In a few minutes, the gondola came to rest at the bottom of a familiar calle. I tightened the grip on my bag.
“This is it, Felice,” I said with a gulp. “We’re finally home.”
As we mounted the smooth, well-worn stones of the landing, I found my doubts and worries turning to excitement. In a moment I would be hugging Annetta! Last words from our gondolier followed us: “I’ll be watching for you at San Stefano, young castrati. Make Venice proud!”
Chapter 2
Two rows of pinched, three-floored houses marched up the calle and split to encircle the Campo dei Polli, a small square at the end of the street. There, a group of boys kicking at a leather ball jostled around the central stone well which supplied the neighborhood with drinking water. Their shouts echoed around the campo and startled a flock of pigeons into flight. The lingering warmth of the day had failed to tempt anyone else outside; the stone benches under the square’s single tree were vacant. Like a hundred other campi in this district, my boyhood home displayed the humbler, more domestic face of Venice. The glorious spires and towers of the Piazza San Marco that had dazzled Felice as we entered the city were not so distant in space, but were a thousand miles removed in tone and mood.
Felice set his bag down and cleared his throat. “Which house is yours, Tito?”
I looked around, fighting a wave of foolish confusion. Which house was it? The square surrounded us with a hodgepodge of dingy plaster façades that each looked equally strange and familiar. Was it that one with the small balcony, or the next one with the withered vines hanging from a window box which should have been taken in weeks ago? Drawing a large breath, I let something like the instinct which leads a sheep to its own pen after a summer of grazing on the mountainside set me before a narrow, wooden door. As I raised my hand to pull the bell cord, we heard loud squeals of anger or laughter from inside.
Before I could ring, the door swung inward to reveal a stooped old man in a worn jacket and floppy red cap pulled down to meet bushy, white eyebrows. The bright blue eyes gazing at us in surprise were surrounded by more wrinkles than I remembered, but they told me I had chosen the right door.
“Lupo! It’s me, Tito.”
A woman carrying a small market basket pushed past our old house servant and threw herself in my arms. “Tito,” she gasped, “I thought you would never arrive.”
For a long moment we embraced as if our lives depended on it, then gently pushed away for a mutual inspection. How can I describe the woman my sister had become? There is a type of beauty that surpasses a harmonious arrangement of features, a beauty that no artifice can match. Annetta’s brown eyes radiated that beauty from vast, calm depths. Her wide smile, generous and confident, was unfettered by the kind of self-doubt that tormented me daily. The glowing brown hair cascading down her back and unblemished complexion completed a picture of health and well-being.
“This must be Felice,” she said, drawing us over the threshold. “Come in, come in. Take off your hats. Hang up your cloaks. There, on those pegs.”
We crowded into the bare, narrow hall as Annetta pushed her basket and some coins into Lupo’s hands.
“Go to the apothecary and get Grisella’s elixir. He knows what she needs. And check to see if the baker is still open. Get some cakes if you can. Now that Tito has come, we must celebrate.”
Lupo gave me a welcoming smile and backed out the door with a small bow to Annetta. Again we heard squealing. This time anger was evident in the shrill cries coming from the floor above.
“No. No, I won’t. I want to wear that one. Give it here you old cow.” Placating murmurs followed, then a loud slap, running feet, and the slam of a door. Annetta charged up the stairs, bidding us wait in the sitting room.
We entered to find a small table and a few chairs scattered about on a Persian carpet. An enameled stove containing some dying embers of coal filled one corner, but our chief interest lay in the delicate but well proportioned harpsichord set before the room’s one window. Immediately, Felice took charge of the instrument and began to run through some scales.
“Come on, Tito, we’ve had no real practice since leaving Naples.”
