by David Hewson
“Where are you from, girl? What use are you to me?”
She bowed her head modestly. “Geneva originally, sir. I cannot answer for the other. You must be the judge.”
“Hmmm. I know men in Geneva. Your teacher?”
“Only my late father, who was a carpenter by trade.”
His face sagged quite noticeably. “Very well, then,” he grunted in a most miserable fashion. “Play something. Let’s get it over with.”
Rebecca opened her case and took out a rough-looking instrument stained a rather disgusting shade of reddy-brown.
“Did he make that, too, girl?” Vivaldi demanded. “Must be the ugliest-looking instrument I’ve ever seen.”
She gazed at him with a firmness of purpose I found quite admirable. “He did, sir, and would have bought me something better if we could have a forded it.”
“Ye gods,” the old misery sighed, and placed a skinny, withered hand over his chin.
I could not take my eyes off Rebecca, for a variety of reasons. Something in this exchange amused her greatly. I felt already that she would best this grumpy old priest.
“A study we used to play, sir,” she announced sweetly, then raised her rough-hewn bow and brought it down on that ugly lump of wood like an angel felling demons with a sword. Well! You may guess what occurred next: a miracle. She wrung from that battered old thing such tones of sweetness, such surging passages of passion that I thought at one point our great composer might faint upon the floor in a swoon!
True, some of this was show (and what is wrong with that in the circumstances?). She dashed through scales, note perfect and at a flashing speed. She double-stopped, then treble-stopped, up and down the neck. A slip of a folk tune fell in here, some baroque finery there. Slow passages, fast passages, light and dark, loud and quiet, they dazzled us with their technical skill and yet carried a great sense of feeling too. I am no fiddler— having listened to Rebecca, I now doubt I am a musician at all—but I know genius when I hear it. Vivaldi was right about the instrument, which was not worthy of her. But none could doubt Rebecca’s brilliance, and it warmed my heart to see it wrung some emotion and generosity out of the old man, too, for when she finished this astonishing exhibition, the priest rose to his feet, broke into a broad, ingenuous grin, clapped his hands like a five-year-old, and yelled, “Hurrah!”
Rebecca, with that knowing smile still upon her closed lips, quietly placed the instrument back in its case, then looked at him and said, all innocence, “I hope I may be of use to you, sir. In some capacity.”
“Good God, girl!” he exclaimed. “You’re just the wonder I need.”
“Thank you.” She said this, I am happy to report, with a touch of firmly demure honesty, which Vivaldi took, I hope, as a small reprimand for his doubt in her.
“But what was it? I recognised Corelli. And some common studies. The rest?”
“I don’t know, sir. Things my father taught me.” She blushed when she spoke. I did not understand why.
The old priest clapped his hands. “No matter. Shame about that damned instrument of yours. Nevertheless, you are welcome to my little band of ladies.” At this the rest of the group, an odd-looking assortment, much like a bunch of nuns who had newly abandoned their wimples, smiled at her and clapped their hands by way of greeting. “Your name?”
“Rebecca.” My heart raced. A sharp look of panic had risen in her eyes. “Rebecca Guillaume.”
“A pretty name for a pretty face,” Vivaldi said pleasantly. “A shame that none shall see you.”
“Sir?”
Vivaldi pointed to the large gilt shutters that ran along each side of the nave. “This is a church, Rebecca Guillaume. Not a music hall. Can’t have ’em ogling the orchestra when they should be listening to the tunes. You play behind these golden eyelids, and I’m afraid they’ll stay tight shut while the audience swoon over your e forts.”
At this her head went to one side, as if to lean upon her shoulder, and I found myself perplexed once more. It was quite impossible to judge what she was thinking.
“Now . . .” Vivaldi announced, beaming from ear to ear. “To the new pieces!”
With that he distributed a score among the orchestra, explaining it carefully, instrument by instrument, with the skill and attention one should expect of a master (none of the “Print that right, lad, or I’ll boot your backside out of the window straight into the stinking canal” that I get from Leo). Rebecca’s presence moved the old man greatly. He threw himself into the music, becoming quite absorbed as they practised it passage by passage, change by change, until the whole began to emerge from what was, at the beginning, mere chaos. They played for almost three hours. The light was failing when we went back outside. I was anxious to return Rebecca to the ghetto before the guards pulled up the drawbridge and kept the world safe from Jews for the night.
