by Donna Leon
They were back at the Foundation in a matter of minutes; Caterina found herself wishing it had been farther away. At the door, Andrea looked at his watch—she noticed that it was gold and thin as a coin, certainly something that would have interested Signor Scapinelli. “I’ve got to get back,” he said. “I look forward to hearing from you.”
She had been studying his watch when she heard these last words. Just as she raised her head to smile at him, he reached into his pocket to pull out his wallet. He took a white card from it and handed it to her. “My email is there, so if you’ll send me the results of your research, I’ll forward it to the cousins.” Pleased as she was by his having adopted her habit of referring to Signor Stievani and Signor Scapinelli as “the cousins,” she was disappointed—she admitted it—that his eagerness to hear from her seemed prompted by the documents.
“Yes,” she said, with what she thought was an easy, relaxed manner. “I’ll get back to it and send you a summary by the end of the day.”
“Good,” he said, extending his hand. She shook it, slipped his card into the pocket of her jacket, and let herself into the Foundation. As she started down the corridor, Roseanna came out of her office.
“Oh, there you are,” Caterina said, smiling. She was uncertain about whether, now that they had become something approaching friends, she should greet Roseanna with a kiss, but she left it to the older woman to decide.
As Caterina got closer, she saw there was to be no kiss. In fact, Roseanna looked decidedly unfriendly; Caterina hoped someone else would be the recipient of her evident displeasure or had been the cause.
“Where were you?” Roseanna asked by way of greeting.
“At lunch,” Caterina said, not specifying where or with whom.
“The office was open.”
“I thought I closed the door,” Caterina said without thinking.
“Yes, the door was closed, but it wasn’t locked.” Roseanna waited, but Caterina’s silence led her to continue. “The documents were on your desk, and the storeroom was open.” Caterina listened to the tone: the words, as well as the facts, left her with no defense. Her delight at Andrea’s suggestion had led her out of the room without giving a thought to the papers or her responsibility to them, a lack of attention in which Andrea had joined her.
“I’m sorry,” was the best she could say. “I forgot.” She reached into her pocket for the keys to the door at the foot of the stairs, and her fingers found Andrea’s card. “I won’t do it again.”
Roseanna unfroze a bit but still said, briskly, “I hope not. We don’t have any clear idea of the value of what’s there.”
Again, it was the tone far more than the words themselves, for Roseanna’s disguised question hinted that she had obtained information about the value of those papers, wanted to be asked about it, and wanted to be praised for having found it.
“What did you learn?” Caterina said, moving a few steps closer to her.
Roseanna went back into her office, leaving the door open, an invitation Caterina took. When they were seated on either side of her desk, Roseanna pushed a sheet of paper across the table. Caterina recognized the letterhead of an auction house in London; below it were listed three manuscripts and the sums paid.
“Qui la dea cieca” (1713?)9,040 euro
“Notte amica” (first page) (1714)4,320 euro
“Padre, se colpa in lui” (fragment) (1712)1,250 euro
Caterina looked up from the paper and gave a broad smile. “Well, who’s been doing her homework?” She glanced at the paper again and asked, “How on earth did you persuade them to give you this information?” She tapped at the three sums with the tip of her finger and said, “Complimenti.”
Roseanna smiled even more broadly and said, all anger or reproach fled from her voice, “I sent them an email, saying I was the acting director of the Foundation and telling them that, in consequence of a large donation to our acquisitions fund, we were interested in any available manuscripts by Agostino Steffani and curious about recent purchase prices.” Nodding toward the paper, she added, “They sent me this.”
Caterina’s look of open-mouthed admiration was entirely spontaneous. “Acquisitions fund?” she asked.
Roseanna waved her hand, dismissing the possibility that such a thing existed. “I assumed they’d answer a request if it was something that might make them money.”
“Ah, Roseanna,” she said, “you have a real call to work in the music business.” Caterina picked up the paper. “So this is what his work is sold for,” she mused. “It would help if we knew when these sales took place.”
“Yes,” Roseanna agreed. “You could call and ask, couldn’t you? Or write to them.”
“What language did you use?”
“Italian,” Roseanna said. “It’s the only one I know.”
Caterina let the page drop back onto Roseanna’s desk. “It might be enough just to know this, that a presumably complete aria is worth at least nine thousand euros.”
Both of them sat and considered this fact for some time until finally Roseanna reached forward and put her finger on the highest sum. “I hope the cousins don’t think to do the same thing I did and find this out.”
Caterina looked across the desk and smiled at her. “They’d start sleeping in front of the door, wouldn’t they?”
“With a gun,” Roseanna added.
Peace restored, Caterina went back upstairs, telling herself not to be such a fool because of an invitation to lunch. “Lock the papers up, lock the door,” she muttered to herself as she went back into the room. Even though she knew she had to be methodical and take the papers in the order in which she found them in the packet, she paged through the remaining documents—about six centimeters of them—looking for musical scores. Near the bottom, she unearthed a sheet of paper half of which was filled with bars of music, neatly written in a very small script, obviously not written by the person with the back-reaching hand. Below were two paragraphs and then the signature: “Your brother in Christ, Donato Battipaglia, Abbé di Modena.”