We launched into the elementary exercises so routine from our years at the conservatorio. Each session always began in the same way, with basic tasks to warm up the throat muscles followed by more vigorous exercises to build strength and stamina. Castrati are famous for having the small, delicately formed larynx of a woman and the prodigious lung capacity of a man. Hours of daily musical training results in a voice that can span three and one-half octaves, sing the highest and lowest notes with equal ease, and hold those notes for long minutes of swelling ecstasy. All of this, while the castrato soprano maintains control over the most complicated embellishments and plays nimbly up and down cascades and trills that no other singer could possibly produce.
I had once witnessed a virtuoso performance by the great Farinelli in Naples. During his arias, all eyes were glued to his face and gestures. Hundreds of ears strained to catch every vocal nuance. Some of the women, and even a few of the men, seemed transported by sensation. With their heads tipped back, watching through half-closed eyes, they appeared nothing short of enraptured. After the opera, the man’s coach could hardly move through the streets for the crowds of people pressing in to give him flowers or just touch his sleeve. I saw one woman who cried her love for him over and over. She unlaced her bodice and bared her breasts before she was finally hustled away. But that had been the famed Farinelli. I reminded myself that I was only Tito Amato, a young Venetian of uncertain prospects, singing scales in my sitting room with my friend whose voice couldn’t please a frog.
Felice fell silent and his roving fingers lit on the accompaniment to one of my arias from the opera that had crowned our student days. I grinned and joined in the melody. Despite our sea journey, my voice was in fine shape and I quickly warmed to the music. I sang the first section as written, then began to add my own embellishments. My throat was nearly bursting with the joy of singing again. I soon left the composer’s intent behind and sounded the notes for their own sake, giving my imagination free rein. Felice gave up trying to follow me on the keyboard. He crossed his arms and nodded his chin in time to my rhythm. When I finally ran out of breath, he gestured to the door. I turned to face four amazed stares. The four broke into applause, and one of the group flew at me and began hugging my neck and covering my cheeks with kisses.
“Oh Tito, I didn’t know you could sing like that,” came in between enthusiastic embraces.
“Enough, Grisella. Don’t strangle your brother. Let Tito catch his breath and have a look at you.” Annetta attempted to pry our younger sister off my neck.
Grisella stepped back but retained my hand in hers. “So what do you think of me, Brother?”
How old was she now? Thirteen? Grisella had certainly left the garments of childhood behind. Her dark green dress was a copy of Annetta’s brown one. Although Grisella’s shoulders were slimmer, her trim waist and swelling breasts filled out the bodice to amply match her older sister’s feminine contours. An oddly extravagant scarf jeweled with bits of colored glass, likely the source of the spat we had overheard, brushed her neckline and mingled with a luxuriant flow of red-gold hair. Where had she come by such hair? No one in our family that I could remember had such a striking mane. Her bright, dark eyes, shadowed by bluish smudges underneath, continued to question me.
“Well? What do you think? Have I changed much?” She playacted a demure expression.
With perfect truth I said, “Grisella, you’ve grown up while I was away.” She smiled, seemingly pleased with both herself and my statement, and let Annetta draw her away to meet Felice.
The next to greet me was old Berta, shy and grinning in her apron and linen cap. She sidled close and said, “How wonderful you sing, Signor Tito, like the beautiful boys in church.” Lupo followed, nodding agreement with his toothless smile.
I was wonderi
ng how Annetta managed the household with the help of only two elderly servants when the street door slammed and my father appeared at the sitting room doorway. Lupo scurried to take his overcoat and tricorne hat while Berta shuffled down the hallway toward the kitchen muttering about supper preparations. The group by the harpsichord was laughing at Grisella’s boisterous efforts to convince Felice that Venice was more of a musical city than Naples or even Rome. My father met my eyes for a brief moment before finding it necessary to inspect the carpet that had covered his sitting room floor since long before I had crawled on it as an infant.
“We’ve been expecting you, Tito,” he finally said. His Venetian accent was softer and more liquid than what I had been used to hearing in Naples, but his tone was sharp. He held himself rigidly and fiddled with the lace at the end of his sleeve. “How was your journey?”
