Vivaldi's Virgins (14 page)

Rosalba’s sister took notes and made sketches as the painter went from girl to girl, turning our heads this way and that to catch the light, all the time saying kind things, even to the plainest among us. She had us bare our arms and lifted the cloth draped over our throats to better see our bosoms. And even as she did this, she looked into each girl’s eyes and seemed to greet the person inside, so that each of us, I’m quite sure, felt a surge of love for her, and hoped we would be chosen.

“Such beautiful girls, each of you worthy of a goddess,” she said in a clear voice so that everyone could hear her.

After conferring with her sister, and then conferring with the king, Rosalba held her hand out to Giulietta—Giulietta with her fair skin and full breasts and her cascade of chestnut-colored hair and pale green eyes, dilated now, as all of ours were, by the belladonna.

“Perhaps,” said the artist, leading Giulietta closer to the grille, “perhaps this is our Diana.”

Of course I felt a pang of envy—how could I not? But there was also a part of me that was very happy for Giulietta, and I vowed to ask her to question the artist in my stead—to find out how she had managed to climb to a place of such prominence and independence in a world in which an unmarried woman so rarely has either.

And then there was a thump, and we all of us turned and gasped to see Marietta fallen in a faint.

Her face was too deathly pale for her to have merely been making a last-minute bid for the artist’s attention. I dropped to my knees to aid her, helping to lift her head and shoulders and loosening her clothes. Opening her eyes, Marietta looked at us with
an expression of horror. And then she vomited all over herself and several of us as well.

You can imagine, I am certain, the embarrassment and disorder that ensued.

I was asked to take Marietta to the infirmary. Walking with my arm around her waist to help support her, I expressed my concern and asked her how she felt, but she only shook her head, and I let her be. On our way, we met Sister Laura, who went ahead of us to make sure the doctor was on hand.

In the examination room, Marietta begged me to wait with her, and Sister Laura said I might. A nurse fetched a basin of water and fresh robes for both of us.

“Your color is better now,” Sister Laura told her. But Marietta, her green eyes full of tears, merely turned her head away.

“It is not a comment on your beauty,” I said, stroking her hand. “You’re just as pretty as Giulietta—but no doubt the painter has a scheme of color in mind that is better fit by Giulietta.”

Marietta only shook her head and murmured, “You know nothing of the world, Anna Maria.” I felt unjustly hurt by her words, and pulled my hand away.

The doctor’s assistant came in and I was told to leave while the doctor examined Marietta—but Sister Laura and I both stayed nearby, outside the door. The assistant emerged and told me to fetch the Prioress.

The Prioress dismissed me as soon as I’d delivered my message.

Our rehearsal had been canceled for the artist’s inspection, and there was another hour before our lesson. And so I took my violin off to my window and turned to my music for help in hearing my feelings. As always, the music was large enough to hold everything I poured into it—all my questions, all my uncertainty, all my fears.

Oh, Mother, we fool not only the world but also ourselves with the masks we wear!

Giulietta came to call me to the lesson, and we held hands as we walked down the hall.

“Marietta is to be married!” she whispered to me.

“But why?” Even at this late hour, I hoped to make it untrue.

“Because she’s pregnant, of course!”

As soon as she said the words, I recognized the veil I had put up inside myself. With shame and self-loathing, I realized that I had known without letting the knowledge through. And I felt the burden of guilt again—for abandoning Marietta to her foolish impulse. And for failing to see what was before my eyes.

Mother, I beg you to pray for Marietta and for the child she will bear. Pray that she will find a wealth of love and strength and kindness such that she has never known before. And pray for me, that I might in future have the clarity of mind to recognize the Truth and live by its light.

With love and humility,
Anna Maria

P
erhaps someday a woman composer of surpassing skill will be able to achieve the equivalent of what Rosalba has done—to live as an independent woman in
la Serenissima
, without either a husband or an institution to protect her. But for those of us who live in relationship to our instruments, rather than directly in relationship with God—who interpret rather than create—no such path will ever be possible. How can it be, when only cloistered women are allowed to perform? It is one of the great injustices of this fair city. And it has made me dream sometimes of other cities—of London and Paris and Vienna, where, I’ve heard, female instrumentalists have actually been
welcomed, from time to time, on the performance stage.