We walked onto the jetty and set up a brisk pace to catch the first gondola. I sought some sign of happiness in her face. She had just been praised by the greatest musician in Venice and welcomed into his band of players. None was there.
“Rebecca,” I said as the boat swung into the volta of the canal and the leaning form of Oliver Delapole’s rented home, Ca’ Dario, with its odd rose windows, came into view. “You’ve made your mark this day. You play like an angel and he knows it.”
“Yes,” she replied in a low, fierce tone. “An angel that stays locked behind shutters where none may see. I’ve just swapped one prison for another to let someone else take the glory.”
Her anger startled me. “I don’t understand. It’s such an honour. . . .”
“What? To be shut away like some caged bird? Who does this condescending priest think he is?”
“Vivaldi. More than a musician. A composer. A conductor. An artist who towers above men.”
Those dark, penetrating eyes bored straight into me. I felt quite naked before their power. “And you think I can’t compose? Or conduct? You think I don’t want to stand in front of the orchestra like him and watch your mouths open in wonder when they do my bidding?”
The white arch of the Rialto grew larger before us, humanity swarming over it.
“He wonders what music I play, Lorenzo? Mine.”
I sat in the rocking boat, above the greasy waters of the Grand Canal, unable to marshal my thoughts. Rebecca was opposite me, on the narrow seat, and leaned forward to grasp my knee and whisper anxiously in my face.
“But there I’m doubly cursed, aren’t I? Not just a woman, but a J—”
There was nothing else for it. As gently as I could, I covered her mouth with my hand, shocked by the damp sweetness of her lips. Her eyes seemed, for an instant, frightened. Then I saw understanding there. No one is more free with gossip than a gondolier. If we continued in this vein, someone would be feeding the lion’s mouth tonight.
“Our stop is soon, cousin,” I said loudly, then, when her eyes told me she understood, removed my hand from her lovely mouth. “We must count our blessings and get on with the job.”
Ten minutes later we ducked into an alley by the ghetto and she put the scarlet scarf over that mass of curls once more.
“And there’s more,” she hissed before we went back into the fading day. “It’s impossible anyway. I hoped to persuade him that I might perform in the afternoon alone, but Vivaldi said I must play the evening concerts or none at all. I can never get out of the ghetto at night. I am a Jew, so it is my jail.”
For a moment I thought she might cry, but her composure held and I wondered unkindly whether she was playing with my emotions. Then she added slyly, “Tell me, Lorenzo. Has a Jew no eyes? Hands, organs, dimensions, senses, a fections, passions? Don’t I eat the same food, hurt with the same weapons, suffer the same diseases? Am I not healed by the same means, warmed and cooled by the same winter and summer, just like a Christian? If you prick me, don’t I bleed? If you tickle me, don’t I laugh? If you poison me, will I not die?” Then, most seriously, “And if you wrong me, shall I n
ot seek revenge?”
My own expression mirrored her earnestness. “Of course,” I replied. “And I am but a humble farm boy from Treviso. Shall I not read an English playwright, too, and steal his wit for my own purposes when it suits me? And if you are ever false with me, Rebecca, then Heaven mocks itself. I’ll not believe it.”
We stood in that dark, cramped alley, so close our hands almost touched, feeling like two clowns, not knowing whose turn it was to laugh and whose to make the jest.
“You are an odd one, Lorenzo,” she whispered, eyeing me with that curious, crooked expression of hers.
“I shall take that as a compliment and make the same remark to you in return.”
She snorted and, briefly, she took my hand. Her touch was warm and soft and delicate, and a sensation stole over me which I have never before encountered. “And I made you risk so much. All for nothing.”
At that I had to laugh. “Nothing? Rebecca, I . . .” Oh, dear. There I was, briefly tongue-tied again. “I wouldn’t have been anywhere else in the world this afternoon. As for what happens in Venice of an evening, let me think a little. It’s easier to hide secrets in the dark than in the day.”
