Befana’s eyes.

I struggled to loosen the arm that held me, so that I could speak. “Please,
Zietta
—help me!”

Her eyes were filled with the flames from her torch. She took my violin away from me. “I am not your
zietta!
” She hissed rather than said the words. I knew the world had gone mad then, and that Sister Laura had joined the ranks of Satan.

La Befana tightened her hold on my neck. “Out whoring, were you? Did he pay you well?”

This was too much for me to bear. I stamped down hard on her foot with the heel of my boot. And then things transpired in such a way that I would not have believed anyone had they foretold them to me even the day before. While Sister Laura turned to la Befana, who was howling in pain, I ran. I reached the landing and had begun to fly down the first stair when I was suddenly pulled up short.

It was like one of those dreams one has sometimes, of begin
ning to walk downstairs and then suddenly the stair isn’t there anymore and one awakens with a start, suffused with the memory of falling. I was reeled around, the back of my robe held tight in la Befana’s fist and pulled against my throat, cutting off my air. I saw her furious eyes in the torchlight, and I heard the jangling of her keys.

I recall these events with a mixture of awe at my boldness and shame at my utter lack of self-control. The very young never think of consequences when their passions are aroused. They feel everything with the conviction that their feelings—both good and bad—will last forever. Perhaps that is why we are all so much more indelibly marked by what happens to us in childhood than we are by countless events and impressions in the years that follow.

In a panic, I struggled to break free from la Befana’s grasp. And then I pulled my own fist back, held my fingers tight inside my knuckles, and punched her. I punched her with all my strength.

She didn’t cry—at least, I didn’t hear her cry, although I saw the trickle of blood from her nostrils.

Someone caught my arms from behind and I was covered in angry voices from all sides. I found myself looking straight into Sister Laura’s eyes as she loomed above me from where I lay pinned to the floor—her blue eyes now crazed with red and filled with fury. Eyes I’d loved and trusted throughout my childhood.

I thought the usual thoughts I thought in my moments of greatest distress. I conjured an image of the Virgin appearing there before me in all her glory. I heard the sound of wings and closed my eyes. But now I pictured both Sister Laura and la Befana falling to their knees in fear and pain. The Virgin would hold out her hand to me, saying in a voice as soothing and low
as the bells of San Marco, “Come, Anna Maria.” I pictured my mother, although I couldn’t see her face. “Come, Anna Maria,” she would say to me. “It is time to go home.”

When I opened my eyes again, Sister Laura was still looming there above me. I felt overcome with the hollowness of the feelings she’d always shown me. What had she been but a mask, a traitor, and a false friend? It was worse—far worse—than if she’d never singled me out for her favor, never believed in me, never made me feel that she cared for me. Without taking my eyes off of hers, I spat out the words that were burning in my throat, “How I hate you! How I hate all of you!”

The torchlight loomed, and then the Prioress was there, high above me. “Enough—for shame! Release her!” As Sister Laura got up from where she was kneeling on me, the Prioress put her foot on my shoulder, so I stayed lying there on the cold marble floor. I saw her move her torch from face to face. “I see.” She crossed herself and then said again, “I see.”

Sister Laura said in a furious whisper, “She was in a gondola on the canal.”

La Befana added, as if the words tasted of bile, “Kissing her lover!”

“He’s not my lover!” I said, but no one was listening to me, and everyone was speaking at once.

The Prioress commanded silence.

By then people were leaning down over the balustrades from the floors above, some with lighted candles. Sister Laura, la Befana, and I were all trembling and breathing hard in a small knot of light.

“You have behaved disgracefully. You have dishonored this institution!” The Prioress included all of the
ospedale
in the sweep of her hand. “Leave us!” she said to Sister Laura.

Sister Laura tried to protest, but the Prioress said to her,
“Now—immediately!” and then held her lamp up close to la Befana’s face. “Are you in need of medical attention?”

La Befana wiped her nose, looked at the streak of blood and mucus on the back of her hand, and shook her head slowly. Perhaps it was a trick of the light, but it seemed to me that she was smiling.

“Come with me, then.” She took her foot off my chest. “Both of you.”

As I walked between them, the torch lit up the stones of the walls enclosing us, and the stones of the floor entombing us. I had never before felt such a sense of anger and loathing. The Prioress cried out to the girls and women lined up in their nightclothes and looking down upon us, “Go back to bed—all of you!” But they stayed there, anyway, and I felt their eyes bore into me and I heard their whispers.

The last hallway leading to the Prioress’s office seemed to have been stretched out so that it felt as if we would have to walk along it forever, the jeering eyes of all the
ospedale
watching, enjoying the show.

When we finally reached her door, the Prioress asked la Befana to wait outside. Then she closed the door behind us, set the torch into its place on the wall, and sat down with a sigh of exhaustion at her desk.

She spoke with utter calm. “I won’t ask you to sit, Signorina,” she said, “because I have very little to say to you. Please listen carefully.”

I listened, although I know I trembled in every part of me.

“As of today, you are demoted from the
coro
to the
comun
. Your new job will be in the soap works, which is an appropriate place for one who has covered herself in the filth of dishonor. The instrument that was formerly your violin will be henceforth the property of Bernardina.”

I was unable to keep my feelings from flowing over—I felt my face crumple, and tears fell from my eyes.

“Maestra Meneghina!” she called. La Befana walked in, her blood-streaked face suffused with a sour look of satisfaction. “Please take her directly to the laundry and see that she’s assigned to a bed there.”

Then she turned to me a final time. “I will pray for you, Anna Maria. I will pray for you to find your way again.”

