Vivaldi's Virgins (12 page)

“And now…”

“And now, Signora?” I tried to keep my voice from shaking, but I doubt I succeeded.

“And now perhaps you’d like to tell me where you were—and what has become of Marietta.”

I looked steadily at her. I know I did, because I can still see the way her face looked to me in that moment. I can remember the hardness I saw in her eyes, and even a glint of humor there. She was enjoying this. It was, for her, a treat. “I felt sick after the journey. My bowels threatened to loosen as soon as I had my first
taste of food. I pleaded with Marietta to come with me, because I was afraid—well, I was afraid of meeting a lion.”

It astonished me how prolifically the falsehoods were breeding, and how easily they tumbled from my mouth into the world.

“And did a lion eat Marietta, then?”

“I told her to leave because—because I didn’t want her, or anyone else, to bear witness to my misery. I asked her to stand well away from me.”

“And then?”

“And then, when I was finished finally, I looked for her everywhere. I called and called her name. I thought she must have grown impatient waiting for me, and hastened to join the others here for the tour of the Basilica of Santa Maria Assunta.”

“And the tower, Anna Maria. Let us not forget the tower, so far away from everyone—as far away as if we were alone on a mountaintop, you and I.”

“A mountaintop,” I echoed, looking around the room in the weak light that filtered in from the waning day outside. I wondered if she hated me enough to kill me. Girls died often enough—and it would be easy, in such a place as this, to make it seem an accident.

“Sit down—there.” She motioned to a rough bench against the wall. And then she sat down beside me, very close. Too close. I could smell her—a smell of sweat and spittle and rot.

I know now that ill luck was as much a part of la Befana’s evil mien as the bitterness she harbored in her soul. Tooth decay, smallpox, and time itself had long ago robbed her of the sweet looks that excuse the small cruelties of the fair.

Is there such a thing as evil, plain as simple? She was the closest to it I have ever known. But, even in her, evil was a complicated thing, made of many layers and wearing many masks.
Beneath it all there was a wounded thing, more animal than human. The crime was that such a person was allowed to be a teacher here—to have so many tender young souls in her power.

Even her hatred of me—her very particular hatred—was somewhat impersonal. She was trying to hurt someone else by hurting me. I was a pawn in the game she played. But, no mistake about it, she wanted my downfall. She was bent on causing it, and bent, too, on making it seem that I had brought it upon myself.

“Are you aware,” she said to me, moving even closer, “that one in twenty people in Venezia is either a priest or a nun.”

“I didn’t know the number was so high. But the call to God is, no doubt, a call of great power.”

“No doubt. And yet a true religious calling is relatively rare. Far more often it is the Republic’s inheritance laws that make nuns and priests of so many whose families have a claim to a title or lands. And it is simple hunger that makes priests and nuns of the others.”

I only realized that I had been holding my breath when I began to breathe again. She was going to lecture, not beat me—at least not for the moment.

She smiled again. Her smile, I swear, was more frightening than anything else about her. “Have you ever thought that you had a calling to God, Anna Maria?”

It was some game she was playing. I knew I had to be very careful about what I said. “My calling is to music.”

“Yes,” said la Befana. The smile was gone. “It is just as I thought. Have your eyes adjusted to the lack of light here? I want to show you something.”

I quickly looked about her person, but didn’t see anything she could use to hit me, apart from her hands. Her hands were frightful things, though. She sat unmoving, seeming to take note
of my fear. Then she bent down and pulled the skirts of her robe up over her knees.

My eyes had adjusted well. The skin of her thighs was as lumpy and mottled-looking as loaves of bread left out in the damp air.

I couldn’t tell if the sick feeling in my stomach had more to do with the sight of her exposed flesh or the fact that I hadn’t eaten anything since the bit of bread I’d had at breakfast.

La Befana spoke in little more than a whisper, and yet the smallness of the room pressed her voice against my ears. “I was the maestro’s
favorita,
in my time. I was just as talented as you are—and I was pious, too. I loved God with all my heart, and tried with all my heart to be good, even when the Devil tempted me.” It was a different voice than she’d ever used with me before, as if she spoke to a friend. As if she loved me. “I would have become a choir nun, had I been able. Yes, I wanted with all my heart to take vows.”