And yet how could I ever leave Venezia? When I think such thoughts, I think of Giulietta, who wasn’t even alone and yet perished in poverty and pain.

I was called to the Prioress’s office the very next afternoon after writing that letter. Marietta was seated there. La Befana, her face nearly purple, hovered over her. Sister Laura sat at a side desk, taking notes.

“Anna Maria,” said the Prioress in not an unkind tone of voice, “Maestra Meneghina has told us that you may be able to help us sort out a mystery here.”

I stole a look at Marietta. She hadn’t slept in the dormitory that night—none of us had seen her since the gossip about her had begun its rounds.

She looked much as she had the day before, of a greenish cast, and I wondered if she was going to vomit again.

“I am at your service, Reverend Mother.”

La Befana broke in, “Did Marietta or did she not meet a man in the woods on the day of our outing to Torcello?”

I looked at Marietta again. But she looked as if she cared not a whit what I said.

“Anna Maria, please,” said the Prioress. “Answer Maestra Meneghina’s question.”

I said a quick prayer. “Marietta and I went into the woods together,” I began, trying to remember the exact wording of the tale I had told la Befana that day in the tower. “I was ill—and I asked her to leave me.”

“Yes, we’ve heard that version of the story already,
figlia mia
.” The Prioress folded her hands, waiting for me to say more.

Marietta had begun to weep silently. They were real tears—but there was something in her voice I distrusted when she spoke
to me. “Tell them!” she whimpered. “I am undone unless they believe me.”

“There was a man,” said the Prioress. “Would you recognize him, Anna Maria, if you saw him again?”

“Yes,” I answered—and I was sure I would. “The gentleman’s looks were very striking.”

La Befana pounced on this. “So you admit you lied!”

The Prioress motioned for her silence. “We will deal with that later,” she said. Then she turned her gaze to Marietta. “Be careful what you say, child. Your future, as well as the future of many others, will rest upon your answer.”

All eyes were on Marietta—and I thought how, even in the depths of her difficulties, she looked happy now, here at the center of everyone’s breathless attention. “Who is the baby’s father, child?”

Marietta raised her eyes to Heaven, and I wished the painter could have seen her face in that moment, because it was a worthy model for the Holy Virgin herself. She took a deep breath and then looked at each one of us in turn before speaking. “He is the second son of Andrea Foscarini.” The words were no sooner out of her mouth than Sister Laura let out a little cry and slumped to the floor.

“Such a plague of fainting!” said the Prioress. “Anna Maria, fetch the doctor!”

Marietta and la Befana were both gone by the time I came back with the doctor. Through the half-open door, I saw Sister Laura, paler than usual, sitting in her chair again, sipping a glass of wine. I heard the Prioress say, “We shall see!” before the doctor knocked on the door and betrayed our presence.

That night I was called down to the
parlatorio
by Maestra Evelina, who put her arm through mine on the stairway. “Such a lot
of excitement, Anna Maria!” she whispered in a manner just as companionable as if she were not a teacher but one of us—which she was until she was confirmed as a
maestra
the year before. “Giulietta has permission from the governors to pose half naked for the painter. And Marietta is either to be married or sent away in shame, depending on what you say.”

Her words stopped me dead. I turned to her. “But I can’t—I won’t be the one to decide poor Marietta’s fate!”

“Oh, Annina!” she said, “Marietta’s fate was decided long ago. All you have to do is tell the truth.”

“But what if…” I stammered, “what if the fate she’s meant to have rests on the necessity of a falsehood?”

“You mustn’t lie,
cara,
or else you’ll put your immortal soul in peril!”

My head ached suddenly. “I must go to Confession.”

“But then again,” said Evelina musingly, “if we tarry—if, for instance, for the good of your immortal soul, we were to sit on the stairs here a while and I were to catechize you—” She took my hand and pulled me down beside her, and put her arm around me.

We were sitting thus, talking of this and that, when la Befana came storming to the base of the stairs. “Hurry up! What are you doing? They are there already. They have seen her!”

She hustled us into the
parlatorio
, where Marietta stood unveiled and looking well pleased with herself and uncannily pretty.

I was given into the hands of the Prioress, who walked me up close to the grille.

