Vivaldi's Virgins (9 page)

I didn’t think about how making my presence known might affect my parents, if they lived, or might even endanger the life or livelihood of one or both of them. Nor did I think overmuch about how my own life might change. In what other place or in what other station could I spend all my waking hours playing,
practicing, and listening to the best music of the age? I didn’t considerer how those things that were most important to me might, in fact, be taken away.

Like any adolescent, I took for granted what was around me, and yearned instead for things beyond my reach. I was not driven either by logic or sensibility in my longing. It did not occur to me then to feel gratitude that I had not been dropped in the canal as an infant rather than placed in the
scaffetta
of the church on a moonlit night. Nor that any reason apart from a lack of love might keep a mother from claiming her child.

N
o one was found to take over the maestro’s classes, to say nothing of the prodigious amount of composing he did for us. We were left in the hands of our
maestre
, the internal teachers, who were rehearsing us in a new oratorio by our ailing
maestro di coro,
Signor Gasparini.

Oratorios have ever been the governors’ great compromise for our repertoire. Set to sacred text, Gasparini’s work had all the stylistic elements—save costumes—of the operas we longed to perform. Perhaps the governors felt it wise to distract us with something as like an opera as possible, given the taste we’d lately shown for stepping outside our prescribed roles.

Our board did, in all fairness, do their very best then—as they do now—to balance our happiness against the needs of the institution, without ever letting one shipwreck the other.

Gasparini’s work told the apocryphal tale of Susannah, held captive in Babylon, falsely accused of adultery, and finally rescued by Daniel. The names were from the Bible and the texts were sung in Latin, but the plot was just as operatic as one could wish for. The oratorio offered us the salve of abundant musi
cal challenges, excitement, and even controversy, complete with snare drums, kettledrums, and trumpets (all of which were banned for sacred choirs, along with opera, by papal decree).

Bernardina and I—although still
initiziate
then—played in among the rest of the
coro
. As the maestro’s favorite up-and-coming violinists of that era, she and I suffered equally in his absence. This fact formed a sort of bond between us, at least for the time.

Marietta, Apollonia, and a newly confirmed
maestra
named Rosa sang the leads with a sound worthy of any opera house. Looking in on one of our rehearsals, la Befana remarked with her usual sourness that the music might make our listeners want to dance the rigadoon or glide in the minuet, but was not likely to make them want to pray.

The oratorio was to be performed on Palm Sunday for the newly elected Doge, Giovanni Cornaro. In a fit of lavishness, the governors decided to give us new robes for this special occasion. And so we had an out-of-season visit from Rebekkah, the seamstress from the Ghetto who made and remade the clothing worn by the
coro
in those years.

I always liked Rebekkah with her pockets and pins and bright laughing eyes. When it was my turn to be measured, she turned my face to the light and looked at me carefully, as if looking for the shadow of someone else. The rhythm of my heart accelerated as I thought of the locket and its Levantine design, wondering whether there might be a connection between Rebekkah and me.

For the first time, I pondered her age. She was, without doubt, of an age to bear children; but whether she was either too young or too old to have been my mother, I found it impossible to determine. Her skin was smooth, but her dark hair was threaded with
gray. We were both of us brown-eyed and long-fingered. I had seen too few mothers and daughters to have gained any understanding of the ways in which they may and may not resemble each other.

When I looked upward from my own hands at Rebekkah, she seemed to be able to read the question in my eyes. “I was only noticing how you’ve changed, Anna Maria, since the last time.” She spoke in a rich contralto that made me think that she was also musical.

If she were my mother, surely she would give me a further sign now. I stopped breathing in that moment, waiting for the squeeze of the hand or the upwelling of tears in Rebekkah’s eyes or whatever token she would give me without letting anyone else see what she had done.

And so it was that I wondered if I was dreaming when she reached into one of her pockets and put something small in my hand, folding my fingers around it. “Save it for later!” she whispered.

Time itself seemed to freeze as, all around us, the other girls and women of the
coro
shivered in their underclothes, for the most part patiently waiting their turn. I swallowed hard and put the small object in the pocket of my chemise. Whatever it was, it seemed to be wrapped in paper. I longed to show her that I understood—and yet a shyness overcame me, and I couldn’t even meet her eyes.

