Vivaldi's Virgins (4 page)

I didn’t touch the bowl of polenta that Giulietta brought to me from the kitchen this morning, even though she’d drizzled it with honey and cream just the way I like it. Sister Laura came in then and sat by me. She didn’t say anything for a long time. Then she spoke in that voice I have come to know so well, as low and familiar as the bell of San Marco that signals the beginning and end of every workday for all those who live outside these walls. “Maestro Vivaldi composes some of the most difficult music that has ever been composed for the violin. You must not fault yourself if you find it difficult to play.”

I started crying then.

She lifted my chin and made me look into her eyes, so blue and mild. “God himself would have trouble with that allegro.”

Even after she let go of my chin, I kept my eyes locked on hers,
looking for the secret thing that allows her to always be so steady and calm.

Oh Mother, if this letter has truly reached you, hear me! Would that I could ask for your help not in words, as clumsy and ugly as the flies that gather in the corners of the windows in summertime, but with the notes of my violin.

I write to you now a girl, still a girl. A virgin who cannot find the key to playing music that comes from a man’s loins. Who cannot play the allegro.

I beg you to pray for me.

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

I
had an answer to my prayers that autumn. A new girl was brought to the Pietà—not an unwanted child, but a paying student from Saxony. She had excellent training and already played quite well.

Even now, there is usually at least one such girl every year, sent to board with us until she reaches the age of seventeen. They are not, as we are, bound for ten years to perform and teach in exchange for the charity bestowed upon us, and to train two replacements if and when we choose to marry or take the veil. For these students from the outside, the Pietà is only a way station on the road to an advantageous marriage and the production of heirs.

These girls bring with them a breath of worlds unknown to inmates of the
ospedale,
worlds where music is not necessarily at the center of one’s existence. They come with their talk of fashion, families, and stolen kisses.

Claudia, as a violinist, was placed under my special care.
I taught her every trick I knew of the Italian style, helped her with her grammar, and acquainted her with our routine. But I was ever more her student than her teacher.

Although only two years older than I, Claudia was already womanly and wise in the ways of the world. I remember how it startled me to see how the maestro clearly took note of her bosom. I was uncomfortable thinking of the maestro—or any priest—as a man. I cannot say that I am overly comfortable with the thought now, even though I know full well that it is a fact of life. It is their very manhood that makes their vows of celibacy both necessary and so difficult to achieve.

It was Claudia who told me, in her imperfect Italian, how important it is to remember that all men—whether noblemen or beggars, priests or procurers—have the same one thing in common, to which they are commonly in thrall.

Shortly after her arrival, the maestro had one of his fits of temper, during which he tore at his hair and wept at the innocence that keeps us from playing with the passion demanded by his music. I looked over to see how Claudia would react. To my surprise, she sat there with an enigmatic smile on her face, looking well satisfied with herself.

That night was particularly cold. Most of us were sleeping in twos, as was our wont in wintertime, even though, the year before, we had each earned the right to our own bed. I was just drifting off, with Claudia’s arms wrapped around me, when she whispered into my ear.

“Anna Maria, I can teach you the secret of this passion your maestro wants you to feel.”

My eyes were still half closed with sleep, and sleep had come only with difficulty because of the cold. “I am a virtuous girl,” I muttered, resentful at being wakened.

“And you can remain one. I promise you! Your virtue will
be unsullied. But you will bring your maestro great joy.” She propped herself up, leaning back on her elbows.

I turned to look at her. “You speak in riddles,” I said crossly. Even though the darkness was impenetrable, I could sense Claudia’s smile.

“Here, let me show you!”

“Show me? Here? In the dormitory?”

“There is no better place.”

She sat closer still, speaking in little more than a whisper. “Every woman, Anna Maria—and every girl—has a secret place on her body. If you stroke it in just the right way, it makes the body quiver and make music like the strings of your violin.”

I lay back down, angry to be mocked in this way. “Go to sleep, Claudia! We need to be at our best for the rehearsal tomorrow.”

She shook my shoulder. “Which is exactly why I am telling you this tonight, Annina.”

“Don’t call me ‘Annina,’” I said. I thought about how I used to believe that the music made by the
coro
came from the girls’ bodies. I couldn’t guess how this Saxon witch came to know of my childish folly.

“Look.” She pulled me upright again. “Here, do what I do.”

My eyes by then had begun to grow accustomed to the darkness. Claudia positioned herself as if playing the cello, her knees splayed. “It’s here,” she said, reaching under her nightclothes. “You have one, too. It’s like—I don’t know the word in your language.” She took her hand out and then cupped her other hand around her finger, pantomiming a bell. “The little piece that makes it ring. Can you find it?”

