Vienna Nocturne (6 page)

Benucci had a three-month engagement in Rome, and would be gone some four or five months in consequence. Mandini would take his place in the interim, as primo buffo at La Scala. Anna had known of Benucci’s impending departure for some time, but still it was horrible and she did not know what to do. For all their secret affections, and for all that she felt they were linked in their souls, still they barely spoke. There was never a chance—someone was always with them. She thought they had an understanding, and that he must love her, but he had never said he did, nor admitted that he wished to marry her. There could be no harm in marrying—there was nothing to prevent them—and yet somehow she was afraid to make it come to that. Her mother would say she was too young. Dorotea Bussani had married at fifteen and she was happy enough, but Dorotea had been poor.

Benucci was not like Bussani. Anna was afraid he might not love her. When they were with others he pretended as if she were nothing to him, and at times it did not seem like pretending. So she
stayed quiet. She was confused and uncertain. Her doubts sometimes were as strong as her longing, and she had nobody to talk to, no confidante. She would not see him for four or five months, and after that perhaps never again. Perhaps he would not wish to return.

But then came a sudden security. The whole opera buffa company from La Scala was engaged to sing their Salieri opera in Venice, for Carnival. They would go there after Benucci had returned from Rome. He would sing it with them. Everything would fit perfectly. Though the thought of being apart from him for almost half a year was unbearable, Anna would be reunited with him in Venice, in the richest and most decadent city that had ever been born, and when he saw her again she would be worldly herself, and beautiful and proud, and he would be amazed and enchanted.

“May I write you?” she asked him. It was their last performance before he departed. They were standing backstage during the duet between Mandini and Dorotea.

“Write me?” He smiled. “What would you say?”

She bit her lip. “Why, what people usually say in letters.”

He sighed and touched her waist. “I don’t like letters.”

“Oh,” she said, and moved away. Then Dorotea came crashing off the stage wanting to be complimented.

Anna wished to cry, but there was nowhere to do so safely. But when she went into the compartment with Benucci at the end of the last act, for the last time, he held and kissed her as usual, and whispered into her ear that he would see her in Venice, and she could not help herself, she abandoned her heart. He contained all her life. They would see each other in Venice, and in Venice she would be changed, changed almost beyond recognition. She would persuade her mother to give her more freedom.

After Benucci left, Stefano Mandini was her primo buffo. He was expert and precise on stage, sang clearly, acted well, never had to be told anything twice. They were doing a new opera by Sarti,
and there was no closet, no reason to be alone together. Mandini was true to his wife. Anna could relax with him. Her thoughts were no longer frenetic and confused. She did not have to be always censuring her feelings. She slept more soundly and spoke more easily with the other singers. The five months passed almost without her noticing. They left Milan and arrived in Venice a few weeks before Benucci was due there, and she thought, as she gazed upon that beautiful city, a city like a painting, that perhaps she did not need to live for him after all. She was almost eighteen, and had made more money in the past year than she’d ever dreamed.

One night, soon after their arrival in Venice, Anna was out with Michael Kelly and her new chaperone when she noticed a girl playing guitar and singing popular songs in a corner of one of the casinos. The girl was tall, with a long face, a pointed chin, and a dark complexion. The Carnival mask she wore was unadorned, and her dress plain. Anna could not tell if she was pretty. But the voice was lovely.

“How do you do?” Anna asked warmly, approaching and introducing herself. The girl offered a shy smile and said she knew who Anna was.

Anna laughed. “Do you?”

“Everyone knows you.”

“They think they do. But what’s your name? You’ve such a pretty voice.”

The girl’s eyes were shadowed by the mask. Of course that was the appeal of the masks; they gave everyone so much mystery. “Lidia Martellati.”

“Not your real name, surely?”
Martellati
meant “little hammers”—a technique for singing fast scales. And Lidia was not a common name.

“The nuns wanted to call me Mariateresa.”

“Nuns?”

Lidia glanced around the room and shrugged. “I came from a music conservatory. I escaped.”

“All by yourself? But who is there to protect you?”

“Why, no one.”

Anna bit her lip. “Are you—then I suppose you must be someone’s mistress.” She could not think
whore;
this girl looked nothing like one.

Lidia smiled graciously. “No, I’m chaste. I play and sing, and work for a seamstress. I have a cousin who helped me.”

“Look here,” Anna said. She blushed suddenly and felt shy. “Would you ever consider—I don’t suppose you should—might you like to be my lady’s maid? I already have one but I can’t stand her. She’s over there. She’s my chaperone. She watches me at parties and sleeps in my bed. But she snores. Do you snore? I like you. I know we don’t know each other, but I think—I daresay we could be friends. I don’t see how I could do anything but like you when your voice is so pretty. We could try it out for a few weeks. You’d stay with me, and talk with me, and unpin my dress and hair at night. I’ve others to do the rest.”

