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

  Chiaretta nodded, and Michielina gestured to her to join her at the rail. “Go on,” she said. “Agnus Dei,” she sang. “Qui tollis peccata mundi.” Even though her song seemed like a whisper, it filled the chapel, but Chiaretta’s voice died before it reached the balcony railing.

  “Take a deeper breath, from here,” Michielina said, circumscribing Chiaretta’s waist with her hands. She took her hands away and stepped back, motioning to Chiaretta to sing. “Lamb of God, who taketh away the sins of the world,” she repeated.

  Chiaretta pulled herself up from the hips to gulp in air, feeling her lungs deflate as she sang out the notes. “Have mercy on us.” Her voice grew larger, and she went through each phrase with increasing confidence until she heard it feeding back to her from the walls of the chapel.

  “Brava,” Michielina clapped. “And the next time anyone asks you if you can sing, say yes.”

  The strange breathing had made her dizzy. “Yes, Maestra,” she murmured.

  “And now you can help me carry this music back to the practice room. If anyone wonders where you’ve been, I’ll say I asked you to help me. But”—she turned toward Chiaretta—“now I must scold you. You must not take it on yourself to go wandering around, going up staircases and whatever else pleases you. Difficult girls can find themselves very unhappy here. Do you understand what I’m saying?”

  “Yes, Maestra,” Chiaretta said, wondering how what Michielina said could be true. I’m happier than I’ve been since I came here, she thought as she hurried down the stairs to find her sister.

  THREE

  Chiaretta’s was the first voice to be heard when chatter and laughter was allowed, and she was the one most often ordered to settle down when the time for frivolity was over. If she and Maddalena were not known to be sisters, the matrons sometimes commented, they would be the most unlikely candidates on the ward.

  If not for Chiaretta’s urging, Maddalena could go for days without speaking to anyone. She daydreamed and made up stories in her head, and the cloister and solitude of the Pietà suited her. She loved how the dust floated in the golden light of the lace room, how a spider wove a perfect web in a corner of the children’s ward, how the candles in the chapel bobbed before releasing long tendrils of smoke into the air when the celebrant of the mass walked near them. She knew where every bird nest was in the eaves of the courtyard and knew without looking up when the nestlings had flown.

  Even if she had wanted to join in at the Pietà, the enforced silences meant that most of the time the figlie’s lives pointed inward. Much better, Maddalena decided, to make a satisfying world of her own. At the Pietà, needing others too much was unwise, especially when, without a good voice or an instrument to play, she was unlikely to get much attention.

  Maddalena did, in fact, have an instrument to play. As with the other figlie, a small part of her week was taken up with music lessons. At nine, she had come back to the Pietà later than most, but within a month or two she had already had a somewhat belated assessment of her musical ability. Annina had been right, the maestra concluded. She was nothing special. Maddalena’s hands were deft from her hours as a lace maker, and she learned the fingerings of the lute without too much difficulty, but she practiced as if it were just another form of work.

  Maddalena, the older women agreed, was turning out very well. A good wife for someone someday. Pretty enough and healthy, but not flighty like her sister, who was too willful for her own good. Altogether too willful for her own good.

  For the past few months Chiaretta had been assigned to the embroidery workshop. The task had appealed to her briefly, when she saw the swirling patterns in gold set off against the luminescent crimson, or emerald, or aquamarine silk that would one day adorn bodices and waistcoats. But when she discovered that she could not manage to finish more than an inch or two in an afternoon, and her work was not crisp and clean enough to win her any praise, the room had come to feel like a prison.

  Several days after her visit with Michielina, Chiaretta got a reprieve. Michielina’s assistants kept track of the music and organized the rehearsals, but she had requested a girl who could make sure keyboards were covered to keep out the dust, music was in neat stacks for filing, and stands were kept clean. The Pietà was full of young girls to keep occupied, but Michielina had one particular figlia in mind—one who was not shaping up to be much of an embroiderer anyway.

