The Jewels of Paradise

by Donna Leon

  Caterina heard nothing, but she saw the father lower his own fork and glance aside at his son. Instantly the circling stopped, and the boy leaned across the table and replaced the morsel on his sister’s plate. The father turned toward him again. The boy bowed his head and finished his own piece of cake, then got down from his chair and left the room.

  She left them to finish their meal and took her wine back to the sofa. She set the glass down and picked up the book, continued reading at the place where she had left off.

  There was no record of Steffani at the court the first year he was in Munich, neither as a salaried musician nor as a member of the orchestra. When he did begin to appear in the voluminous records, he was being given organ lessons by the Kapellmeister, Johann Kerll, who received a significant sum beyond his normal salary to teach him. By 1671, Steffani was being pampered with “a daily ration of one and a half measures of wine and two loaves of bread.” Further, he had advanced to the position of what was termed Hof und Cammer Musico.

  “Oddio,” she said out loud, setting the book aside. There it was, the thing she had only suspected while at the same time reproving herself for thinking such a thing. She picked up her glass and finished the wine; then, turning the light on and not giving a thought to the three people who were still at the table in the house across the calle, she went into the kitchen and poured herself another glass.

  “Musico. Musico,” she said aloud. She remembered a patter aria from a riotously funny production of Orlando Paladino she had seen in Paris that spring in which the word was also used. Even after the era of their greatness was finished, Haydn had still used the code to make fun of them. She’d read the word in scores and letters; when certain Baroque singers were described by contemporary writers or listeners as musico, they had always been castrati.

  “Oddio,” she repeated, thinking of the man in the portrait, with his pudgy, beardless face and his look of patient, unbearable sadness.

  Twelve

  She woke at nine the following morning. After finding that word, musico, the previous evening, all she had been able to do was make herself some pasta, finish the bottle of wine, and go to bed with the second of the books she had taken from the library. But by the time she got under the covers, she was too tired, or too sodden, to be able to follow much of what she read, and she fell asleep, only to wake in the night, close the book and put it on the floor, turn off the light, and go back to sleep.

  There was no sign of the Bear family when she went into the kitchen to make coffee the next morning, and their kitchen looked as clean as her own did not. “I think it’s time you started having a life, Caterina,” she said to herself as the coffee began to bubble up in the pot.

  “Or a job with a future,” her more sensible, pragmatic self added.

  She wondered if this is what happened to unemployed musicologists: they ended up in rented apartments filled with Ikea furniture, looking into the windows of their neighbors for reminders of human life. In order to give herself a sense of purpose, she did the dishes from the night before and put the empty wine bottle—telling herself it had been less than half full—into the plastic container meant to hold glass and plastic garbage. That was one positive change in the city since she’d moved away, differentiated garbage collection. The thought depressed her, not that the city had such a thing but that she would measure progress in these terms. No new ideas, no new politics, no influx of young people with houses and jobs, only paper on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday and plastic on Tuesday, Thursday, and Saturday. On Sunday, God and the garbagemen rested. It would make a stone weep; so would the fact that most of her friends believed that it all ended up in the same place, anyway, and the whole thing was merely a scam to enable the company that did the collecting to raise the price. She abandoned these thoughts and went to take a shower.

  A half hour later, after stopping for a brioche and another coffee, she walked out onto Riva dei Sette Martiri, having decided to take advantage of the sun and bask in beauty on her way to work. The golden angel seemed to dance in the breeze from his post on top of the bell tower of San Giorgio. The sight of it lifted her spirits to such a degree that she wanted to wave at him and ask him how things were up there.

  She remembered something the Romanian, in one of his rare moments of sobriety, had asked her once: how was it that angels got dressed? In response to her astonished look, he had insisted he was quite serious, and she was the only person he could ask. “I see how their wings come out when they get undressed—that’s easy, the cloth passes the right way over the feathers—but wouldn’t it disturb their feathers to have to push them through their sleeves when they put them on?” It was evident that this lack of certainty troubled him. “Do they have buttons?” he asked.

  Her visual memory had summoned up Fra Angelico’s Annunciation in Florence, the angel kneeling, starstruck, before the baffled virgin. His multicolored striped wings stuck out behind him. Of course the girl looked puzzled. The Romanian, she had to admit, had a point: a careful angel could probably fold them up and unbutton his side vents when he put his robe on, but slipping them through would still snag a lot of the feathers. Slipping them off would be easier, for the cloth would run along the feathers easily. Maybe, being angels, they never needed to change their clothes?

  Illumination came and she had smiled at him with an all-knowing expression. “Velcro.”

  “Ah,” had escaped his parted lips, and he bent to kiss her hand. “You people in the West know so many things.”

