The True Adventures of Nicolo Zen (4 page)

“Why not?”

“Because you’re not a boy, of course.”

“Of course,” I agreed, and remembering to curtsy rather than bow, I hurried out the door.

The truth—the real truth—is that I was no Orpheus, and it had nothing to do with my gender. My mother had insisted that I could sing—or at least hum tunes—before I could speak. And that if I heard music, even some neighbor singing a scrap of song while doing his chores, or men regaling themselves while drinking wine, I would stop in my tracks to listen. When the tinsmith, in his ragged gray coat and floppy hat, made his rounds, he belted arias—off-key, often improvising nonsense lyrics—and I would follow him and sing along. “The problem with your boy,” he joked to my mother, “is that he shows me up, because he never misses a note.” So, yes, I had sung in the church choir, and soaked up the troubadours’ ballads, and imitated the woodland birds, and I was indeed blessed with a musical memory (hearing a piece just once, I could repeat every note), but what I had dared not reveal to the Master was the special nature of my clarinet.
It
possessed unique powers that made
me
appear to possess great talent. Not surprisingly, this would turn out to be a mixed blessing.

The day my father presented me with the clarinet, the very first time I raised it to my lips, I was astonished to discover that I could play it proficiently. How was this possible, I asked myself, when I barely knew how to hold the instrument? I tried playing it again, but this time produced a mess of off-key notes. On my third attempt, my playing was again flawless—a snatch of organ music I
had been humming that day. It took me an hour of trial and error before I solved the mystery: if I blew into the clarinet’s embouchure while thinking of a tune, and hearing the notes in my head, my fingers would find the right holes and the tune would emerge perfectly. I had to concentrate hard, but it worked every time. If my concentration broke, the tune fell apart. As I grew adept, I attempted more complex music, including some of the Master’s own concerti, and those of his great rival, Signor Albinoni, which I heard when a string quartet from Parma visited the church.

In short, I realized that my clarinet was enchanted. By what force or power, I couldn’t imagine. I had grown up around people who believed in talismans, and not just the religious ones condoned by the Church, or the countless miracles performed by saints that I heard about during mass. My late grandmother, my father’s mother, had possessed a blue amulet reputed to heal the sick. Supposedly it had revived a stillborn infant when placed on the child’s chest and restored the sight of a blind girl. The day my grandmother died, the amulet disappeared, and my parents never did find it.

So enchantment was nothing new to me. But this was different: a musical instrument to whose magical properties I was a party. I doubted that Signor Agnetti knew of these properties or he would have guarded the clarinet more carefully, and certainly would not have allowed my father to carry it away so easily. I practiced daily, and after a while told myself that, despite the fact the clarinet was doing much of the work for me, each time I played a piece I learned more about how to breathe and blow, about fingering properly and employing complex dynamics. Like all clarinets at that time, mine had been fashioned to play in C or D major,
and only with great effort did I learn to cross-finger all the sharps and flats, my fingers guided magnetically by the clarinet until I could work the eleven holes and three key pads in various combinations to produce eighteen keys from a low F to a high G sharp. It was as if the clarinet were teaching me how to play it—my breath, hands, and spirit absorbing the essence of the music, making it sound second nature to me. Imagine keeping your fingers on the keys of a mechanical clavichord—the Austrians called it a “player piano”—day after day, month after month, until eventually you could play on your own, on a regular keyboard. In short, if I had been truthful when the Master asked the identity of my teacher, I would have answered that it was the clarinet itself.

On Mazzorbo, it had not been difficult to conceal my secret. Outside of church, no one was much interested in music or musical instruments. I played the clarinet selectively, even around my family, and kept to the simplest pieces. One day when my sister Rhea picked it up and blew into it, I was terrified my secret would be revealed. But all that emerged from the clarinet was a dull squawk. She took a deep breath and tried again, with the same result.

I grew bold enough to ask Rhea to think of her favorite song while blowing into the embouchure. She had perfect pitch and was a far better singer than I.

“What good will that do?” she said.

“You may be surprised.”

“Are you crazy?”

“Just try it. Please.”

