Vivaldi's Virgins (2 page)

Maestra Bianca ran down the stairs in her nightclothes and told the
portinara
to unbar the door and light her way to the
scaffetta.

And that is how I entered the Pietà—first stuffed into the wall of the church, like a swallow’s nest. And then plucked out and
carried upstairs by Maestra Bianca, her famous golden hair unloosed, shouting so that her voice echoed in every archway and corner, waking all the foundlings: “A baby! God has brought us another baby!”

But it was not God who brought me to the Ospedale della Pietà.

I have tried to imagine it a thousand times, tried to will myself to remember. When I close my eyes and get very still, I can feel the dip of the gondola as the gondolier holds your elbow and you step across onto land. Usually you are clothed in black like a proper Venetian noblewoman, and you are masked (as is the gondolier), because it is one of the months of Carnival. At other times, when I’ve been unable to sleep at night, you have been a washerwoman or a courtesan or a Jewess from the Ghetto who wished for a musical life for her child. Sometimes it is not your foot that dips the gondola, but the gouty foot of a cardinal shod in red silk. Or the clodhopper of a farmer’s son, terrified because he has been in Venezia only once before and feels sure the gondolier is planning to rob him, hit him over the head with an oar, and drop him into the canal. Sometimes it is four brothers and five sisters, all younger than I am now, who pull back the cloth that covers my head. They kiss me, one by one, passing me from youngest to eldest so that in the end my face is wet with their tears, my family’s tears.

Fourteen years ago, you held me in your arms and gazed down upon me. I like to think that you looked down on me with love, glad that I was born.

When I play well, I play for you. My greatest wish is that someday, at the end of a performance, I will see a beautiful woman rise up from the audience. (I always imagine you as the most beautiful woman there, even though I myself am not beautiful.) There are
tears shining in your eyes as you hold out your hand to me. “Anna Maria dal Violin,” you say in a voice both sweet and low, “it is time to go home.”

The bells are ringing for Vespers. I will write to you again when Sister Laura lets me. I will hold you close to my heart till then.

Your daughter,
Anna Maria dal Violin,
student of Maestro Vivaldi

ANNO DOMINI
1737

T
HE PRIORESS ANNOUNCED
the governors’ decision today: I’ve been named
maestra di coro
—concert mistress and leader of the orchestra at the Pietà.

Would that I could reach out to my younger self, put my arms about that desperate girl and whisper, “Anna Maria,
sii coraggiosa—
be brave!”

Her letters—my letters—now yellowed with age, are spread out before me on my writing table, a beautiful piece of furniture inlaid with rosewood and mother-of-pearl, commissioned from a master of his craft by the Doge and given as a present to me.

I haven’t looked at them for a long time, these missives spilling over with my girlish hopes and fears and needs. But today, after the announcement at dinner, I took them out of their silver casket lined with pale blue silk and untied the darker blue ribbon their recipient used to bind them together so many years ago.

I have in my possession not only the letters, but also the part-book containing all the violin solos Vivaldi ever wrote for me: twenty-eight of them, plus two for the organ. All are marked at the top, “
Per Signorina Anna Maria
,” with his notes scribbled throughout and little changes we made inked on fresh scraps of music paper, carefully stitched over the altered passages.

Sometimes he and I were the only ones who could play the fast sixteenth notes in the ledger lines. He would mark them, just for me—“
Più allegro che possibile,
” faster than possible. The book, bound in soft brown leather and stamped in gold with my name, is the only token I have of him. It is worth more to me than all the gold and jewels of any noble house of Venezia.

He treats me as a friend now and has even confided in me more than I would wish. But during my girlhood there was so much more that I wanted from him than he was ever willing to give. I craved his special notice—which, in all fairness, he often gave me. But I also wanted his protection from those who wished me harm—from la Befana and, in those days, Bernardina.

When the maestro was traveling, we were often given over to Maestra Meneghina, who had a moustache darker than Vivaldi’s and hit us when we didn’t play to her satisfaction. We called her la Befana, for the ugly witch who rides her broom to give either presents or lumps of coal to children at Epiphany.

I used to wonder at the incontrovertible fact that la Befana could not have come into the world as a bitter old woman, but must have been a young girl at some point, not all that different from any of my peers among the
figlie di coro
. It made me shudder to think about it—because if she was once young like me, then I could end up old and horrible like her.

Children are incapable of believing that they will ever really grow old. It’s their special trick of believing only in the present. It’s a trick I would love to learn to recapture. But old people, as far as I’ve been able to see from those around me here who are even older than I am—old people live only in the past.

