by Donna Leon
Below this, in a different, backward-slanting hand, was written, “Good man. See if this can happen.” Nothing more.
She reached into her bag and pulled out a notebook and pen. “1. Letter of request for position as choirmaster. Favorable comment in different hand on bottom. 4/1/1710.” Perhaps Marco would show up again; perhaps another letter would thank the “Most Worthy Abbé” for his help in winning the position for the young man.
She turned the two pages facedown beside the remaining papers and picked up the next paper. This was a letter dated 21 June 1700, addressed to Mio caro Agostino, the familiarity of which salutation brought the scholar in her to the equivalent of a hunting dog’s freezing at point. There was general talk of work and travel, mutual friends, the problem with servants. Then things turned to gossip, and the writer told his friend Agostino about Duke N. H.’s public behavior with his brother’s wife at the last ball of Carnevale. The third son of G. R. had died of bronchial trouble, to his parents’ utmost grief, in which the writer joined them, for he was a good boy and barely eight years old. And then the writer told his friend that he had overheard Baron (it looked like “Bastlar” but might just as easily have been “Botslar”) speaking slightingly of Steffani and making fun of him for singing along with his operas while attending them in the audience. The writer thought his friend should know of this, should he receive compliments or promises from the Baron. Then, with affectionate wishes for Agostino’s continued good health, the writer placed his illegible signature at the bottom.
She made notes of the contents and no other comment, though she felt something close to outrage that a mere Baron would make fun of a musician. She set the letter aside and picked up the next document. Her heart stopped. It was entirely involuntary; the shock of seeing it grabbed her heart and tightened her throat. On top of the pile now lay a sheet of music, the notes doing their visual dance across the lines from left to right. Making no sound that could be heard by anyone, she began to sing the music line by line, heard the bass line and the violins. When she turned to the second page, she saw the words and knew she was no longer giving voice to the instruments but was singing an aria.
She turned back to the first page and let her mind play through the music again. Oh, how perfect it was, that figure in the introduction, only to be repeated in the high register, right from the start of the aria. She looked at the words and saw the predictable “Morirò tra strazi e scempi.” And who had churned out that sentiment, she wondered? “I’ll die between pain and havoc.” If she could find a time machine, she’d go back and pick up most of the men who wrote libretti and bring them back to the present, though she’d set down and drop them off in Brazil, where they could all get jobs writing the scripts for telenovelas.
A glance at the opening words for the second line, “E dirassi ingiusti dei,” confirmed her temporal and geographical desires. She read through to the end of the aria, concentrating on the music, not the words. “Well, well, well,” she said out loud and then turned off the music by looking away from the paper. “Wasn’t he a clever devil?”
She wished now that she had paid more attention to his music while at university and had seen more than the single performance of the wonderful Niobe in London. The genius manifest in this aria proved him to be a composer with a far greater gift than she had before thought him to possess. She paused. Could it be that it had been sent to him by a colleague or a musician or possibly a student? She reexamined the manuscript, but there was no attribution and no signature, only the same back-slanting handwriting she had seen in the note on the bottom of the first letter.
Identification could be made in the archives of the Marciana. All she had to do was go there and have a look at one of his autograph scores, even find a book with a reproduction of a few pages of a score in his hand. She had a good visual memory and could take a clear image of the aria with her. But how much easier to stay here and read on; sooner or later, she was bound to come upon a signed score. She cheated by paging ahead to the bottom of the packet: no more music.
The beauty of the music drew her eyes back to the aria. She made a note of the probable title of the aria, then turned it facedown to uncover yet another document in ecclesiastical Latin, this a letter from 1719, addressed to him as Bishop and attempting to explain the delay in forwarding him his benefice from the dioceses of Spiga, wherever that might be.
After making a note of the contents of this letter, Caterina looked at her watch and saw that it was after two. Almost as if the sight of the time had released her from the spell of her own curiosity, she realized how hungry she was. She opened her bag and pulled out her wallet. She opened flaps and slots until she found her reader’s card for the Biblioteca Marciana. It had expired two years before. In a normal country, in a normal city, one would go and renew the card, but that was to be certain that a clear, prompt process for doing so existed or functioned. Though Caterina had not lived in Italy for a number of years, she had no reason to believe that things had changed, and so her first thought was to find a way to get what she wanted without having to waste time with a system that, if memory served and if things had remained the same, exulted in creating ways to block people from having what they deserved or desired.
She ran her memory through the gossip and news of the previous decade: who worked where, who had married, who had inserted themselves into the mechanism that kept the city going. And she recalled Ezio, dear Ezio, who had gone to school with her sister Clara and who had been in love with her for three years, from the time they were twelve until they were fifteen, and who had then fallen in love with someone else and subsequently married her, retaining Clara as best friend.
Ezio, by common agreement, was as clever as he was lazy and had never wanted success or a career but only to marry and have lots of children. He had them now, four, she thought, but he also had—and this is why Ezio came to mind—a job as a librarian at the Biblioteca Marciana.
