Vivaldi's Virgins, page 17
“It’s the talk of all Venezia, how she has run away with the young Giambattista Tiepolo.”
I wondered if Franz had come to ask me to run away with him. I’ve wondered much over the years what I would have said.
“Anna Maria, I have to leave Venezia. I am called home.”
“Is there bad news from your family?”
Franz sat back so that his face moved away from mine. “They think it’s good news,” he said bitterly.
I said nothing. What could I say? What right did I have to ask anything of him?
He moved close to me again and, although there was no one else in the room, he spoke to me in a whisper. “Please believe me. If I could choose a bride, I would choose you. I would live with you and love you for the rest of my life.”
Tears came into my eyes, but still I said nothing.
“But I am not free to choose. These travels of mine—as well as a bad investment my father made—have left my family close to ruin. They have found a girl with a fortune, whose family would like to link itself to ours. And so I am to be married, against my every inclination, when my whole heart belongs to another. Oh, sweet Signorina, my heart belongs to you.”
I placed my hand against the grille, and he placed his hand against mine, so that there was only the thinnest filigree of metal between us, and I could feel the heat of him and the floral pattern—a design of pomegranate blossoms—press itself into the flesh of my palm. “I will keep it safe, then, Franz Horneck.”
I heard Maestra Evelina clear her throat, signaling that she had come back, and that the time for the visit was over.
Franz lowered his mask. “Forever,” he whispered.
It surprises me now, looking back, how hard I thought in that moment about myself and Franz and the years that would stretch on without him. I think, as in a vision, I saw my entire life. People who have almost died say that one experiences just such a vision—one’s entire life in a flash of light—in the moment one sees the face of the Angel of Death approaching.
The words came unbidden, against my better judgment. After all, Franz Horneck was about to be married, and I was but fourteen and a virgin. And yet the words would come—the words would be spoken. “Forever,” I whispered. “Per sempre.”
ANNO DOMINI 1710
Madre mia carissima,
Dearest Mother, I write to you in desperation! I think sometimes that God must hate me to leave me here cut off from those I love. And yet haven’t I served God well, dedicating my very youth to singing His praises? What have I done to deserve to be abandoned here—again and again abandoned here? How I wish that you could send word to me somehow and tell me that I do not write to you in vain!
There are ways. The girls who work in the laundry seem to have the greatest access to contact from the outside. I have an ally there—a girl of the comun who has shown herself quite happy to carry out commissions for those of us who need her services. Only recently she slipped a letter into my hand while she passed me in the hallway with a pile of clean linens. This letter was from Marietta, who knew full well that it would have been burned without ever reaching me if she’d sent it in the normal way.
Poor Marietta has had a miscarriage. She wrote to say that she was carefully tended by the good nuns of San Francesco della Vigna, who massaged her and gave her herbs at night to help her sleep. And yet her baby broke free of its moorings well before it ever had a chance to grow. It was just a mess of clotted blood that came out of her more awfully and painfully than the worst period she’d ever had.
She is still engaged to be married to Tomasso Foscarini, who loves her à la folie. At least now, writes Marietta, his family will not tax her with the shame that would have been brought upon them by a pregnant bride in the wedding processional.
Because the Foscarini are so rich, Marietta’s father-in-law is willing to forego her dowry—which means, of course, that no contract will have to be signed, apart from the marriage contract, and Marietta will be free to pursue her singing career outside the Pietà.
It would not have happened this way if I hadn’t lied for her.
No one was injured by my falsehood, and both Marietta and her bridegroom have been made very happy as a result of it. Why is my lie, then, a mortal sin?
I hope I live a very long time, because I have a terror of facing Judgment Day. And yet I have played only a small part in the great web of events that have conspired in Marietta’s favor.
