Vivaldi's Virgins (23 page)

The legends on the tombstones are eventually worn away as the stone is eroded by rain and wind and centuries. Better to slip away quietly after having lived as fully as one can, doing the very best one can with the gifts one has been given. What more can a mere musician possibly hope for?

Music cannot be kept or captured. It unfurls in one miraculous moment in time, and then it’s gone. The glorious sound of Marietta’s voice in a cantabile aria will be forever lost after she is dead and all of us who ever heard her are dead, too. No matter how well I manage to play, my playing will be forgotten when all those who have heard me have died.

As Silvio and I walked through the Hebrew cemetery of San Nicolò di Lido, the sand worked its way into my shoes, so that I knew I would carry a small part of these graves back with me to the cloister. It is tonic to be reminded, once in a while, that we are but specks in the world, and as easily swept away.

We stopped, and Silvio held the torch close by a single headstone that stood apart from the others. I knelt to read the legend, which simply said,
EBREI
1631. “All the hundreds of Jews who died in the Plague are buried here in this one grave.”

As we walked, we cast shadows on some of the graves, and revealed the legends and symbols of others: stone drapery held aloft by the small, rigid hands of putti. A plumed helmet. A two-headed eagle. A deer in a basket, like Moses in the rushes. The moon, the stars, and a rooster with a palm branch clutched in its claws. Hands joined in prayer above a crown.

Silvio explained to me that all of these are symbols for Jewish
families from disparate tribes and cultures, who live as far apart from each other and as separately as they can, within the close quarters and limited space of the Ghetto.

Before that night in the graveyard, I had thought the Pietà to be the only place in Venezia where people who would never have mixed on the outside all sleep together in the same place. But I was wrong.

We stopped at yet another grave, this one marked by a ladder and a scorpion. “My grandmother’s teacher is buried here—a poet and philosopher who was famous both inside and outside the Ghetto, and throughout Europe as well.” Silvio held the torch so close that it nearly singed the headstone of Sara Copio Sullam. “Some say that the dead dig their way from here, under the sea, and all the way to the Holy Land, to be there on Resurrection Day.”

“The Holy Land cannot be half so beautiful as this place. I think I could spend eternity quite happily here!”

“Well, you can’t,
cara
—so you’d best reserve another bed for your final slumber. Being buried here is one of the very few things a Jew is allowed in this pestilential world that a Christian is denied.”

Silvio took my hand before a headstone topped by an angel playing the violin. Rachel’s name was inscribed on it both in Italian and Hebrew, with some verses Silvio translated for me from the
Cantico dei Cantici,
“The Song of Songs”—

My beloved speaks and says to me:

“Arise, my love, my beautiful one, and come away,

for behold, the winter is past;

the rain is over and gone.

The flowers appear on the earth,

the time of singing has come,

and the voice of the turtledove is heard in our land.”

The words were half-covered in ivy and moss. There beside Rachel was Rebekkah’s shiny green marble headstone, simply inscribed with her name and the years that bracketed her life, and the phrase,
ZIETTA DI SILVIO
. “It’s what she wanted,” he told me.

The fence nearby was covered in late-blooming roses the color of ripe apricots, glowing now in the moonlight. It was a lovely, peaceful place. Silvio knelt there, and I was silent because it seemed that he was praying.

“Do you pray as a Christian or a Jew?” I asked when he looked up again.

“I pray as one who hopes to win a bit of God’s mercy in any way he can.”

I thought of what Vivaldi had said to Rebekkah, that night in the Ghetto. “Surely God listens gladly to our prayers, in whatever language they’re spoken.”

“Hah!” said Silvio. “Tell that to the Magistrates of the Inquisitors Against Blasphemy. As far as they’re concerned, all Jews are damned from the moment of their birth—and, under Hebrew law, as Rachel’s child, I am a Jew.”

“And yet you were baptized at the Pietà.”

“Yes, Saint Peter is going to scratch his head mightily when I show up at Heaven’s gates. I rather like that I can be either Christian or Jew, depending on which suits the situation.”