Caterina replaced the papers in the packet, though she did not bother to tie it closed. She went to the storeroom and put it into the smaller trunk, then closed the door and locked it, using all three keys.
Only then did she go back to her bag and pull out her telefonino. The number, not used for a long time, was still in the memory. She dialed it and, after he answered, said, “Ciao, Ezio, sono la Caterina. Volevo chiederti un favore.”
Ten
Caterina felt no regret at so peremptorily having left Manchester, but she did regret having had to leave her books in storage, an act that made her entirely dependent upon the Internet and public collections of books. Ezio had told her to come to the library at four, so after she stopped for a panino and a glass of water, standing at the bar as she had done as a student, she did another studentesque thing and went into an Internet café. It would take her too long to go home and use her own computer to do the basic research, and all she wanted was to have the basic chronology of Steffani’s life fresh in her memory when she went to the library.
Her grandmother had been famous in the family for keeping her memory all her life, and Caterina was the grandchild said most to resemble her. As she read through the information about Steffani, she justified family tradition, for most of the information came back to her as she read: born in Castelfranco in 1654, he was early seen to be a talented singer and musician, choirboy at the Basilica del Santo in Padova from the age of ten. A nobleman from Munich was seduced by the beauty of his voice and took him home with him, where he had tremendous success as a musician and a composer. After two decades, he moved to Hanover, where he had more of the same. He seemed to drift away from music while he devoted himself to politics, working for the Catholic cause in a country whose rulers had decided to turn it Protestant.
“Ernst August,” she said out loud as she came upon reference to the duke of Hanover: yes, she remembered him. Here the writer of the article opened a parenthesis (and explained that Ernst August’s peo
ple built him the most sumptuous opera house in Germany, not to delight him but to attempt to keep him from taking his yearly, and ruinously expensive, trips to Carnevale in Venice). His son, Georg Ludwig, was to become George I of England. Like most people trained in research, Caterina willingly gave in to its intoxication and sent Google running off after Georg Ludwig: wasn’t there some scandal about his wife? Soon enough, there she was, the beautiful Sophie Dorothea, the greatest beauty and most desirable marital catch of the era; married at sixteen to Georg Ludwig (another parenthesis explained that they were first cousins) before being caught in adultery, divorced, and imprisoned for more than thirty years until her death. It all made fascinating reading, but it didn’t tell her much about Steffani.
Caterina went back to the original window and continued to read about Steffani’s life after his virtual abandonment of music. He shuttled about endlessly on diplomatic missions here and there. He spent six years in Düsseldorf, concerned chiefly with political and ecclesiastical matters, producing his last three operas there. He appeared to have prevented a war between the Pope and the Holy Roman Emperor, both of them embroiled in the War of the Spanish Succession, and who remembered what that was all about? He had spent a good deal of his nonmusical life attempting to persuade various North German rulers to return to the arms of Holy Mother Church. She looked up from the computer and let her eyes trail to the facade of the church of Santa Maria della Fava. Suddenly her soul was enwrapped by Vivaldi, an aria for Juditha triumphans, what were the words? Transit aetas / Volant anni / Nostri damni / Causa sumus. How gloriously simple the score was: mandolin and pizzicato violin, and a single voice warning us that time passes, the years fly by, and we are the cause of our own destruction. What better message to give to the leaders of those empty churches? We are the cause of our own destruction.
“Would you like another half hour, Signora?” the young Tamil at the cash register called to her. “Time’s up in five minutes, but you can stay online for another half hour for two euros.”
“No, that’s fine. Thank you for asking, though,” she said and resisted the urge to look for the aria being sung on YouTube. Steffani moved back to Hanover in 1709, but there was no further mention of his music, only travel and political involvement. Almost no more music. Was genius painful, she wondered? Did it, at some point, simply cost too much for the spirit to continue to create? As she watched, the screen went blank, taking with it Steffani, his music, the church he served, and all of his desires to restore that church to her former power. She picked up her bag, thanked the young man at the desk, and started toward the library.
It took her no more than ten minutes to get there; to pass in front of the two caryatids and into the lobby of the Marciana was to pass from the constant crowding of the Piazza into the calm tranquillity that thoughts and the books that contained them were meant to give. She stood for a moment, as if she were a diver waiting to decompress, and then she approached the guard and mentioned Ezio’s name. He smiled and waved her through an apparently deactivated metal detector and into the foyer of the library.
One of the guards must have phoned him, for by the time Caterina got to the head of the stairs, Ezio was there, coming toward her with outstretched hands. There were lines around his eyes, and he seemed both thinner and shorter than he had been the last time she saw him, almost a decade ago. But the brightness and the smile were the same. He wrapped her in a tight hug, pushed her free of him, kissed her on both cheeks, and then they took turns saying all of those sweet things that old friends say when meeting again after many years. All of her sisters were fine, his kids were growing, and what was it she wanted him to do?
She explained the need to find information about a Baroque composer for a research project she was doing for the Foundation, of which he had heard, though vaguely. There was no need to explain more than that to him. He said she was welcome to use the stacks as much as she liked, then excused himself and said he’d go and organize a reading card for her as a visiting scholar.
