by Donna Leon
“As to the injunction that a castrato could not and cannot be a priest, your memory is, as is so often the case, Cati dearest, correct. Canon Law 1041, #5 º states clearly that anyone who has gravely and maliciously mutilated himself or another person or who has attempted suicide cannot be ordained. It is also a basic tenet that inadequacy for marriage renders a man similarly inadequate for the priesthood, no doubt an evasive way of speaking of castration or sexual dysfunction.
“Pope Sixtus V, on 27 June 1587 (you might not like us, dear, but you must admit we’re very good at keeping records), made the Church’s position very clear in his Breve Cum frequenter by declaring that castrati are denied the right to marry.
“So there you have it, Baby Sister, and I can add no more until I have further information from two people I’ve asked about this, all of which will come to you in due course. Things here are fine. I’m working on another book, this one about Vatican foreign policy in the last century. It’ll probably get me kicked out or sent to teach third grade in Sicily. Or maybe you could hire me as a full-time researcher? Stay well, Kitty-Cati. Keep an eye on the family for me, please, especially poor sad Claudia, who should have married that nice electrician from Castello instead of that dreadful lawyer. I miss you all terribly. There are times when I want so much to be home that I could walk out the door and start hitchhiking south. Yes, that makes me remember the time we hitchhiked to France and told Mamma and Papà that we were taking the train. Driving into Paris with that man—was he an accountant? I can’t remember anymore—was one of the most thrilling moments in my life. Getting a doctorate or being named full professor were nothing in comparison.
“I send my love to all of you and leave it to you to spread it around in direct proportion to how much anyone needs it. Love, Tina-Lina.”
As a researcher Caterina had been trained to read between the lines of texts. This was as much a habit for her as it was for a veterinarian to see mange on the skin of a friend’s dog or a voice teacher to hear the first faint signs of excessive vibrato. Her sister’s email left her uncomfortable, chiefly because of what it revealed about her mood but also at her own initial self-satisfaction at reading it. “ET, phone home,” she said in a soft voice.
She shifted from the mood of the email to its contents. What had begun as a wild surmise on her part was now confirmed as a distinct possibility; indeed, more than that. She thought of those long fingers, that beardless, puffy face, utterly devoid of the exciting angles and lines of the male face, even at the age of sixty, which Steffani had been when that portrait was painted.
She turned off the computer, picked up her bag, and went downstairs, but not before checking that the cupboard and the door to her office were locked. Roseanna had left. As she closed the outer door to the building, Caterina noticed a sign saying that the library was closed until the end of the month. It was warm outside, so there would be no suffering on the part of the people who used the reading room as a warm place to spend their time. But it was entirely possible that they also needed a place where they could pass the day.
Thinking about this and other things, she walked toward home, not the apartment where she was living but her parents’ home down near La Madonna dell’Orto, the area of the city that would ever be home for her.
She could have taken a vaporetto if she had walked back to the Celestia stop, but she didn’t like that part of the city very much, however well-lit most of it was, so she chose to walk through Santa Maria Formosa, out to Strada Nuova, and home the same way she used to return from school.
So much taken with the thought of Steffani’s life was she that, at first, she paid no attention to the man who appeared beside her, as if to pass her, and then fell into step with her. She glanced aside, but seeing that it was not anyone she knew, she ignored him and slowed her steps to let him pass in front of her. But he slowed his as well and kept pace with her. They came down into the campo, which was dark at this hour. The paving stones were covered with a thin film of humidity that dissipated and reflected the lights. A few meters beyond the bridge, where light also came from the windows of the shops on her right, she stopped. She didn’t bother to pretend she wanted to take something from her bag; she simply stopped and stood still, waiting to see if the man would move off. He did not.
The vegetable stand had already closed up and gone, but there were a number of people crossing the campo, and three or four were within hailing distance, though she didn’t know why she thought of it in those terms.
“Do you want something?” she asked, surprising herself but, apparently, not the man.
He turned and looked at her, and she didn’t like him. Just like that: instinctive, visceral, utterly irrational, but equally strong. Her instincts told her this was a bad man, and the fact that he stood and looked at her and said nothing was bad. She wasn’t in the least afraid—they were in the middle of a campo and there were people around them. But she was uneasy, and the longer it was that he didn’t say anything, the more uneasy she grew. He was an entirely average-looking man, about her age, short hair, no beard, normal nose, light eyes, nothing to remember.
“Do you want something?” she repeated, and again he didn’t answer. He stood and looked at her, studying her face, her shoulders, the rest of her body, and then again her face, as though he were memorizing everything he saw.
The desire to run or to strike out at him and then run came over her, but she pressed her body into obedience and remained standing still. A full minute passed. From somewhere to her right, a church bell began to ring eight-thirty, and she was late for dinner.
