“That’s more like it,” he said. “I want to see you smiling.” He came around and pulled her to her feet. “You are my wife,” he said, looking in her eyes, “and I am so proud, and so happy.” He grinned. “And all of Venice is jealous.”
The fire had died down and the dawn light had begun to filter into the room before Chiaretta and Claudio were too tired to talk anymore. His mother, they agreed, would be difficult to get around as long as they lived in the same house. But families had an understanding that each floor in the home was separate and private, and Giustina was as unlikely to invade their space without warning as they were to walk unannounced into hers. The circumstances that morning were unusual, and she wouldn’t be making such appearances a habit. If she did, Claudio, not Chiaretta, would take it in hand.
The situation might change, but seeking Giustina out now, they agreed, would gain Chiaretta nothing. She would probably end up feeling worse every time she tried. Though Giustina might see herself as in charge of her daughter-in-law’s education, Chiaretta would be better off making herself as unavailable as possible for her mother-in-law’s kind of lesson. Tomorrow Claudio would stop by Antonia’s house and ask her to come over as often as she could to spend time with his wife. Chiaretta could learn from her friend how everything was done, and when her pregnancy forced Antonia into confinement, Chiaretta could keep her company at home.
“I just hope she doesn’t turn you into a monster.” Claudio laughed, pulling Chiaretta to her feet. “But for now, I need to get you to bed. I’ve kept you up all night.”
In her bedchamber, he removed her robe, revealing her body beneath a thin silk shift. “Ahh,” he said, running his eyes over her as she reached out her arms. “But I would be a cad to lie with you again so soon.” He pulled back the coverlet. “Sleep now. It will all work out. Just give it time.”
FIFTEEN
The mask was made of leather, stretched and molded into the shape of a cat’s face and painted in pearlescent shades of white and blue. A filigreed design in gold mesh and wire sprang out like angel wings from the nose bridge, as if the cat itself were wearing a mask.
“It’s beautiful,” Chiaretta said, running her fingers over the faux pearls and tiny glass beads that rimmed the mask’s edges. Handing it to Claudio, she stood and turned around. “Will you help me put it on?”
When he was finished tying the ribbon, she went out to the portego to look at herself in one of the gilded mirrors along the walls. At the Pietà, Chiaretta had seen her reflection only when she studied maniera and in the few minutes before a concert, when the figlie passed around a hand mirror. Two months after her wedding she was still getting used to the sensation of seeing herself in her new clothes and hairstyle as she walked through the portego or looked into the silver-backed mirror on her dressing table. This is what I look like with my hair down, or This is what I look like when I wake up in the morning, or This is what I look like walking, she would think to herself, not so much out of vanity as curiosity and amazement.
Chiaretta stood in front of the huge mirror, watching the masked figure copy her movements. She felt a little queasy, as she sometimes did getting on or off a gondola when the canal waters were stirred up. She untied the mask and the feeling vanished, then she held it up to her face and took it away over and over again, in a slow process of reassurance.
It does look beautiful with my new dress, she thought. The bodice of shimmering silver and aquamarine brocade showed off her full breasts over a skirt fashioned from yards of taffeta silk that swished when she moved.
Turning to find Claudio to have him put the mask back on, she gasped to see a man in a tricornered hat over a black hood and mantle watching her from a few feet away. “Did my bauta scare you?” Her husband’s voice was muffled beyond recognition by the edge of the plain white mask resting on his upper lip.
The blood rushed from her head, and she put her hand on a chair to steady herself, ambushed by the sudden memory of the man in the white mask so many years before. “I don’t like this,” she said.
“Nonsense! Everyone loves Carnevale. It just takes a little getting used to.”
“But what if we get separated? How will I find you?”
Claudio had taken off his hat and mask, and stood before her in a silk hood that covered his head except for a small hole for his face. He leaned forward to kiss her cheek. “Some other man in a bauta will put you in his gondola and take you to his house and I’ll never see you again.”