I told you of Handel’s plans for an opera. The libretto is by Cardinal Grimani, whose family owns three of our greatest theaters: the Santi Giovanni e Paolo, the San Samuele, and—the very best of them—the newly reopened San Giovanni Grisostomo, which the composer dearly wanted for his opera debut in la Serenissima. I am well informed for a cloistered girl, am I not? Maestro Vivaldi always spoke freely with us about such things while he taught here.
The libretto for Handel’s opera, naturally, had to be passed first by the censor. But, in this case, the censor was the Grand Inquisitor himself, Raimondo Pasquali—a great friend, as it happens, of the Foscarini. Influence is everything, and everyone, it would seem, has his price, whether it’s paid in influence or gold.
Everything was in place. But Handel could find no one who pleased him for the role of Poppea—Poppea, who must be beautiful enough to be loved and desired by every male character in the opera, and yet must sing with the sweetness of an angel and the range and power of a whole host of angels over many hours.
Someone, it seems, whispered three words in the ear of our dear young Saxon composer, il caro Sassone, as everyone calls Handel now: Marietta della Pietà.
Oh, tell me, Mother, that it was you who told Handel about how perfect Marietta would be for his opera! It would be proof that you have been reading my letters, even though you have never answered them, not a single one.
I am hoping against hope that the figlie di coro will be allowed to go see Marietta perform. She writes that so many flowers have already been sent to her that the parlatorio of the convent of San Francesco della Vigna looks like a garden.
I feel sorry for those nuns who need to minister to Marietta’s needs every day—Marietta the newly minted diva. Marietta risen up from the gutter to have her name written into the Golden Book, joined in marriage with Tomasso Foscarini. Marietta who promises to visit the Pietà in her wedding procession along the Grand Canal, who says she will stop here and give us enough chocolates to make us all sick for a week.
Thank you for helping my friend, if it was you who helped her, dear Mother. I wish there were some such magic you could work for me. But there will be no procession of gondolas for the wedding of Anna Maria dal Violin.
I received another letter this week, handed over to me by the Prioress herself. Claudia wrote to tell me of her bridegroom. He is not old and ugly as she had feared, but someone of a neighboring noble family who was her playmate during childhood—a great favorite of hers—before she was sent here to hone her musical skills (and stay out of trouble until she came of age). His family is noble and poor, while Claudia’s has had its fortune and lands for only a couple of centuries. And so the match benefits both houses. She will actually have the title of princess now. Can you imagine that? La principessa Claudia.
She, too, has promised to bring us chocolates.
I have not one single friend left here in this place. Bernardina hates me more than ever, now that she has to take lessons from me. And Maestra Meneghina—la Befana—is the only one deemed skilled enough to be my teacher. She never has anything good to say about my playing. When she is silent at the end of one of our lessons, I feel that I have triumphed—because at least she has not been able to find any reason to fault me.
I can’t remember the last time I laughed. I’m sure it was before Giulietta ran away, because she and I were always the ones who laughed most tremendously together—she and I, and Claudia, too, sometimes. When I lie in bed and pore over what we said and did, I can make myself smile and even, sometimes, laugh a tiny bit. But that kind of laugh—a remembered laughter—only makes me cry, in the end, because my friends are gone now, and I know how alone I really am.
I would probably be crying myself to sleep every night were it not for the music that Maestro Vivaldi continues to send me.
It seems that he is composing more and more. I’m sure it’s what he cares about most, even though, of course, he’s very vain about his skill as a performer. Half the time, I think, he composes simply as a means to show this virtuosity to the world. But then, at other times, he writes something so tender, and so filled with invention and sweetness and passion. What can this be but Divine Grace? I wonder mightily why some people in the world—even though they may not really seem to be more righteous or deserving than any others—are thus singled out. Sometimes I think that God makes artists quite by accident.
The Prioress handed me another of the maestro’s compositions along with Claudia’s letter—a sonata in B-flat. There at the top—just as he had that very first time—he’d scrawled the words, “per Signorina Anna Maria.” Like the last solo he wrote for me, it’s very hard to play. I suspect, in fact, that he gives them to me only to see if it’s possible for anyone other than himself to play the music as he’s written it. Please don’t think me too vain—but everyone says this about the music the maestro dedicates to me.