She started walking toward the bridge on the other side of the campo. She did not look behind her but she listened for his footsteps. Her mind was humming and she could no longer remember if his footsteps had been audible before. As she reached the bridge, the desire, the need, to turn and see if he was behind her became all but overwhelming, but she resisted it and continued up and down the bridge and then into one of the narrowest calli in the city. As she entered it, she prayed that someone would approach from the other end, but it was empty. She shook with the desire to turn around, but she kept walking until she was out of the calle and at the next bridge.
Up and down and into Campo Santa Marina, where she had to decide which way to go. Turn right and save a few minutes, but pass down Calle dei Miracoli, which was a narrow place with little foot traffic, or continue straight and come out by San Giovanni Crisostomo and run into the heaviest foot traffic in the city as she went toward Strada Nuova and home. She continued straight ahead.
Sixteen
She made no mention of the man at dinner, not wanting to alarm her parents but also not wanting to alarm herself. He had done nothing to menace her, had not even spoken to her, yet he had unsettled her and, she admitted to herself while trying to pay attention to a story her mother was telling, had frightened her. The city was a safe island in a world that seemed to be going increasingly off its axis; to read the papers was to fear that some infection was abroad. She returned her attention to her mother’s story, and to her food. Homemade polenta made from grain sent to her father by an old friend who still grew corn in Friuli. The rabbit came from Bisiol, where her mother had been buying rabbit for twenty years. The artichokes were from Sant’Erasmo; her mother had recently joined a cooperative that delivered a basket of vegetables and fruit to the house twice a week. The purchaser had no choice about what was delivered: it was what was in season, and it was organic.
Her mother had complained about never having eaten so many apples in her life, but when Caterina ate one of them, cooked in red wine and covered with whipped cream, she would gladly have signed her mother up for another two months of apples. They talked of many things: her father’s work, her mother’s friends, her sisters’ marriages, her nieces and nephews. Caterina wondered, should it happen that she someday had an estate to leave, whether she would be happy to leave it—in
the event of her not having husband or children—to her nieces and nephews? They were only children now but who knew what they would become as adults?
As her parents continued to talk and she continued to half listen to them, she thought about Steffani. He had passed most of his life in Germany, going back to Italy only occasionally and usually for fairly short periods. How much had he seen of his relatives or their children? Had he even seen them, known them, tossed them in the air and played with them and sung his songs to them? And the cousins, these men who descended from the children’s children of his cousins, with what right did they stake a claim on his papers and estate, and where had the idea of a “treasure” come from? No one had explained that to her. The only reference she’d found to his estate mentioned that, after his creditors had been paid, there remained “2,029 florins, some papers, some relics, medals, and music.” It was that “and music” that hit her with force. Exclude that and the man had lived seventy-four years: some papers, some money, some relics, and some medals. Treasure?
“Where did we all get the idea that your great-grandfather lost everything at the casinò?” she surprised her father by asking. Both her parents stared at her, but neither of them asked her if she had been paying attention to what they were saying, so obvious was it that she had not.
Her father ran both hands through his still thick hair, something he did when he wanted time to think. Her mother, as she always did when things didn’t go as she had planned, put more food on their plates. Everyone in the family except her mother and Cinzia ate like wolves and never changed weight by a gram. “All I have to do is look at a carrot and I weigh a kilo more the next day” was her mother’s mantra.
“I don’t know,” her father said, not about the carrot that played so frequent a role in his wife’s conversation, but about the question Caterina had just asked him. “It’s family legend. People used to talk about it when we were kids, and I talked about it with Giustino and Rinaldo.”
“Did anyone ever check to see if it was true?” she asked.
Her mother gave Caterina a startled glance, but her father smiled and said, “No, I suppose we never thought about doing that.”
“Why?” Caterina asked.
He considered her question for a while and smiled again. “Probably because it sounded so romantic and so Venetian—palazzo lost at cards, gambling away the family fortune.”
“What do you think really happened?”
He shrugged. “I suppose what usually happens. My great-grandfather wasn’t good with money, wouldn’t listen to his wife, and lost it all.”
Her mother broke in to say, “It’s how we like to think of ourselves.”
“We?” Caterina asked.
“Veneziani. Gran signori,” she said, quoting the tag line of a common saying that defined Venetians.
“But instead?” she asked.
“Cati,” her mother said, “you haven’t been away so long you’ve forgotten. We love to make a deal and beat someone else out of something.”
“But you don’t and Papà doesn’t,” she said, knowing this was true.
Neither of her parents said anything for some time until she put her spoon down and admitted, “All right, all right. You don’t, but most of us do.”
“Do you?” her mother asked, as if she had just shown some sympathy for child prostitution or the MOSE project.
“No, I don’t think I do,” she answered.
Before things could grow more complicated, her mother said, “You’ve got twelve minutes to get the boat at San Marcuola, Cati.” She hadn’t looked at her watch, hadn’t asked the time, she simply knew.
Hurried kisses, promises to call the next day, and every day, her mother’s insistence that it made no sense for her to live all the way down in Castello when she had a perfectly good home to stay in, and then she was out of the house and on her way to the boat stop.