I reached under my nightclothes. How was it I’d never noticed before? When I touched it, it was exactly as if I were a violin. I felt the touch of my fingers vibrate in every part of my body, but especially the tips of my breasts and the arches of my feet.

I saw that Claudia had closed her eyes. I did the same.

“Can you feel it?” she asked me.

“Yes,” I said, gasping a little, because my breath was suddenly labored, as if I’d been climbing stairs.

“Stroke it just as you stroke the strings of your violin, Anna Maria dal Violin.”

“The strings of my violin don’t grow wet when I stroke them.”

“Think of the sonata we’re playing tomorrow—of the allegro. And when we’re playing the allegro tomorrow, think of this!”

I could not answer her. The urge to keep stroking was suddenly larger than everything else, so large and so loud that everything else disappeared. I forgot where I was; I forgot
who
I was. There was only the urgent need to—I knew not what. And then—oh, blessed Mother of God—my body rang with the joyful force of all the bells of
la Serenissima
on Easter morning.

It was as if I’d fallen into the sea during a storm and been washed up on the shore, half drowned, half dead, but like one who has seen the face of God.

When I woke the next morning, I wondered if it had all been a dream. But there was Claudia sitting over me, smiling her little catlike smile.

I smiled back at her.

“Don’t forget to think of it while you’re playing today.”

“I will think of nothing else!” I assured her. “I must tell Giulietta. She must think of it while she is playing her cello today!”

I told Giulietta (and drowned in that sea again in the telling), and I think Giulietta must have told others in her turn.

When we all gathered for rehearsal, it was a pale-faced, fever-eyed group of girls who faced the maestro. “What’s this?” he muttered. “Have I misread my calendar?”

From the moment we began playing, it was clear to all of us—but most of all to him—that everything had changed. We played with brio. We played with passion. We played with urgency. We played so that we were panting at the end, and I would not be surprised if some of our bells were ringing.

The maestro lowered his hands and stared at us with disbelief. “I’m dreaming,” was all he said at first. And then, with an expression of rapture filling his eyes: “How did this happen?”

All of us just sat there and smiled with the same little half-smile that Claudia wore.

I
SIT HERE
holding my next letter, the first one written from jail in the depths of that famous winter of anno Domini 1709. If Sister Laura had told me to write to the Virgin herself, I would still have poured out my heart to her, so desperate was I to have someone—anyone—hear my cri de coeur.

Casting myself back in time, I think the real beginning of my life of trespass was that winter night when Marietta and I sat on the cold stone floor between our two beds, our nightgowns pulled over our bare feet.

I was fourteen and had not yet seen my first blood. Marietta and I were both keeping half an ear open for Sister Giovanna, who was patrolling the halls as the
settimaniera
that week. I whispered, as loudly and harshly as I dared, “You’re completely
pazza
!” Marietta had taken it into her head that she would become an opera star. But, of course, opera was then and is still forbidden in every cloister of Venezia.

With a voice that spanned three octaves, Marietta could move up and down the scale so lightly and quickly that a flea would seem ponderous by comparison. She had the rose-petal skin, in those days, of a Botticelli angel, and the devil’s own fire in her eyes. Dressed in velvet and taffeta, draped in jewels, her pretty little feet shod in silk, she was made to be Venezia’s favorite prima donna. She knew this, and it was burning a hole in her heart.

I reminded her that she would not be allowed to perform in
an opera without foreswearing her home at the Pietà, as well as her dowry.

Marietta’s eyes are still as green as the most sluggish canals of Venezia at the height of summer—and sometimes just as full of poison. She made them bore into me, there in the half-light of our dormitory, as she said that she would foreswear both in an instant for the chance to sing on the stage.

In the rest of the room beyond us, the other girls were sleeping and snoring. Marietta managed to make her whisper sound like a clarion call as she announced to me and whomever else might be listening, “I must see and hear a real diva sing—in a real theater!”

Even a commoner’s
bollettino di passaporto
, in the pit of the theater, cost a third of a ducat, which is more gold than girls our age then could save over months of stinting ourselves. I asked Marietta how she—a cloistered
figlia
of the Pietà—proposed to lose herself in such a crowd, with agents of the Grand Inquisitor everywhere, impossible to recognize or run away from. Did she think she would just sit herself down among gondoliers and thieves and knaves and all manner of men who would see her as nothing more than a rare and delicious comestible?

I reminded her of the veritable war at the Ospedale dei Mendicanti over whether the cloistered musicians could perform an opera there. The Mendicanti’s governors merely censured the choir nuns who advocated in favor of opera. But then one of the most outspoken among them—one Sister Justiniana, herself renowned as a soprano and mentioned by name more than once in the
Palade Veneta
—was, to the great scandal of all Venezia, fished out of a well.

