The Four Seasons: A Novel of Vivaldi's Venice Read online

  When she opened her eyes, she saw that the ease had returned to the priora’s face. “There are many ways to do that, my dear. You do it with your voice every week. Not only does God hear you but, just as important, you bring others closer to Him.” Signore Bembo concurred with a nod of his head.

  I tell her I want to leave and she tries to talk me out of it. Maddalena says she wants to stay and she doesn’t listen. I don’t need to be honest. She doesn’t deserve it. I just have to win. “Perhaps I am just being selfish, Madonna, but I am more concerned about my own soul.” She turned toward Signore Bembo, looking up through her lashes at him the way she had practiced at the villa.

  “What taint could there possibly be on your soul?” The man’s voice exploded with disbelief.

  The look of fragile innocence had worked. “It’s the music,” Chiaretta said, folding her hands in her lap and posing with her eyelashes again. “I sometimes sing just to hear myself, and I am so prideful I often can go through a whole mass without thinking about God at all.” Please God, don’t let me die before my next confession, she prayed. But the faces of Signore Bembo and the priora were so grave, they made her feel reckless. “I think perhaps I should not sing anymore at all.”

  Signore Bembo chuckled, and Chiaretta felt a sudden panic. If this milk goes sour, I will drown myself in the canal.

  “That, Chiaretta, is what confession is for,” he said. “All God asks of you is that you recognize your shortcomings and ask for His help in overcoming them.”

  The priora nodded. “The solution, my dear, is to learn to sing with less pride, not to stop singing.”

  Chiaretta fell silent. She could think of nothing to fight back with. I’m not going to get what I want, and now I’m going to lose my sister or end up in a convent too. “Maddalena has no vocation,” she said. “I don’t want her to go.” She covered her face with her hands and tried not to cry.

  The priora’s face clouded as she watched Chiaretta disintegrate before her. “I have been priora here for nearly twenty years now, and I see what reaching womanhood often does to young girls. It makes them moody, or sometimes just lazy and difficult to control. Chiaretta, look at me.”

  Chiaretta took her hands from her face and accepted the handkerchief Signore Bembo handed her.

  “The priora has kept us informed about your sister,” he said. “She showed promise as a musician, but—”

  The priora broke in. “You may not know this, but the Congregazione is very much involved with the progress of all the girls. They are the ones who promoted you early, and they also decide who stays and who goes. If you take vows, it will only be because they permit it. Your future’s not yours for the asking.”

  Chiaretta didn’t like being told that someone else would make that kind of decision for her, but in this case, she needed the Congregazione’s help out of the fix she had gotten herself into. She turned to Signore Bembo. “Please don’t send my sister away. I beg you, sir.” She paused and the tears welled in her eyes again, this time without a shred of insincerity. “I beg you.”

  “Our policy is to watch and wait to see if girls of the coro can come out of the problems associated with their”—Signore Bembo paused to look for the most delicate word—“womanhood in a year or two and be useful again. Your sister has done little of any value to the coro for several years now.”

  That’s not why! Chiaretta wanted to scream at him, but more than anything she did not want to make him angry. “It will be hard for me, signore, if she is not here. I am studying for my first big parts now. I have never lived without her.”

  “There are no plans to send her immediately,” the priora said in a tone that seemed a little more sympathetic.

  “I know Maddalena is having trouble,” Chiaretta went on. “Something inside of her is different now. I don’t understand it, and I don’t think she does either. But please, don’t throw her away like this.”

  “I hardly think—” the priora said, but Signore Bembo waved her off.

  “She doesn’t belong in a convent,” Chiaretta pleaded. “Can’t she be bled? Isn’t there a tonic?” And then another idea occurred to her. “Maybe having a pupil would give her something she liked doing. Maybe it would help.”

  “My dear, no one but the giubilate are allowed to make money by taking on outside students,” the priora said. “Surely that can’t be what you’re suggesting.”

