Vivaldi's Virgins (15 page)

She has talked much to Rosalba of my playing, in hopes that I may be invited one day to make more of the artist’s violin than just a bibelot. But I’m sure that I will not be allowed—not as long as Sister Giovanna is the chaperone for these expeditions.

I am due for my lesson.

A thousand
baci,
Mother dear, wherever you are. May this letter reach not only your hands and eyes, but also your heart.

Anna Maria dal Violin

I
cannot but wonder, reading over these letters now, that I had not the slightest inkling of Giulietta’s plans.
Were
they plans—or did she sign her fate in a single impulsive moment, carried away by the strength of her feelings? We were, after all, best friends. If she had planned this, she would have told me, surely.

I was like King Shahryar and she was Scheherazade, with her tales spun out, night after night, in the bed we shared.

If I heard such tales today, I would know precisely what they portended. But I was far too caught up in my own dreams of love to do anything more than listen raptly while Giulietta gave me glimpses of hers. And she would not have let me stop her, even if I had possessed the wisdom and will to try. Love burns ever hotter in the presence of obstructions. Who knows this better than I?

While I waited for diligence from Marietta, I busied myself in trying to find out which two of the nine senior members of the
coro
and
comun
were currently serving the Pietà as scribes.

The various duties and privileges of the nine
cariche
rotate every three years, but on a changing schedule—so it was not an easy thing to determine at any given time who was responsible for what (beyond the more obvious roles of
dispensiera
or assistant prioress).

It was a period of particularly gloomy weather that winter. The rain poured down unceasingly, and those few people who came to see us at the grille of the
parlatorio
looked half drowned. On many visiting days, no one came at all.

The cooks endeavored to lift our spirits (and also dry out the walls of the
ospedale
) by baking more than usual. We were all at breakfast one day, exulting over the unwonted array of pastries set before us, when we heard—all of us heard it, except Signora Geltruda, who was stone deaf—the tolling of the single bell that hangs hard by the
scaffetta
.

“A baby!” someone murmured. And then the word was taken up by a dozen other voices in the room, pronouncing it with varying degrees of tenderness and delight.

There are some years, and some seasons, more plentiful than others for babies. Sometimes two will arrive in a day. And then sometimes three months will go by without the arrival of a single one. When the bell of the
scaffetta
sounds, it is always the role of the Prioress, wherever she may be at the time (unless she is ill), to go into the Church, to the place in the east wall where a compartment opens on the outside and is pushed through to the inside—not a
ruota
, or wheel, as at the convents, but a kind of drawer, cleverly wrought of stone. She is always accompanied by one of the two
scrivane
, who takes careful and detailed notes in the special books of the
scaffetta
kept in an annex of the Prioress’s office—books that have been kept and hidden there over hundreds of years, since written records were first kept at the Pietà. If the baby appears to be diseased or deformed, the doctor is also called in.

The Prioress was with us at breakfast that morning, I think in tribute to the cook’s offering of pastries. I saw her look straight at Sister Laura, who nodded so subtly that anyone who knew her less well than I did would have missed the gesture. The Prioress
slipped a sugared
cornetto
into her pocket, daubed her lips with a napkin, and told us all to play with special care today, because a new set of ears would be listening. Not two minutes after she quitted the room, Sister Laura also got up to leave.

“So soon?” I asked, looking hard at her as she walked by. “The cook has baked an almond cake.”

My eyes, I’m quite sure, spoke of more than almond cake, and my heart was beating fast. Sister Laura, a
scrivana!
Was this new? Would she be as kind to me in this regard as she had been in other matters? Would she search through the books, then, and tell me what I needed to know?

“Save me a piece,
figlia mia,
” she said, pausing long enough to push a stray lock of my hair under my wimple.

I knew I would need an accomplice to save her a piece of the cake that had not yet been served, and also follow her. But Giulietta had already gone to
la Rosalba
’s, Claudia was still away visiting her parents, and Marietta was gone from us forever. I turned to Bernardina, who sat at my left. I touched her first because I knew it was her blind side. “Would you do something for me,
cara?
”

Bernardina never asked me for anything, and I never asked anything of her. We were sworn enemies in those days. If there were two solo violins in a new piece that was written for the junior members of the
coro
, we did battle with each other every time to determine who would get the bigger part.

Once, before an audition, she managed to insert a dry grain of rice through one of the F-holes of my violin. It was after I had tuned the instrument, and the horrible buzzing sound it made took me completely by surprise. La Befana dismissed me as insufficiently rehearsed when I asked if I could start my piece over again, and I ended up leaving the audition in tears.

A month or so later, Giulietta played avenging angel by pour
ing a large measure of
olio di baccala
—the horrible-tasting fish oil the pharmacist uses to dose girls who get rickets—into Bernardina’s soup on a night when she had a cold and couldn’t taste anything. She spent the entire next day—which also, as it happened, was an audition day—on the privy.

Bernardina was the one who had told the Prioress of my escape with Marietta to the theater, landing me in jail. She always seemed to be watching me, waiting for my next mistake so that she could profit from it. At times, I really thought she wished me dead.

She turned at the touch of my hand.

What did Bernardina see when she saw me then? With her one eye, it always seemed that she could see much more than other people could normally see with two. We looked at each other for a good long moment—I with an expression of supplication, and she with suspicion. I hated having to humble myself before her that day, but I really felt I had no choice. There was no one else there I could ask to help me.

She glanced at the doorway through which Sister Laura had just slipped away. Then she smiled—and it seemed like a real smile to me. It seemed to me suddenly as if Bernardina wanted to be my friend—as if she’d wanted this all along. “Go after her!” she whispered. “I’ll snag two extra pieces of cake, if I’m able.”

