The Jewels of Paradise (14 page)

What was it, though, to know you’d never have them and not through your own choice? Would it bother a man to the degree that it tormented women?

She had never been much curious about the sex lives of the castrati, had not bothered to see the film about Farinelli some years ago. She had read a number somewhere, years ago, of the tens of thousands of boys to whom it was done, all in the hope of producing a star. The lurid novel lying on the shelf in the Foundation’s library could lie there until doomsday for all she cared. She had never bothered to speculate about what they did or did not do, and she knew she did not care. She wondered only what they lost in terms of the bonding that came with it, and was that worse than knowing there would be no children, no one to pass things along to, no one to teach or tickle? Was this the message in that sad man’s eyes?

She reached out suddenly and retrieved the string, rewrapped the packet, and took it back to the closet. She placed it on the flat top of the higher trunk in back and took another packet from the smaller one. Returned to the desk, she untied the packet and pulled out the first sheet. It seemed to be more of the same, an invitation dated 1722 for “Monsignore di Spiga” to present his written request directly to the Secretary for Appointments and Benefices of the Archbishop of Vienna. She looked beneath this letter, hoping to find a copy of Steffani’s request. It was common for people of that epoch to keep copies of the letters they sent, and they often attached the copy to the letter they were answering. But, instead, she found another begging request for help in winning an appointment to office, this one dated 1711, addressed to Steffani as the “Assistant at the Pontifical Throne.” He was back in Hanover by then, she recalled, still working to bring Catholicism back to Northern Germany.

The next paper was a list of what looked like titles and clerical positions. Although it was written in German, the hand was Italianate and the document bore no date. She remembered then that one of the things she had wanted, and failed, to do in the Marciana was find an autograph score and check the handwriting against what she had found in these papers. Memory did tell her, however, that it very strongly resembled the writing in a letter of his reproduced in one of the books she had at home.

Because she had sat still too long, Caterina got up and went back to the cupboard, where she retrieved the first packet of papers. She untied it, opened it, and paged through the papers until she found the aria. She took it back to the table and placed the first page next to the list of titles. She studied the papers for some time. Both of them had unusual
d
’s and
e
’s, each letter with a tendency to circle over itself back toward the left, as though the writer had tried to draw a circle but had grown tired of it and stopped a quarter of the way around. She had no idea if this was enough to prove they were written in Steffani’s hand, but she decided to believe that they were and see where that led.

She returned to the list of offices and titles that were lined up neatly beneath one another: Privy Councillor and president of the spiritual council; General President of the Palatine government and council; Monsignore di Spiga; Apostolic Prothonotary; Rector of Heidelberg University; Provost of Seltz; Envoy of the Palatinate in Rome; Apostolic Vicar of North Germany; Assistant to the Pontifical Throne; Temporary Suffragan of Münster; Member and President of the Academy of Ancient Music.

Below them, in what she believed was the same hand, was a row of question marks running from one side of the page to the other. She felt the hair on the back of her neck rise. Caterina was not a woman much given to reading scripture nor, for that fact, paying much attention to it, but her mother was a religious woman and was fond of quoting it. “If I know all mysteries and all knowledge, and I have a faith that can move mountains, but have not love, I am nothing.” Provost of Seltz. What was that? Apostolic Vicar of North Germany? What was that worth to a man condemned to be forever childless?

These reflections were interrupted by a light knocking at her door. She got to her feet and went over to open it. It was Dottor Moretti, today in a dark blue suit made of the same quality fabric as the dark gray one he had worn the day before. The tie was a bit less sober. In fact, the burgundy stripes on a dark blue field, worn by a man of Dottor Moretti’s sartorial sobriety, seemed to Caterina little different from a red rubber nose and yellow clown wig.

“I’m not disturbing you, am I, Dottoressa?” he asked.

“No, not at all,” she said, stepping back from the door to allow him room to enter. “Please,” she said, waving him over toward the table.

“I brought you the computer,” he said and smiled. “As I said, it’s nothing special, but our tech person said it should be enough for simple things.”

“All I need to do is make notes on my reading and send them to you by email,” she said.

“And read
La Gazzetta dello Sport,
if you please,” he said. “If you need distraction from the eighteenth century.”

For a moment, she didn’t understand, and then she did. “Don’t tell me
La Gazzetta
’s online, too?”

“Of course it is.” Then, seeing her expression, he added, “You seem surprised.”

Caught, she had to admit, “I suppose I have certain ideas about the people who buy it.”

“That they wouldn’t be computer literate?” he inquired.

“That they wouldn’t be literate, full stop,” she said.

It took him a moment, and then he laughed along with her. “I’ll confess I was surprised to learn it, too. My brother reads it online.”

“He likes sports?” she asked.

“Hunting and fishing and tramping around in wet fields all day with his pals,” Dottor Moretti continued, shrugged, and smiled.

“I have a sister who’s a nun,” she said to suggest he was not the only one with odd siblings.

“Is she happy?” he asked, adding to her surprise.

“I think so.”

“Can you see her?”

Caterina smiled. “She’s not locked up, you know. She wears jeans and teaches at a university in Germany.”

“My brother’s a surgeon,” he said, holding up his hands. “Don’t even think about asking. I don’t understand anything.”

“Is he a good surgeon?”

“Yes. And your sister?”

“Head of the department.”

“In Germany,” he observed in the tone of respect Italians used when speaking of German universities. He looked down at the bag he was holding and placed it on the table. Unzipping it, he pulled out a laptop and its cord. He looked around to find an electrical outlet and had to carry the computer down to the other end of the table to plug it in.