  “Perhaps she could assist them somehow?” Chiaretta liked the idea more and more. “She’s so patient and kind, I know she would be a good teacher. She wouldn’t ask for any money.”

  “With Signore Bembo’s permission”—the priora looked at him—“I will talk to Maestra Luciana about the possibility of taking Maddalena on as an assistant with her pupils?”

  Luciana! Chiaretta hadn’t thought of that. Maddalena would rather be a nun. “Maestra Luciana is a very gifted musician,” she said, “but she has not recognized my sister’s ability for reasons I do not understand.” She liked the way she sounded—a mature woman with important business to handle—although she wasn’t quite sure where the voice or the manner had come from. “I don’t believe she will agree, or be of any help in making it work if she does.”

  The priora looked at Chiaretta quizzically. She took in a breath as if she were about to speak but changed her mind.

  “Well then,” she said, getting up from her desk to let Chiaretta know their meeting was over.

  PART THREE: CHIARETTA TRIUMPHANS

  1710–1716

  TEN

  Elizabeta Contarini was so pale the tracery of blue veins could be seen under the skin of her hands. Her hair was too fine to hold in the combs that kept it off her face, and little wisps fell across her temple and onto her right cheek as she bent her neck over her violin. She bit her lower lip in concentration, showing the tips of her small and slightly crooked incisors. Her mouth was an almost perfect replica in miniature of the heart shape of her face.

  “It’s very hard,” she said in a tiny, girlish voice.

  “Yes, it is,” Maddalena said. “Try it again, and remember to keep your hand from rotating out when you’re fingering.”

  Elizabeta’s family’s wealth was conveyed in the silk brocade of her dresses and the fasteners of gold and pearl in her hair. Her father’s importance as a member of the Congregazione caused a stir in the practice rooms when she came once a week for singing and violin lessons.

  Maddalena had been her private violin instructor for almost a year, starting as Luciana’s assistant. For the first few months, Chiaretta had intercepted the eleven-year-old as she came and went from her singing lessons. Charming her at first by teaching her the same breathing technique Michielina had taught her years before on the balcony, Chiaretta had brought up the subject of Luciana in an off hand way. As she suspected, Elizabeta was terrified of the maestra, so much so that she had made almost no progress on the violin in more than six months. Over the course of a few weeks, Chiaretta had worked on her to get her father to request that Maddalena be her instructor rather than the disfigured and bad-smelling Luciana, whom Chiaretta suggested was the source of the nightmares Elizabeta all of a sudden claimed to be having.

  Once Luciana was out of the picture, Maddalena discovered that Elizabeta was not shy at all. In fact she seemed so desperate for someone to talk to that Maddalena often had to tell her to concentrate on the music. When she first talked about her family, Elizabeta had been astounded that Maddalena did not know that among her ancestors were six doges of Venice, the first having ruled as far back as the eleventh century and the most recent having served until his death less than thirty years before. In Elizabeta’s world, everyone just knew.

  When Elizabeta’s father and mother had determined that, for reasons of temperament, her older sister was not suited for marriage, they decided it would be Elizabeta who would marry instead. Her family had only a few years to groom her into a prize for a nobleman, and the lessons at the Pietà were part of that preparation. Elizabeta told M
addalena all of this in a detached way. Parents chose for daughters, and daughters went along without forming their own opinions.

  Elizabeta had no particular aptitude for the violin, but she loved her lessons. “Let’s play the game,” she would plead after struggling with her own music for a while. “Petals falling in an apple orchard,” Maddalena would say as she improvised, or “bees buzzing around a honeycomb,” or “a breeze rippling across the lagoon,” and Elizabeta would clap her hands in delight.

  Over time, the color returned to Maddalena’s face, and a small amount of weight began to accumulate around her hips. She was included again in invitations to parties, and most important of all, she was back on the balcony of the Pietà.