He watched to make sure she knew he was joking before adding, “It won’t happen. You will be glued to my arm. Or even better...” He disappeared into her bedroom and came back with the square of purple silk the mask had been wrapped in. “Help me fold this and pin it on my hat.”
When Chiaretta handed him her mask to tie it back on, he shook his head. “That’s for parties.” He disappeared into his study and brought out a bauta identical to his own. “You have to wear this.”
He helped her put on the hood and mantle, and after tying on her plain white mask, he went back into his study and returned with a tricornered hat identical to his.
Chiaretta looked out at herself and felt the nausea returning. Two figures stared at her from the mirror. One was tall and, except for the white mask, was garbed in black from head to foot. The other was smaller and, below the mantle, was wearing a taffeta skirt. She shut her eyes and exhaled through her nostrils. The mask heated up in response, and as she shifted her shoulders inside the bauta, she reminded herself that as long as she didn’t look in the mirror, she was just herself.
She took Claudio’s arm, and together they descended the stairs and walked out the dock. Chiaretta glanced up at the purple rosette pinned onto his hat as they boarded the gondola. Seeing it, a surge of affection overpowered her, making her want nothing more than to run with him back up to her bedchamber, throw off their costumes, and make love.
The gondolier cast off the lines, and they slipped out onto the Grand Canal toward the Rialto Bridge. Around them in the darkness, boats glided through the water, filled with figures in black, their masks a ghoulish white in the lamplight.
Where Claudio was taking her was a surprise he didn’t want to spoil. Not until she saw the brightly lit facade of the Teatro San Giovanni Grisostomo did Chiaretta understand that she was going to her first opera, not at the Teatro Sant’Angelo but as the guest of boxholders at the most lavish theater in Venice.
“I’m afraid you’re going to be totally spoiled and you won’t even want to come to my poor little theater after you see this one!” Claudio spoke almost at a yell to be heard over the cries of people hawking refreshments and selling tickets. “Scenario!” he called out, holding up a small coin to catch the attention of a young boy selling programs.
As they moved through the lobby, Chiaretta saw the majority of the people in attendance were wearing cloaks identical to theirs and the same white masks, although a few wore black ones with wrinkled brows or bulging eye sockets.
“What are those?” she asked, mumbling her words under the lip of her mask.
“Characters from the commedia dell’arte,” Claudio said. “In a year you’ll recognize them all.”
“And who is that bird?” She nodded in the direction of someone hobbling toward them wearing a mask with painted-on spectacles and a long beak.
Claudio lifted his mask slightly to speak more clearly. “During the last plague, a doctor stuffed his mask with herbs he thought would keep him from getting sick while he treated his patients.”
“Did it work?”
“Not for long, but everybody loved the mask.”
The person wearing the plague doctor mask brushed Chiaretta’s shoulder in passing, offering excuses in a soft, high voice before continuing on.
“Was that a woman?” Chiaretta asked, amazed.
Claudio turned around to look. “You never know in Venice,” he said, scrutinizing the figure as it disappeared around a corner. “She—or he—is wearing pianelle. They’re
these ridiculous high clogs hardly anybody wears anymore. Women today would rather get their feet wet than walk on stilts, and I for one am glad.” He hugged her around the shoulder. “I like you just the height you are.”
Claudio took her arm as they reached the staircase. After ascending several flights, Chiaretta found herself in a curved hallway. Men in livery were standing in front of a dozen or more gilded doors, and when Claudio reached a particular one, the servant ushered them inside.
The box in which Chiaretta found herself was divided into two parts. In the back, just inside the door, a couch and matching armchair were arranged around a table on which playing cards were strewn. On a credenza to one side were several bottles of wine and silver trays with cheeses and preserves. A mirror was positioned on one wall to reflect the view on the stage for those who were too far inside the box to see it directly. In the middle of the box, a curtain had been pulled back. Through it Chiaretta could see a gilded balcony rail and a scattering of half a dozen or more seats with red velvet upholstery.
