Hidden Voices (26 page)

When I first step into the kitchen, Signora is busy putting something in the small oven built into the bricks around the fire. She jumps back on seeing me, bids me
buon giorno,
takes a plate and starts to fill it with what she had prepared much earlier. There are cheeses and warm breads, a bowl of fruit from trees that touch the house. She pours a special tea from rose hips that I’ve grown to like. This time she fills a large cup for herself and sits across from me.

“So,” she says at last, circling the cup with her hands to warm them, “how have you been amusing yourself without Catina?”

“Oh,” I say, “it has not been hard. I roam about. Sometimes I help the boy who owns the cow.”

“Alessandro?”

“Yes.” I do not say his name, suddenly afraid he can be taken from me if it should escape my lips.

“How did you meet?”

“Catina and I. We watched him milk one day.” The half-truth comes so easily.

“And now that Catina is gone?”

“He is good company. I stay out of his way.”

“As well you should. He’s here to work, you see. You’re here to breathe the fresh air and get well. You must not distract him from his duties. It’s how he earns enough to keep the cow.”

I had not thought of that, that he has duties for which he is paid.

“I only try to help.”

“Well then, you can help me. Today I bake the bread for the entire week. The kneading is the hardest part. A pair of extra hands will be a boon.”

“I . . . I never baked before.”

“It isn’t hard,” she says, and hands me a rough apron I must double at the waist to fit around me.

“With the two of us working,” she continues, “we may be finished by the afternoon.”

It is in fact the longest morning of my life, and doesn’t really end at noon, as she had promised. My hands ache from the constant kneading and squeezing and pounding of the vast amounts of dough. My forearms feel as if they have been pummeled. In truth, it was not hard to learn, but it was harder to endure than any practice sessions back-to-back, and so much less enjoyable.

“There,” says Signora Ricci at last, filling a basin in which to wash the flour from my hands and the dough from underneath my fingernails. The loaves are stacked up neatly by the hearth. She’s managed somehow to prepare a hearty soup of vegetables in oxtail broth, and I collapse before it like an animal before its only meal in weeks. Afterward, she lets me take my ease out in the sun, where I fall fast asleep still sitting on a chair made from a tree with all its bark.

I do not know the hour that I waken to a shower of dry leaves upon my head. Confused at such a happening in this growing season, I squint into the sunlight with one hand above my eyes. There, a dark shape in silhouette, stands Alessandro, smiling at me with great mischief in his face.

Before my wits have awakened with me, Signora is outside the cottage door and greeting Alessandro with much affection, her plump arms encircling him as if he is her errant child.

“I came to find what happened to your boarder here,” says Alessandro, “and to bring the milk,” he adds, handing a pail of it to Signora.

“Luisa helped me with the bread,” she says, as if it had been my idea. “I’ll make a baker of her yet before she has to leave.”

Leave.
Why is she even using that word? I have been here such a short time. I cannot leave. I can never leave Alessandro.

“While I had thought to turn her into a milkmaid,” says Alessandro.

“And I have decided,” I say, finally collecting myself, “to remain a musician. Wait here.”

I fetch my mandolin and sit back down again upon the scratchy chair and play for these two new people in my life, but I do not sing. I must be careful not to sing, for then Signora will believe that I am cured.

With great concentration I direct my thoughts to Alessandro, the only recent witness of my gift returning.
Don’t tell,
I beg of him in silence.
Please. You must not tell.

A
NOTHER LETTER FROM LUISA
has arrived at last. It is so near the end of summer that I thought she would be home by now. In her absence, I am eager for a letter nonetheless and save it for a time when I am in the nursery, alone with all the little babes. It is their time to nap, and I can sit and rock and read without disturbance.

No
Dearest friend
again. But no matter. There are other things about this missive that do not cheer me in the least. It seems a country boy has claimed her heart. What future can there be for her in that? And at the very point that her glorious voice has been returned to her. Also she has sworn me to keep secret something I would sooner shout to one and all. Was not such a cure the reason for her
villeggiatura
? Shouldn’t she return to us at once? Should not Father Vivaldi be the first to know? But it will be just as she wishes. For a while. I will in fact destroy the letter, tear it into little bits, to keep it from the prying eyes of Silvia.

I am lost in this troubling conundrum when Father stops me on my way to a sectional in chapel. My head is down, and he must reach out and put an arm across my path, an action that indeed arrests my woolgathering.

“We’ll try again,” he says most earnestly.

“What do you mean?”

“I’ve composed a new concerto for your wily instrument. We’ll make another stab at landing you
a paramour.”

“Signore.” I laugh. “Is there no end to this? Must I go angling for a fish I do not wish to catch?”