He lifted the lid, pushed a button, and took a step back from it, as though not at all certain what was going to happen and perhaps fearful there would be a loud noise or an explosion. The machine hummed and clicked, although in a very small, discreet voice.

When the various lights stopped blinking, he bent over the computer and opened a program, then another. He stared at the screen, turned to Caterina, and asked, “The thing for the Wi-Fi is down at the bottom, I think.”

“The thing?” Caterina asked herself. This was the lawyer in intellectual properties speaking, and he referred to it as “the thing for the Wi-Fi”?

He touched the pad and moved the cursor to the bottom, tapped once, waited, tapped twice, and gave her a triumphant grin when Google appeared.

“See,” he said, “you can send emails.” Then, looking stricken, he asked her, “You won’t mind using your own address, will you?” And, before she could answer, explained. “Our tech man,” he said, speaking with unwonted awkwardness. “He asked if there were an email address here at the Foundation, and when I said I didn’t know, he suggested I ask you to use your own.” Then, in a much lower voice, he continued, “He told me I could give you an address at the office, but when he told me what had to be done to do that, I said I’d ask you if you’d be willing to use your own.”

When Caterina did not answer, he went on hurriedly, “It’s all right. I can have him do it, set you up with an account at the office. I can give it to you this afternoon, but it sounded to me like he’d want the computer back to put it in.”

She smiled, glad to be able to relieve him of this concern. “It’s fine. I can easily use my own. No sense your having to take that back to your office and then bring it back again.” She considered the work ahead of her and said, “Besides, I don’t know how much there’s going to be reported at the beginning.”

He waved toward the papers on the desk. “Nothing?”

“So far, all I’ve found are documents about his career as a musician and a bishop and one aria that I think he wrote.”

“Aria?” he asked, quite as if he knew nothing about musical notation.

“I don’t know where it’s from, but it’s an opera aria, not one of his chamber duets.” She saw that this distinction was not one he understood and so glossed over that by adding, “I think it’s in his hand.” Then, before he could ask, she continued. “There’s a copy of one of his scores in one of the books I’m reading, and the handwriting looks the same,” she said, pointing back toward the paper that lay on the table.

When Dottor Moretti failed to comment, she said, “It’s probably his, but I’m not qualified to authenticate it.”

“You know what the first question from the cousins will be?” he asked.

“Of course: ‘How much is it worth?’”

Then, answering the question he had posed, Dottor Moretti said, “I imagine it’s at the whim of supply and demand, though you wouldn’t think it would be like that for art, would you?”

“It’s not art,” she said. “It’s just pieces of paper.”

“What? I’m not sure I understand.”

“The art is in the sound—the music, the singing. The score is just the way it’s passed on.”

“But if it was written down by the composer? Mozart? Handel? Bach?” He sounded astonished and made no attempt to hide it. This was her profession, after all; she should know this sort of thing.

“If you don’t know how to read musical notation, what good is the paper? If you’re blind but you can still hear, what good is the paper? Unless you can
hear
it, what good is it?” She saw that he was stumbling after her, trying to understand but perhaps not managing to.

“Would you try to tell someone what a painting looks like? Or say that a perfume smells like a mixture of lavender and roses? Or tell the plot of a poem?” she asked. He looked at her with complete attention and she realized he was following all of these examples. “If you can’t hear it, what is it?” she asked.

After a long time, Dottor Moretti smiled and said, “I never thought of it like that.”

“Most people don’t.”

Thirteen

A
FTER THAT,
C
ATERINA PAUSED FOR A LONG TIME, FEELING
strangely exposed by having so forcefully expressed her opinion. In situations like this, in which she found herself defending a position she knew that others would find extreme, she often tried in her subsequent remarks to pour unguent on what she had said, but this time she didn’t want to: she believed this. The art was the sound; the beauty was in the singing or the playing: to want to own the notes written down on paper, to place a greater value on the paper if it bore the signature of the composer, seemed to her an impure desire. She remembered something from her school catechism classes, about the sin of worshipping “graven images.” Or maybe it was the sale of indulgences she was thinking of. Or perhaps she wasn’t thinking at all and didn’t need a comparison; it was creepy and it was wrong to think that the written music was the real music.

The lawyer smiled. “I understand your position, really I do. But unless someone can write it down for the singer or the musician, they don’t know what to do.”

“But that’s not what I’m talking about,” she said. “I’m talking about turning a piece of paper or an object into a fetish. Like a letter by Goldoni or Garibaldi’s belt buckle. Goldoni’s important because he’s a great writer, and Garibaldi’s famous because he banged heads and made this into a country. But his belt buckle’s nothing. It’s not him. And a letter from Goldoni has only the value someone is willing to put on it.”

“Isn’t that true for music?” he asked. “I mean, a performance. If everyone thinks it was lousy and howls at the singer, then how good was the performance?”

She smiled. “Unfortunately, there isn’t enough howling.”

“I beg your pardon?”

Caterina smiled again, pulled out her chair and sat, waved to Dottor Moretti to take the chair opposite her. “I mean that audiences are too polite. I’ve heard playing and singing in theaters that was disgraceful, and people applauded as if they’d just heard something wonderful. I think what’s gone wrong isn’t that bad performances are howled at, but that performances that should be howled at, aren’t.”

“And the musicians? What about their feelings?”

This was a lawyer talking? “I thought you lawyers were supposed to be hard-nosed and coolly analytical.”

He had the grace to smile. “When I’m working, I’m as hard-nosed as they come and coolly analytical. It’s part of the package.”