The tiny package was light, small, and round. It seemed far too insubstantial to be another piece of jewelry, although I reasoned that it could have been something very delicate suspended from a chain. Surreptitiously, I shook the thing in my pocket to see if it rattled.

I wanted to stay and glance sidelong at Rebekkah in this new light. I had sometimes wondered whether, with my dark eyes, I
might be a Jewess or a Gypsy or a southerner. My mind raced. If Rebekkah was my mother, then who was my father? Did he also come from the Ghetto? It seemed unlikely for a pair of pious Jews to give up their child to a Catholic institution. Had Rebekkah borne me out of wedlock? What was her connection with the Pietà, anyway? Why, when we had our own tailors on staff, was she brought from the Ghetto to make and mend our robes?

I couldn’t wait to get away to some private place where I could examine the contents of the gift she’d given me.

E
VERY EFFORT
has always been made in this place to discourage personal vanity. There is only one sanctioned full-length mirror in the whole of the
ospedale
, and that is kept under lock and key in a small practice room off one of the passageways connecting the church to the orphanage. Singers are taught there to look at themselves while they practice their art in order to ensure they are using the proper technique for producing the best sound. And yet it is a place where the prettier adolescent girls especially have become entranced over the years, standing before their own reflections.

Marietta, who was as pretty as they come, used every ruse she could think of to increase her time in front of the full-length mirror, although
maniera
is usually taught only once a week.

Girls and women of the Pietà have ever been resourceful in finding ways to gaze at themselves in objects other than the mirror in the practice room. They inspect their faces in the polished bowls of their porridge spoons. They find reason to gaze out of dark windows at night, even though all they gaze at is their own reflection. In my time, coins were exchanged for the privilege of looking at oneself in another girl’s eyes—and the price was double if she’d managed to dilate her pupils with a dose of purloined belladonna.

When the
portinara’s
keys are lost or stolen—as they are from time to time—it is as often to break into the practice room with
the mirror as it is to get into or out of any other locked part of the orphanage.

The governors have always strived to make us into one selfless body of prayerful musicians, each working for the good of the Republic. And yet every one of us—or perhaps just the most imaginative among us—has led a double life. In this second life, we are each the heroine of a drama that has nothing to do with saving the collective soul of Venezia. We become celebrated courtesans, ballerinas, or opera stars. We are remembered and reclaimed by long-lost parents. We hatch a secret plot to run away. How can we envision ourselves in these dramas if we don’t even know what we look like?

Not only do we not see ourselves, but no one else sees us, either, apart from the daily view we have of one another. When Franz Horneck looked at my face, and looked at it so slowly and carefully and with so much pleasure, it was as if in that moment I truly existed for the first time. I saw the possibility of a real rather than a fantasy life apart from my cloistered existence. And, suddenly, both lives seemed of equal potential.

Although mirrors are banned to those who most long to gaze in them, nearly every senior member of the
coro
keeps a mirror of some kind in her chamber. If she has primarily been an instrumentalist, she may decide to sing in the choir for a season. To that end—and, of course, for no other reason—she will petition the governors for a mirror to be affixed to the wall of her room. If she has been a singer all along, and she is confirmed as a
figlia privilegiata
, she will say that she needs her own mirror as a tool for instructing a private student in her care. And if neither of these excuses works for her, she will save her money and bribe one of the servants with access to the outside to buy a mirror for her so that she can hide it in her chamber.

Make no mistake about it: every girl here has memorized, by the time of her first blood, the locations of all the rooms with mirrors. It is only lately that I retired the small mirror, prettily housed in a silver frame, given to me as a gift from the Foscarini family and emblazoned with the family crest.

God knows why, but when the fitting session with Rebekkah was finally over and it was time to go to dinner, I made for one of the mirror rooms. Perhaps I wanted company when I made my discovery. Or perhaps I wanted to be caught and kept from knowing.

In those minutes of walking as quickly as I dared down the deserted hallway, a sense of dread was growing inside me. Finally knowing where I came from would cut off every other path, including the path that might lead me back into Franz Horneck’s arms. Even though I knew nothing of his family, I was quite sure that they were not about to let him marry a Jewess.