I suppose I’m showing my age by writing these notes at all. The past! We are either dwelling in it or fooling ourselves into believing that we are still as young as we were then. Growing old
still seems to me to be something that happens to others but will never happen to me.

Giulietta and I would talk about it sometimes—and we would always end up rolling on the floor, holding our sides, vying with each other to see who could paint the more horrific picture of the other’s old age. But, really, when we were done laughing—as I looked at Giulietta’s rosy cheeks and bright blue eyes—it was impossible to believe that any such horrors could ever come to pass.

One of our favorite pastimes in the dormitory was to act out a play in which a nobleman had come to ask for la Befana’s hand, having fallen in love with the beauty with which she played her violin. (We knew she must have been among the best musicians of her generation to have been made a
maestra,
even though she never performed, and picked up the instrument only once in a while, and only then to demonstrate how to do right what she felt we had been doing wrong.)

The play had two endings. In one, la Befana and the nobleman swore eternal vows—and when she lifted her veil, demanding a kiss, he threw himself upon his sword. In the other version, the bridegroom caught sight of her face before the wedding and ran off with her best friend.

Whoever says that girls are kind has never lived among them.

La Befana saved her special wrath for me, although she only dared show her feelings when the maestro was away. Either I was playing with too much brio or not enough, too fast or else too carefully. There was no pleasing her. I never bowed my head, as the others did, when she railed at me, which infuriated her all the more. I didn’t give her the satisfaction of seeing how she hurt me when she hit me with her baton. Never on the face or
hands or arms, but always where the marks would be hidden from the world’s eyes. I knew nothing then of the special reason she had to hate me.

Giulietta begged me to give in enough so that la Befana would leave off me. “It is a sin, Anna Maria, to be so proud.” Giulietta was ever a true friend to me, pretty Giulietta who clasped her cello between her legs as if in practice for the lover who would eventually carry her away.

It was not pride, though, but anger that made me hold my head high, that kept my face frozen while la Befana beat me. I stared ahead of me and prayed to the Virgin to appear before us in all her glory so that my teacher would fall to the ground in fear and shame, hiding her pockmarked face from God. In my dream, the Virgin extended her hand to me—“Come, Anna Maria. The angels are weeping.”

Sometimes it was not the Virgin but a veiled lady who would take my hand. I couldn’t see her face, but I knew who she was. “Come, Anna Maria,” she would say to me in a voice that I remembered as one remembers a lullaby unheard since infancy. “Come out from these walls so that all of Venezia can know who makes these heavenly sounds.”

And then la Befana would hit me again.

If Vivaldi passed by on his way to the sacristy to get a new supply of quills or rest between lessons, he merely smiled and waved without really looking at us. “Play on, my angels!” he would call over his shoulder.

And I would ask myself, how can a man who notices so much when his own reputation is at stake—who can hear the smallest omission, the tiniest cheat in our playing—walk through the rest of his life as one who has neither ears nor eyes? How can a man whose music cracks open the hearts of all who hear it have so little room in his own heart for anyone apart from himself?

In those days, before the arrival of Anna Girò, his only allegiance was to his music.

Nothing was more important than his own ambition then. Even God had to wait His turn while Vivaldi composed. People still love telling the story about how he would abandon his place at the altar during Mass because some musical idea had struck him. He would leave all of us waiting while he hastened off to the sacristy to write it down.

This only had to happen a few times before the governors excused him from saying Mass altogether. It was an easy thing to find another priest to lead us in our devotions, but quite another to find a composer of Vivaldi’s prodigious merit. From the first years when I thought to notice such things, I noticed that the governors seemed to value the musician without much liking the man.

We loved him, though. He was always by far our favorite teacher. There was no one’s love and praise we craved more than his—perhaps for the very reason that he didn’t give it lightly.

I’ve given much thought to this in my years as a teacher here. Vivaldi asked more of us than anyone else did. I think we were willing to work so hard—well past what we would do for any other teacher—because the maestro believed in our greatness. We
were
angels for him, heavenly messengers who delivered his music to the world.

The bells are ringing to mark the interval of rest before we carry on singing the Divine Office and once again preserve the Republic from the wrath of God. Venezia’s sinners will have another day and night to go about their pleasures in peace.

A fire crackles in the grate here in my room—yes, at this point in time, my allotment for wood is always generous. And I have only to raise my eyes from my desk to gaze out upon the
bacino
and the life I no longer have any cause to envy.

Venezia—
la Serenissima,
the most serene—immortal that she is, has hardly changed at all since the day when I wrote that first letter. It is only when I look down at the map of my own hands that I can trace time’s passage.