“But...?”
“No.” I was adamant. “One thing at a time.”
In silence, we dawdled back to the ghetto. I stopped at the bridge, with an ill-mannered guard who watched her walk across the drawbridge, then noted, “Five minutes later and that little kike would have been in deep shit, boy. Not that I’d mind an hour or two in the cell with her, eh?”
I refuse to follow the city fashion and carry a small dagger in the waistcoat. If one chooses where one walks, there is, I believe, no need of such a weapon. Nor do I much fancy the idea of wearing some hidden jewellery designed for no other purpose than to wound my fellow man. Nevertheless, at that moment I fancied I had just such a blade inside my jacket and, in my imagination, I withdrew it, slowly stuck the swine in the chest, then heaved his bleeding corpse into the canal.
“Yes, sir,” I answered lamely as this regrettable daydream played in my head.
Then I walked back through the dark and narrow streets of the city, over the bridge, back into San Cassian, where the whores stood around the campo whispering filthy come-ons to any who chose to hear. When I walk I think. By the time I opened the door to Ca’ Scacchi, I knew how it might be done.
18
The Grand Canal
AFTER SOME FRANTIC SCRIBBLING AND A SWIFT SHOWER, Daniel was downstairs in Ca’ Scacchi, ready to catch the vaporetto to San Marco, six pages of solo violin tucked inside a clear plastic envelope. Laura joined him, dressed in jeans and a red T-shirt, hair swept back behind her head.
“Night off,” she said. “And tomorrow too.”
“Ah.”
Scacchi and Paul wished him well. Then he and Laura walked to the canal, caught the boat, and sat together in the stern. For once she did not wear the sunglasses. In some odd way he felt this was a victory for him.
“On a date?” he asked hesitantly.
Laura glared at him. “What an impertinent question! I am going to see my mother. As I do every Wednesday, if it’s any of your business. She’s in an old people’s home in Mestre.”
“I’m sorry. Is she ill?”
“No. Merely old. I was a late child.”
“I was being presumptuous.”
“True.”
“I thought there must be a man.”
Her green eyes opened wide. “A man! Daniel, do you not think that Scacchi and Paul are enough men for one life? Furthermore, I seem to have acquired a third child of late, and one who can be just as infuriating as the others. You think I am short of men?”
“Oops,” he said softly, smiling at the water. Her anger, which was clearly feigned, was amusing. Laura loved Scacchi and Paul. She enjoyed his own presence, too, he believed, which disturbed him mildly. He had avoided relationships in the past. There had been other cares: his mother, studying, and the part-time work he was always seeking to pay his way. When he thought about the kind of woman he hoped one day to meet, he always had the same image: of a person around his age who carried a fiddle case from concert to concert and shared his interest in old books and music. Someone from a similar mould, not a delightfully eccentric servant, and one who was older too.
“Oops,” she repeated with a wicked gleam in her eye. “And what kind of English word is that?”
A tourist, a burly, bearded man in his late fifties in shorts and a tennis shirt, several cameras laden round his neck, stared at her.
“Oops!” Laura bellowed at him gleefully. The fellow got up and walked to the middle of the boat. They both laughed.
“And since we are now allowed to ask personal questions, Daniel Forster, you will kindly tell me about yourself. There is, I assume, some English rose of a girlfriend back home? Come. Tell me.”
He was aware that he was blushing, vividly. Laura’s face fell.
“I am sorry,” she said. “I forgot. You looked after your mother. It was for so much of the time?”
“A lot,” he replied. “And I never regretted a moment.”
Laura watched the water and said without looking at him, “And is this when your life begins, then? With the crazy strangers in Ca’ Scacchi?”
“Perhaps.”
She folded her arms and, determined to steer the conversation elsewhere, murmured, “I suppose this American girl is pretty. The Locanda Cipriani. I have lived here all my life and been there just once.”
Daniel thought about Amy Hartston. “She’s very pretty,” he said. “In an American way.”
