Hidden Voices (19 page)

After a while, I can’t help exclaiming over the beautiful houses along the water, with their own gondolas tied onto pilings at entrances from the canal, and over the filigreed gates and small gardens. We make up stories about who could be living in one or another, how the children in such places pass the time, what they wear on ordinary days.

When passing other gondolas, we try to see inside or wave to the gondolier. It is such great sport that I almost forget my sadness, and we are at Santa Lucia in what seems to be no time at all.

There is a market here with many stalls filled with colorful fruit and vegetables, all manner of freshly caught fish, their eyes staring dumbly, killed chickens tied together and hung by their legs. And there are many wagons. I had thought to be on the lookout for one wagon only. How will I know which one has been sent from the Ricci farm? Most are now empty but still fastened to a donkey or horse snuffling a feed bag and pawing the ground.

I try not to alarm Catina, but I see no way to make an identification among them. The gondolier puts our small valises and my guitar and mandolin upon the dock and begins his little speech to entice another passenger aboard. I can’t help thinking how Rosalba would have flirted and cajoled until he’d found our wagon for us. Left to my own devices, I have no idea where to turn, and for the first time since departing, I wish Signora had at least come with us this far.

We have been given a few florins, so I take Catina’s hand and we pass over the road to a bakery tent. We buy a small sugar cake apiece, which manages to make us so thirsty that we must then bargain for two cups of cider.

“You keep looking all around,” says Catina at last. “As if you don’t know what we’re to do next.”

I should have realized that I couldn’t pretend with this child.

“I know what I was told to do. But . . .” I begin.

“You can’t find the wagon,” she says.

“Yes, that’s right. I can’t find the wagon.”

“It should not be so difficult,” she continues, “if you look in the right place.”

“I should think that would go without saying.”

“But we aren’t in the right place. We’re in the market now. The wagons are out by the trees.”

“I was buying some time.”

“If we stay here too long, Luisa, the man from the farm will think we have never arrived.”

I had not thought of that possibility, so we quickly head back to the dock. Remaining clearly visible proves to be the best solution, because soon a large conveyance, more cart than wagon, pulls up in front of us, and a ruddy man dressed in the dark and shabby clothes of a farmer doffs a battered hat.

“Ciao,”
he calls in greeting, and uses one side of his open toothless mouth to make a clicking sound with his cheek and halt the small horse.

“You are the
signorine
from the Ospedale,
capisci
?”

“Sì,”
we both say at once.

He jumps down and swings our small trunks and my instruments into the back with great agility for one so old.

“One of you can sit up here with me,” he says, “but the other will need to sit in the back.”

“We will both sit in the back,” says Catina, and I’m glad she’s made that decision for us, as I would not have desired to sit next to such a man, smelling of earth and sweat and garlic and heaven knows what, or to travel all alone with the bounty of odd things that he transports.

“Bene,”
he says, and spreads a tattered blanket over rags and baskets of every sort. It is a lumpy place on which to sit, and the entire cart is raised in the front and tips toward the ground in the rear. To keep from sliding off, we must scoot up and put our backs against the driver’s seat — downwind of him, I fear. Otherwise there is a great freshness to the air, and I notice that Catina has not coughed during all the activity of getting settled. When we pull away from the marketplace and onto country roads, we both breathe deeply, and it is like filling our lungs with sky.

Such an expanse of it overhead, such fresh green plots of land dotted with olive and eucalyptus trees. Here and there are peaceful milk cows grazing close to the road, their calves nearby. Sometimes a few bulls in separate fields, well muscled and brawny, laze off by themselves in the sun.

For all the tranquil beauty of the countryside, it is an uncomfortable trip, bumpy and rough from start to finish. When we finally pull onto a muddy narrow lane and in front of the whitewashed farmhouse we had seen from a distance, I am filled with relief. We climb down as fast as we can and both head for the little privy we have noticed in the yard.

After this necessary duty, we return to the entrance, where a round and rosy woman stands with arms crossed over her ample stomach. The set of her lips is stern until she sees us scurrying back over the weeds and grass. Then her mouth widens slowly and reassuringly into a warm smile that seems to shimmer; she laughs and claps her plump little hands together and all but jumps up and down with excitement.

“Benvenuto,”
she exclaims over and over, opening her arms and gathering us into them as if we’re her very own children. Neither of us hesitates. It is as if we had known she would be waiting for us, as if we had always known it.

I
OPEN MY EYES
to an unfamiliar room, spare of everything but a rim of dust motes along the walls, a small old table and basin, one broken chair, and the cot on which I am lying, covered by a coarsely woven blanket with the unpleasant smell of someone else’s sweat. From a yellow cast to the pale light slanting through two high windows, I suspect it may be morning. Right away I raise a finger to my lips. They are still swollen and scabs have developed where the teeth pierced me. My clothing is torn and bloodied and damp just as I remember. And I remember everything, even wandering through the streets for hours and finally collapsing in a cluttered doorway that smelled of cat piss. The odor of it, and that of my attacker, linger on my clothing. It was not a dream. None of it was a dream.

But I have no idea how I came to this place, to this plain and dirty little room, and have no desire to arise and discover where the one door leads. A new heavy sensation — shame — keeps me prone and fills my entire body like hot lead. Am I still in Venice, somewhere in Venice? How near am I to the Ospedale? Have they sent someone to look for me? What streets do I travel to go back?

Unfamiliar voices come from somewhere in the distance, as if swaddled in gauze, and quick footsteps sound on a bare wooden stairway. I have just begun to fear what may lie beyond that door when it opens and a woman sidles in as if she hesitates to wake me. When she sees my eyes are open, she brings up the one chair and sits beside me. Her face is creased by time and weather and some merriment, I think, for at the edges of her eyes, there are these scratchy lines from laughing. But she isn’t even smiling now.