I’ve come to believe that music is the one companion, the one teacher, the one parent, the one friend who will never abandon me. Every effort I give to it is rewarded. It never spurns my love, it never leaves my questions unanswered. I give, and it gives back to me. I drink, and—like the fountain in the Persian fairytale—it never runs dry. I play, and it tells me my feelings, and it always speaks the truth.
We are placed here to pray for Venezia and the grace of the Republic in God’s eyes. But I have found the secret treasure in this task of ours, and it has nothing to do with any higher good but only my own satisfaction.
There—you see how self-serving I am. And perhaps I am, in truth, my mother’s daughter. No doubt it serves you best to keep yourself hidden from me.
The priest and the Prioress and everyone else here would have us believe that nothing in this life is important at all, when compared with what comes later. And yet the afterlife holds no attractions for me, as I know it will be my lot to suffer when I am sent there. I will burn in Hell for these bad thoughts of mine. And pray God that no one in la Serenissima but you is ever party to them!
Dante Alighieri wrote letters to his beloved Beatrice from the time they met as children until long after she died. Letters that he never sent and she never read. When I wake at night and cannot sleep, I am possessed by the thought that my letters to you are like Dante’s letters to Beatrice—like music played in an empty room.
I will give this letter to Sister Laura after I seal it. I like to think of you breaking the seal on my letters. I reach out to you across the void that has separated us and will perhaps separate us forever. I write and write even though I am afraid that you never read these letters—that no one reads these letters, nor ever will. That Sister Laura simply throws them in the fire, satisfied that I have been given the illusion of being someone’s daughter.
Across that void, nonetheless, I send my kisses to you. I send my love.
Anna Maria dal Violin
There was much I left out of my report of Marietta’s letter. I may have been fearless in my writing when it came to betraying my own blasphemous thoughts, yet I was determined never to reveal information that might betray my friends.
But Marietta wrote without censoring a single thought or deed. Each time I receive one of her letters, I’ve contemplated burning it. More than one in the pile I have here has singe marks on it from the initial impulse that made me throw it into the fire after my first reading.
Marietta’s letters were and have been a secret indulgence for me. I read them whenever I am feeling dull or bored, and I’ve hidden them—along with all my other secret things—so carefully that they will not be found.
All my letters—and my one little book, if not the other—must be hidden, at least until I am dead. But, for now, they are a companion to me such that I have never had in my lifetime, there for me whenever I want them. They are like a passageway into my youth again, and a window onto the sort of life I know I will never have.
Annina,
What a foul place this is! All but a few of the nuns are vile creatures who get their jollies by making life as miserable as possible for the novices and other young people—like me—thrown into their midst.
You can imagine what hay they made of my pregnancy. It’s only the fact that my darling dolt has two aunts here that kept the most self-righteous of the old biddies from throwing me down a well! I told them that I didn’t want to be pregnant, and would be quite obliged to them if they could give me some herb or push me down the stairs or something to make it go away. But then all I got was more sermons about how I’m more wicked than the Grand Caliph and Genghis Khan put together for wanting to do away with Tomasso’s precious baby. I thought if I could get hold of a couple of those aunties and drop a hint or two that Tomasso had nothing to do with the state I was in, I might get a bit of help.
And then I heard from one of the choir nun’s private maids that my name was being bruited around for the role of Poppea in Handel’s opera. She’s the one who’s loved by every one of the male characters—and so she has to be beautiful as well as a brilliant vocalist, and able to sustain her role for a full five hours or so.
That was the last straw for me. I sent for my future mother-in-law and told her that if I didn’t get her help, I’d be giving birth to someone else’s bastard. Of course, I was a bit more refined in the way I said it, but clear enough not to leave her in any doubt about what to do.