“It went well, Father, only a few short delays,” I answered slowly, trying to send unobtrusive signals to Annetta, mentally willing her to turn from the harpsichord and join the conversation. But the laughter by the window continued. I forced myself to raise my chin and keep my gaze steady. With my heart pounding so insistently, I could have been a novice on the conservatorio stage in my first singing role.
“I see you’ve brought your friend.” The slight curl of Father’s lip and his cool glance toward Felice told me what he thought of my friend.
Now Annetta came forward leading a subdued Felice by the elbow. “Father, this is Felice Ravello. He’s agreed to stay with us until he gets settled in Venice. I’m going to have Berta air out Alessandro’s room.”
To my great relief, my father’s instinctive good manners came to the fore. “A pleasure, Signor Ravello. Is this your first time in Venice?”
“I’ve never been north of Naples, Signore. The conservatorio agents took me from a village near Palermo when I was very young. I’ve lived in Naples ever since.”
“You were born in Sicily, then.”
“Yes, east of Palermo…I think.”
“You don’t really know?” Annetta was quick to put a kind hand on his shoulder. “But what of your family, haven’t you been back to see them?”
“I’ve had no contact with them. After the surgery, on the journey back to Naples, I came down with a raging fever. I think the men were surprised that I survived. Maybe that is why I remember almost nothing of my life before San Remo.”
Annetta’s questioning look prodded Felice to continue. “Only one picture stands out…my mother’s face…very sad and fragile. Then there’s a vague impression of noisy brothers and sisters riding in a farm wagon with huge wheels. And one old goose who used to chase me around the yard trying to nip me with her beak. Maybe I’d teased her and she wanted revenge. I don’t know.” Felice shrugged and smiled to show that these long ago events were of no consequence, but Annetta persisted.
“Didn’t your family write or find some way to keep in touch?”
“They were peasants, Annetta. I doubt they could read or write.”
“How sad!” My sister eyed Felice sympathetically.
“No, no,” Felice replied. “I adored the Conservatorio San Remo. They made me work hard, but I had a soft bed and all the food I could eat for the first time in my life. And it was so exciting to be there. It seemed like I had stepped into a magic world created just for me. I can’t imagine what it would have been like to grow up working the fields of a worn out farm in Sicily. Besides, my father must have been very poor to take the money from the agents, to allow the operation.”
The look on my father’s face stopped Felice’s reminiscences, and my friend continued in a different vein. “I’m grateful to you all for taking me into your home. I promise I’ll be no trouble. I’m sure I’ll find a position and be out on my own soon.”
Concern impelled me to speak. “Father, do you know anyone at the Mendicanti or at your musicians’ guild who might have a place for Felice? He’s been working on choral music and can play the harpsichord and violin.”
This put my father back on familiar ground. He had been the organist at the Ospedale Mendicanti for many years. The Mendicanti was one of Venice’s four asylums for orphaned or abandoned girls. Unfortunately, the city overflowed with an abundance of waifs. Venice boasted several thousand courtesans whose names and addresses were published in a yearly guidebook distributed to foreign visitors. The Tribunal of State Inquisitors decried the loosening of morals in the declining Republic, but their protests were muffled. They understood that the ladies were a valuable complement to Venice’s other attractions and allowed the practice to continue behind discreetly closed doors.
Like the other asylums, the Mendicanti had a conservatorio that educated the girls in music at the state’s expense. The Republic recouped its investment by drafting the young musicians to perform at state occasions and in the pageants that filled Venice’s crowded festival calendar. Of course, the girls were closely chaperoned. They usually sang behind grillwork screens and mingled with their admirers only under the watchful eyes of a phalanx of white-robed nuns. The very best sometimes went on to sing on the opera stage, but most ended up married or shut into a convent. My own mother had been a Mendicanti orphan before being plucked from the choir by Isidore Amato, the young organist who would become my father.