She set the paper down and looked across at the wall, her mind suddenly alert or alarmed but unable to tell the cause. She looked at the signature again. Battipaglia was a new name; this was the first letter from him she had seen, and she could not recall any previous reference to him. Still standing, she turned her attention back to the letter. It began with a description of a concert—not Steffani’s, the writer hasted to clarify—which had sounded like “the scraping of a badly oiled carriage.” From there, in the excessively complimentary style of the period, the writer praised Steffani’s Le Rivali concordi, a copy of which the writer had had the “inestimable fortune” to see in the library of his patron, Rinaldo III, Duke of Modena. He praised the score in its entirety as well as the seriousness of the sentiments expressed in the text, and then turned his attention to an example of “a singular mastery of musical invention.” The bars he quoted, he said, came from the duet Timori ruine, which he found sublime. Caterina looked at the musical extract, which he provided in full, and fell into agreement with the sentiment of the Abbé. She hummed through it. Oh, he was good, this Steffani, she thought, with his fourteen operas, divertimenti, duets, and religious music and his glorious feel for what the voice wanted to do. Then she went back to staring at the wall, trying to nudge herself toward what it was in the letter that had caught her attention.
She looked again at the signature. Wasn’t it said that people revealed themselves in the way they wrote their names? But the flourishes and squiggles were in no way unusual for their epoch. “Donato Battipaglia, Abbé di Modena.”
“Abbé,” she said out loud. “What the hell was an abbé?”
Liszt came to mind. He was an abbé, and if he had lived the life of a priest, it was Caterina who was the heir to King Zog.
She switched to her
email account and typed in Cristina’s address at the university. It was a professional question she was asking, and Cristina was always sure to check that address rather than her personal one.
“Ciao, Tina-Lina,” she began.
“I hope this finds you overworked and happy. Look, I’m working at that job in Venice, examining the papers of the Baroque composer who worked and died in Germany and I need some information. He was an abbé. What’s an abbé? Does he have to be a priest, or can he be something else and be called a priest? (A bit of deceit, of course, that your Employer would never think of tolerating).” Old habits die hard, and Caterina had spent more than twenty years of their lives baiting Cristina for her decision to become a nun.
“Also, I’ve come to think this man might have been a castrato. I have it in my memory baggage that a castrato could not be a priest. Would making him an abbé be a way to get around this? (Not that your Employer would . . .) Could you let me know about these things with something other than your usual glacial pace?
“Mamma and Papà are both very well and as happy as ever. Clara and Cinzia are fine, and so are their kids. Claudia looks sensational and seems to be getting on better with Giorgio, though who knows how long that will last? Why didn’t she get the same happy genes the rest of us seem to have inherited? I wish there were some way to . . . you know what I mean, but I don’t know what to do. I’m fine, the work looks interesting, and . . .” She paused here, wondering if she should mention Avvocato Moretti, but her good sense prevailed. They had gone to lunch together, for heaven’s sake, that’s all. “. . . it’s sure to keep me here for some time, and by then one of those other jobs might well have come in. I hope this finds you happy and busy and giving Deep Thought to the Totally Erroneous Path You Have Chosen in Life. Love, Cati.”
Cristina, who had been the only other one in the family to opt for a professional life, had always been her favorite sister. The closeness explained Caterina’s shocks and, yes, horror at Cristina’s decision to enter a convent, but it also permitted the irreverent tone that characterized her every communication with the Professoressa Dottoressa Suora.
She was about to put the computer to sleep when she remembered that Cristina had no background information at all. She started another email and added, “His dates are 1654–1728, if that helps,” and sent it after the other.
She closed the computer and slid it along the table until it was out of reach. She pulled the notebook close and went back to reading.
After an hour and a half of taking notes about various ecclesiastical benefices granted, requested, or refused, Caterina got up and walked over to the windows. She opened a window and wrapped her hands around the bars; she pulled at them and, when they refused to move, did the same with the bars of the other window. Was this what it was like for Steffani, she wondered, trapped inside a body that had had physical limits placed on it? That’s what prison was, wasn’t it? Physical limitation, a restraint on what a person was free to do. But prison was usually temporary, and the prisoner had, if nothing else, at least the hope of someday being free again.
That’s the hope Cristina could have, were it not that Cristina did not—to listen to her—see it in this light. If anything, she welcomed the limitation on her freedom, said it helped her concentrate on what was important in her life. Could Steffani possibly have come to think this way? But Cristina, for good or ill, had made the decision for herself. All right, she had made it at nineteen, but no one had made it for her, and no one had forced her into it. Quite the opposite, and she could always, wanting to, walk away. And if she did decide to leave, she’d keep her doctorate and her job, wouldn’t she?
But Steffani? He couldn’t walk away from what Caterina now believed him to be, nor could he have walked away from the Church that gave him definition and position and importance, even though that same Church had been complicit in making him what he was. Surely his genius would have provided him work and fame as a composer. Yet, the thought came to her, would it have provided him the respectability that the Church could give him? And would his genius have draped him in the crimson of a bishop and thus kept him hidden and safe from the jokes and contempt of men?