Andrea Foscarini stood there. As one of our greatest patrons and a distinguished member of the Board of Governors for as long as I had been at the Pietà, his face was well known to me.

A younger man—although still not a very young man, nor even
one as handsome as his father—stood beside him, grinning in an unbecoming way. I heard him say the word
bella.

The Prioress let me have a long look, even though I knew at first glance that the man was not the one I had seen waiting in the woods for Marietta. There was no mistake about it. And yet he looked delighted with her. Would he be pleased enough or foolish enough to lend his name and fortune to another man’s bastard? And I realized that, of course, this was what Marietta had planned all along, step by step, and I was in awe of her cunning and cleverness, and frightened of her utter lack of fear.

“Well?” the Prioress asked me, in a voice barely above a whisper. “Is that the man you saw in the woods?”

I
AM QUITE SURE
that San Pietro will shake his head and turn me away when my immortal soul asks for entry at the gates of Heaven. There is too much stacked against me. I could have done everything I’ve done and still gained entrance if I had the will or even the opportunistic turn of mind that would groom me for repentance. But there is only one act of mine for which I truly feel remorse—and that was an act of ignorance rather than intention.

No—when I think of who my companions will be in Hell, I feel rather glad that I will be going there. It will be filled with those I most well and truly loved.

In the moment that I understood Marietta’s plan, I was determined to help see it fulfilled. I looked a long time at Tomasso Foscarini. I looked into his foolish blue eyes and I knew that he would make an excellent husband for her. He was the second son of one of Venezia’s premier families. He did not look very smart. But Marietta, I felt quite sure, would be smart enough for both of them.

I spoke slowly, as if after careful deliberation. “Yes, Signora. That is the man.”

I felt the gentle touch of a hand laid upon my arm and turned to see Sister Laura. “This is an important matter,” she said in hushed but urgent tones, “of consequence to more than just Marietta.”

I met her eyes, and I felt an upwelling of love for her. She was
far too pretty to be buried here in her nun’s habit, and far too kind not to have had the chance to have children of her own. I remember wondering if she had been a younger sister, too—someone for whom her family could afford the bequest required by a convent for a bride of Christ, but not the forever-inflating dowry required by the nobility of Venezia. Only the very wealthiest families—or the most foolishly romantic men—will make an offer of marriage to a girl or woman who comes without money.

These days, more than ever, a girl’s dowry is the most important thing about her. Families who lose their fortunes gambling at the Ridotto can establish themselves once more through a well-dowered daughter-in-law. First-born sons are auctioned off to the highest bidders among the fathers of such girls.

Lately the price has soared so high that hardly anyone at all among the gentry can afford to get married. The noble houses of
la Serenissima
are stuffed full with the aging bachelor sons of greedy, profligate, and desperate fathers, and the convents are filled with girls who have been placed there against their will.

Not for the first time, I wondered what it was that allowed Sister Laura to avoid the bitterness that poisoned the lives of Sister Giovanna and la Befana.

Sister Laura’s eyes, when she looked at me, were filled with all the tenderness of a teacher for her favorite protégée.

I placed my hand on hers. “I know,” I said—although I knew nothing then except that Marietta would be honor-bound to help me if I helped her now. And that she would be able to help me more if she lived outside the walls of the Pietà.

La Befana stepped between us. “Think carefully, my girl. Think long and hard about what happens to liars!”

I wish I could remember the look, if any, that passed between la Befana and Sister Laura in that moment. I know their eyes must have met—and I would give a lot now to have seen the look
in them. But my mind was fully occupied in turning over and over again the decision I felt could gain me so much and yet would cost me so much, too. I remember thinking that I would rather go to Hell than betray my friend and please my greatest enemy all in one fell swoop.

I turned to the Prioress. “That is the man, Signora, the same man I saw with Marietta on the island.”

I
saw Marietta only once more before she found a way to end her pregnancy and became a bride.

It was a season for brides. Our thirty-six-year-old
figlia privilegiata
, Madalena Rosso, finally succeeded in getting permission from the governors to marry the oboe teacher, Lodovico Erdmann, late of the Pietà. He was some nine years her junior, and not even a Catholic till he converted for her. Duke Cosimo III interceded with the Doge to grant a dispensation. The unlikelihood of such a marriage—and the fact that it had actually taken place in the church of Santa Maria della Salute, and we’d seen Madalena in her bridal gown beneath our windows—filled all of us with a weird restlessness, a sudden belief that perhaps anything was possible.

