Vivaldi's Virgins (18 page)

I ducked behind the balustrade. Judging by the sounds of laughter and crockery, there seemed to be a little party going on. There were some girls from the
comun
I didn’t recognize, as well as some of the teachers from the lower school—foundlings, orphans, and bastards, all of them. And in their midst I saw Silvio, passing around little cakes and bottles of wine.

I stepped out from my hiding place. “Oh Signorina,” gasped one of the girls. “Please don’t tell on us!”

Silvio had grown taller. There was something odd about his costume, and then I noticed that he was wearing a yellow cap.

He didn’t say a word to me but simply took the violin from my hands, kissed several of the girls in a most familiar way, and led me to the gondola he had waiting.

I felt all at once so happy to see him and so nervous and excited about whatever mystery awaited me at the end of this gondola ride.

Every time I started to speak—to ask him what was going on—he took my hand and hushed me.

I looked at the gondolier and then back at Silvio. “He won’t tell. He’s honor-bound not to. Isn’t that right, Signor?” The gondolier, a tall and slender man with pale blue eyes, smiled and nodded at me.

“You see, Silvio?”

“Hush!” was all he would say, though once he opened my fingers and kissed the palm of my hand.

It must be one of the most beautiful things in the whole world to sit in a gondola with someone you love in the nighttime of Venezia, hearing nothing but the dip of the oar and the whisper of bubbles, and gliding along the black, star-studded water with the grace and stateliness of a swan.

After a while, I had no more desire to speak. As if in a dream, I wished that I could sit forever side by side in that gondola with my sweet, funny friend, and that neither of us would ever have to grow older than we were just at that moment—that beautiful moment—poised between the childhood we’d already left behind and the rest of our lives, all clothed in darkness, all unknowable.

W
E PASSED THROUGH THE GATES
of the Ghetto without a word from the guard, who looked down at us and simply waved us through.

“I thought these gates were locked at night,” I said to Silvio.

“They are,” he answered me, “on every other night but this one.”

We pulled up to a mooring, and the gondolier gave us each his hand as we stepped from his boat. Silvio paid him. I clutched tight to my violin. There was a distant sound of laughter and singing, hands clapping, and feet stamping.

“What is this?” I asked Silvio.

“A festival.”

“I know of no festival today.”

Silvio gave me his usual ironic smile. “That’s because you don’t know a thing about the Jewish calendar—despite your superior education.”

“If you have something important to tell me, you exasperating boy, tell me quickly.”

“It's not what you think, Annina. At least, I think it’s not what you think. You’ve been brought to the Ghetto as a hired musician tonight.”

He pulled me along a dark alleyway toward the noise.

“What’s that horrible smell?”

“The smell of old cloth and used clothes—the smell of rags
and bones and too many people living in a small space. Here, go up these stairs.”

We walked up one crooked stairway and down another to a
campo
softly lit by oil lamps and filled with a crowd of people singing and dancing, drinking and babbling in several different languages. A bearded man wearing brightly embroidered garments was dancing with a scroll that was itself richly clothed, ornamented and bejeweled. Men, women, and children stood around him, clapping and stamping their feet.

“Behold the bridegroom!” laughed Silvio.

And then Rebekkah walked up to us. I’d never seen her look so beautiful. She was always well covered up in the capacious black cloth of a
zendaletta
or a domino when she came to call on us at the Pietà, topped by the yellow or sometimes a red
baretta
marking her as a Jew. But now her head was uncovered and she wore a well-cut gown that showed her curves, lace sleeves and a mantle of pale blue silk. She took my hands and kissed me on both cheeks. “I’m afraid the party is already well under way,” she said. And then she pulled me into the very center of the
campo
.

At the sight of me, everyone stopped singing and dancing, so that Rebekkah and I were left standing there in the silence of the night.

“Signori e signore,
” she said in Italian. “The present I promised to you, in memory of my sister Rachel and in tribute to her dream of reviving Rabbi Modena’s plans for a musical conservatory in the Ghetto, the Accademia degli Impediti.”

The people gathered round listened attentively and, it seemed to me, a bit skeptically to Rebekkah as she continued. “It is a dream of long standing that we who live here in exile can once again make music as beautiful as the music made by our ancestors. Do not forget, dear friends and neighbors, that the music now performed with such beauty and subtlety and to
such great renown in the Christian churches of Venezia”—here she nodded her head to me—“was patterned on the music of the Second Temple, music composed and performed by Jews. Do not forget—even in the conditions of squalor in which we live here, even in the daily struggle to survive—that such music is our heritage and our birthright.”