Whatever the reason, he had made the choice to stay. Her thoughts went back to that duet in the letter: was it meant to be a hidden message from a man who had suffered and survived? She flipped the pages over and searched for the letter from Abbé Battipaglia.
Non durano l’ireAngers don’t last
E passa il martirAnd suffering passes away
Amor sa ferireLove knows how to wound
Ma poi sa guarireBut it also knows how to heal
Vera fortuna severaSevere fortune
A’i nostri contentiTo our peace of mind
D’un alma che speraTo a spirit that hopes
Consola il desirPlease bring consolation
Once again, Caterina found herself quoting scripture. “Jesus wept.”
Fifteen
The rest of the afternoon passed without event. She read, she made notes, she transcribed a few passages, all about Steffani’s relatives; aside from Agostino, only a brother and a sister, they also childless, survived to maturity. “Cousin” frequently appeared as a form of address, both in letters to him and letters about him, but she was sufficiently Italian to realize that this was a term with an extralegal meaning. As for testamentary instruction, she might as well have been looking for advertising jingles. She had so far found nothing written by or even containing the name Stievani or Scapinelli or any of the variant spellings of these names.
Among Steffani’s friends and correspondents, the person he seemed most attached to was Sophie Charlotte, the Electress of Brandenburg. Caterina found frequent reference to Sophie Charlotte in letters to Steffani from other people, in which she was referred to as “Your friend the Electress,” “the Electress to whom you so warmly refer,” and “Her Highness Sophie Charlotte, who so honors you with her friendship.” The letters that passed between them showed great warmth and even more openness than could be expected, given the difference in their status.
She wrote to tell him that she was studying counterpoint, the better to prepare herself to begin to compose music, hoping that her duets would be as natural and tender as the ones he wrote. He responded by joking that he hoped she would fail in her endeavor, for should she turn to composing, “the poor abbé will go forgotten.”
At five Caterina got up to turn on a light but resisted the desire to go out to have a coffee, chiefly because she did not want to have to lock everything up and then go through the business of unlocking it and taking it all out again when she came back. At six she went to the storeroom and exchanged packets, pulling out an especially thick one that occupied most of the space on the left side of the trunk. The first letter showed promise, for it was sent by a certain Marc’Antonio Terzago and addressed Steffani as “nephew.” He thanked Agostino for the help he had given in finding a place as a student at the seminary in Padova for a young nephew and for this proof that “familial loyalty was not diminished by the immense distance between Hanover and Padova.”
She registered the man’s name. Steffani’s brother Ventura had been taken in by an uncle and had taken his name, Terzago. So here was an entirely different family of “cousins.” Could they have died out, or were they ancestors of Stievani or Scapinelli? Below it there was a letter in the less well formed hand of the boy himself, Paolo Terzago, thanking his “dear cousin” for his efforts in finding him a place at the seminary, where he was “very happy and warm.” The letter bore the date February 1726. February in northern Italy: no wonder the boy commented on the temperature in the seminary.
At seven-thirty, feeling as though she had not progressed toward any understanding of Steffani as a man, nor of having gained much information about his relatives, she got to her feet, put the unread papers facedown on top of the packet, tied it clo
sed, and locked it in the cupboard.
Before she left, she thought she’d have a look to see if Cristina had overcome her legendary sloth and answered. And indeed the first thing she saw in her inbox was mail from her sister’s personal address.
“Cati Dearest,” she read, “your Abbé Steffani does leave behind him a wake of uncertainty.” Though she knew she had not used his name, Caterina opened her “sent” folder and reread her original email, and indeed she had not used Steffani’s name, only his title of abbé.
“I see you checking the ‘sent’ folder, dear, only to confirm that all you gave me was his title. To spare your suffering or believing that my having crossed over to the Dark Side has endowed me with Dark Powers, I say only that you gave me his dates and the fact that he was a composer, probably Italian (he was a castrato, or so you suspect, and that’s where they came from, alas), who died in Germany.
“You gave me these facts, and the training as a researcher given me at enormous expense by Holy Mother Church, which over the course of many years and countless thousands of hours has honed my mind to razorlike sharpness, gave me the sophisticated skills to put those three pieces of information into Google. Just one name comes up. Perhaps the Church could have saved all the money it spent on me and, as you so often suggest, given it to the poor?
“Indeed, ‘abbé’ was, at the time of your composer’s career, pretty much a courtesy title, and though the documentation is contradictory (I shall spare you the details) it is safe to say that to be an abbé is not necessarily to be a priest. Some were; many were not. There is a subset here of bishops who were not priests, either, and as your composer later became a bishop, I save time by telling you that wearing the miter did not, in those times, require ordination. For more about this see his patron Ernst August, who was also—though married, a father, and never ordained—the Prince-Bishop of Osnabrück. Of course Ernst August was a Protestant (hiss) but they seem to have had the same dodgy rules that allowed men (of course) to become bishops and even create/consecrate other bishops without themselves being ordained. It does make a person think of yogurt, doesn’t it, where all you have to do is add a little to make more.” Here, Caterina marveled, not for the first time, at the lack of seriousness with which Cristina often spoke of the organization to which she had given her life and spirit.