I asked Marietta to think of poor Sister Justiniana.

She gave me that superior look of hers, and shook out her curls. “What I’m thinking of has nothing to do with any nun!”

Someone called out from her bed, “Will you two please shut up? We’re trying to sleep!”

Marietta dragged me out into the hallway. The wick of the oil lamp on the wall was smoking, and the smoke cast weird shadows around us. “Tonight—it must be tonight!” she whispered, leaning so close that I felt her lips on my ear. “That new soprano from Napoli is singing at the Sant’ Angelo—the maestro told me.”

Although I was—I have to admit—a little afraid of Marietta then, I planted myself squarely in front of her and crossed my arms. I asked her how she would find her way to the theater, even if she did manage to get out.

“Unlike certain people who have spent their entire lives inside this crypt, I can make my way around Venezia, thank you.”

I assured her that she would never be able to pass there undetected. The maestro—who was performing then as a soloist in the Sant’ Angelo’s orchestra—would find her out in an instant and see that she was brought back and given a good beating.

Marietta expressed her opinion—which I largely shared—that Vivaldi cared little enough about the rules. Her words awakened in me the resentment I felt about the latest rumors circulating, that the maestro had begun composing an opera in hopes of having it staged at the Sant’ Angelo.

As
inserviente della musica
, we were his servants, too—vessels always ready to be filled with the holy oil of his musical fantasies. Why would he spend his talents on others—and others, at that, who worked not for the good of the Republic but to fatten their own purses and flatter their reputations?

Marietta understood Vivaldi and his ambitions much better than I did then.

She turned the full grace and charm of her looks upon me. “I will persuade him to write us an opera disguised as an ora
torio—one that will be so magnificent that the theaters will sit empty while people flock to hear us. And then the governors will change their rules. But I must have a chance to study these divas first, and learn their ways.”

“And will you fly out these walls on the wings of a dove?”

“Matteo’s rheumatism is bothering him tonight.”

“What does this have to do with you?”

“Signora Bettina will resume her post as
portinara
when the bells ring for Compline. We can leave when Matteo leaves.”

“We?” In the silence that followed, I could hear my heart pounding with the noise of a kettledrum.

Matteo was a hugely fat old man who had started his life as a foundling of the Pietà. He was said to be too feeble-minded to be placed as an apprentice, and so continued on here, performing tasks that no one else wanted to do. The regular
portinare
of the
coro
called on Matteo whenever they grew tired of sitting hour after hour, guarding the door.

I thought of the oft-rehearsed dream of my mother appearing before me, extending her hand, inviting me to leave. It took me a moment to find my voice. “How?”

“Under his cloak.”

I’m sure my face reflected the disgust her proposal inspired in me. Matteo looked like he may have bathed once or twice in all his years, but at no time recently. He kept stale crusts of bread in the folds of his robes, as well as hunks of dried fish that he chewed on while sitting on his stool in the doorway. We all believed him to be almost completely deaf. It was said that he was allowed to work among us for this reason, because he would not be tempted to lust by the beauty of our voices.

“I would sooner be carried out with the contents of our chamber pots!”

“That’s the trouble with you, Anna Maria, living your whole
life here as a hothouse flower. You’ve never known the stink of life on the outside.”

I tried to look as much unlike a hothouse flower as I possibly could. “The canals stink horribly in summertime.”

“That’s not the same.”

Marietta knew whereof she spoke. Her mother had worked in the dankest alleyways of San Marco, sometimes as a chambermaid, sometimes as a whore. One day when she was sober enough to see clearly, she noticed how men had begun to look at her eldest daughter, who was earning bread for them both by singing in the perfect musical venue formed by the vaulted spans of the Rialto Bridge. That’s when Marietta’s mother took her to the board of governors, and had her sing for them. They offered to take her in at the Pietà, even though she was already so old. They would clothe and feed her and pay her dowry, if she served out her ten years and trained two others to take her place.

Marietta wept and wailed without stopping for the first week she was at the
ospedale
—she was put in a room by herself so her cries wouldn’t keep the rest of us awake, but we heard her anyway. She cursed her mother’s name, and then she begged the Virgin to make her mother change her mind and take her back again. Even the worst family is better than no family at all. That’s what Marietta never tired of telling me during her first years here—until she decided to make a friend of me.

I looked into Marietta’s jade-colored eyes, and I could tell that she knew from the start I would agree to go. She gave me a kiss on the cheek, I suppose to show me how glad she was I’d given way to her. That girl gave out kisses like a queen scattering coins.

I clutched at her arm, more to steady myself than out of affection. She shook my hand away, done with charming me. “There are two woolen cloaks under my bed—get them, and wait for me
at the bottom of the stairs. I have an errand to do in the kitchens.” She turned and scampered off, leaving me alone in the hallway.