It was also the season of my first blood. I was prepared for it; I had even been impatient for it. But I hated the mess of it when it finally came. I stripped the sheets, too embarrassed to leave them for the
conversa
, and unwilling, anyway, to sleep on the soiled bedclothes until the day arrived when she came to clean our dormitory. Sister Laura, who was the
settimaniera
that week, gave me permission readily enough to go down to the linen room to get a clean set of bedclothes.

I had been there only rarely since becoming an
iniziata
in the
coro
so many years before. The linen room is next to the laun
dry, which is peopled by the
figlie
of the
comun
. Walking past the great bubbling vat of lye where the soap is made, and through the steam from the washtubs where a hundred red-faced girls stood scrubbing and bleaching, I remembered how the girls of the
coro
looked to me when I was a girl of the
comun
.

One takes the twists and turns of one’s own pathway pretty much for granted until confronted with the paths one might have taken if Fate and Fortune had been less kind. What was it that kept me from such a life of drudgery but a certain accidental affinity for music?

I shielded my eyes as I walked past the furnaces where the irons were heated. And then I saw Paolina, our spy for the lottery, puffing and sweating over a stack of smartly creased linens.

“Signorina Anna Maria!” she said to me, then cried out as she burned her finger.

“Signorina Paolina,” I answered, not wanting her to be more courtly to me than I was to her. “Forgive me if I startled you.”

“I never see you here.”

“I’ve come for clean sheets for my bed.”

She looked at me slyly. “
Congratulazioni, cara!
You are a woman now.”

“A woman with a belly that feels as if it’s made of lead.”

“
Poverina!
Here—” She passed her iron over the towel again. “Put this under your chemise! Apart from time, heat is the only thing that ever helps.”

I looked around, lifted up my skirts and placed the warm towel inside my clothes. “You are the best of girls, Paolina.”

She looked over her shoulder. “I’d best get back to work.” And then she added, as I turned to walk away, “The oratorio was so beautiful, Signorina. And your playing! It was like being in the presence of angels.”

It was my turn to blush and duck my head. When I looked up again, I saw Marietta through a swirling mist of steam.

She was flanked by two
cariche
, the
dispensiera
and the assistant prioress. With a languid air, she was indicating with either a nod or a shake of her head which linens she wanted. All the ones she nodded at were stacked in a large chest at her feet. Our eyes met.

The
cariche
had their backs to me. Marietta suddenly fanned herself, and I could see her miming that she wanted to sit down. They left her there, presumably while they went off to fetch water or a doctor.

The moment she was alone, Marietta beckoned me. “Faster, Annina!
Più veloce!
” Then, jumping up and clasping me in her arms, she wept real tears. “I thought I would never have the chance to thank you.”

I did not return her embrace. Did she think that a few tears and a thank-you were compensation for the peril in which I’d placed my immortal soul by lying for her?

“You will have the chance to thank me soon.”

“Yes, when I am married—”

“No—before then!” I think my tone surprised her. “Send word to me when you know where you’ll be confined.”

“I know already—San Francesco della Vigna.”

“Good—listen carefully. A young nobleman pawned a golden locket not too long ago at the Banco Giallo. Find out his name!”

“
Cara,
I’ll be in a convent!”

“A convent filled with the aunts and sisters of such men, who have nothing better to do than keep abreast of their news.”

Marietta looked thoughtful. “I’ll make friends among the nuns and find out what I can.”

The
cariche
were coming back. “Only use a messenger who can be trusted. And, Marietta—” I squeezed her hand. “Stay safe! I can’t wait to see your baby!”

When I turned away from her, she had tears in her eyes.

People say terrible things about Marietta Foscarini, but only some of them are true. She will do—and has done—anything to get what she wants. But she will do the same for those few she counts as her closest friends. And it’s untrue that she doesn’t feel pain for the pain she causes. She does—she’s just very good at keeping it hidden.