Tall and broad shouldered, my father met Felice’s height and confronted him eye to eye. “You’re not trying for a position at the opera? After the training you’ve received at San Remo?”
Stared down by Isidore Amato’s unyielding brown eyes over his proud beak of a nose, Felice floundered defensively. “You must understand. My voice is really very good…it’s just going through a rough patch. It’s not up to solo work right now and I don’t want to force it.…”
He would have stammered on if Annetta hadn’t broken in. “Father, perhaps you could speak to Signor Viviani. He’s on the Board of Governors at the Mendicanti and attends all the concerts there.” She turned to Grisella. “Aren’t you singing with the girls tomorrow afternoon?”
My younger sister nodded. “Father is playing the organ for us.”
Annetta clapped her hands together. “That will do perfectly. Father can approach Signor Viviani while the music has him in a mellow mood. Maybe he has need of another musician for his theater or even his own household.”
My father frowned. I gathered that he wasn’t fond of being interrupted, or of taking orders from women. “I don’t think so,” he said. “Felice wouldn’t want to get himself indebted to the Viviani. It would put him in a most uncomfortable position. That family is famous for exacting more than the expected compensation for favors given.”
Felice inclined his head. “I’m sure you know best, Signor Amato.”
Annetta was not so easily put off. She pushed up her sleeves, ready for an argument. My father regarded Felice with a jaundiced eye. I felt a bead of sweat roll down my forehead; the heat from the corner stove suddenly became oppressive.
I didn’t fancy having my homecoming ruined by a family battle over Felice’s prospects or lack thereof, so I jumped in with the first comment that came to mind. “The gondolier who took us off the boat told us that Domenico Viviani is enamored of the prima donna at the theater.”
“Oh yes. He does have a well merited reputation with the ladies,” Father hastened to agree. “That’s part of the feud he has going with the Albrimani family. It seems Viviani is so obvious in his liaisons with other women that his wife’s family objects. If only the man would show a bit of restraint!”
“I don’t remember the Albrimani,” I replied.
“An old family of impeccable lineage…very proud. The Albrimani have been in the Golden Book since the founding of Venice. They didn’t buy their way into the nobility during the Turkish Wars like the Viviani. I’m deuced if I can recall the basis of the feud, but for years, the two families have been at each other’s throats. Gondolas are scuttled, trade routes blocked, younger sons and cousins attacked in the streets
. Your new employer married a daughter of the Albrimani household a few years ago. The alliance was supposed to heal the wounds, but thanks to Viviani’s indiscretions, it seems to have done more harm than good.”
Annetta spoke up excitedly. “Everyone knows about Domenico Viviani’s amorous exploits. The Albrimani are furious over his open disrespect to their kinswoman. He’s really courting danger there.”
“Anna-Maria! What do you know of such things?” My father’s face was livid.
Annetta raised her chin and shot back, “I can’t live in Venice and be entirely ignorant of what is said about such a prominent nobleman.”
As our father took Annetta to task for listening to gossip at the market, I was struck by Grisella’s pose by the harpsichord. Her back arched at an odd angle, and her bright eyes blinked rapidly while her lips pressed in a tight, straight line. I took a step toward her.
“Grisella?”
Annetta whirled around, then called for Berta as she ran across the room to Grisella. Suddenly, the girl exploded in a blurred motion of flailing arms and swirling skirts. She struggled against Annetta and emitted terrible growls punctuated by several words for excrement that would have won me a caning at the conservatorio. Father watched this amazing spectacle with a detached shaking of his head, as if he were at a performance where the musicians were playing slightly off key.
Felice and I ran to help Annetta but were pushed out of the way by Berta hurrying past with a brown glass bottle. With practiced moves, Annetta pinned Grisella’s arms while Berta tipped a small portion of the bottle’s contents into her mouth. The girl calmed almost immediately. With glassy, unfocused eyes and squiggles of purplish brown liquid running down her chin, she allowed Annetta and Berta to lead her away.
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