The owners of the box had not yet arrived, but within a few minutes Claudio was greeted by a man who removed his mask to reveal himself. Marco Grimani, whose family owned the opera house, was making the rounds of the boxes to greet his friends.
“I heard you would be here,” he said to Claudio. “And I wanted to meet your bride, the famous Chiaretta della Pietà.” He bowed to her and took her hand. “Blasted Carnevale! For years I tried to see your face, and now you’re wearing a mask!”
“You can take off your bauta,” Claudio told her, reaching up to remove her hat. He untied her mask and helped her pull the hood and mantle over her head.
“Brava!” Marco said. “Proof that the putte are angels after all!” He lifted her hand with a flourish and kissed her on the wrist.
Their conversation was cut off by the arrival of the owners of the box. While Claudio sat on the sofa and chatted, Marco escorted Chiaretta to the front. She looked out across at the tiers of identical boxes ringing the sides and back of the theater. Gilded reliefs of shells, flowers, and leaves decorated the pillars. Human figures carved in marble held up each box from below.
She leaned out to look over the railing down to the floor, where dozens of people were milling around. “Where are they going to sit?” she asked Marco.
“They’re not,” he said, “unless they rent seats. Just like at the Pietà.” He pointed to a few people carrying benches to the front. “There’s still an hour to go. It will be packed down there by the time it starts.”
“But how will they see?”
Marco chuckled. “No one pays much attention anyway.” He pointed up. “Watch the ceiling!”
On one end was painted the Grimani coat of arms and a figure that Marco told her represented Glory, surrounded by cherubs and divinities holding garlands of flowers. Toward the other end was a tableau depicting Venus.
“It’s beautiful,” she said.
“Oh, you haven’t seen the best part yet,” Marco crowed. “It’s one of the wonders of Venice!” Just then the tableau of Venus began to retract and a chandelier almost thirty feet across was lowered. Four gold and silver branches, on which dozens of white candles burned, came together at the center in the coat of arms of the Grimani family, from which emanated gilded rays encrusted with balls painted like pearls.
“Bravo!” Claudio said, coming up behind them and pulling up another seat. “For my bride,” he said, handing Chiaretta a small glass of amber-colored wine. “The Grimanis put on the best show in town even before the opera starts.”
“And while we’re waiting, we can watch the pre-opera entertainment.” Marco pointed across to the boxes on the other side. “There are the Gradenigos, enjoying the first course of their dinner.” His eyes scanned the boxes. “What have we here?”
He pointed to a box where a man in a bauta cupped the bodice of a masked woman’s dress before they closed the curtain behind them. “We’ll just pretend we can’t imagine who they are,” Marco said. “After all, they’re wearing masks. Who could tell?”
“No idea at all,” repeated Claudio, his eyebrows raised as the two men passed a look between them that Chiaretta did not understand.
Below, on the main floor, she saw two men arguing. They pulled the masks from their faces and began to rain blows on each other. Soon others joined in, until a pile of bodies kicked and flailed on the floor while a few women fanned themselves wildly and people in the first tier of boxes threw whatever they could find at them.
The orchestra had been tuning up for the last five or ten minutes but could not be heard over the din until the conductor signaled them to play as loudly as they could. As the chandelier rose and the tableau of Venus slid back through the hole in the ceiling, they played the first notes.
Chiaretta watched the curtain go up on a set evoking an ancient Greek harbor. A vessel sat at a wharf midstage, while in the foreground on one side was an open-air temple. Chiaretta looked into a palace courtyard with a marble staircase, leading up to a mezzanine bedchamber on the other side of the stage. In a manner so seamless there appeared to be no back wall to the theater at all, the set blended into a painted backdrop depicting a coast with an armada of ships in the distance.
The audience on the floor applauded before going back to what they had been doing. Dancers came onstage to perform a ballet, setting the scene for the entrance of the hero and his entourage of soldiers. After a few minutes of recitative, a voice pierced through the noise in the theater and brought the crowd briefly to attention. Though the pitch was in a woman’s range, the same as Caterina’s when she sang Judith, the sound resonated off the back wall and ceiling with what seemed to Chiaretta to be several times the volume.