Her feet knew the way—out the door and right along the canal, then left over the bridge, and stop thinking about it and let your feet do it for you, then nine minutes later she walked out in front of the church of San Marcuola, where, she reminded herself, Hasse’s tomb was hard to find, and straight to the boat stop. She took out her imob and pressed it against the sensor, heard the blip of acceptance, then walked into the lighted embarcadero.
And there he was, the man who had followed her from the Foundation. He sat on the bench to the left-hand side, his legs stretched out in front of him, feet crossed at the ankles. His arms were crossed over his chest, and he looked like any person sitting and waiting for the vaporetto to arrive. He glanced up at her and, though he noticed her, there was no sign of recognition on his part, just as there had been none when he’d looked at her on the street some hours before.
She opened her bag and slipped her imob into the inside pocket, walked past him to the front of the dock, turned right, and looked up the Grand Canal. The boat was a hundred meters away, clearly visible in the brightly lit canal. Its headlight approached. What did she do if he got on the boat with her? Ignore him and get off at Arsenale and then walk home? There were sure to be people on the street, but perhaps not on the small calle where the apartment was. She could call the police, but what if he didn’t get off the boat when she did? The boat came and she got on, went into the cabin, and took an aisle seat on the left side, where she could see who got on after her. He did not.
As the sailor flipped the rope loose, she waited for the man to make a sudden move and jump on the departing boat at the last minute, but he didn’t. The boat started forward. She turned to the left and saw him still sitting there, legs comfortably stretched out in front of him, arms folded. As she moved past him, he continued to look at her, expression unchanged.
She looked forward. She felt something sting her eye, and when she placed her hand on it, she felt the perspiration that had run down her face and soaked her hair. It took almost a half hour to get to Arsenale, and Caterina was glad of it, for she had time to talk herself into a state of calm.
The boat pulled in, the sailor tossed the rope and wrapped it around the stanchion, and five or six people lined up to leave the boat. She put herself in the middle of them, matching her pace to theirs. Careful to stay behind an elderly couple who walked slowly ahead of her, she followed them off the boat and down to Via Garibaldi until she came to the street where she was living, Calle Schiavona. She paused, but only minimally, at the corner. The key to the front door had been in her hand since the boat had begun to slow for the stop.
The house was along on the left. She reached the door, put the key in the lock, and let herself into the entrance. She turned on the light and walked to the top floor, then let herself into the apartment. She walked through it, turning on all of the lights one after the other. When she was sure she was alone in the apartment—though she tried not to think of it in those terms—she went into the bathroom and was violently sick into the toilet. She washed her face and rinsed her mouth, went into the kitchen and made herself a cup of chamomile tea, and took it back to the living room.
Sleep, she knew, was impossible. She sat on the sofa and picked up the second of the books about Steffani she had taken from the library.
The story recounted so captivated her that she soon forgot about feeling sick, drank the tea, went and made more, and returned to the book. She read a few more pages, went into the kitchen and ate a few dry crackers, drank more tea, then returned to the book.
In 1694, the movie-star handsome—she liked this anachronistic description—Count Philip Christoph von Königsmarck disappeared overnight from the castle of Ernst August, the duke of Hanover and Steffani’s patron. He disappeared, she read, “into thin air.”
It was subsequently rumored that he had been killed on the orders of someone, and even though the official version always remained that he had simply gone missing, nothing could prevent it from becoming
the greatest scandal of the time. There were a few candidates for the role of killer, or sender, first among whom was Duke Ernst August himself, who objected to the openness of Königsmarck’s affair with his daughter-in-law, the beauty of the century, Princess Sophie Dorothea.
With the entrance of a second double-barreled Sophie, Caterina was forced to flip back to the genealogical chart at the beginning of the book. The Sophie Charlotte whom Steffani corresponded with and of whose friendship he was so proud was the sister-in-law of this second Sophie. The betrayed husband was Georg Ludwig, the future king George I; his adulterous wife, Sophie Dorothea, was also his first cousin. She had been a desirable catch because of her beauty and charm and, not incidentally, because of the hundred thousand thalers a year that came with her.
The nausea had passed, and Caterina found she was hungry. She went into the kitchen and put some rice on to boil. On the way back to the sofa, she paused in front of the mirror next to the front door and asked herself out loud, “Have you been watching too much television?” Since Caterina had never owned or lived with a television and never watched it, the question was rhetorical; she asked it as a way of commenting on the melodrama of the story she was reading.
It was not, to say the very least, a love-filled marriage. Truth to tell, Georg Ludwig and Sophie hated each other. The book recounted an incident when an argument between them had so escalated that he literally had to be pulled off of her. Georg had a series of mistresses and, in fact, when he subsequently went to England to become king, he packed up two of them—whom the English looked at and quickly nicknamed the Maypole and the Elephant—and took them along. Sophie Dorothea seemed to have limited herself to only one, and everything Caterina could find suggested that her error was not the affair but her failure to keep it secret.