As she spoke, she began unwinding the bandages that were wrapped around her legs from her knees to her ankles. “But only the daughters of Venezia’s noble houses are considered fit to be choir nuns. No matter what the talents of a base-born girl, nor how supreme her efforts to serve God well, she is not considered good enough to sing God’s praises for the Republic’s salvation. If she takes vows, she can be no more than a serving wench to the choir nuns of Venezia.” She unfastened her shoes. There were more bandages beneath, stained with sweat and time—and underneath those, her naked feet.

I had never seen an old person’s naked feet before. Each misshapen toe had what looked like a hard little lump of flesh set upon it like the hat of an organ grinder’s monkey but drained of all its color. The toenails were thick and yellow where the flesh beneath them wasn’t stained a brownish-looking purple. Her
lower legs were likewise covered in bruises, and the veins stood out upon them blue and swollen.

Apart from torturing me with the sight of all this ugliness, I couldn’t imagine why she was showing this to me.

She grimaced and pressed both of her naked feet onto the dusty floor.

I remember wondering if she really
was
a witch, who could read people’s thoughts. Could she do it only when her feet were bare? I made myself pray, although no doubt it was a particularly great sin to do so on the heels of a lie.
Deus in adjutorium meum intende. Domine ad adiuvandum
, I repeated as hard as I could inside my head until she began speaking again, so softly that I wondered at first if I was hearing her words inside my head as well. But I saw her lips moving.

“I was
la favorita
, in my time, just like you. A prodigy. ‘A gift from God,’ the maestro told me often enough. We had special lessons together, just he and I.” She wrapped her fingers around my collar and pulled me even closer, so that I could see the coating of spittle on her teeth. “Do you know the meaning of sacrifice, Anna Maria?”

I closed my eyes. I’m sure I was wincing. I thought before I spoke, wanting to give the right answer—and to avoid whatever special torture she’d devised for me this time, high in the tower, where no one would be able to hear my cries. “Jesus sacrificed himself so that the rest of us can rise on Judgment Day and live again.”

She suddenly let go of me. “You answer like a child.” Her friendly tone, like her smile, was gone. “I am speaking of the sacrifices made by a woman.”

I didn’t consider either of us to be a woman then—neither myself nor la Befana. I watched in horrified fascination as she
lifted up her right foot and held it in both her hands, turning it sideways to expose the inside of her ankle, just above her heel. The skin was as cracked and rutted as a dirt pathway after a time of drought. I saw the brand there, burned into her skin: the letter
P
,
with a cross at its base, boxed in by four flourishes, the top right one ending in a hook.

I knew the secret history, even then. The Senate passed a law at the turn of the century prohibiting the branding of children. But branding was still in practice when I was brought to the Pietà, as near as I can calculate, in anno Domini 1695. Because our facilities have ever been cramped, most of the babies who enter the system are sent out to board with wet-nurses, as far away from Venezia as possible. Ever mindful of the expense of raising us, the governors count on at least some of these foster mothers growing attached to their wards and wanting to keep them.

But poverty on the mainland is such that a foster mother would sometimes murder the foundling in her keeping, using her pay to feed and clothe her own child, whom she would return to the Pietà at the age of ten to complete her education at the continued expense of the State.

The governors, in their wisdom, lit upon the solution of having the surgeon brand us, on the arm or the foot, so that no other child could be raised and returned in our stead.

I didn’t know that la Befana had been a foundling. I should have, because nearly all the grown women of the Pietà begin their lives here. And yet, like all children, I had trouble thinking of the adults around me as having ever been other than what I saw and felt them to be: alien beings with their own language and code of conduct. Unlike the Prioress and Sister Laura, and even Sister Giovanna, la Befana was not around when I began my musical studies.

I cast my mind back. I remembered her from the time when I was nine or ten. She entered as a member of the
coro
. And then, some years later, she’d been promoted to
maestra
. Where had she gone, then, in the time between? And how long had she been away?

