The Case of the Orphaned Bassoonists (17 page)

“Oh, is that the plan, then?” I said.

“Well you’re the one who wants me to go out,” she said, tugging on the bomber jacket. “To go where I could well be recognized.” Panting, she tried to zip up the jacket.

“Don’t break the zipper!” I warned. I was quite liking the feel of the velvet, though I would never have admitted it. I threw it off and wrestled the beret from her head and the jacket from her back.

The rain still held off as we set out, but the air was violent, and the sky crackled. I was not going much faster than Nicky. After all, I had been on my feet nearly all day, had hardly had a proper meal, and was still carrying the conductor’s biography as well as the two novels in my satchel, and one of the novels was very heavy.

“Oh, just toss them,” Nicky said when I complained. “Tell Simon both of them are dreadful. He’ll never know.”

“The whole issue,” I said, ignoring that suggestion, “is what sort of literature should be published. I’m being asked to decide, and I can’t. One of these is entertaining and one isn’t. One of these is profound, and the other is superficial, but with some feminist interest. But literature can’t just be entertaining.”

“Why not?” asked Nicky. She was absolutely the wrong person to discuss this with. She adored historical romance novels, particularly if they had dramatic Highland settings, and the men were called “the Bruce” and wore short skirts, and the women defended their castles with pots of boiling pitch. She’d probably love
Lovers and Virgins
.

“Entertainment is not enough,” I said. “It’s enough sometimes. You don’t want to hear the Beatles fully orchestrated. You don’t want Aretha singing
Tosca
. But serious literature is so much
better
. So much
deeper. So
much…”

“You take the high road and I’ll take the low road,” hummed Nicky.

“Well, you won’t be there before me in those ridiculous shoes,” I snapped.

“Oh, come along, Grandma,” said Nicky, pushing me on to the
vaporetto
at San Tomà and into a seat. “The best art is entertaining
and
serious. Like Vivaldi. Like Matisse. Like a big, beautiful woman wearing high heels.”

“With analogies like that, it’s a good thing you’re a bassoonist and not a poet,” I said, but “Grandma” had made me think of “
Grossmutter
.”

I told Nicky about my conversation with Frigga. As I talked I was conscious of a word or two lying just below the surface in my memory. Something someone had said, or that I’d read, that hadn’t quite jibed.

“That’s incredibly sad,” she said. “I couldn’t see Gunther for Bitten. It’s strange, isn’t it, how they both were marked by the war? Bitten lost her father in Dachau and Gunther his grandfather.”

We had the brightly lit Palladian rectangle of the Church of the Redentore on our right and the sweep of San Marco’s waterfront, the Molo, with its stairs leading down into the lagoon, its view into the Piazza, coming up in front of us. The front door of Venice, it had been called. It still astonished me whenever I saw it. Nicky didn’t look at the glorious view, however, but directly at me. I could see she was thinking over what I’d told her, and was worried.

Music students in Vienna. Attempts to get to London. Dachau.

“But Bitten’s mother, Jakob’s wife, was named Elizabeth,” Nicky said. “Bitten and Gunther can’t have been related, can they?”

“Gunther’s grandmother was Frigga’s daughter, Dorothea,” I said. “She didn’t go to Sweden, she went to Munich and died in a fire.”

“And she didn’t have a girl called Bitten. She had a daughter called Ruth, who was raised by Frigga.”

“In wartime, there must be so many similar cases,” I said uneasily.

“And anyway,” said Nicky. “Someone would have contacted Olivia if Jakob had had children in Germany.”

“Bitten’s mother never tried to contact Olivia.”

“There is no way Gunther and Bitten could be related—unless Jakob had two wives,” Nicky said. As soon as she said it, dismissively, we both thought of Gunther’s height and blondness, and how similar Bitten was. If Gunther’s grandfather was named Jakob, that would make him Bitten’s—what—half-nephew?

“If Bitten
is
Olivia’s granddaughter,” I said, as our boat began to travel along the length of the city to our stop at Giardini, “It’s amazing that she’s a bassoonist, just like you.”

“No, not like me, Cassandra,” said Nicky, almost harshly. “Because I
knew
Olivia, I cared for her, I loved her. Bitten never even met her.”