When I got up, Signora Geltruda called out in the overly loud voice she used, even when talking to herself, “Why is everyone leaving? The cook has made an almond cake for us. She will be very cross!”

I
hid myself behind a pillar in the hallway. After a long wait there, I saw the assistant prioress come out with a swaddled infant in her arms. The baby—a tiny thing with a face
like an old man—was squalling pitifully. It’s odd because the very sound of it made tears come to my eyes. Did I also squall in just the same way? At least this baby wouldn’t be branded, as I was, and there would be a wet nurse waiting for it in the nursery, poor little motherless thing.

I had to wait quite a while longer for Sister Laura to emerge, wiping the ink from her fingers.

I stepped out from my hiding place and we looked at each other in silence before she spoke to me. “Shouldn’t you be in class now?”

“I didn’t know that you were a
scrivana,
Zietta.” I sometimes called her
zietta
—auntie. Such is the custom for girls taken under the wing of a particular teacher.

“I was only recently given the job. As you can see,” she said wiping her hands, “I’m not very good at it.”

“You seem to be very good at everything you do.”

“That is where you’re mistaken, Annina. There are many things at which I’m exceedingly bad.”

“It is your modesty speaking.”

“Oh, speak to Maestra Meneghina, if you don’t believe me.”

I snorted. La Befana? She spoke ill of everyone. Sister Laura looked at me reprovingly. “She was my teacher, you know, for many years. I would not have my place here were it not for her.”

My tone of voice was not as nice as it might have been. “Forgive me, Zietta, but I find Maestra Meneghina to be an odious person, as well as an odious teacher.”

“Really? You do her an injustice, then. She is one of the finest musicians we’ve ever had here.”

I remembered what la Befana had told me in the tower—how she had been a
favorita
. “Perhaps she was not so sour, in the old days, when Maestro Gasparini taught here on his own.”

“And there you’re misinformed again, my dear. There was a string teacher here then, just as now—the brother of Don Giacomo Spada, who was predecessor to Maestro Gasparini.” She looked away from me. And then she finished her little speech by saying the brother’s name, “Don Bonaventura Spada.”

Giacomo or Bonaventura—these names meant nothing and mattered even less to me. What did I care about the priests who taught here long ago? Sister Laura was the one who could help me now. We were there, and perhaps alone, just outside the secret room. It would be but the work of an instant for her to let me inside. All she would have to do would be to look the other way. She had on countless other occasions shown her willingness to break the rules for me.

I was trying to find the right words to persuade her to let me in—or to look in the books on my behalf. I could stand guard at the door.

And then I realized that the silence between us had gone unbroken too long. She’d mentioned the old maestro, the one who’d come before Vivaldi. I said to her, “I suppose that only a priest—or a eunuch—is considered safe enough to teach in a place such as this one.”

Sister Laura looked away from me again, out toward the window where tepid sunlight was filtering in from the day outside. It was the first sunlight I’d seen in a long time. “Bonaventura Spada was no eunuch, child. And although a priest, he was in love with Meneghina. Everyone knew it then. Everyone but I.”

She looked back at me from the window and could see readily enough that I found the idea completely ludicrous that someone had actually been in love with la Befana. “She was quite good-looking when she was younger, before she almost died—along with so many others that winter—from the smallpox. And she
played like an angel. You will see,
figlia
—time leaves its mark on everyone. The marks we can see and the marks we can’t see. But no one goes unscathed.”

“Please, Sister—” I burst out. “I beg you to look in the
libro della scaffetta
for me. Find my name and whatever is written about my state when I was found. And whether there is any hint about who I am.”

My heart was beating so hard that I could hardly breathe.

Sister Laura reached out her hand and touched me, softly, raising my face up so that I had to meet her gaze.

“There is nothing about you in the book of the
scaffetta
. I have looked there.”

My whole heart told me that she was lying. I hated her in that moment. I hated her for being so selfish and smug and unfair. It was worse because she pretended to love me. I pushed her hand away. “How can that be? Information on every child is recorded.”

“And yet there is no record for you, Anna Maria.”

The anguish I felt then welled up in my eyes. “You know who my mother is—you give my letters to her. Or else you’ve made me live a lie!”

She looked as if I had struck her. “I am not the courier for your letters. You must trust me, Anna Maria.”

“You speak of trust—and yet you won’t trust me! How can you know what you know and not tell me? Even la Befana seems to know who my parents are! How can it be right that everyone knows but me?”

She held me by both shoulders and looked straight at me with her clear blue eyes. “You should stop asking and stop seeking. There are some things that are better left unknown.”

I stared right back at her. “Are they murderers, then, my parents? Is my mother a whore?”

She winced and yet she hung on tight to me—so tight, in fact,
that she was hurting me. When she spoke, she spoke with difficulty. “Trust me—you have to stop looking for them!”

I wriggled out of her grasp. “I will never trust you again!”

“How you try my patience, child! There is nothing written about you in the book of the
scaffetta!
” She took a deep breath then and smoothed the fabric of her robes. I heard the whisper of the silken petticoat beneath them. It sounded like the hiss of a snake to me.

When she looked at me again, her face was once again composed. “You ought not to assume that you know the truth based solely on what you see before your eyes. I suggest that you get to your class, Anna Maria, before you earn yourself a bigger punishment than you have already.”

N
ot long afterward, the Prioress called me into her office.

“Anna Maria,” she said, looking up from a stack of papers on her desk and removing the spectacles that had been made for her in Switzerland, a gift from the Grand Inquisitor. She looked at me for a long time after I had curtseyed. “Sit down, child.”

As a general rule, the Prioress only meted out bad news. I braced myself for whatever she was about to say, reviewing in my mind all the rules I had broken lately.

“Are you aware, Signorina, that every one of your teachers has nominated you for promotion to the
coro?
”

I shook my head.