In the face of this outburst Lidia seemed at a loss. She pressed her hands together and looked very thin indeed. Then she smiled and touched her heart and said, “I’d like that very much.”

Anna clapped her hands. “Splendid! Come see us tomorrow afternoon. Here’s my card. But you must act sober and dour. That’s what my mother likes and it won’t come off if my mother doesn’t approve.”

Lidia was from the Infanta orphanage in Naples. While in service there she had been trained in singing, guitar, cello, and violin. She had played in the girls’ orchestra and sung in duets and trios. Her voice was a sweet alto. It might have been a voice for the stage, had she learned to breathe properly, but she did not like to sing loudly and she did not like everyone staring at her. But music was all she knew, and since she did not care to become a nun, and no one wished to marry an orphan who was so tall and boney, she had at
some peril come to Venice alone, from Naples, to make her way as best she could. The night Anna met her she had not had a good meal in three days.

Mrs. Storace looked Lidia over and pronounced her underfed and swarthy. However, she said, she liked the sternness of her bone structure and the modesty of her garments. Anna explained about the chaperone’s snoring and said that Lidia could read in Italian, Latin, and French, and was eager to learn English.

Mrs. Storace said, “She appears all right and proper. She is not loud but neither is she
mousy
. She is not afraid of me and yet she is
deferential
. You are becoming a woman, Anna. Someday you will have to choose a whole household. I will trust you in this, and woe to you both if she fails.”

“Oh, Mama,” laughed Anna. “You’ve been reading too many romances.”

Mrs. Storace shook her head. “You may kiss me, my dear, and bring me that fan from the other room. I think I will dine with you tonight. You may not go out. You haven’t practiced and you sounded weak in your low voice on Friday, although the last cadenza was well done. And you know I never compliment. But you must not forget to practice.”

Then she yawned and fanned herself and bade them a good afternoon.

The people of Venice sang as much as they talked, sang as they worked and wooed and slept, in gondolas and barges, on market squares, lubricated by drink and company and the place itself, a city in the water that waked by night and slept by day, that prized folly over sense, and saved itself for nothing, but spent all, risked all, for beauty’s flowering and pleasure’s gratification. A city that directed its people to go masked, that friends might meet as strangers and strangers as friends.

You might have found Anna, on nights she wasn’t performing, playing faro at the Ridotto, with her darkly fringed eyes shadowed by a golden half-mask, a
columbina
. She sometimes sang at the table—everyone sang in Venice—and that was how one knew her, even masked, even in so crowded a place as the Ridotto. Anyone who considered himself anyone in Venice in December 1782 could identify the voice of Anna Storace, so warm and sweet it was, so personal and beguiling. Names for her hung in the air like the
smells of the lagoon and the songs of the gondoliers: La Storace, L’inglesina …

She loved to play faro but never risked much. Her mother thought she was too young for it, but Anna insisted it was politically necessary. She must mingle with her patrons and benefactors and be known. She enjoyed the game for the way it made her feel as alive as she felt on the stage, with a racing heart and warm jovial bodies all around her and sensations of peril and security rolling in delicious contradiction in her belly. She loved, too, how everyone at the table knew and praised her, and blushed, some of them, to be in her presence. Young men grown bored of throwing away money in their own names placed bets in hers, leaning over her cards and urging her to bid another hundred, another thousand, until they had no more.

If not at the Ridotto she might be found at the private casino of a friend or patron, playing the same games with smaller and more select company. Sometimes she would be asked to sing. At three or four in the morning she would leave for home with Lidia. Drowsily they’d float along the crowded torch-lit canals and disembark into the apartment where Anna’s mother was waiting, there to take off their sweat-stained masks (Lidia’s a hooded
bauta
), and then Lidia, suppressing her yawns, would undress Anna, and help her put on her nightgown, and comb her dark fragrant hair, and Anna, tired and intoxicated, would lean into Lidia’s flat chest as if she could not stand, and so they would fall into bed like sisters and sleep into the afternoon.

In the weeks since she’d arrived in Venice, Anna had resolved to forget all about Francesco Benucci, to disdain and torment him, but the moment he walked into the theater and kissed her cheeks, surrounding her with his smell and his touch and his warmth, with his ringing voice, bright upon dark upon bright, wholly his own,
wholly recognizable, thrilling to heart and bone, there was no hope for her.

He smiled broadly, his eyes playing over her face and torso. “Did you miss me?”

“I forgot all about you,” she answered, turning up her nose at him. Then she darted away, laughing, before he could catch her.