Hidden Voices (18 page)

I wait until the free time after dinner, when the din of scales and trills throughout the rooms is deafening. How Rosalba did abhor the noise! Anetta is surprised to have me take her hand and lead her to the back parlor. There is, in fact, a look of shock upon her face. Her head is twisted quizzically upon her sturdy neck. “I need to tell you something,” I begin when we are seated face-to-face. She has good reason for surprise. Only rarely has a conversation between us begun at my instigation. “But you cannot tell a soul.”

“Who would I tell?” she asks immediately. “My one confidant has disappeared.”

“And mine.”

There is such disappointment in her pale, defensive eyes.

“All the more reason we should rely upon each other,” she says. “At least we could have each other to tell things to.”

“Well, that can’t be for long,” I say. “It’s why I’ve asked you here.”

“I don’t understand,” she says in sudden agitation. “Are you more ill than I know?”

“It isn’t that. Or not exactly. The fact is, Prioress is sending me into the country. To recuperate. To regain my voice.”

She blanches visibly and raises folded hands up to her lips as if in prayer.

“For how long a time?”

“Until I’m well,” I say, and then try to make light of it. “Until I’m fattened up, she says.”

She smiles a little. “That could take forever!”

“Not in the fresh air, she says.”

I look down at her two hands now in her lap, at how the fingers are entwined and twist about. For some reason, I’m uncommonly nervous as well.

“The real reason that I’ve told you this is that if I go so far away . . . if I leave here . . . that will mean there will be no one left but you to wait for her return . . . no one close to her . . . waiting for Rosalba to come back. I mean . . . you will be waiting all alone.”

She laughs darkly. “There’s always Silvia.” Then she says, “You could stay here forever, and it wouldn’t make a difference.”

“What . . . do you mean?”

“You cannot bargain with impossibility. The very day after the night she did not return, Prioress informed me that she couldn’t, that they wouldn’t ever let her back. I thought you knew.”

“Never let her back! But it’s Rosalba!”

“It doesn’t matter who it is. It could be the perfect Anna Maria or even the amazing Agrippina. If someone runs away, they can’t come back. There isn’t any question of it.”

“But what if she’s been hurt . . . or . . . or kidnapped? Haven’t they been looking for her?”

“Looking for her! Prioress says they wiped her name right off the Ospedale register the day she left. She claims that’s the ruling of the board. That it has always been the rule. If someone runs away, they can’t return.” Then she says bitterly, “To them, she might as well be dead.”

I am astounded at such cruelty. It seems so unlike all the kindness we have known here.

“As well she could be after all this time. Even if what Prioress says is true, isn’t there something we can do?”

“Don’t you think I’ve tried to think of a remedy every night and every day? And you. I know you don’t sleep well because of this, that you are deeply troubled, too. I hear you thrashing in the night. And your weeping. It pains me more than you can know. But even if we could sneak away to look for Rosalba, we do not know the city or where to look, and we have no one to turn to for help outside these walls.”

I cannot think of one more thing to say. After a time of sitting together in a miserable silence, Anetta comes to my aid.

“You should go to the farm, Luisa. You cannot help Rosalba by remaining here. She’d want you to be returned to health.” And then she adds, “As do I. Yes, you must take this opportunity to have some time away from here.”

The last words seem to take all her energy, as if they say the very opposite of what she means.

L
UISA HAS ALLOWED ME
to help her ready herself for her journey, and I am both amazed and grateful. There are two new frocks made by the
commun
girls for her days in the country, two petticoats of dimity, a light chemise, a lighter
tabarrino
cloak of camlet, and a new pair of leather shoes, for though she is not filling out, her slender feet are still growing. At times, in fact, she appears to inhabit the body of a much younger child — spare and thin and a trifle potbellied.

Imagine! She will travel by gondola to Santa Lucia, where a wagon will take her to a farm and vineyard in the country. I am truly excited for her, but dread the empty time when the two people I care most for in the world will both be invisible to me.

“We can write letters,” she says, and the surprising thought does manage to cheer me a great deal. I will cherish possessing something in Luisa’s own hand.

“Would you . . . would you do that?” I ask in disbelief.

“Of course. How else will I know which girls have attracted suitors, the ones no longer on speaking terms, who is being given the best parts to sing. I will expect you to keep me well informed.”

Her sudden profession that she will look for an answer back from me to her missives is more than I could have hoped for.

Signora Mandano even allows me to engage the gondola and to settle its two occupants inside. Catina, wrapped too tightly in scarves and capes for such a warm day, squeals when she sees the plush interior, and in her exhilaration, she begins to cough. Luisa seems no longer an orphan but a fine young lady on her way to court. We have arranged her hair with small horns above the temple and even teased ringlets onto the forehead before putting on a gathered cap with lappets hanging down the back. I am pleased to see that there is some excitement in eyes that have been dim and often red-rimmed for many weeks. I’d like to clasp her in my arms the way I’ve seen her mother do, but such fond expressions have no place within the Ospedale, except, of course, with the infants, and even then we’re cautioned not to coddle them. And so I merely watch as she steps through the little doorway of the covered gondola, goes to a window, and shyly pulls the curtain back to wave at me. I am, truly, so happy for them both.