She puts a hand upon my arm that holds the blanket to me and leans in closely till she’s speaking right into my face. Her breath is strangely acrid and sweet all at one time. There is still no smile upon her thin lips.

“How are you feeling now?” she asks. “We didn’t dare to clean you up last night because, for a certain, you would have been awakened from your deep sleep. Pasquale carried you just like a little babe. You didn’t stir.”

I don’t know what to say. She must know what has happened to me then. The smell of it is about me still. Pasquale, whoever he is, must know as well. I wait for some harsh words, but they don’t come.

“Whoever did this to you is an evil man. A devil.”

The wig-maker’s assistant? Truly evil? And yet what else am I to think? I can no longer hide from the brutal truth of it or continue to court love as I did, the way it had appeared to me within the plays and all my beautiful fantasies with such smug abandon.

“I will get water and some cloths for you to clean yourself. For now, you can wear my other dress. It will not fit too well, but I can wash and mend the things you’re wearing and perhaps borrow something for a while from another musician we know who is about your size.”

“You are a musician?” I ask before I realize that I have seen her face before. A violin had been beneath the chin. The eyes, more tired than I remember, had looked out from a small mask. Up so close, the same strong hands that had fingered the strings and held the bow have crooked fingers and swollen joints.

“We play at Carnival and other festivals. My sons and I. We play to earn our bread and keep a roof — this roof — above our heads.”

“This is your house?”

“Half a narrow house, really, and we are temporary lodgers only. Three rooms, one above the other, and a stairway. Nothing more. You and I can share this bedroom.”

It is her room. And there is only one bed. Why does she speak as if I plan to stay?

“I will be leaving when I get cleaned up,” I say, getting to my feet. The room whirls a bit, but soon settles. I’m not sick, just battered and unbelievably tired, and as dirty as a lard, one of those thieves who work the streets.

“Where will you go?” she asks.

“Back to the Ospedale della Pietà, on the Riva. You must know it.”

“I thought as much. You are too refined to be from the neighborhood around here, yet you’re not dressed in the manner of royal folk. A runaway, I told Pasquale, and Salvatore, he thought so, too. Carnival, it is a time for such things.”

“It was a foolish thing to do,” I tell her.

“More foolish than you know.”

“What do you mean?”

She sighs and takes my hand. Hers is thin and knobby and not warm to the touch.

“Only that it isn’t the first time I’ve seen the likes of what happened to you. Oh, not the ravishment. But other girls have run away, thinking to find . . . whatever romantic dream they have in their foolish heads.”

Knowing that others have done the same is some comfort.

“What happened to them?’

“I don’t know for a certain. Except for one who kept hanging around our
campo.
She began to sell herself, you know, sold her favors on the street, until she took quite sick and died.”

“Did none of them go back?”

“They may have tried. The Ospedale doesn’t take back runaways.”

My heart drops, and I need to sit again to think. What does a street musician know? She hasn’t met Signora or Prioress. She doesn’t realize how fond they are of all of us. I’m sure she must be misinformed.

I tell her this, and she just shakes her head. Some tufts of hair about the ears suggest that she will soon be as gray as all the ladies who wear shawls to Mass. Will she still play her violin, I wonder, when she is stooped and really old?

“What is the instrument you play?” she asks.

“Chiefly the oboe,” I tell her, “but sometimes the continuo when it is needed, and often the mandolin and lute.”

“And do you sing?”

“Yes, of course. We all sing.”

What is she thinking?

“You can sing with us awhile until you earn enough to buy an instrument, a used but playable one, in the Piazza San Marco. It won’t take long. We can use a new and pretty face to draw the crowd and to give me a vacation.”

“How can you tell that I am pretty?” I ask, searching my swollen lips again to see if there has been some change.

“I’ll admit, you are a sight. But it came to me a little while ago that you’re the one we saw at the Piazza last Tuesday week. The one with the Signora from the Pietà and all the little girls. You watched us from your spot by the Campanile while all the others watched the puppets.”

“Yes, that was me,” I tell her. “I thought you played quite well. I thought you seemed to be having such a grand time.”

“When we don’t work hungry,” she said. “But you’ll see. We’ll make a place for you.”

“Oh, no,” I say. She still misunderstands me. “As soon as I look more presentable, I’m going back to the Ospedale. I’ve learned my lesson, don’t you see?”

“My girl,” she says, quite kindly on the one hand but rather too briskly on the other, “what more is there to say? You don’t believe me yet, but you will never be allowed to go back there.”

A rap upon the door saves me from yet another protest, as one of the young men whom I’d seen play in the Piazza, the plainer and the shorter of the two, comes into the room.

“This is Pasquale,” says the woman, “And my name is Lydia. I don’t think that I told you that before.”

“How are you feeling?” asks Pasquale in a much larger voice than I would have thought belonged to someone of his size.

My face must be as scarlet as my vest, for he has seen me in my complete disgrace, even carried me and my soiled clothing in his arms. I cannot look at him.

“I came to tell you that Salvatore is heating up the goat stew for midday meal. It’s very good.”

Lydia turns to me. “You’ll feel much better when you’ve eaten,” she says. And then she adds, “What is your name?”

I do not tell her at once. It is the only thing I have to give away, and I’m not ready to do it.

“It’s all right,” Pasquale intervenes. “A woman should have secrets.”

A woman. I am still a child. What happened to me makes me feel this even more. I will go back to the Ospedale and throw myself against the skirts of Prioress, beg for her mercy, never leave her side. But first I must use the water this lady, this Lydia, has just poured into the basin. I must become presentable.