  From then on, Chiaretta was permitted to leave the embroidery room early to assist in the practice room and choir loft. Michielina was approaching retirement and was losing her vision after copying scores year after year in dim light. Whether her eyesight had taken a turn for the worse or whether, as some thought, she just enjoyed Chiaretta’s company, within a few months Chiaretta had been excused altogether from embroidery and was at the maestra’s side much of the day. Within a few months she could follow sheet music well enough to turn the pages at rehearsals, singing along under her breath while Michielina nodded her approval.

  “The maestra’s little lapdog,” a few of the girls whispered under their breath. But Michielina was loved, and everyone knew she was not well. The figlie di coro, at any rate, knew how to keep their most unbecoming thoughts to themselves.

  * * *

  When a growth spurt heralded Maddalena’s incipient puberty, she was ordered to collect her belongings for a move to another ward.

  “If I don’t see you here, I’ll never see you at all,” Chiaretta cried. Though she had meant to whisper, her words had come out in hoarse sobs loud enough for the matron to threaten her with solitary confinement if she didn’t immediately quiet down.

  Maddalena’s face crumpled in despair as she picked up her belongings in a single armful and carried them to the ward for adolescent girls. Awakening after her first rest period on her new cot, she saw that the girl with the cot next to hers was already sitting up and staring at her.

  “I wanted to see if I could get you to wake up just by looking at you,” she whispered. “What’s your name?”

  “Maddalena. Who are you?”

  “Anna Maria. What do you do?”

  “I make lace.”

  “I’m in the coro, and I’m a prodigy.”

  Maddalena didn’t know what a prodigy was, but she had no trouble figuring it out. Jiggling her heels up and down, Anna Maria ticked off on her fingers all the instruments she could already play, and the ones she was planning to learn.

  “What do you play?” she asked.

  “I’m learning the lute.”

  “Oh, please ask if I can be your teacher! I’m going to get a new pupil soon, they told me.” The jiggles had now moved upward as Anna Maria put her hands beside her hips on the cot and began to bounce up and down.

  She has even more energy than Chiaretta, Maddalena thought. Thoughts of her sister invaded her mind with such intensity that for a moment she could not breathe. A bell sounded, and the ward fell silent except for the rustle of girls bending over to tie their shoes and standing up to straighten their dresses. Putting on her hood, Maddalena pulled it down by the hem and held it there with her eyes shut, but whether she was trying to keep something safe inside or something else out, she did not know. She let out her breath, opened her eyes, and put on her cap. Anna Maria fell into step beside her as they left the ward.

  Hidden behind their hoods and caps, most of the girls of the Pietà would be difficult to identify by name. Anna Maria was an exception, not because of remarkable beauty or ugliness but because of the intensity of her eyes, which were always so wide open she seemed perpetually amazed or startled. When she blinked, which she did energetically and often, it added to the impression that Anna Maria burned as if she were powered by some hidden star.

  Anna Maria did not appear to have even a single friend. When Maddalena had lived alongside Chiaretta on the children’s ward, she had watched with no more than casual interest how the other girls allied themselves. Her sister was the one friend she needed, and the Pietà afforded little time to seek ou
t others. Now, seeing how desperately Anna Maria wanted to be her friend, how she positioned herself on her cot so she could see her the second she came through the doorway, Maddalena pitied the girl. She pitied herself as well, now that she no longer had Chiaretta to wake up next to. Within a few months, however, Maddalena’s imaginary conversations with Chiaretta as she lay in her bed had dwindled in favor of real ones with her new friend.

  Anna Maria had two favorite subjects—her music and her future—and to her they were one and the same. “I’m going to be”— she grasped for a word—“indispensable.”

  “Indispensable?” Maddalena chided. “That’s not a job. You’re supposed to say I’m going to be a nun, or something like that.”

  “Well, I’m just going to be indispensable. They’ll say, ‘We need a theorbo and a harpsichord,’ and I’ll be there. I can play violin and viola already, and I’ll learn cello and bass when I am a little taller. And the organ, but I can’t quite reach the pedals now.”