She put the clarinet to her lips and closed her eyes to concentrate,
but this time all that emerged was a screech, and I breathed a sigh of relief.

Pushing the clarinet into my hands, she said angrily, “Just because I don’t have your talent doesn’t give you the right to mock me. It’s cruel.”

Even now, this is a painful memory, for I loved my sister and I couldn’t explain what was behind my request and show her that no cruelty was intended. Any chance of doing so ended with her death.

As for my parents, they thought it a marvel that I could play at all. My father swore that one day I would take my clarinet out into the world and gain fame and fortune. My mother called it a miracle. And it was a miracle. I believe each of us is presented with one real miracle in life—if we can recognize it as such—and this clarinet with the mysterious powers was mine. I thought it best to keep those powers to myself until such time as I might truly need them and know how to employ them. The epidemic that swept Mazzorbo had hastened that moment, thrusting me out into the world and forcing me to live by my wits. The fact that I had nothing to fall back on made me guard my secret all the more vigilantly.

The Ospedale was not Mazzorbo; its residents were not simple peasants. Performing publicly with the city’s finest orchestra, living among competitive, talented girls, I knew that keeping my secret was going to be far more difficult. When I added in the secret of my false identity, which the slightest misstep could reveal, my position felt even more precarious.

The dormitory for the elite orchestra, known as the
privilegiate di coro
, occupied the fourth floor of a brown building with tall yellow shutters and a terra-cotta roof that adjoined the church. The dining hall was on the third floor and practice rooms on the second. Two neighboring buildings comprised the greater part of the orphanage, housing the many children, some taking music lessons, others not, who were wards of the State. In yet another, much older building was the infirmary that was the original children’s hospital from which the orphanage sprang. A hallway on the first floor of our building connected it to the nave of the church, and there were at least two hidden passageways on the upper floors linking the buildings, and rumor had it, a third, truly secret corridor known only to the Master, Luca, and Signora Marta, the
priora
, our official chaperone. Aldo must have known about it, too, as I discovered later.

The dormitory itself was not the airless, poorly lit space I expected. I had imagined a kind of drab convent: rows of narrow beds, clothing hanging on hooks, guttered candles, and a group of solemn girls whose saving grace was their music.

Instead, I followed Luca into a set of bright, lively rooms that were indeed “privileged,” where several dozen high-spirited girls between the ages of eleven and seventeen, wearing white frocks and blue slippers, were bantering, reading, waxing violin strings,
polishing lutes, annotating sheet music, and combing their hair before long mirrors. Those yellow shutters were open and the four large interconnected rooms were flooded with light. There was a ceiling mural of the sun ringed with angels in flight. The curtained beds were well spaced, each flanked by a chest of drawers and a night table with a pitcher and basin. Instrumentalists lived in the first two rooms, singers in the other two. Looking around at all the girls, and seeing that most of them were looking back at me, I wondered how I could possibly pull this off.

Signora Marta was waiting for me. She was an imposing woman who could have been forty or sixty. She always wore a stiff dress with a stiff white collar. Nearly as tall as Luca, she had long gray hair, parted down the middle, black unblinking eyes, and hands the width and weight of small shovels. Especially when they came down on the backside of one of the girls. She cursed and cuffed all of us in her charge, often cuffing us for the fact that we had cursed aloud.

Luca told her my name—shouted it, in fact—the first time I heard myself identified, like the other girls in the elite group, by the instrument I played: Nicolà dal Clarinetto,
Nicolà of the Clarinet
. With a stern glance at me, Luca left the room, and Signora Marta crossed her arms and inspected me from head to toe. Finally she gave me what I would learn was her customary greeting. “Wipe that smile off your face,” she bellowed, whether you were smiling or not. And usually you weren’t, but if you were, your smile disappeared.