I
HAVE FRIENDS
who moon over picture calendars of rural Tuscany, and save their money to rent villas outside Florence for a week or two in autumn and return home with bottles of wine and freshly pressed olive oil and longings to live
la dolce vita
permanently. These Italy-worshipping friends would never think of visiting Venice. It’s too crowded, they say. It’s too expensive. It’s cold and haughty and damp and putrid-smelling. And, worst of all, it’s the one place in Italy you can’t even get a good meal.

But those people have clearly never eaten at a steamy little trattoria run by Giovanna’s aunts, two energetic ladies in their sixties who kept the dishes coming for a good two hours: artichokes served with lemon and olive oil, followed by pumpkin gnocchi with a sauce of butter and sage. For Nicky, the heartless carnivore, there was a tender slice of veal Marsala, and for me, a lightly grilled local fish. Giovanna was presented with an array of vegetarian plates: roasted eggplant, crisp green beans, white beans with black olives. The aunts filled our glasses with Pinot Grigio, and at the end of the meal brought plates of fresh figs along with golden
vin santo
.

The aunts clearly approved of Nicky. They liked her auburn ringlets and hearty appetite. They ran their hands over her silver lamé tunic and exclaimed when they heard she was a bassoonist. “Nicola, Nicolina,” they were soon calling her, while their tongues twisted on Cassandra. “Eat, eat,” they cooed, as Nicky cleaned her plate. They nudged Giovanna, “Another musician, hmmm?”

Giovanna took it in stride. Her little pink dress was gone, and, surprisingly, her strawberry hair had taken on a darker tint since this afternoon. She’d replaced her big green-rimmed glasses with wire-rims and was wearing a linen jacket over jeans. She had clearly tried to replicate Nicky’s respectability even as Nicky had gone in the opposite direction to match Giovanna’s earlier verve.

At the door there were embraces and kisses. The aunts handed Giovanna her violin case and our coats. They had Nicky in my leather jacket and me in her flowing velvet cloak before I could stop them.

“Relax, Cassandra,” said Nicky when I began to protest. “Your inner Venetian, remember.”

Outside in the small campo, the air was unstable, eager, and from an upper window came a woman’s voice, singing. With the wind flapping the cloak around me, we began to walk down the Via Garibaldi to the embankment that ran along the lagoon. Giovanna and Nicola, deep in a discussion of Vivaldi, linked arms. The camaraderie of musicians was something I’d always envied. Painters couldn’t paint together, writers couldn’t write; but whenever you got two musicians together, they always wanted to play something, sing something, even just hum.

We were strolling toward the Pietà. Over the last few days, I’d approached the church from the other direction, battling through tourists and vendors. From this direction everything was far less crowded; the heart of Venice, the Piazza, lay in front of us, but distant enough so that we saw only the lights, and didn’t hear the babble of language. The sound of Venice tonight was the gurgle of the lagoon waters against the stone retaining walls, the faint buzz of motor boats, Giovanna’s voice humming an example from some movement or other.

I caught up with the two of them in time to hear Nicky quoting, “‘The canals are crowded with musical people at night, bands of music, French horns, duet singers in every gondola.’ 1745, Dr. Charles Burney. He was an English musicologist who gave us a picture of Venetian musical life at that time, especially the women’s orchestras of the
ospedali
. I’m thinking about using his words in the opening scenes of the film, as the camera pans over the city in an aerial shot, with gondolas arriving in front of the Pietà.”

Only this morning the project had been a CD-ROM; in the library Nicky had begun talking of a video documentary. Now it was a film.

“You might show the audience going through the doors of the church of the Pietà,” suggested Giovanna. “Lots of talking and bustle. Eighteenth-century dress, gold and velvet and silk in the candlelight. Slowly we become aware of the girls, all dressed in white, in the balconies above.”

Nicky continued, “The camera focuses on the faces of the various girls as they tune up. The audience quiets. Vivaldi raises his baton. There’s a long close-up of one girl, a bassoonist, raising the instrument to her lips. And then another voice-over, in her words: ‘I never expected to find myself a performer in an all-women’s orchestra…’”

“And now a flashback to a room where her mother, a celebrated courtesan, is giving birth…” Giovanna made some baby noises.

“The mother gives her baby an agonized look, and then turns away. ‘Take her to the Pietà. At least let her have a different life than I can give her, than I had!’”