I kissed him on the cheek—in truth, Silvio looks more like an angel than any grown man I have ever known. I could not imagine that God would not want him in His Heaven.

We sat down on the other side of the headstones then, out of the wind, supported by the two sisters who had given Silvio life and nurtured him. I wished I had my violin with me so that I
could play for Rebekkah a final time—but, then, I truly believe that the dead can hear us wherever we play. And when we play well, we lop years off their term in Purgatory. I dearly hope that someone plays for me after I have gone to my grave, because my term will be a long one, and I will need a lot of music, well played, to set me free.

Silvio turned to me. “Are you ready, Annina?”

I nodded and fished the little velvet bag out of my bosom. He rummaged in his clothes and brought out the locket, just as Franz Horneck had done, so many years ago, when he gave it to me. I missed him then—but I always miss Franz. There is rarely a day that goes by when I don’t think of him.

“How odd of Rebekkah to have waited so long to give this to me! Do you have any idea about what might be inside?”

“A fairly good idea, but not based on anything but a sense of affinity.”

“Affinity for what?”

“For you, of course. Here—you do it.” He held the torch closer so that I could see where to put the key. “It’s usually the men who have to poke it in.”

I laughed then till he squealed at me, in that
finocchio
way of his, to hurry up.

The key turned easily, the lock gave way, and I opened the tiny jewel-encrusted door on its little hinges. There was nothing inside—or, at first, so it seemed. But then, looking harder, we could see some writing inscribed into the gold.

It took a long time to decipher it, because—alas—our eyes are not what they used to be. I said each word out loud, syllable by syllable, as I strained to make out the inscription,
“‘Unending—love—forever—secret—forever—’
Very repetitive, whoever wrote this!”

Silvio continued for me. “Forever ours—my darling—Laura…”

We read the last two words out loud together: “Bonaventura Spada!”

He was laughing. I was crying.

“I knew it! My own little sister!”

I’m sure that Rebekkah was laughing, wherever she dwells. And I’m equally sure that Rachel must have wept for the perfidy of her lover. Still her lover had given a gift of great price to his two bastard offspring by two different mothers. Deprived of them, Silvio and I nonetheless had each other. We always had—but now I knew that not only friendship but also blood bound us together, and had done so all along.

I understood immediately why Rebekkah had chosen to wait until after she was gone. It was a final act, beyond the grave, of nurturing her beloved nephew. Of letting him know that he is not alone.

It was the most beautiful piece of news I’d ever learned, because it wasn’t too late this time. It wasn’t too late to throw my arms around him and tell him how happy I was and how grateful. I sat there in the moonlight, among the graves, sobbing in my brother’s arms, mad with joy.

O
ne does not need very many thrills—nor to be thrilled too often—to feel that one’s life is quite thrilling enough to be perfect, in its own way.

I’m sure that if I lived anyone’s life but my own—in any other place—I would overindulge on the thrills that here, in this life, are few and far between and yet of such surpassing beauty that I am filled by them and fed by them through all the times of quiet and routine.

No—my life in the cloister suits me well.

Every year, since I came of age, I’ve had at least one proposal
of marriage. And every time, I’ve considered my suitor and turned him down. By now, it is a joke here. The governors, I’ve been told, have a pool to see whether I will ever marry, although they would be loath to see me do so, I think.

They need not fear. No lure of riches, or even a handsome face, has ever been strong enough to draw me away from what I love. And I have recognized for a long time now that I am too old and settled in my ways to start life someplace else.

The Pietà is my home, after all. I have much more freedom here, as a
figlia privilegiata
and now as
Maestra di Coro
, than I would have in any house as someone’s wife. What husband would tolerate a bride who lived and breathed music in all her waking hours? And, anyway, I know myself. If I did love, I would not be able to live a divided life. And if I let music die in me, I would die as well. I know myself well enough to know that this is true.