I wondered at the fact that the laughter and chatter filling the rooms moments before hadn’t seemed to bother her. And when two girls just a few feet from us began whispering, and Signora
Marta did not react, I realized she was nearly deaf. If you shouted like Luca, she could hear you; otherwise, she mostly acted upon what she saw. Which was why she often misread situations and reprimanded a girl who had done nothing wrong. As for our music, she never heard a note of it when she attended a performance. Only the timpanist, Agnes, occasionally penetrated her deafness. And it was Agnes who would tell me that Signora Marta had grown up in the orphanage, the abandoned child of a prostitute. Marta was a promising oboist, on the verge of joining the elite orchestra, when someone pushed her down a flight of stairs, causing her to hit her head and lose her hearing. Embittered ever since, she took out her rage on the girls of the orchestra, but always with an uncanny instinct for knowing just how far she could go without arousing the ire of the Master or the suspicions of the Governing Council, trustees of the Ospedale, appointed by the Doge, who were the Master’s overseers. To the Council members, Signora Marta was someone who ran the dormitory smoothly and kept the girls out of scandals. When the latter occurred, she made sure they didn’t become public.

Signora Marta led me to the bed I had been assigned, the second one in on the right-hand wall. My neighbors were Carita dal Cornetto, a small, silent girl with a sallow complexion, and Julietta della Tiorba, a pretty brunette, my own age, who greeted me with a pleasant tilt of her head before returning to the book she was reading.

“Dinner is at six o’clock, Nicolà dal Clarinetto,” Marta shouted. “Be in bed by nine o’clock. Make your bed at dawn. Bathe three times a week. Mind your manners. Attend morning
mass and vespers Tuesday and Saturday. And say your prayers, for God is looking down on you.”

The girls went back to their conversations, but no one came over to talk to me. I sat down on my bed holding my clarinet in my lap and kept my eyes politely lowered, the way my sister Alessandra used to. I tried to imagine how she would carry herself as a newcomer, the expressions she would wear, the gestures she would make. Of all my sisters, she had the most poise. My mother used to say that she was the aristocrat of the family. Now she was just one of the dead, in a place where there were no aristocrats, no commoners, no one sick or poor and no one rich and robust, just a sea of blackness in which everyone became a shadow forever. Despite all I had been taught in church, and all my mother read to me from Scripture, I didn’t believe in Heaven or Hell. When you left this life, you didn’t go anywhere or experience anything. Put into the earth, you became one with it, like any other animal or plant. I didn’t believe in God, either, for how could a God who was all-powerful, all-knowing, and infinitely merciful have so cruelly snatched away my gentle sisters and so many others for no reason at all? I would attend mass and vespers, but I planned to put wax in my ears so I didn’t have to listen to the priests, and if the likes of Signora Marta believed that was heresy, for which you would be struck dead, so be it. If their God truly existed, and was so spiteful and uneasy that he would destroy a boy—or girl—who put wax in his ears, I wanted no part of the world he ruled.

When I glanced up from this jumble of thoughts, I saw Carita and Julietta looking at me sidelong. Then a beautiful blond girl on her way to bathe paused for a moment to smile at me, and say
“Welcome.” At six o’clock Signora Marta rang a bell and all the girls trooped down one flight to the dining hall and took their assigned seats at two long tables. I looked for that blond girl, but she was at the far end of another table, with her back to me. Again I was between Carita and Julietta. Bowls of fish stew, baskets of white bread, and plates of olives and salted peppers were set before us. Marina the Prima Violinista, a tall, homely girl with a serious demeanor, led us in reciting the Lord’s Prayer. After that, we were not allowed to speak during dinner. The clinking and scraping of forks and spoons were the only sounds.

Because the orchestra performed behind an iron grille, it had been impossible for me to view the musicians clearly during the one concert I attended. I only saw flashes of the girls’ white blouses and their hair, and never an entire face but just a pair of lips or a cheek. Now that we were stationary, at close quarters, I began studying the girls seated around me, but the smell of the stew distracted and got the better of me. I ate with gusto, wolfing down chunks of fish and potato and mopping my bowl with bread. I had never tasted white bread, only black rye from the bakery on Mazzorbo. I told myself to be more ladylike, but I couldn’t help it: the more I ate, the greater my hunger—as if my enforced fast of the previous days had caught up with me all at once. As I polished off the nearest plate of peppers, I caught a few girls watching me and exchanging glances. Marina glared at me until I put down my spoon and sat back, chewing softly and smiling at her, which seemed only to intensify her glare.