“A shot, a shot right here,” Giovanna said excitedly, for by now we’d arrived at the Pietà itself, “of the baby going through the little door in the wall. The maid gives the sign of the cross as she places the baby inside and rings the bell. Then we see the baby being received on the other side by a nun. The baby is washed, marked with a small P. ‘Your name will be…’”

“Giovanna,” said Nicky.

“Isn’t it time we should be getting to the klezmer concert?” I asked.

“No, it’s early yet,” said Giovanna. “Let’s go inside a moment.”

Very often the church had concerts at night; this was one of the few evenings it was empty. There was a soft rope stretched across the entrance to the church interior, but Giovanna persuaded the sacristan that Nicky was a famous filmmaker from London. At least I think that’s what she said, for she spoke to the man in dialect.

It wasn’t a particularly magnificent church, yet with imagination it was possible to people the space with chairs, not pews, and to place flickering wax candles on the walls instead of electric bulbs. It was possible to peer up and see the girls peering back through the grilles of the balconies above.

“And she looks out and sees her real mother,” said Giovanna and added, sighing, “Isn’t that what we all wish!”

“Yes,” said Nicky, taking up the story. “Her mother is now old, raddled from syphilis, no longer able to work as a prostitute to the wealthy. She’s dying, in fact, but she’s come to see her daughter play the bassoon one last time.”

“Now, Nicolina, are you absolutely firm that the focus of your film is the bassoon? Because Vivaldi was a great violinist, you know. Will there be perhaps some
small
role for a girl who is a violinist?”

I sat down in one of the pews, wrapping the long velvet cloak closely around me. They definitely had the right idea with these capes, those old Venetians. It had always seemed from the paintings that they wrapped themselves up to their eyes as a disguise, but now I was sure it was only to keep warm.

“My own interest is the bassoon,” said Nicky slowly, staring at Giovanna. “And when I thought of doing a series of concertos in period dress, I only thought of the bassoonists. But if the story expands to the whole
concept
of the musical schools of the
ospedali
…”

Without a glance at me, the two of them continued to wander closer to the altar. We would be here for a while.

The last time I’d been in the Pietà had been two nights ago, during the concert performance of
Orlando Furioso
. Gunther and Bitten had been sitting in front of me then, poor things. They’d quarreled soon after—what had they quarreled about? Had they told each other their family stories, and had Gunther somehow realized that he was also a descendant of Olivia Wulf? Had he wanted a share of the estate that Bitten planned to wrest away from Nicky? Had Bitten pushed him in the canal because of that? Was the overwhelming grief she exhibited now caused by guilt or remorse?

At least I knew one thing: Andrew was probably the bassoon thief. Albert’s theory about Signore Sandretti’s taking the bassoon for insurance purposes didn’t hold water. The magazine clipping Albert had found in the bassoon clearly pointed to Andrew’s involvement. It was the explanation that made the most emotional sense: Andrew and Nicky were rivals researching the Pietà music school. He’d wanted to get Nicky in trouble—serious criminal trouble—so that he’d have an open field for himself. And to an extent, he’d succeeded. Here was Nicky lurking about Venice incognito (as incognito as someone like her could ever be), while Andrew ensconced himself in the city for a year with the chief librarian of the Conservatory of Music at his beck and call. The camaraderie of musicians, indeed.

The sound of a violin being tuned up filled the church. Giovanna had taken her instrument from its case and the familiar notes of Vivaldi—any one of two hundred violin concertos—peeled forth. I looked up at the balcony and thought of a girl standing there, searching for her mother in the crowded congregation below. Andrew knew about being abandoned firsthand. On some level, many of us knew about it. We still wanted the mothers who’d rejected us.

Nicky made her way back to my pew and slid in beside me.

“So,” I said. “Your film is going to be about the whole orchestra now, is it? Perhaps the plot now includes a love affair between the protégées of Vivaldi—a violinist and a bassoonist? I think the movie audience of the new millennium could handle that on screen.”

“Umm, brilliant,” said Nicky absently. “But I feel I’m going in the right direction now. Ever since I arrived in Venice last week, I’ve felt there were serious obstacles to my project. Namely Andrew. He may not be as fine a player as I am, but his credentials are better. He’s a Ph.D.; he’s a slogger, he’s a fact-finder. While I’m more of a—visionary. When it comes down to it, Cassandra, I couldn’t write a book about the Pietà, but I think I could produce a film. I know I could. The plot is coming together in my mind. I
see
it.”