  She turned in just before the Church of the Pietà and worked her way back past the Church of the Greci until she arrived at the Foundation. She let herself in, stopped in Roseanna’s office, but there was no sign of her. She opened the door to the stairs and went up to the director’s office, let herself in, and set her bag on the table. She unlocked the storeroom and took the packet of papers she had left in the smaller trunk. Leaving the doors open, she went back to the table, set down the folder, and took out her notebook. Whispering the word musico, she resumed reading the papers where she had left off the day before.

  There was an affectionate letter from a priest in Padova, apparently a childhood friend, who told his “Dear friend and brother in Christ, Agostino,” that the various members of his own family were all well and, with the help of God, would so remain. He sent his wishes and prayers that the same would remain true for his friend Agostino’s family. In the absence of substance, all she could do was note the date of the letter.

  The next was a document from October 1723, containing a list of the candelabra, books, relics, and paintings left to the church of Saint Andreas in Düsseldorf by a certain Johann Grabel. The candelabra were in brass and silver, the books all on religious themes, the relics a series of desiccated extremities, including the big toe of Saint Jerome. “Left or right?” Caterina asked aloud. The paintings were portraits of saints, with a heavy preponderance of martyrs. Below this list was written, in Italian, in that backward hand, “To the Jesuits. Fool.” She made a note and passed the document to her left.

  She continued like this for another two hours, finding a random sample of letters from the later part of his life, and all addressed to him, that contained requests for help of one sort or another, praise, ecclesiastical news, and more than a few requests for payment for articles such as wine, books, and paper. The letters came in from all over Europe, but strangely enough none of them made any further reference to music or to Steffani’s work as a musician. For all the evidence found in these papers, he might have been a clergyman and only that all of his life. By the time she got to the last of the papers in the packet, there had been just that letter and the single aria to give evidence to a life beyond the Church.

  She pushed the papers away from her and rested her chin on her palms and found herself thinking about her family. They had been lucky in one thing, that none of them had had to survive the death of a child. One of her
aunts and two of her uncles had died relatively young, but not before their parents and not before having had children. Two of her sisters had children, whom they loved to distraction. And she still had time to have them. Here, her inner cynic broke in to observe that, in a decade, it would probably be normal for women in their fifties and sixties to have children, so there was no sense of urgency, was there?

  What was it, though, to know you’d never have them and not through your own choice? Would it bother a man to the degree that it tormented women?

  She had never been much curious about the sex lives of the castrati, had not bothered to see the film about Farinelli some years ago. She had read a number somewhere, years ago, of the tens of thousands of boys to whom it was done, all in the hope of producing a star. The lurid novel lying on the shelf in the Foundation’s library could lie there until doomsday for all she cared. She had never bothered to speculate about what they did or did not do, and she knew she did not care. She wondered only what they lost in terms of the bonding that came with it, and was that worse than knowing there would be no children, no one to pass things along to, no one to teach or tickle? Was this the message in that sad man’s eyes?

  She reached out suddenly and retrieved the string, rewrapped the packet, and took it back to the closet. She placed it on the flat top of the higher trunk in back and took another packet from the smaller one. Returned to the desk, she untied the packet and pulled out the first sheet. It seemed to be more of the same, an invitation dated 1722 for “Monsignore di Spiga” to present his written request directly to the Secretary for Appointments and Benefices of the Archbishop of Vienna. She looked beneath this letter, hoping to find a copy of Steffani’s request. It was common for people of that epoch to keep copies of the letters they sent, and they often attached the copy to the letter they were answering. But, instead, she found another begging request for help in winning an appointment to office, this one dated 1711, addressed to Steffani as the “Assistant at the Pontifical Throne.” He was back in Hanover by then, she recalled, still working to bring Catholicism back to Northern Germany.

  The next paper was a list of what looked like titles and clerical positions. Although it was written in German, the hand was Italianate and the document bore no date. She remembered then that one of the things she had wanted, and failed, to do in the Marciana was find an autograph score and check the handwriting against what she had found in these papers. Memory did tell her, however, that it very strongly resembled the writing in a letter of his reproduced in one of the books she had at home.

  Because she had sat still too long, Caterina got up and went back to the cupboard, where she retrieved the first packet of papers. She untied it, opened it, and paged through the papers until she found the aria. She took it back to the table and placed the first page next to the list of titles. She studied the papers for some time. Both of them had unusual d’s and e’s, each letter with a tendency to circle over itself back toward the left, as though the writer had tried to draw a circle but had grown tired of it and stopped a quarter of the way around. She had no idea if this was enough to prove they were written in Steffani’s hand, but she decided to believe that they were and see where that led.

  She returned to the list of offices and titles that were lined up neatly beneath one another: Privy Councillor and president of the spiritual council; General President of the Palatine government and council; Monsignore di Spiga; Apostolic Prothonotary; Rector of Heidelberg University; Provost of Seltz; Envoy of the Palatinate in Rome; Apostolic Vicar of North Germany; Assistant to the Pontifical Throne; Temporary Suffragan of Münster; Member and President of the Academy of Ancient Music.