While the Prioress looked on, la Befana tied my wrists together with a length of rope and then nudged me to begin walking ahead of her. I tried to stay as far away from her as I could on that journey down through the bowels of the
ospedale
to the
comun,
but it was a short length of rope and I could feel her breath and hear her muttering behind me. The rope chafed at my wrists, and I felt a sense of dread in the small of my back, where I feared she’d kick me.

She didn’t kick me, though, but handed me over to Signora Zuana, the head of the laundry, who was mightily cross at being woken. La Befana merely shook her head and smiled her horrible smile as she left me there, first whispering to no one, “Like mother, like daughter.”

M
aking soap is a backbreaking and loathsome process that requires great care, to be sure, and yet it leaves the mind disengaged to think all the hopeless thoughts it will.

My mind was free to agonize over my every painful memory. I thought how I’d wished for a new life, and how this wish had been granted me. My new life was so different from my old one that I hardly recognized myself as I went through the motions of living it.

My first job in the soap works was to make the lye water, pour
ing in and stirring the white ashes gathered from the stoves and fireplaces throughout the
ospedale
.

An extra
corbetta
of wood bestowed by the governors has always been a coveted mark of distinction among members of the
coro
. Play well and you will stay warmer over the damp cold nights of winter and spring. The ghosts of all those cheerful, comforting, status-laden fires are carried away in buckets by the menials of the Pietà, down to the workrooms of the laundry. There the ashes are mixed with rainwater and beef fat, and made into soap.

At the end of my first day I was powdered as white as the barber’s assistant who carries his rack of newly dressed wigs to the gentry every Sunday morning. My fingers—those same fingers that so lately coaxed music from my violin—looked like the fingers of a dead person.

And yet I willed myself to keep the music alive in me. I would choose a composition first, listening to the whole of it in my memory, as many times as I needed to hear it in its entirety. And then, beginning with my own part, I would try to both see and hear the notes on the page, and the sounds made by each of them with my violin—or the violin that once was mine and was now being played by Bernardina.

I didn’t dwell on thoughts of Bernardina, because they only made me sick with envy that she was still playing while I was being told by everything around me that I would never play again. As soon as I’d seen and heard my own parts, I went back and saw and heard each of the other instruments in turn. This was very hard for me: sometimes reconstructing even a few bars would take me hours.

I sifted through the buckets of ash, removing all the pieces of charcoal that had not yet burned. And then I had to stand on a ladder to ladle the sifted ashes into the wooden barrel with its
noxious cargo. The ashes floated up and into my eyes and hair. At the bottom, where the spigot was, I had to strain the sodden ashes from the brown lye water, trying never to let it touch my skin.

Just so, I sifted through the sounds in my memory, finding the notes that now I wished I’d heeded with more care. Every forgotten note seared me with regret as caustic as the lye.

I had never thought in so focused a way about the different parts played by each member of the orchestra. It made me realize something more of the skill it takes to put them all together—and how all of them together create something far greater than each of them separately.

I felt as close as I ever had to the maestro at these times. I remembered how Giulietta and I had hidden ourselves in the sacristy and watched him compose. In silence, we’d imitated the terrible faces he made. Later, in our dormitory, we’d laughed so hard that we’d fallen onto the floor.

Now I wished I could see him and tell him that I understood:
Christus
really had stood before him, and angels had whispered the notes in his ears.

One could think of music while sifting and ladling ash. But utter concentration was required for tending to the great vat of lye and grease perched above the fire. When I had the job of stirring it, all I could think about was trying not to let any of it well up and burst in the air. A half-mad girl named Maria-Bianca, charged with teaching me my job, told me that the bubbles “speak” when the soap is ready to be tried. They come to the surface, linger there for a moment, and then explode. It took only one drop of lye searing my skin to make me turn every particle of my attention upon the work at hand, as if God himself and not the bubbles had been about to speak to me.

I could not think of anything then but trying to keep as much distance as I could between the exposed parts of my flesh and
the boiling contents of the iron pot I had to stir with a wooden spoon that was taller, from bowl to tip, than I am. My back ached with the strain of it. Ninetta, a lame girl who stoked the fire beneath the three iron pots—two small and one large—had already been blinded in one eye. Her face and arms were streaked with white scars where someone careless, stirring the mixture, had dripped it down upon her. She was the one who showed me the trick of dropping a chicken feather on top of the mixture: if the feather began to smoke and dissolve, the soap was ready for salting.

Hell, I’m quite sure, is filled with vats of lye and poor sinners ever stirring it and stoking the fires beneath it, afraid of being dissolved by it to a smoking pile of bones.

I only thought of my friends when I lay down at night in the bed I shared with three others. As tired as I was, it sometimes took me a long time to fall asleep, what with their shoving and complaining and, finally, their snoring and smells. Everything and everyone in the soap works smelled of the rancid beef fat that had to be rendered and added to the lye.

As I labored to fall asleep, I tried to imagine the lives of my friends. I wondered if Claudia was back yet from Saxony, and whether it was hard for her to be living in a cloister again after the balls and soirees of her family’s life in the country. After the castles and hunts, the masquerades and garden parties. After the fitting sessions with the dressmaker, and her trips to town with her mother to pick out the silks and velvets and lingerie for her trousseau.

I thought about Giulietta traveling the wide world with her young lover. I thought of her playing her cello in some cheerful atelier while he painted and birds sang and the yellow sun poured like honey through their window.

I thought of Marietta on the stage of the Teatro San Grisos
tomo. I pictured her in a magnificent costume, dripping with jewels, her eyes outlined in kohl, and her hair studded with pearls. I saw the flowers strewn at her feet as if she stood in a garden.

I thought sometimes of Sister Laura and how she would be telling some other girl to call her
Zietta,
some other girl she’d favor with an apple or some praise or even a kiss on the forehead.