She lowered her voice, and yet everyone could have heard her even if she had whispered. “It is my honor and pleasure to present to you one of the finest young violinists in all of
la Serenissima
”—at this, she drew aside so that I stood alone in the center of the circle, clutching my violin, “Anna Maria della Pietà.”

I stood there alone, unable to tell whether the crowd was sympathetic or not to Rebekkah’s words. I saw a fierce-looking bearded man spit on the ground before turning his back and walking away. Faces followed him, and people murmured, but no one else left the circle. They stood there, looking at me as if I might suddenly grow horns or wings.

The silence lasted so long that I feared they might start throwing stones at me. All the grown men were bearded. Some of the women were richly garbed, but most of the people standing round—even the children—had careworn eyes and garments as plain and poor as my own.

One young mother, standing with her two children at the inner edge of the circle, started clapping her hands, slowly but encouragingly. A few others joined her. Someone else—another woman—let out a fainthearted cheer. And then—after an excruciating interval—lots of the people standing around started clapping and cheering.

“Play, Anna Maria!” Rebekkah shouted above the sudden noise.

I had never played before, in such a manner, standing alone at the center of a throng of strangers. I turned, looking for Silvio.

“Play, Annina!” he shouted, laughing.

“Play, Annina!” echoed a toothless old woman standing near him. And then a man’s voice from the opposite side of the circle bellowed, “Play, Annina!”

The entire crowd took up the chant, clapping in time to the words. “Play, Annina! Play, Annina!”

How could Marietta, I wondered, actually wish to find herself in just such a situation? With all my heart I longed for the blessed anonymity of the choir lofts and the grille. “What should I play?” I murmured to no one in particular, scanning the sea of faces around me until my eyes saw a shock of red hair and a pair of laughing eyes beneath them.

“Maestro?”

There he was, standing elbow to elbow with the Jews of Venezia, who grew quiet again, so that it was just as if he and I were the only ones who stood there in that moment.

I hadn’t seen him since that day I saw him with Handel. “Why not play your solo from the eleventh concerto of
L’Estro
?”

It was the latest piece he had given to me, and I’d practiced it so much in the past weeks that I knew it quite by heart.

I’ve learned since then that the way to do one’s best in such a situation, uncompromised by all the attendant fears, is to pretend that one is playing for one beloved and trusted person who knows better than anyone else in the world how to hear the music. Only then will one give every note the proper measure of sweetness and feeling. Only then will one touch the bow to the strings with the open heart and certainty and commitment required to make the music sing as if this were the first and last time that a composition fit for the ears of God would ever be played.

Vivaldi has ever been that person for me, but I only knew it for the first time that October night in the Ghetto, that night
of Simchat Torah, as I later learned, which celebrates a year of reading the first five books of the word of God in the original Hebrew, week by week, verse by verse.

I played for my teacher, just as skillfully, just as beautifully, as I was able. I closed my eyes while I played, but I saw his face before me. I saw those eyes that looked into mine when I was eight years old and discovered the musician hidden inside me, the musician I would become.

I was so focused on this vision that I was surprised, when I was done, to see the crowd of strangers gathered round me and hear their adulation, so loud that it made my ears ring.

Vivaldi walked up to me and shook my hand. “Well done, Signorina! It’s uncommonly good, don’t you think?”

The crowd was shouting for an encore. Vivaldi whipped his violin out from under his mantle. “Shall we play the largo from the first concerto?”

And thus it went for an hour or more, till Rebekkah took our hands and pulled us away through the protesting crowd to the door of a brightly lit café. “I would invite you into my own house,
Professore,
but it is against the law, and doubly so”—she nodded at me—“for the young one.”

Vivaldi took out his
gnaga
, the same model of grotesque white mask that Marietta and I had worn to the opera that night that now seemed a hundred years ago. “I must excuse myself, Signora,” he said to Rebekkah, bowing low. “I have an important meeting I must attend early tomorrow. But I cannot tell you heartily enough what a pleasure this has been for me. And, please—I hope you’ll let me help in any way I can. It is a noble enterprise to revive the tradition of
ars musica
in this place. Surely the Creator is gladdened by the sounds of beautiful music wherever it comes from.”

Rebekkah’s eyes were shining. “Thank you, Padre! Believe
me, the humble students of our own Compagnia dei Musici will forever aspire to the musical heights that were scaled here tonight.”

Looking quite happy with himself, Vivaldi turned to me. “I will see you safely to the Pietà, Signorina. But I suggest you travel
mascherata
, as I know for a fact that the Cattaveri are out in force tonight.”

Silvio pinched me. “Ouch!” I said. “No thank you, Maestro. I’m sure that Signora Rebekkah and Silvio will see that I return unharmed.”