  Below them, in what she believed was the same hand, was a row of question marks running from one side of the page to the other. She felt the hair on the back of her neck rise. Caterina was not a woman much given to reading scripture nor, for that fact, paying much attention to it, but her mother was a religious woman and was fond of quoting it. “If I know all mysteries and all knowledge, and I have a faith that can move mountains, but have not love, I am nothing.” Provost of Seltz. What was that? Apostolic Vicar of North Germany? What was that worth to a man condemned to be forever childless?

  These reflections were interrupted by a light knocking at her door. She got to her feet and went over to open it. It was Dottor Moretti, today in a dark blue suit made of the same quality fabric as the dark gray one he had worn the day before. The tie was a bit less sober. In fact, the burgundy stripes on a dark blue field, worn by a man of Dottor Moretti’s sartorial sobriety, seemed to Caterina little different from a red rubber nose and yellow clown wig.

  “I’m not disturbing you, am I, Dottoressa?” he asked.

  “No, not at all,” she said, stepping back from the door to allow him room to enter. “Please,” she said, waving him over toward the table.

  “I brought you the computer,” he said and smiled. “As I said, it’s nothing special, but our tech person said it should be enough for simple things.”

  “All I need to do is make notes on my reading and send them to you by email,” she said.

  “And read La Gazzetta dello Sport, if you please,” he said. “If you need distraction from the eighteenth century.”

  For a moment, she didn’t understand, and then she did. “Don’t tell me La Gazzetta’s online, too?”

  “Of course it is.” Then, seeing her expression, he added, “You seem surprised.”

  Caught, she had to admit, “I suppose I have certain ideas about the people who buy it.”

  “That they wouldn’t be computer literate?” he inquired.

  “That they wouldn’t be literate, full stop,” she said.

  It took him a moment, and then he laughed along with her. “I’ll confess I was surprised to learn it, too. My brother reads it online.”

  “He likes sports?” she asked.

  “Hunting and fishing and tramping around in wet fields all day with his pals,” Dottor Moretti continued, shrugged, and smiled.

  “I have a sister who’s a nun,” she said to suggest he was not the only one with odd siblings.

  “Is she happy?” he asked, adding to her surprise.

  “I think so.”

  “Can you see her?”

  Caterina smiled. “She’s not locked up, you know. She wears jeans and teaches at a university in Germany.”

  “My brother’s a surgeon,” he said, holding up his hands. “Don’t even think about asking. I don’t understand anything.”

  “Is he a good surgeon?”

  “Yes. And your sister?”

  “Head of the department.”

  “In Germany,” he observed in the tone of respect Italians used when speaking of German universities. He looked down at the bag he was holding and placed it on the table. Unzipping it, he pulled out a laptop and its cord. He looked around to find an electrical outlet and had to carry the computer down to the other end of the table to plug it in.

  He lifted the lid, pushed a button, and took a step back from it, as though not at all certain what was going to happen and perhaps fearful there would be a loud noise or an explosion. The machine hummed and clicked, although in a very small, discreet voice.

  When the various lights stopped blinking, he bent over the computer and opened a program, then another. He stared at the screen, turned to Caterina, and asked, “The thing for the Wi-Fi is down at the bottom, I think.”

  “The thing?” Caterina asked herself. This was the lawyer in intellectual properties speaking, and he referred to it as “the thing for the Wi-Fi”?

  He touched the pad and moved the cursor to the bottom, tapped once, waited, tapped twice, and gave her a triumphant grin when Google appeared.

  “See,” he said, “you can send emails.” Then, looking stricken, he asked her, “You won’t mind using your own address, will you?” And,
before she could answer, explained. “Our tech man,” he said, speaking with unwonted awkwardness. “He asked if there were an email address here at the Foundation, and when I said I didn’t know, he suggested I ask you to use your own.” Then, in a much lower voice, he continued, “He told me I could give you an address at the office, but when he told me what had to be done to do that, I said I’d ask you if you’d be willing to use your own.”

  When Caterina did not answer, he went on hurriedly, “It’s all right. I can have him do it, set you up with an account at the office. I can give it to you this afternoon, but it sounded to me like he’d want the computer back to put it in.”

  She smiled, glad to be able to relieve him of this concern. “It’s fine. I can easily use my own. No sense your having to take that back to your office and then bring it back again.” She considered the work ahead of her and said, “Besides, I don’t know how much there’s going to be reported at the beginning.”

  He waved toward the papers on the desk. “Nothing?”

  “So far, all I’ve found are documents about his career as a musician and a bishop and one aria that I think he wrote.”

  “Aria?” he asked, quite as if he knew nothing about musical notation.

  “I don’t know where it’s from, but it’s an opera aria, not one of his chamber duets.” She saw that this distinction was not one he understood and so glossed over that by adding, “I think it’s in his hand.” Then, before he could ask, she continued. “There’s a copy of one of his scores in one of the books I’m reading, and the handwriting looks the same,” she said, pointing back toward the paper that lay on the table.