  The two girls started another circuit of the courtyard where they took their recreation, and Anna Maria chattered on. “I’ll become a sotto maestra and maybe even the maestra di coro. Hopefully before I start to smell as bad as she does.” Anna Maria tried to contain her laughter behind her hands, but as usual it escalated to loud snorts that echoed off the ceiling and walls of the open corridor, earning them both a scowl from the matron.

  Anna Maria had been assigned to give Maddalena her first lessons on the lute, but within a few months they had both concluded that Anna Maria’s dream of Maddalena joining the coro was not going to happen. She could accompany someone if the piece was not too complicated, but Maddalena’s lute playing did not appear headed for any more than that.

  “They’ll probably give you a recorder teacher pretty soon,” Anna Maria said one afternoon. “You’re supposed to learn two instruments before—” Her face grew somber and she did not finish the thought. The girls fell silent and looked away from each other until Maddalena heard Anna Maria sniffling.

  “What’s wrong?” she asked.

  “First I won’t get to be with you as much when you stop learning the lute.” Anna Maria’s voice caught in her throat. “And then I won’t see you anymore at all when you go away.”

  “Who says I’m going away?”

  “Well, they’ll make you leave someday, tell you to go be a nun or something. I don’t know!” Anna Maria buried her face in her hands.

  The prospect unnerved both of them enough that they began disappearing during the recreation periods to practice in the empty sala.

  It still wasn’t enough. “I don’t know what the problem is,” Anna Maria said. “You’re not like Annetina, who makes me want to die before the end of our lesson.” Anna Maria took the lute from Maddalena and played in a way that sounded like a donkey plodding under its load, throwing in a few misfingered chords to complete the effect.

  “I don’t know why I’m not better,” Maddalena said. “I try hard enough. Maybe it’s just too far between my fingers and my head.” She pulled the lute up, and bending her head so her cheek grazed the edge of the instrument, she strummed. “I wish I could hear it.”

  Anna Maria screwed up her face. “What do you mean you can’t hear it? Are you deaf ?”

  Maddalena didn’t know how to explain. “I mean hear it better. Maybe it’s just not the right kind of loud.” She thought for a moment, not sure what she had meant.

  Anna Maria shrugged and handed her back the lute. “Play the part with the arpeggios again. As loud as you want. No one else is here.”

  “You know what I would like more?” Maddalena asked, and before waiting for a reply, she went on. “To hear you play. But not the lute.”

  Anna Maria got up. “What then? The mandolin? The violin?”

  Maddalena had heard the mandolin only once or twice and wasn’t quite sure she liked its sound, but the violins always sounded nice in the chapel. “The violin,” she said.

  “I’m tired of the stupid old lute anyway. Let’s go.”

  Anna Maria took Maddalena into another practice area, where she picked up a violin case and carried it into a small room paneled in wood. “This is where the most senior violinists get their private lessons,” Anna Maria said. “I’ve never played here, but they’ve never actually said we can’t.” She shut the door behind them. “Maybe we’ll get in trouble, but I don’t think anyone will hear, and I want to know how it sounds.”

  From the moment Anna Maria started to play, something inside Maddalena began to surrender. She settled into an old chair, and even when it could give no more under her weight, she felt as if she were still sinking, so deep that she could fold up on herself until she was a small package of perfect contentment. The room f illed with sounds that gleamed like polished brass, melted like caramel in the mouth, and raised the hairs on Maddalena’s arms.

  Anna Maria stopped. “You’d better close your mouth or you’ll drool.”

  Maddalena startled and pulled herself up in her chair. “Play more,” she said in a voice so low it was almost a whisper.

  Anna Maria began again. Maddalena thought she could hear every hair on the bow as it caught the strings. The music whirled and flirted with the air, spinning like snowflakes in an alley.

  “Do you like that one?” Anna Maria asked. “I’m just making it up.” She looked at Maddalena. “Your mouth’s open again.”

  Maddalena stared at Anna Maria for a moment before hearing her and then closed her mouth, biting her lip to keep it shut. Finally she spoke. “I don’t want to play the lute anymore.”