“I will clothe her in a
zendaletta
over a domino,” Rebekkah said, “masked in a
moreta
and a
bauta
, with a three-cornered hat on her head. She will be indistinguishable from the Grand Inquisitor himself.”

“Perhaps a little shorter,” said Vivaldi. “Very well.”

“You’ll send another piece to me, Maestro?”

“Without fail, Signorina!” He put on his mask and pulled the hood of his cloak over his head so that not even the faintest part of his red hair was showing as he ducked into the shadows of the
sottoportego
and disappeared.

W
e sat down with Rebekkah in a quiet corner of the café. It was my first time in such an establishment, either within or outside the Ghetto. I looked around at the other people there, trying to find out the appropriate way to comport myself.

But it seemed a place with few rules. I was surprised to see both Jews and non-Jews there, all engaged in lively discussion. I could hear at least five different languages being spoken, besides our own. The words danced around the room like the call and response of a choir of Babylon, accompanied by an orchestra of glassware and crockery and hissing steam.

There were women there among the men, from every walk of life—and I thought then that I would give a lot to be able to move so freely in the world. I realized, too, that rules are only made in a desperate bid to prevent what is happening already and what, perhaps, is impossible to prevent entirely: there are no walls or guards or gates that can keep the people of Venezia separated from one another. After all, everyone moves together beneath their masks during the six months, all told, of Carnival.

I was but a girl of fourteen, but I realized in that hour, my first hour in a café, that the separation throughout the rest of the year is but the overture to the grander pageant of Venezia. We act out our separate parts in those months of repentance—black-clad aristocrat and yellow-hatted denizen of the Ghetto, swaggering gondolier and simpering virgin, priest and prostitute, cloistered orphan and cherished daughter of a wealthy family, man and woman of any stripe. But the months of Carnival show the truest picture of
la Serenissima
, when we can be anything we dream of and do anything we dare.

I understood that night, sitting in that cheerful cacophony, occupying three corners of a table with Rebekkah and Silvio, that this freedom was also mine: I had but to take it. It seemed at that moment to be the biggest revelation of my lifetime.

Rebekkah ordered food for us from a swarthy waiter who took not the slightest note of who I was or whether I belonged there. It was only after an exchange of pleasantries and some time spent, on my part, happily looking around me, that I remembered why I’d been brought to the Ghetto.

“
Scusi
, Signora Rebekkah,” I said, taking my first delighted sip of a frothy, fragrant drink. “You said in your note that you had information for me.”

“And she has earned her payment, wouldn’t you say so, Zietta?”

I was surprised to hear Silvio call her by this pet name—
auntie
—and to use the
tu
with her. But, then, he worked at her side every day, and she had, no doubt, become very fond of him.

“I only hope,” Rebekkah answered with a pensive smile, “that my tidings will seem a worthy payment for her extraordinary performance tonight, alongside
il Prete Rosso.
”

Silvio took my hand. “It’s about the locket, Annina.”

I looked at him quizzically. “I thought you said it wasn’t.”

“It’s not what you thought it might be—not in the slightest.” Silvio was smiling. He had—and still has—the most beautiful smile.

I waited without any of the old feeling of dread. Maybe it was the calm that came after the courage demanded by the impromptu concert with Vivaldi in the
campo
. Maybe it was my sudden sense of there being many more choices open to me than ever seemed possible before. I was still madly curious about the locket, and why Franz had been asked to give it to me. But the door I’d thought to unlock with it seemed to have suddenly swung open of its own accord.

I took another sip of the wonderful drink, savoring its smell, and then faced Rebekkah, ready for whatever she had to tell me.

Y
ou heard me speak tonight of my sister, Rachel,” she began, “may God rest her soul! She was, like you are, a musical prodigy. My mother named her for another Rachel, who sang with such beauty and became so famous that she was given free rein to go from
palazzo
to
palazzo
in her gondola, as free as any Christian, to perform for the nobles. Our Rachel, like you, was a violinist.

“By the time she was fourteen, she had learned all she could
from every music teacher in the Ghetto. Our father, who is a man of some influence, was able to use his connections to engage a priest-musician who taught violin at the Ospedale della Pietà, Don Bonaventura Spada.”

The maestro’s predecessor—I remembered the name from Sister Laura’s speech to me. He was the one who had been in love with la Befana.

“Over the years this priest became a favorite with my family. He nurtured Rachel’s talent. He listened attentively to my mother when she spoke of the Jewish mysticism she’d learned at the feet of my grandmother, who was a protégée of the great and learned Sara Copio Sullam. He earned not only his wages but also my father’s friendship. He ate at our table on the days he came to teach Rachel, and he drank our wine.