  Chiaretta was quietly triumphant. Maddalena knew that her sister had gone to the priora and had succeeded in granting her at least a temporary reprieve, but Chiaretta would never share the details. As time passed, the success of her trip to the priora’s off ice was clear. The subject of the convent was never raised again.

  Just as the August heat began to settle into the rooms of the Pietà, Maddalena and Chiaretta packed their bags to go with a small group of attive up the Brenta Canal to spend a few days at a villa in the countryside. Chiaretta, who to that point had only been able to tell Maddalena about such outings, was beside herself with excitement that Maddalena, at eighteen, was coming on her first trip.

  “Perhaps you’ll have an admirer,” Chiaretta told her sister. “You’re so pretty you’re bound to be popular.”

  Though Maddalena was not a great beauty, her hair was a lustrous auburn color, and her cheekbones and angular face gave her a distinctive appearance that some might call appealing, even compelling, if not exactly pretty in a conventional way. Indeed, in some families she might have been considered the attractive one, but next to Chiaretta anyone would have come out a distant second.

  The figlie went by gondola to Fusina, where they transferred to a private barge and draft horses pulled them along the towpath to Villa Foscari, the first of the grand mansions along the canal. Chiaretta and the others wanted to protect themselves from the sun and heat, so Maddalena went out on deck alone. It had been almost ten years since she’d left her foster home in the country, ten years without seeing cows grazing, or a dirt path through a field, or the sky unobstructed by rooftops, and she could not make herself go back inside despite the chaperone’s warnings that too much sun would make her sick.

  Eventually they reached the villa. It looked to Maddalena as if someone had erected a palace on the back side of a Greek temple. The flat roof of the villa was broken up by four towering white chimneys and a small triangular attic with gabled windows. An open porch made of columns covered by a sloped roof jutted out, accessed by two matching white marble staircases leading up from the pathway across the lawn.

  The barge came to a stop at a small dock, and several men dressed in livery emerged from the ground floor underneath the porch. They hurried toward the dock to help the girls off and take their belongings to the house. Chiaretta was one of the last off the barge, and Maddalena held back to wait for her, watching the line of figlie scattered along the path like a border of red flowers against the green lawn.

  Inside, Maddalena wandered through the portego, which stretched from one end of the house to the other. No tortured saints or sad-looking virgins conspired to make her feel humble, and no depictions of heavenly rewards hinted at what obedience might gain her. Here, the frescoed walls showed banquet tables heavy with fruit and roasted meat, around which comfortably dressed people were caught in the moment of telling a secret, sharing a furtive kiss, or even playing with a dog. Trompe l’oeil windows held curtains that seemed to blow into the room, and painted doors opened into rooms that did not exist. The whole space was an invitation to enjoy life, and Maddalena had never seen anything like it.

  Chiaretta caught her sister’s elbow. “We need to go up and rest before the guests arrive.” She steered her toward a doorway in an alcove at the far end of the room. At the top of a staircase was another portego, off which were sleeping chambers for the figlie. Maddalena and Chiaretta settled in to a sleeping platform elevated a few feet above the floor in one of the rooms. The bed took up almost the entire space in the sparsely decorated room, except for a cassone under the window, in which they found an extra coverlet embroidered with a garland of leaves and flowers.

  Maddalena pulled the coverlet over them both and turned to her sister. “Thank you,” she said.

  “Thank me for what?”

  She fiddled with a strand of Chiaretta’s hair, not so much because it was out of place but because she felt a sudden surge of love that made her need to touch her sister.

  “For everything,” she said, nuzzling her head into the pillow and shutting her eyes.

  The Foscari family had invited a dozen dinner guests in addition to the figlie, swelling the crowd in the room to a little under thirty. The first evening the concert preceded the meal to accommodate the figlie, who were tired from their journey. Even before the instruments had been put away, servants had lit torches on the walls to illuminate a table topped with green-and-gold brocade. Game and fish brought in that day from nearby streams and f ields were heaped on platters, along with vegetables from the garden, and rice flecked with spices from the Levant. After dinner, a heady drink as sweet as syrup had been poured into small glasses, accompanied by panna cotta sprinkled with berries from the forest at the edge of the estate.