I thought of abandoning her to her foolish scheme and simply tiptoeing back to my bed and climbing under the covers. And yet I was also filled with curiosity and excitement at the prospect of such an adventure. I let myself believe that perhaps, with all her knowledge of the world, Marietta could make this happen in such a way that we could go and return undetected.

I had quite convinced myself by the time I slipped back inside through the darkness of the dormitory, feeling my way along the cold marble floor.

The air was thick with the exhalations of the fourteen girls who slept in our room, each one floating in the murky stuff of her own dreams. I got down on my hands and knees and swept my arms under Marietta’s bed till my fingers found the rough wool of the cloaks.

It never ceased to amaze me how Marietta was able to make things work for her that worked for no one else. Woolen cloaks were closely guarded and hard to come by. But then I remembered having seen Marietta more than once in conversation with Maestra Andriana, who was the
dispensiera
that year, in charge of all our supplies. A theorbist as well as a singer, Andriana was one of the nine
cariche
among the eighteen
maestre
entrusted with the most delicate tasks of responsibility at the Pietà.

It was rumored—and now I know that it was probably true—that Maestra Andriana had been imprisoned for misdeeds when she was younger. I can say from my own experience here that the Pietà’s prisons have often been the nurseries for its leaders.

I gathered up the cloaks and then stood in the shadows of the doorway, looking up and down the hall and peering as best I could down the stairs before venturing out again.

Shrinking into a shadowy corner at the bottom of the stairs, behind the balustrade, I waited for Marietta. Finally, after what seemed like hours, she emerged from the passageway to the kitchens and larders, carrying a bottle of wine and what looked like half an uncooked turkey under her arm.

“If we’re caught,” she said as she thrust the wine into my hands, “I’ll lie and say that I made you come with me.”

“As well you did,” I murmured—but she was already halfway down the portal stairway, as fleet of foot as she was of voice. I had to rush not to be left alone in the hall with the stolen cloaks and wine.

There were torches burning in the portal. Matteo’s fat face lit up when he saw us. “Ah!” he sighed, but whether he sighed after the victuals or Marietta, I couldn’t tell. He pressed his finger against his lips and beckoned us to join him in a dark corner.

And then—in truth, I feel sick with the memory—he lifted up his voluminous robes, settling us under them with the little shakes and sounds of contentment of a mother hen.

It was all I could do not to drop the wine. The odor of the uncooked fowl was overpowered by the most intimate smells of Matteo’s body—not just the smells of elimination and sweat, but another, terrible odor, previously unknown to me, which I knew instinctively had to do with his manhood. I shrank from it as I shrank away from the most noxious sores and pustules in the hospital on the days when we were made to tend the beggars there—days that were fewer and farther between as I rose in the ranks of the
coro
.

“Matteo!” we heard Sister Giovanna’s voice trumpet from the stairs. “Where are you?”

Apart from la Befana, Sister Giovanna was the worst of our keepers when it was her turn to patrol the halls at night. All the
choir nuns of Venice, of course, come from the ranks of the nobility. But some have a religious calling, whereas others are given to God against their will. Sister Giovanna was one of these, interred here by her parents so that they would have sufficient funds to marry off her younger, prettier sister to another of Venezia’s noble families. It seemed to be Giovanna’s purpose in life to make others suffer for the injustice visited upon her.

“Did you call me, Reverend Sister?” said the doorkeeper as he began to shuffle out into the room.

“Are you ill, Matteo?” She was much closer now. We could see her bulky shape silhouetted through the brown cloth of the doorkeeper’s robes.

“It is my rheumatism, Reverend Sister. I can hardly move.”

“It is no wonder, Matteo. You have grown so fat!”

“The pain is always worse when it rains,” he whined. “My sister-in-law has made a poultice for me. But Signora Bettina will sit tonight and keep the angels safe.”

“God keeps the angels safe, doorkeeper. Your job is to keep the angels in.” I had never before heard her speak of us in this tone, as if she spoke of felons rather than angels.

The bells began tolling in the same moment that we heard the tap of Signora Bettina’s stick on the flagstones. Although Signora Bettina was nearly blind, I was sure she would nonetheless see us beneath Matteo’s robes. She used to tell us that her stick had an eye upon it that could see even through walls—and then she would point it at us and narrow her eyes, so that we always felt naked before her.

“Ah, there she is now,” said Matteo, patting his clothing so that his hands fell upon our bodies. “Goodnight to you, Reverend Sister! And to you, Signora—and may God bless you both!” There was the sound of the door being unbarred, and then we
felt the rush of cold air as it was opened and Matteo continued to shuffle out into the night with us holding on, by necessity, to his hairy legs.