“Do you know who that is? You’re seeing one of the great castrati of our time,” Claudio told her. “It’s Senesino. He’s on his way to Dresden after this opera closes, but word is he plans to sing for Handel in London.”
The heroine was going to fall in love with a short little man with rolls of fat spilling out over the collar of his costume? He looks like a walnut with arms and legs, Chiaretta thought. As he continued his aria, the magnitude of his voice began to make anything, even love with a walnut, seem possible.
“The lungs of a man and the voice of a boy,” Claudio said. “But quite a price to pay.”
Senesino’s voice grew louder, leading into a cadenza filled with trills and swoops and runs of notes growing ever higher in pitch until the whole audience was watching him. Cued by a flourish of his pudgy arms, the orchestra joined in, and the aria ended, to an explosion of applause.
Then the stage was filled again with soldiers, and women waving them off to war. Senesino got on a boat at midstage. Around him painted rows of waves moved back and forth, and his boat began to rock. A god flew down from the rafters, and they performed a duet before the god disappeared above the stage. As the boat moved offstage, Senesino raised his voice. Brandishing his sword, he brought the curtain down on the first act.
Except for a naval battle, complete with cannons and smoke and a ship that sank by disappearing under the stage, the audience ignored most of the rest of the opera. The seats on the other side of the theater were empty except when Senesino sang, and below Chiaretta, the people in the lowest-tiered boxes were more engaged in a contest to see who could spit farthest into the crowd.
As she watched the other singers struggle over the noise, Chiaretta thought about the rapt audiences seated below her as she sang from the chapel balcony. Tonight, a soprano had already stopped in the middle of an aria and rushed into the wings screaming at the audience to stop throwing things onstage, and another let her voice drop as if the effort wasn’t worth it, but most just went gamely on.
Finally, even Chiaretta grew bored and went to join Claudio. His face was flushed with wine, and he was losing jovially at cards. She stood behind her husband, resting her fingers on his shoulders. He reached up and patted her hand. “My good luck has arrived,” he said to his
friends, and won the next three hands.
The curtain dropped for the final time, the chandelier came back down, and the audience began to drift out. Hiding a yawn, Chiaretta put on her bauta, and as she took Claudio’s arm, they descended to the lobby and out onto the street.
The square in front of the theater had been transformed into a wild scene of masked Carnevale revelers, jugglers, street musicians, and vendors of food and trinkets. Claudio led her through the crush and down side streets, shielding her with his body from the crowds of people trying to force their way through in both directions.
Then she and Claudio were at the Rialto Bridge. Above them, the stone arch was full of people, reminding Chiaretta of the day she had witnessed the fights at the Ponte dei Carmini when she was a little girl. Drunken choruses of bawdy songs drifted through the night air, but tonight the occasional loose feather from a mask or empty flask of wine was all that fell from the bridge.
Still, Chiaretta leaned into Claudio’s arm and held it tight. She wanted to be home. Home. Palazzo Morosini, her own bed, her own room, with her husband beside her.
Maddalena listened to the sounds of the first night of Carnevale from behind the walls of the Pietà. Earlier that evening she had been in the parlatorio as group after group of people passed through. The figlie chatted and giggled with their faces close to the grille, offering pastries and small glasses of wine across the barrier to their guests, and clapping their hands as the revelers entertained them with hand puppets and magic tricks.
Maddalena had watched to see if perhaps Chiaretta would be among them. She had come twice with Antonia since her wedding, but the experience of talking to each other through the grille was so unnerving they had both been glad when the visits ended. But tonight Chiaretta had not come, and although Maddalena wasn’t surprised, she was still disappointed when she left the crowded parlatorio and went up to bed without a glimpse of her sister.
The Four Seasons: A Novel of Vivaldi's Venice Page 21