I walked straight up to the
dispensiera
, curtseyed, and told her that I’d been sent by Sister Laura to fetch clean linens for my bed.

ANNO DOMINI
1710

Dearest Mother,

I write to you today not on stolen music paper or from one of the jail cells, but rather from my own room. Sister Laura has given me my own supply of paper, ink, and quills. On my birthday—or, rather, on the day we’ve always called my birthday—she gave me sealing wax and a seal stamped with my initials: AMV.

I pretended that it was you who gave me the seal and sealing wax and kissed me on my forehead.

Do you not think that it is odd for a young woman to have the name of an instrument in place of a family name? Was I made, then, in the workshop of a violin maker? (Even if I had been, I would still have been given
his
family name.)

I have been left much to myself lately. Claudia is still away in Saxony. Giulietta, accompanied by Sister Giovanna, goes every day to sit for
la Rosalba.
A gondola comes to call for them in the morning. From my window, I watch them float out from the
rio
toward the Grand Canal.

Every night Giulietta slips into my bed and tells me all about her day. She says she hopes the painting of Diana will never be finished.

Rosalba’s house is in the Calle di Ca’ Centanni. She is attended there by her old mother, who has a lapis lazuli box she keeps filled with fresh-baked gingerbread for everyone who crosses the painter’s threshold.

There are only females in the
palazzo:
Rosalba’s sister, Signorina Angela, who is engaged to be married to the painter Antonio Pellegrini (whom she calls her
burattino).
And the other sister we saw on the day Rosalba came here, Giovanini, whom everyone calls Neneta.

They are all short of stature, so that Giulietta says that she feels like an Amazon among them. Rosalba’s family calls the painter
la putela
—for she is the very shortest of them all. She starts the day in high-heeled shoes that make her taller, but always kicks them off after an hour or two of standing at her easel.

Everything is beautiful there, and the place is filled with sunlight. There’s a landscape on one wall that shows the countryside of France—a gift of his own work by the painter Watteau. The studio has a spinet, where Rosalba sits sometimes and plays while Giulietta—who gets pins and needles from sitting so long—walks around the room.

They talk then, just as naturally as if they had known each other for years instead of days. It turns out that Rosalba worked as a lace maker, plying her mother’s trade, until the age of eighteen. And then she met a French artist, Monsù Jean, who taught her to paint miniatures on ivory and vellum. He broke her heart when he left Venezia to return to France with a trunkful of lace for his bride-to-be.

For her first portrait, painted for a friend, Rosalba was paid in two pairs of gloves and two perfumed sachets. For the head of Diana, it is widely rumored, she will receive a king’s ransom of twenty-five
Luigi!

Every day, Neneta dresses Giulietta’s hair. She sits her on a
wrought metal stool with a striped damask cushion at Rosalba’s dressing table, where, among the paints and perfume bottles, the artist keeps a brace of pistols.

Rosalba also has a violin, the gift of Francesco Gobetti from the workshops of Matteo Goffriller. How I would love the chance to play it!

The king has twice looked in on these proceedings, each time in a different disguise—once dressed up as a ladies’ maid, and then the second time as a Hussar. Giulietta says that he’s wonderfully vain, spending as much time admiring himself in the mirror as checking on the progress of the painting. Sometimes an apprentice comes to help mix the colors, a young Veneziano named Giambattista Tiepolo. But he is not allowed in the studio while Giulietta is posing, although she has caught glimpses of him looking at her through a half-open door.

Rosalba has instructed Giulietta to dream the daydreams of a goddess and thus infuse her features with the right expression for Diana.

Giulietta says that she sits there and thinks of love and the terrible price it exacts of those who fall under its spell. She thinks of Actaeon, happening upon her as she bathes naked in the sacred pools of Arcady. In the moments before Actaeon is turned into a stag and devoured by his own hunting dogs, Giulietta imagines a kiss between the goddess and the hunter—a single kiss so divine that Actaeon will gladly pay for it with his life.

Sometimes the hunter’s lips stray to Diana’s naked shoulders, and his hands, smelling of the forest, fall upon the goddess’s jasmine-scented breasts.

When Giulietta ends these stories, we both lie awake, though wordless, in the night that is still but for the lapping of the water outside, the sound of our breathing, and the occasional song of a gondolier.