How is it possible that so many years have gone by? How can I have nearly reached the age of forty-two? When I chance to see my face now in a darkened window, I can only wonder at the identity—and the boldness—of the stranger who stares at me with such a look of knowledge in her eyes, as if she were able to see straight inside my soul.

Every time, that reflection fools me. I have taken to averting my gaze from the windows after darkness falls. Far better to look at all the fresh young faces round about me here than to commune with my own decay.

No matter. My hair may be fading from blond to gray, and my cheeks may be less plump and pink than they were before, but my fingers still work well. I can still send a cascade of notes heavenward from my violin—or, for that matter, from the cembalo, cello,
viola d’amore
, the lute, the theorbo, and the mandolin, as the writer of doggerel wrote in yesterday’s
Palade Veneta.
Six full stanzas of his silly poem were devoted to me, the selfsame Anna Maria who wept bitter tears twenty-eight years ago because no one knew her and no one cared.

How many moments I stole from sleep to go searching through the lightless passages of memory! But sleep always overtook me before I had traveled far enough to find out what I longed to know. It mattered so desperately to me then. Who were my parents? Why had they left me here? And what sort of life would I have if I found them?

The secret files of the
scaffetta
are filled with notes about each baby who was ever placed in the niche of the church wall, down to the last detail. Some of the foundlings are put there dressed in
velvet and lace, and others have nothing more about them than filthy rags. Sometimes a token is found in the swaddling clothes or clutched in a tiny hand, and it is always half of something: half an elaborate drawing or half of a rare coin or medallion—so that someday the parent who possesses the other half can come back and reclaim her child. It has happened only twice in all my time here, but it is something that every child of the Pietà dreams of and hopes for more fervently than they hope for Heaven.

The earliest memory I was ever able to grasp was before the time of speech, but well after I had been tucked into the
scaffetta
and left there. It was spring. I know it was spring because I could smell something wonderful, which only much later I learned to connect with the purple wisteria that scales these walls and hangs about these windows with a determination as great as that of any lover bent on wooing a virgin of the Pietà.

I can remember the sound of rain on water outside the windows that give on to the canal. It was definitely before what Maestra Emmanuela, the Prioress then, called the age of reason—I thought the music I heard came from the stones of the
ospedale
. There was always music, so I concluded, with a child’s logic, that the stones could sing. Later, when I saw the orchestra, I thought the girls’ bodies were part of the instruments they played. After all, they were part of their names: Beatrice dal Violin, Maria dal Flauto, Paola dal Mandolin. There were also girls without instruments attached to their names but heavenly sounds that issued directly from their bodies: Prudenza dal Soprano, Anastasia dal Contralto, Michielina d’Alto. I remember the moment when someone told me that, no, they weren’t angels. They were girls made of flesh and blood like me.

Even after I had become an
iniziata
in the
coro
, my childish mind found much to distract it from the rigors of lessons and prayer. In all my classes with Vivaldi, I would ever marvel at the
color of his hair—how it seemed to burn more furiously when someone played a false note or failed to play fast enough.
“Il Prete Rosso,”
everyone called him behind his back, as they refer to him even now: “the Red Priest.”

Sometimes he would make us play so fast and practice so long that our fingers bled. When we held up our hands to show him, he only nodded and said, “Good. It is good to bleed for music. Girls shed blood all the time for far less noble reasons.” We would blush when he said such things.

There were those who predicted that Vivaldi’s red hair would bring him to a bad end. But I always believed in him as one beloved of God. Not because he was a priest—for, in truth, even then I knew that priesthood is more often a livelihood than a calling. I believed in Vivaldi’s grace because he wrote music for us that was fit for God’s choir.

He is still doing so. The choral music he’s just lately begun to produce for us is, in my opinion, among the most celestial of his compositions—and most expressive of his nature, his real nature, which he keeps hidden from almost everyone. It overflows with the part of him that—quite apart from being a priest—truly is a man of God.

They come from all over Europe to hear us perform his music: poets, philosophers, princes, popes, and kings. We watch them trying to peer beyond the grille that shields us from their eyes, past the veils that make each of us appear to be, at least potentially, beautiful and young. They press gold into the hands of the Doge: “For the orphans of Venezia.”

And gold I had in my hands without seeing what I held. Poor Anna Maria! If you knew then what I know now! If you could have but glimpsed the future, you would have found such comfort there. But my suffering younger self can’t hear me, no matter how many words I scribble in this little book, nor how many
secrets I reveal. I can read her words, but she can never read mine. She’s caught in that past of hers, abandoned and alone.