How odd it was that I assumed, even then, that Franz would want to marry me, long before he’d made any declaration apart from that kiss on the balcony at the
palazzo.

The room toward which I made my way had belonged to the banished Sister Celestina. I knew she’d kept a mirror there, hidden under the bed (it was Marietta, our resident expert in such matters, who had told me). I hoped that the mirror hadn’t been found when the disgraced nun’s other belongings were packed up and sent away with her.

Did I want to inspect myself, with Rebekkah’s image so fresh in my mind’s eye, to see if I resembled her? I don’t know. Perhaps the Virgin took pity on my sorry state and led me to that room—because when I slipped through the door and my eyes grew accustomed to the darkness, I could smell the smoldering wick of a candle and I knew that I was not alone.

“Who’s there?” I whispered.

No one answered. Emboldened by the knowledge that I had not yet done anything wrong, whereas whoever I found there in the room probably had, I spoke with brio. “Show yourself—or I will guard the door and call someone else to go and get the
settimaniera!
”

“So uncharitable of you, Annina!” It was Claudia’s voice. She struck a flint, and I saw two of her faces in the light of the candle that burst into flame—her real one and her reflection in the mirror she’d propped against the headboard of Sister Celestina’s deserted bed.

I closed the door behind me and sat down on the nun’s hard bed beside my friend. We embraced and said each other’s names, both greatly relieved, I have no doubt, that it was only the two of us who were involved. She pushed me away then and showed me something she held in her fist—what looked like a sweet wrapped in paper, twisted at each end. I reached into my pocket and took out what Rebekkah had given me. It was identical to the object Claudia held.

“I’m expecting a message from Scarlatti. Forgive me for saying nothing, Annina! I know the risk is greater for you than it is for me.”

I had never thought of the possibility of Franz Horneck sending a note in such a way. How worldly Claudia was compared with almost all the rest of us! She carefully untwisted the delicate paper of her packet, flattened it on the bed and then held it up to the candle flame. And then she met my eyes. “There is nothing written here—
nichts!
There is only—”

“A chocolate,” I said, unwrapping my own little packet.

The insides of my cheeks began watering even as the tears sprang into Claudia’s eyes. Chocolate was a great delicacy for us in those days. Claudia’s parents sometimes sent her chocolates, and I was always in awe of her willingness to share them.

Nothing, I am quite sure, can transport a living being closer to the delights of Heaven than the taste of chocolate. I am the fortunate recipient of chocolates from time to time, now that my name is better known. But in my girlhood, I would have eaten it even if I’d been assured that it would bar me from Heaven forever. Chocolate is the one earthly pleasure I would not exchange for the promise of infinite pleasures deferred.

I contemplated the confection just long enough to gauge its size. It could only have been poured around an object as small as the innermost doll that fit inside Rebekkah’s fantastic Russian toy—the bean-size doll, I thought with sinking heart, that didn’t open.

While Claudia’s present was no doubt beginning to melt in her fist, I parted my lips and placed mine on my tongue with all the reverence of a communicant receiving the Host. I was determined to suck it slowly.

As the chocolate warmed up in my mouth and released its magic, my tongue poked at it, trying to find out whether it was chocolate through and through or hid something else inside. The shape and texture of that thing began to emerge as the chocolate disappeared. There were ridges on it and points at both ends. The size and shape indicated something my mouth soon recognized.

I carefully sucked off all the chocolate, and never did a sweet thing taste so bitter to me. Spitting the uncoated object out into my hand, I didn’t want to believe that the thing I found was only an almond. I broke it with my teeth, just to make sure.

Claudia was by then crying over the instructions from her lover that had failed to arrive, and I was staring balefully over some half-chewed nutmeats in the palm of my hand.

Our eyes met, and we started to laugh. Once we started, it was hard to stop.

I gauge the closeness of my friends even now by how helplessly they can make me laugh. Barely able to breathe from the effort to laugh silently, Claudia and I were both crossing our legs to keep from wetting ourselves. When Claudia coughed and made wind, we both fell off the bed, upsetting the candle.

I can only marvel now, looking back, that Sister Celestina’s old room didn’t go up in flames.