I do not live in perpetual exile from family life. I spend at least a week every summer at the Villa Foscarini Rossi on the Brenta. There I live quietly among the sometimes antic goings-on of my relations, enjoying the chance to amble in all that greenery and under all that blue sky.

I can only laugh at Marietta when she throws up her hands in despair at her daughters’ bad behavior. “They are no worse than you were,
cara!
” I tell her. In truth they are, each and every one of them, a holy terror.

They are as beautiful as well. Marietta herself has grown rather fat, naturally enough, and she’s furious with me for keeping my figure. I tell her that there have to be some compensations for remaining a virgin.

I’ve never told her about the reappearance of Franz Horneck in my life. I’ve never told anyone, nor ever shall. It is the one secret I will carry with me to my grave.

I have the mask that Silvio made me for my occasional forays
into the outside world. It’s a beautiful creation, as all his creations are, of silk and silver filigree, fashioned to look like a butterfly. He made two such masks so that we can always recognize each other if we have gone out separately or lose each other in a crowd.

Marietta likes to bring costumes of her own devising, although we have not gone out together
in maschera
for years. She still visits me every week in the
parlatorio
, except when the doctor makes her stay in bed.

I never know when Franz will come to me again, except that it will be during one of the months of Carnival. He always engages the same gondolier, except—last year—it was that same gondolier’s son who came to call for me at the water gate.

We are faded butterflies, Franz Horneck and I—but we are no less beautiful in each other’s eyes. He has grown sons now, in that other life of his in which he’s a God-fearing, good husband.

We’ve gone to crowded places to wonder at the marvels there—the fireworks, the slaughter of the bulls, the human pyramids, and the daredevil who slides down a rope from the top of the Campanile to the
Piazzetta
in a gondola made of candlelight. And we have gone to those islands that only exist for a single night, where the waters of the lagoon wash over every trace of us and the island itself disappears beneath the waves by dawn. There we’ve smelled those magic flowers that unfurl like butterflies in the darkness, whole meadows filled with them, pumping their fragrant wings.

Those islands don’t last long enough for anyone or anything to ever grow old there, and our visits are not long enough, nor frequent enough, for us ever to grow tired of each other. Each kiss is the first kiss, and there is not time enough to ever quench
one’s thirst completely.

Lucky for me that Franz, as a man of the world, is wise in its ways, and I have never come to harm.

In truth, I feel watched over in this life: I have always felt watched over by the Virgin even though I know that, later, I will be punished by God. This life of mine, in all its wealth, will have been worth whatever punishment is visited upon me.

T
he maestro just left me. He looked more worn than I have ever seen him look, even during those times when he’s afflicted by his breathing difficulties and chest pains. At first I thought it must be his excitement over the success in Verona of his latest opera. That and the rumors that he will not be allowed in Ferrara this Carnival season. It seems that certain cardinals there are none too happy about the Red Priest’s activities as an opera patron and impresario.

It is, of course, all because of Anna Girò. The Church does not take kindly to priests who are rumored to travel with their mistresses and never say Mass—although he has always protested that he doesn’t say Mass only because he doesn’t have the breath for it. I think he doesn’t have the time for it, either, what with everything else he tries to do.

He seemed feverish to me, and as if he’d been suffering from lack of sleep. I offered him a glass of wine and we drank together. I saw he had something to tell me, but I never would have guessed—or perhaps I would have, if I’d thought about it properly. After all, his story is my story as well.

He paced back and forth between my desk and the window, started speaking, and then interrupted himself with several observations about trivial things that I knew had nothing to do
with what he wanted to say. I was meanwhile looking over the piece of music he had given me.

“You wear glasses now, Annina?”

“Yes, for reading. But only when the light is low.”

He sat down, and I poured him another glass. Outside my window, the sun was setting over the Canal. “I will always think of you as a young girl, far too young for reading glasses.”

“Then you are living in a dream, dear Maestro.”

“Yes, I suppose I am.” He drank—he drank it all down in one gulp, I noticed, and then wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. “I want to ask your advice.”