“No,” he said, turning back toward her. “Let me take you up to the stacks. You can get an idea of what’s there.” When she began to protest, he refused to listen, saying, “You’re a friend of mine, so don’t worry about the rules. Once I get you the card, you have access to almost everything.” Without waiting for her answer, he set off to the right and led her into the long gallery she recalled from her student days. The marble floor might have served as a chessboard for two opposing tribes of giants; there were far more than sixty-four squares, and a giant could stand on each of them. The glass viewing cases displayed manuscripts, but they passed through so quickly she could distinguish nothing more than the even lines of script and the large illuminated letters on some pages. The enormous globes of the earth appeared to be the same, as did the outrageous vaulted ceiling without an inch of empty space. Why were we Venetians so excessive, she wondered? Why did there always have to be so much of everything, and all of it beautiful? She glanced out the windows and had a momentary sensation that the Piazza was hurrying past her stationary self.
She followed him from the gallery, like Theseus on his way to slay the Minotaur, thinking that she, too, should leave a trail of string behind. Turn and turn and turn about, and soon she had no idea where they were. These were inner rooms, so she could not orient herself by looking out and seeing Saint Mark’s Basilica or the bacino.
At long last, they entered a room that had a row of windows, and beyond them she could see the long expanse of windows on the Palazzo Ducale across the Piazza. “How do you find anything?” she asked when Ezio pointed to a wall of shelves.
“Do you mean a room or a book?” he asked.
“Both. I’d never find my way out of here. And how do I know what’s here?” she asked, looking around for the computer terminals.
Smiling a broad smile, Ezio led her over to a shoulder-high wooden cabinet the front of which was entirely filled with small drawers. “Do you remember?” he asked, patting the top of the cabinet. “I saved it,” he said, obviously boasting.
“Oddio,” she exclaimed. “It’s a card catalogue.” When had she last seen one? And where? She approached it as a true believer would approach a relic. She reached out and touched it, ran her hand along the top and side, slid her finger under a flange and pulled a drawer out a few centimeters, then slid it silently back in place. “It’s been a decade. More.” Then, in a conspiratorial voice, she said, “I love them. They’re so full of information.” Then, lower still, “What did you do?”
In the voice of an actor in a war film suffering from shell shock, he said, “They were going to destroy all of the cards. My superior told me. It was a direct order.” He paused and took in two very melodramatic breaths. “First I threatened to quit if they removed it.”
She covered her mouth with her hands, though it was insufficient evidence of her horror. Then she said, “You’re here, so you didn’t quit. What happened?”
“I threatened to tell his wife he was having an affair with one of my colleagues.”
Instead of laughing, which would have been her normal response, she asked, “Would you have done it?”
Ezio shook his head. “I don’t know, really. Maybe.”
“But he gave in?”
“Yes. He said we could keep them, but we weren’t to let anyone use them. The bulletin he sent said that the catalogue was to be fully computerized and the only access to the collection was to be via the computer.” Ezio made a gesture that looked suspiciously like spitting on the floor. “He told us to do it, and then he cut our funding. So there’s no money.”
“And the computer catalogue?”
He paused, smiled, changed roles, and became any diplomat when asked a direct question. “It’s being worked on.”
“And your superior?” she inquired.
Again, the gesture. “He’s been reassigned to a provincial library.” Befo
re she could ask, Ezio explained: “It seems three of the last people he hired were relatives of his wife.”
“Where is he working now?”
“Quarto d’Altino.” He smiled. “It’s rather a small library.”
As so often happened when Caterina heard the tales told by friends or colleagues who had remained to work in Italy, she didn’t know whether to laugh or cry.
She set her bag on one of the tables at the center of the room and opened it to take out notebook and pencil. When he saw her do this, Ezio said, “I’ll go get you your entrance card.” He pointed to an empty carrel that stood between two of the windows. “You can use that one if you want. Leave the books there while you’re using them. When you’re finished with them, put them on the desk near the door over there,” he said, pointing to the desk, “and they’ll be reshelved.”
She nodded her thanks. Ezio said, “This might take some time,” and left.
Caterina went over to the window and looked down at the Piazza. People passed to and fro, no one much bothering to look to the sides of the Piazza. Everyone entering was intent on the facade of the Basilica, as Caterina thought they should be, and those leaving often turned around to have another glimpse of it from a distance, as if needing to assure themselves that it was not an illusion. To her right, the flags flapped in the freshness of springtime and she relaxed into the ridiculous beauty of the place.
Turning from this, she went to the catalogue and found the drawer that ran from Sc to St. From Scarlatti to Strozzi, which would also contain Stradella and Steffani. Under “Steffani,” she found entries in many different handwritings and just as many different spellings of his name. She also found a cross reference to “Gregorio Piva,” which a feathery note on the card explained was the pseudonym Steffani used for the musical compositions of his later years. She retrieved her notebook and wrote down the call numbers for the books that looked like biographies of Steffani or might be more concerned with his life than with his music, then went to the shelves and began to hunt for the volumes.