“I know,” she hissed. “Perfect teeth, perfect hair, perfect ass. Always smiling. Always polite.” The bad English accent returned. “ ‘’Ave a nice day!’ ”
“I think that may be stereotypical.”
“Huh!”
“And I hope,” he added, “she can play the violin better than me.” He waved the plastic envelope. “Because this stuff is hard.”
She picked up the paper and looked at his neat, upright rendition of the notes on the staves. “Doesn’t look too hard.”
“Oh, doesn’t it? You know about these things?”
“No. But it’s just a few sparrow droppings on the page, isn’t it? Not like those spiderwebs you see them staring at in the concerts.”
He sighed. “It starts like that but soon quickens. In any case, I shall let you in to a secret about music. Sometimes, dear Laura, the slowest parts are the hardest. There is, you see, nowhere to hide in all those quiet spaces.”
She regarded him closely, thinking. “There are occasions,” she said eventually, “when I don’t know what to make of you. What a very mature and perceptive thing for a young man to say. Furthermore... Oh! Oh! See, Daniel! Tell me the name of that house, please.”
Laura was pointing at a small palace on the starboard side of the boat. Daniel stared at it. This was not one of the buildings he recognised, yet it was undoubtedly remarkable. The narrow building sat crookedly a little way down from the Guggenheim gallery, a small pink-and-off-white oddity, with three rose windows set off-centre to its right and a skin that appeared tattooed with smaller glasswork. Three rows of arched glass ran from the first to the fourth floor. A set of inverted funnel chimneys topped the flat roof.
“I haven’t a clue,” he said.
“Hah! So much for education! That is one of the oldest on the Grand Canal. Even after all these years I stop to look at it every time I go past. Ca’ Dario. Fifteenth century. There’s a rumour it’s cursed. Plenty of murders and suicides over the years.”
“And is it?” he wondered. “Cursed?”
The corners of her mouth turned down in a wry gesture he was coming to recognise. “It gave me nightmares. When I was a child.”
Daniel studied Ca’ Dario. It was unfair that the mansion was dwarfed by the palaces around it. The design was unusual and interesting. “How could a house like that give you nightmares?”
“I was a child! A
nd it was doubtless a dream. I was coming back from confirmation, in my sweet white dress, standing in the back of the vaporetto, feeling the most important person in the world.”
She hesitated.
“And?” he asked.
“It was Carnival. I looked up at a window. There. On the second floor. The long one second from the left.” The boat was moving steadily past the house now. “There was a face. A man, holding up his hands. I thought he was screaming.”
“What did he look like? Young? Old?”
“I don’t recall. It was a dream, probably.”
“Or the house is cursed.”
She laughed, thinking he humoured her. “I don’t think so. Though Woody Allen nearly bought the place a couple of years ago. Now, that would have been scary.”
“You’re a wicked, sharp-tongued woman, Laura,” he observed. “Can one visit it?”
She shook her head. “Private house. Mind you, I believe your friend Mr. Massiter maintains an apartment in the neighbouring palace. Perhaps he will let you peer in from there. With your pretty American girlfriend, naturally. ‘ ’Ave a nice day.’ ”
He decided he would not rise to that particular bait. The vaporetto rounded the end of the canal, with the great grey slab of Salute to the right. Laura stood up, scanning the jetty, and he followed suit.
“Massiter’s not arrived yet,” she said, pointing to a walkway beyond the public stop. “He’ll pick you up there, I imagine, where the taxis dock. The manners of the man. Why couldn’t he come for you?”
“I’m grateful in any case.”
She gave him a fierce look. “Grateful, grateful. You spend too much time being grateful, Daniel. No one does anything without a reason, not even Scacchi.”
“But...”
It was too late. In true Venetian fashion she had elbowed her way through the crowd. The sunglasses were jammed on her face once more. By the time he reached the pavement, she was a distant figure, marching off towards San Marco.
Daniel waited. Ten minutes later a sleek, polished speedboat docked exactly where she said it would. Hugo Massiter sat in the open back, sharing a bottle of champagne with Amy Hartston. As they left the jetty, Daniel, too, held a glass of the exotic liquid in his hand, feeling as if his world had suddenly expanded.