She’s a whirlwind, that future mother-in-law of mine. No sooner had she left than one of the nuns came in from the apothecary with what she said was a sleeping draught for me.
I drank it down with a prayer that Mamma Foscarini hadn’t decided to go the easy route and just poison me. She’s quite fond of Tomasso, though, and I was banking on her not wanting to tell him that his fiancée just happened to drop dead after a visit from her.
The bleeding started after Vespers and went on and on through the night and well into the morning, great clotted masses of it, and all the while the nun—who stank!—stood by and kneaded my belly as if I’d been a lump of dough. It hurt, too, worse than any period you can imagine. But the nun told me that she had no particular need to please the Foscarini, and that if I screamed she’d kill me.
When everything had all come out and I realized I wasn’t going to die, the nun put a powder of dragon’s blood in my opening, and gave me another foul-smelling potion to make me sleep. And it was as if, in sleep, I became a virgin again.
Oh, Annina, you cannot imagine the relief of waking up and knowing that I was no longer with child! I’ll bear children—because I’ll need to. And I’ll probably even love the little blighters. But it’s far too early now, and, really, it wouldn’t be fair to give Tomasso a child that wasn’t his own.
When did a sense of fairness ever enter into my plans? Don’t be too quick to judge me. I have as much a sense of right and wrong as the most pious-seeming nun in this place. It is just that my sense of justice is mingled with the practicalities of living in the world. And I do not hide my evil, unlike the rest of them.
A message came from Handel, just as I knew it would. He’d found everyone for his opera—the great fat soprano Margarita Durastanti to play the title role of Agrippina; the bass Antonio Francesco Carli to sing the role of Claudio; two castrati who get treated like gods, Giuliano Albertini and Valeriano Pellegrini, for Narciso and Nerone; the contralto Francesca Maria Vanini-Boschi, wearing breeches for the role of Ottone; and her husband, Beppe, a bass, to sing Pallante.
But Handel couldn’t find his Poppea, he wrote, because his Poppea was hidden away in the convent of San Francesco della Vigna.
The mother-in-law again intervened—and I can see why, too. If I become an opera star, no one will remember the gossip about how I snagged her son. The more famous I become, the happier she’ll be—as long as I behave myself from now on. And believe me, she extracted just such a promise from me, promising in turn that she wouldn’t hesitate the next time to have me poisoned if I dared ever cross her. And yet she as much as told me that I’d have my cicisbeo, providing he was from a noble family and we comported ourselves with discretion.
I think I’m going to like this mother-in-law of mine.
All right. I know you’re reading this and asking, yes, that’s all very well, but what about the thing Marietta promised to do for me?
I haven’t forgotten, cara. I was just saving the best news for last.
Just as I said I would, I asked around about who might have a brother or uncle who’s been in financial trouble lately. It seems that just about everyone does—so that led nowhere. But then my mother-in-law let something slip about Tomasso—how she hopes I’ll take a strong hand with him and straighten him out, as he’s really been going to Hell in a handbasket lately.
I played as dumb as I dared, expressing the opinion that nobles have it all over the common people when it comes to moral behavior. Mamma Foscarini gave a great big snort and advised me to keep a close eye on my jewels (as if I had any!), as Tomasso had lately stooped so low as to steal something out of his own sister’s room and pawn it in the Ghetto.
So maybe every duke and duchess in Venezia steals one from the other, as far as I know. But the situation seems to bear a passing resemblance to the one you described. Wouldn’t that just be something if the man you’re looking for turned out to be Tomasso!
Trust me, Annina, I’ll find a way to worm out the rest of the tale and whether this path will lead you anywhere or suddenly end. I think it’s a big mistake for you to try to find out in the first place. There’s a reason we’re stuck in these holes. Don’t imagine that your mother, if she lives, is going to thank you for throwing back the curtain and showing the whole of Venezia what she has probably gone to a great deal of effort to hide. But I’m bound to help you, and help you I will.