  When everyone had declared the meal magnificent and pushed away from the table, most of the guests wandered outside to enjoy the cool night air. Laughter and song drifted across the lawn from small boats on the canal, their lanterns making slow trails along the water as they passed.

  Maddalena watched as half a dozen people got off a boat and came down the pathway. One of the women squealed as a man chased her. Another man caught her when she tripped over her hem, and as she fell into his arms, he reached inside her bodice to fondle her breast. Another man and woman lingered behind the others. He held a bottle of wine in one hand while he leaned forward to kiss her.

  Maddalena quickly slipped behind a pillar to avoid being seen. When they reached the top of the stairs, one of the men noticed the girls in their concert dresses. “Look what we have here!” he exclaimed, lifting his eyebrows in approval.

  Alvise Foscari’s wife came out on the porch, and the man turned his attention to the woman of the house, kissing her hand before following her inside.

  “You can come out now. It’s safe.” The voice belonged to another guest, who had witnessed the spectacle.

  “I’d better go,” Maddalena said, feeling suddenly overwhelmed.

  “Please stay. It isn’t often I get a chance to talk with one of you.”

  Maddalena had no idea what she was supposed to say, but it didn’t matter because he did most of the talking. His name was Marco Valiero, and he was visiting for the evening from his family’s villa a few miles away. He was handsome in the way lent to ordinary appearance by immaculate grooming and well-fitting clothing of high quality, but by any other standard he was a slightly overweight man in his late twenties, of middling height and unremarkable face. Still, he was well mannered, and within a few minutes Maddalena had relaxed enough to decide she was enjoying his company.

  “Are people always like that here?” she asked him.

  “Like them? I’m afraid so. We would die of boredom otherwise.

  I mean, we visit each other, but we don’t all act like they did.” He made a sweeping gesture and bowed as if he were greeting a princess. “Some of us are far better behaved.”

  Maddalena smiled.

  “Good!” he said. “I was wondering if you had teeth. So far your mouth has been so tightly closed I wasn’t sure.”

  She smiled again.

  “Even better!” He picked up her hand and kissed it.

  One of the chaperones appeared from nowhere at Maddalena’s side to tell her the figlie were to go up to their rooms f
or the night.

  “It’s been a pleasure,” Marco said as she turned to leave, but Maddalena was ushered away before she could reply.

  Nestled into the bed, with the curtains drawn, she and Chiaretta whispered about the day. “Who were those women?” Maddalena asked.

  “The ones who came on the boat?” Chiaretta replied. “Courtesans.”

  Maddalena pictured the hand inside the bodice and the indiscreet kiss on the walkway. Years of listening to gossip in the Pietà had exposed her to what went on between men and women, and to the general outline of what some women did for money, but she had never seen any of it played out before her eyes.

  “Who was the man you were talking to?” Chiaretta asked.

  Maddalena told Chiaretta about her conversation, but when she got to the part about the kiss on the hand, she felt her sister stiffen.

  “Maddalena,” she said. “I feel like one of the chaperones getting ready to wag my finger. But you have to be careful.” Chiaretta sat up in bed and looked at her sister. “Most of these men have wives, and a few are betrothed. That doesn’t mean they aren’t looking for female company, just that it must not be us. Most of the bachelors can’t afford to marry, and they’re just looking for a little entertainment.”

  “But I don’t understand. I thought the whole point is that we’re virgins.”

  “And most men don’t want anyone to think they disrespect that.” Chiaretta thought back to the hand touching her thigh so many years ago and shuddered. “But not all of them. For some, I suppose, we’re a form of sport.”

  Maddalena was by now sitting up in bed also. “You make it sound so sordid.”