Yet the emptiness I feel while watching their craft make its graceful way up the Grand Canal seems bottomless, a ballooning of the constant ache I have carried with me since Rosalba’s disappearance. Going back into the school building with all its noise and confusion is like taking a small potion of forgetfulness that only dulls a little of the pain. I must remind myself again and again that Luisa will be away only a short time, that she will be sending letters to me, that she will be, at long last, completely well.

“Has the little invalid been sent on her way, then?” asks Silvia while tuning her violin. We have been waiting so long for Father to appear that the room is restless. Some girls practice their new parts oblivious to other sections being played. Unlike so many of the others, I must have silence in which to contemplate my own mistakes, and so I remain apparently idle, though studying the score all the while.

“She has left, yes,” I tell her, and turn my back to her to try to look over my music in what peace I can make for myself.

“You will need me for a friend,” she says behind me, “now that the two you’ve doted on have disappeared.”

“Not disappeared,” I tell her with annoyance. “It’s true that my two dearest friends are temporarily away. It’s not true I can replace them, especially not with someone as ill-tempered as you always seem to be.”

She feigns dismay. “Me? Bad-tempered? I only point out things to people for their own good that they may have missed.”

“Well, point them out to someone else. I do not need to don the same cloudy lenses that you seem to look through at all times.”

Before she can come back at me with her riposte, Father Vivaldi swings the door wide and rustles through it like a sudden wind. Almost always rather neat, today he is disheveled and quite red of face. He slaps a score upon the music stand and coughs into a handkerchief.

“Sorry about the wait,” he says at once, “but this tightening of the chest has been plaguing me of late. Father Gasparini is not well himself, but I am here to run you through the piece we started yesterday as best I can.” He delivers this entire string of words in a halting, breathless manner.

“Our instruments have already been tuned,” Anna Maria, the first violinist, tells him.

“Fine then,” he says. “We will start right in.”

We enter into the first movement’s vigorous contained rhythm without hesitation. Perhaps because of my own sadness, the score for the second movement seems more tender than it did even yesterday, and the repetition of its melodies is about to break my heart. There are tears streaking my face before the end of it. Father himself seems affected by his own notes, for he takes two short intakes of air after putting down his baton, then coughs and wheezes into a large rumpled handkerchief.

“If you are not feeling well,” I overhear Anna Maria whisper to him, “I can rehearse the group for you.” She has done it before, and rather competently, I must confess.

He thanks her, but instead of accepting the offer, he struggles through the next few hours, wheezing unmercifully. It is most discomfiting, and we are all relieved when the last of this earnest but unsettling rehearsal comes to an end. I, however, am not to be dismissed as yet, for Father motions me to the front and holds some pages in the air above his head.

“The concerto for your viola d’amore,” he declares, waving the score about in triumph. “I stayed up all night to finish it.”

His effort to make this announcement causes another breathing crisis, and he goes quite purple in the face.

“What can I do, Father?” I say, distressed. “How can I help you?”

He calms a little, but his words are rough and breathy when he speaks again.

“The only thing that you need do for me is play my music well. I think you’ll find that this piece accents your skills. I think I’ve made a marriage here.”

If he only knew the irony he speaks. Me and my instrument. United in a love match like no other. Still, the music is a wondrous gift and far more welcome than any duke it might attract. It is, perhaps, the best match I will ever make.

I am not feeling hungry for the midday meal, so I go up to the nursery instead to help feed the babies. Concerta stands now if placed beside a little chair and thumps her bottom up and down if I sing to her.

“She is musical,” I tell Sofia.

“She had better be,” says the nurse, “if she wants any kind of life here. It’s the ones who play and sing who have a chance at something better than the life I lead.”

I do not tell my thoughts to her, that a life entirely within the Ospedale would not be so bad, that tending the babies, watching them grow, loving them, continuing to love even when there’s no love in return. It is not so very bad.

O
UR GONDOLIER IS OLD
and does not sing at all, but Signora says he can be trusted, that they have engaged him many times before. He simply guides his boat, and after seating us inside, doesn’t pay any attention to his passengers.

I had not thought it would be so hard to leave the Ospedale behind, or Anetta. Especially not Anetta. But watching from the window of the gondola as they both fade from view, my eyes sting and a thin stream of tears runs down to my chin.

When I try to wipe away the dampness with the back of my hand, wise little Catina notices and counsels me. “We will not be away for long, Luisa. In just a few months, this same sight we now leave behind will greet us.”

Her attempt at consoling me would be amusing if I weren’t feeling so bereft and timid about this journey. I am, after all, the one who is supposed to be in charge. At other times she seems easily as young as her years, too excited to sit still, even though all the jouncing about makes her cough and wheeze the more. She rises repeatedly to point out the sights she has seen before when on a trip with Signora to a see a specialist in breathing disorders.

“Look, Luisa, the Doge’s Palace! Look, Luisa, Cá Foscari! Look, Luisa, the Rialto Bridge!”

I search fruitlessly for Calle del Carbon as we approach the area of my mother’s apartment and for anything that looks familiar — a building, a marketplace. I remember a small
campo,
some steep steps, the dark interior of what must have been a church, someone helping me to light a candle with a long wick. I remember how brightly it burned.