Everything was so overheated for me then. I saw signs and portents in the simplest events of daily life, imagining that they all referred to me. I felt barbs where none were meant, and I heard criticism ten times louder than any praise. I felt a sense of closeness to my friends so intense that I couldn’t imagine that life would ever have the temerity to part me from them.

I understood almost nothing then.

W
hen Rebekkah returned toward the end of our rehearsals with the half-made new robes, she had an apprentice with her. There was a good deal of giggling all around, because the person she’d brought into our midst—although feminine in both gesture and manner—was clearly a boy.

He looked harmless enough, slight and delicate of build, with skin that would be the envy of many of us here. I knew that boys of the
ospedali
sometimes apprenticed to tailors, and all of us, in our schooldays—before the
figlie di coro
were winnowed out from the
figlie di comun
—learned sewing and spinning side by side with the youngest boys, along with arithmetic and reading. It wasn’t until Rebekkah’s assistant was at my feet with pins in his mouth that I recognized the comical gleam in those eyes of his, and I clapped my hand over my mouth to keep myself from laughing out loud.

“Silvio!” I whispered.

“Shh! Yes—I hoped I’d see you here! I heard you were in the
coro
. How pretty you are, Annina!”

“I’m not!”

“You are! Would that I had those eyes—and that beautiful ass!”

And then I couldn’t help myself from laughing, so that la Befana—who was supervising the proceedings—glared at me and said in a loud, clear voice that there was to be no idle chatter.

Rebekkah turned my head and had me hold my arm out to my side, taking its measure. “Were you two playmates, then?” she said close to my ear.

I knew I should have felt grateful to her for the chocolate. But I was sulking over the promise she’d unwittingly held out to me and then taken away. I nodded without giving her the smile I knew she wanted from me.

Silvio and I had all our classes together until I was plucked out of the
comun
and made an
iniziata—
how long ago it now seemed! And then he was sent away altogether at the age of ten, as are all the boys who are taken in as foundlings here. We hadn’t seen each other in four full years, a space of time that may count as nothing to an adult, but seemed a lifetime to me then.

Silvio had been our king of comedy, able to impersonate each of the teachers with such accuracy that I received many a punishment for laughing out loud at inopportune times.

I looked longingly after him when my hems were pinned and he’d moved down the line to the next girl. But he managed to steal a look back at me. Even with pins in his mouth, he made a face so utterly like la Befana in a froth of disapproval that I burst out laughing, just like in the old days, only just managing to cover it with a feigned groan.

“Are you ill, Anna Maria?” la Befana asked me—a little hopefully, it seemed.

I nodded, biting down hard on my lower lip as Silvio carried on his impersonation, unseen by any but me.

“Then report to the infirmary!”

Silvio blew a little kiss to me and, emboldened by the memories of all our past mischief, I pointed to my bottom as I swept past him.

Luckily—because I really wanted to see Silvio again—the gorgeous red taffeta robes were ready for us to try on the following week. I was prepared for him this time: As Silvio laced up my sleeves, I slipped a note into his hand. Accomplished actor that he was, my old playmate pocketed the missive without betraying its presence to anyone.

Or so I thought, until Claudia confronted me that night as we lay in my bed still whispering after the final Angelus had rung. “You know what he is, don’t you, Annina?”

“He is the dearest, funniest boy I ever knew—and of course I know that he is not like other boys. He has always been neither boy nor girl but like something in between.”

I turned so that I was whispering into her ear. “I asked him to find out, if he can, about the locket—to seek out the banker who serves von Regnazig, learn its history, and find out who has the key.”

Claudia said nothing, but I could tell that she was taking in what I’d told her, thinking it over. “And if that history, once learned, is not to your liking?”

I felt annoyed with Claudia when she said this sort of thing. Her words were forever revealing the ways in which she was far wiser than I, even though she always said them kindly.

I knew that finding out my identity would open one door—even while it closed others. As an anonymous
figlia
of the
coro
with no grave physical defect, I had as good a chance as any of receiving a rich offer of marriage when I’d served my term and
trained two musicians who could serve the
coro
in my stead. I would have a place, if I chose to take it, among the richest and most refined people of Venezia. What chance of this would there be if I unraveled my history to find out that I came from a whore or a beggar or a Gypsy? What rich merchant or nobleman would welcome me then as a wife?