  Anna Maria shrugged. “I like all the instruments pretty much the same.” She handed the violin to her. “Put it under your chin,” she said. “No, not like that—pull your cheek back a little.” She curled Maddalena’s fingers around the neck of the instrument and placed them in specific spots. “Keep them there,” she said, “and just run the bow over the strings.”

  Maddalena winced at the harshness of the sound.

  “Don’t hold the bow so tight, and keep your wrist straight.”

  Maddalena loosened her grip and tried to pull the bow with the same delicacy with which she finished the last stitches of a collar.

  The result was a far cry from the tones Anna Maria could make, rich notes redolent of the glint of light on the water, apple blossoms, laughter. In Maddalena’s hands, the violin sounded like the creak of rusty door hinges, but she didn’t care.

  She opened her eyes and saw Anna Maria staring at her.

  “You really like this,” Anna Maria said. “I think you like it more than I do.”

  Maddalena didn’t know what to say. She didn’t want to look at Anna Maria for fear of giving something away before she even understood what it was. She looked down at her hands. The nails were ragged and tipped with calluses, but in the last year her fingers had grown long and slender. Maybe they were made for this. She shut her eyes, her head full of music yearning to be played.

  * * *

  “Sicut erat in principio, et nunc, et semper, et in saecula saeculorum.” The priest’s voice echoed off the walls of the church of San Sebastiano, but Maddalena and Chiaretta were barely listening. On the edge of a group of figlie who had been brought to mass there, the two had tipped their heads back so far that when they tried to join in saying amen, the muscles of their necks tugged and left their mouths gaping.

  “Look there!” Chiaretta whispered to Maddalena, pointing to the ceiling. “I can almost see up under that man’s shirt.”

  “Move along.” The chaperone pushed the girls lightly on their backs. For once her tone was not harsh, for after all, Veronese’s ceiling frescoes of the story of Esther were what the figlie had been allowed to leave the Pietà to see.

  “Mea culpa, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa.” Maddalena and Chiaretta joined the other figlie pounding their chests in repentance for their sins as they walked toward the altar.

  Chiaretta looked up at the ceiling again and let out an inadvertent whimper. M
addalena reached out for her hand as they stared upward at two horses, one black and one white, which from where they were standing appeared to be galloping toward them through the roof. The women in the fresco watched with fearful eyes from a palace balcony, and three male figures strained to hold the wild-eyed beasts back to avoid trampling everyone in the church when the animals burst free from the plaster and thundered to the floor.

  The scene overhead swirled and threatened, and Maddalena looked down. Chiaretta continued to stare so hard she had to grab on to Maddalena to steady herself. They giggled as Chiaretta staggered, mimicking her loss of balance until the chaperone’s hisses made them stop. Squeezing each other’s hands, they forced themselves to pay attention to the mass.

  Afterward, the figlie gathered in the piazza in front of the church. “We’re walking now to the convent at Santa Maria dei Carmini,” one of the chaperones said. “The nuns are going to feed us a special dinner, and then we’ll head back to the Pietà.”

  The girls walked single file along a narrow fondamento until they turned onto a broader walkway along a bigger canal. The brick walls of Santa Maria dei Carmini rose up on their right, while in the water to their left a few ducks paddled, and a seagull sat on a post. To the cloistered girls of the Pietà, the ducks’ feathers were as rare as jewels, and the chaperones stopped to let the girls watch them for a moment.

  Eventually, Geltruda, the older of the two chaperones, clapped her hands. “Come along,” she said. “The sisters are waiting for us.”

  Ahead, the bridge leading to the Campo dei Carmini came into view. The girls had been almost alone on the fondamento, but the bridge was crowded with small groups, most of them young men, talking in excited voices loud enough to be heard from a distance as they hurried across.

  One of the chaperones, walking at the head of the group, stiffened and slowed down. Geltruda came from the rear to talk with her.

  “Do you see that?” Maddalena overheard her say. “Do you think...” Her voice trailed off as Geltruda appeared to complete the thought with her eyes.