She wiggled her toes and began to wind the bandages around her feet and legs again.

I tried to keep my voice steady as I looked her in those cruel eyes of hers. “Were you at the Pietà, Signora, when I was brought in?”

My question seemed to give her pleasure. She looked at me a long time, reached out her hand, and touched my face. She touched me softly, and yet I flinched. “Yes,” she said. “I was one of the first who ever laid eyes on you.”

How could that be? I knew that she could not have been one of the
cariche
then. She was not even a
maestra
yet, so she could not have been one of their trustees.

“You were a very small baby, so delicate and small and sickly that the priest was sent for straight away.”

I mouthed more than said my next two words: “Tell me.”

“Whether you were dressed in silk or rags? Whether there was any special token about your person—or perhaps a letter? Half a letter, or half a drawing, or half an ancient coin?”

She sat back, smiling again—more like the rictus of a corpse, it seems to me in retrospect, than an expression of pleasure or mirth. Truly, when I look back, I can almost feel sorry for her. “Alas, I can’t remember.” Her smile vanished. She looked straight at me, her eyes filled with hatred.

“No doubt, I can’t remember because I was too distracted by the sense that everything I’d ever strived to build had just fallen in a heap of rubble at my feet. That everyone I’d believed in had lied to me. And that all the sacrifices I made were for nothing!”

I caught a glimpse, in that moment, of the wounded, suffering thing she carried around inside her—the part of her that was indeed dead or dying. She saw me see this and I could tell that she regretted having spoken so unguardedly.

She seemed on fire when she spoke again. “Do you know the special fate reserved in Hell for liars, Anna Maria? How their flesh, no matter how smooth and pretty, is perpetually rent from their faces, torn away, over and over again, for all eternity, by the Devil’s birds of prey?” She reached out to touch my face again, but I shrank away from her. Crows were cawing as they flew past the tiny window of the tower.

“Yes, I was there when you came into the world.” Truly she seemed like a monster to me. A whispering, lying abomination. “How could I not have been?”

Everything began to swirl then, so that I thought the tower must be about to fall. A hand fell hard across my face. “Don’t you dare faint, you foolish girl!”

I whimpered like a puling infant. It was the first time I had ever cried in front of her.

What had she always wanted but to hurt me? Why would she not do everything in her power to hurt me now—and surely now, more than ever before, I was in her power.

I told myself that la Befana was a devil and a liar who only wanted to make me pay for every wrong she’d ever suffered. I reasoned that she would have said something about the locket if she had not been merely trying to convince me of her power. She knew nothing of the locket. We were marked by the same brand—and perhaps she had been at the Pietà when I was brought in. But that meant nothing. I was well on my way to finding out what I wanted to know—and I wouldn’t let her bar my path, nor put false answers in my way.

I stopped sniveling, crossed myself, and stared straight
ahead of me, even though I felt like hanging my head and weeping some more.

“You are a fine one, with your religious airs, Anna Maria.”

The tears filled my eyes and, like a child, I held my hands over my ears.

She regarded me coldly. “You have yet to learn the meaning of duty or sacrifice. You pretend to be an
inserviente della musica
, but you are servant only to your own desires. And your own ambition. You are selfish and self-indulgent and, yes, remarkably like your mother.”

I wept harder then, so relieved to hear her phrase it thus, removing herself from any possibility of filling that position. She got up and stood looking at me from the top of the stairs. “You are very little like your father, though. Yes, sometimes I wonder if it wasn’t perhaps someone else who sired you.”

She turned to walk down the stairs, then stopped and looked back at me one more time. “Bear in mind, Signorina, that if anything befalls Marietta, you will be held responsible—with the full weight of the punishment that would entail. Think hard upon it.”

I sat there in my own silence for a long time, and then I think I must have fallen asleep. The sky outside the window, when I became aware of it again, was the color of a freshly bitten ripe plum. I could hear voices calling below me—“Marietta! Marietta!
Dove sei?
Where are you?”