“I have my orders, child. If it were up to me, I’d much prefer to keep you here, brandishing your bow, singing your harmonies, and spoiling the
bambine.
”

He hands me pages that have not yet seen the copyist. His mysterious markings still adorn the margins. The many ornaments denote another aspect of his style that anyone would recognize.

“We won’t debut this for another month or more. So take your time.”

“Time is what I do not have right now,” I tell him, but in truth, I am quite pleased that he has written something just for me again, and I make promises within myself to learn it well and cause him to be proud of both the work and me.

He climbs the stairs into the loft that is my destination as well, where there’s a sectional for altos with Maestro Scarpari.

“Children,” Father says when he arrives there out of breath. He claps his hands and gasps for air a moment. “You must bear with me this afternoon. Maestro has been called away.”

Anna Maria goes at once to the continuo, ready to accompany our efforts, while Father wields his small baton and taps the music stand. It is his own composition that we sing, a short cantata with some places that are difficult where melody and harmony cross and sound most dissonant. The contralto solo opens this new work and is sung legato by Brigitta, but at the
tutti,
Father jumps about and shouts,
“Agitato, Signorine! Molto agitato!”
He makes us try the passage many times before he moves ahead to the next section, which is marked
dolcissimo
but which he urges us to sing
ancora espressivo.
At the
marcato,
he asks for
un poco allegretto,
which is not marked within the score. We please him, however, at the passage marked
sforzando
and are beginning to feel in synchrony with him and with the music when he suddenly becomes the true violinist, directing us to “sing with longer bows,” while rising on his toes and gesturing into the air. “That’s right, Signorine,” he calls out to us. “Much longer bows.”

He asks me later if I’ve had any new letter from Luisa, and I tell him yes. But when he also asks about her voice, I say as little as I can and feign no knowledge of it. I very much regret deluding him. Is someone truly sworn who does not wish to be and has not herself agreed to it? Whom can I ask who will not make me give the truth away?

It’s not until I’m passing by the kitchen that I see an opportunity. Catina sits upon a stool and watches Cook. The child’s so thin, it looks as if she’ll slip right off her perch into the pot of soup. Her face is ashen and her tiny body stooped. Her raspy breathing colors all her speech. It doesn’t stop her constant questioning, however, which seems to drive poor Cook a little mad.

“I told you, dear,” she tells Catina, “the water has to boil before you put the pasta in.”

“It takes so long,” Catina says. “Isn’t there a better way?”

“Just watch me, and you’ll learn how it is done.”

On seeing me, Cook takes her chance.

“Anetta,” she says, “Catina here is getting tired. Take her out into the air a bit. Go help her find some marjoram and thyme to dress the fowls for supper.”

“I don’t know one herb from the next,” I tell her, but she winks at me and gives silent permission to return with anything at all.

“Just go,” she says.

We start out for the little patch in back that is abloom with leafy things that must be herbs and gated by a squat white fence — to keep the rats away, is my guess. It’s well beyond the lines for drying clothes and up against a higher fence along the street.

At first Catina seems quite happy to be outside in the air, but at a grassy place beneath the trees she drops to her knees.

“I’m very tired now, Anetta. Will you pick the herbs?”

She curls up on her side and plucks at dandelions. I sit beside her and stretch out my legs.

“What about Cook?” she asks.

“I’ll get the herbs she wants. I’ll do it in a while.”

For quite some time we stay this way and do not talk. I think she may, in fact, be falling off to sleep when I decide to whisper, “Today I had another letter from Luisa.”

She looks up from her prone position, squashing all the dandelion pieces in her hand. “I’m glad that she could stay in that nice place. It was so beautiful.”

“She says there is a boy there. Alessandro. What of him?”

“I saw him once. He keeps a cow.”

“And did Luisa sing to him when playing on her mandolin?”

“I never heard Luisa sing at all the while that I was there. She played sometimes, but did not sing. Did not Luisa tell you that?”

She turns upon her back and looks up at the sky. I pick the petals from a daisy in the grass.

“The things Luisa tells me in her letters, the things that she instructs me not to tell a soul. What do you think? Am I obliged to keep her confidence?”

“Why are you asking me?”

“You have a way of speaking frankly,” I say, laughing. “As if you are an oracle.”

“I make the others angry when I’m wrong.”

“But sometimes you are right.”

“Sometimes.”

“And so. What do you think?”

“I think you do not have to keep a secret if you did not ask to have it given to you.”

“Truly?”

“And if that secret, being kept, will harm the one who trusts you with it.” She pauses to suck a clover stem. “That’s what I think.”

“Thank you,” I say, for I am stunned at just how wise she appears, this delicate young girl who seems to lately hover between earth and heaven.

It is an answer I did not expect and one that I must contemplate awhile. I have no question as to what is best for my dear friend. But if I act upon the truth of it, I stand to lose entirely the very love I seek.