6 - Whispers of Vivaldi

by Beverle Graves Myers

  Beatrice dug into the pocket beneath her skirts and plucked out a folded letter, its blob of red sealing wax still in place. I could make out a delicate flowing hand as she smoothed the missive on her silk covered knee.

  “Listen, Papa.” She read, “A young castrato imported from Naples sang the lead role. What a ravishing voice! After each aria, cheers spread through the theater like wildfire. No mortal man could sing so divinely. It was as if an angel had assumed the shape of the singer who kept us in his thrall. Thus, the Milanese have dubbed him Angeletto, though his real name is Carlo Vanini. Oh, my dear Bea, you must have your Papa call this angel to Venice so you can hear him, too.”

  Beatrice looked up, refolded her letter, and regarded her father expectantly.

  Passoni gave his head a small shake. “But Venice already possesses excellent singers. Majorano, for one. Nothing would do but that you would have Majorano sing at the musical evening to celebrate your sixteenth name day. As I recall, you nearly swooned on that occasion.”

  A pout. “By now everyone has heard Majorano a hundred times. He’s all right, I suppose…but…but it’s not fair that Amalia has seen Angeletto and I haven’t.”

  Beatrice turned toward me, beaming a smile that displayed perfectly matched dimples. Of course she would have dimples; this girl lacked for nothing.

  She wiggled back around on her father’s lap. “Angeletto must come to sing at the Teatro San Marco. He must sing the part of the duke who Tito thinks is so important. Please, Papa.”

  Passoni set the girl on her feet and regarded me with elbow on knee, chin on fist. He was all business again. “Do you know of this Angeletto, Tito?”

  “Not by that name, Excellency. But if he just adopted it, I would know him by his family name. Carlo…?”

  “Vanini,” Beatrice supplied from behind father’s chair. “From Naples.”

  “Carlo Vanini,” I repeated blankly. The name stirred some emotion deep in my gut, but it disappeared before I could even put a name to it. Like most castrati, I’d been trained for the stage at a Naples conservatorio. I remembered no boy by the name of Vanini, but in the dozen years since I’d returned home, over a hundred students would have come and gone. I slowly shook my head. “I don’t know him, Excellency. Or even how to reach him.”

  “Papa…” Beatrice emphasized the last syllable. It hung in the air as a challenge.

  “Hush, my precious.” Her father reached to squeeze her hand.

  To me he said, “You must find him, Tito. With Venice prepared by accounts of Angeletto’s conquest of Milan—and my magnificent shipwreck, of course—this new opera might truly double the box office takings.” His eyebrows slashed downward. “Do I make myself clear? You and Maestro Torani may have your False Duke, but only if Angeletto heads the cast.”

  So there it was.

  I’ve never enjoyed jousting with the powerful, and it was easy to see who ruled this turf. I assured the tyrant Beatrice that every effort would be made to engage Angeletto, thanked the Savio, and took a hasty leave of the sunny study.

  ***

  An uneasy happiness suffused my mood as I retraced my steps to the hall that ran the length of the palazzo. The opera I had chosen would progress from notes and words on paper to a fully acted and sung performance—but with unwelcome compromises. And only if I could locate the newly christened Angeletto in short time. Unfortunately, a journey of several days lay between Venice and Milan.

  I was halfway down the corridor when a tall man darted out of a doorway and fell in beside me. “Did you find His Excellency amenable to your proposal, Signor Amato?”

  The voice was high and lilting, a castrato’s voice. I stopped and turned to face Signora Passoni’s cavaliere servente. He sketched a quick bow, making me think he was anxious to conclude whatever business he had and be away. He said, “I am Franco.”

  “Signor Franco?” I was baffled, I admit it.

  “Just Franco.” His smile was gentle and wistful. “Will you answer my question? I don’t ask for myself.”

  This “friend of the house” actually served only one person. I asked, “Does Signora Passoni share my concern for the Teatro San Marco?”

  “I’ll just say that my lady is most anxious to see your new opera come to fruition. She wants nothing to stand in the way of The False Duke. Will it come to pass?”

  “I’ve been given leave to open the season with it.”

  With another smile, Franco reached for my hand and filled my palm with a small weasel-skin purse. My fingers closed around the lumpy bag.

  “Wha—” I began, but he silenced me with a finger to his lips.

  “For your fine work and…for incidental expenses,” he whispered as we reached the main foyer. “We know we can rely on your discretion.”

  Then, with a flourish of his long arm, and in a louder voice, “Here you are, Signor Amato. It is easy to become lost in our maze of corridors.” With that, Franco quickly disappeared through an archway that led to a dim, curtained room. As I slipped the purse in my pocket, I imagined a trail of question marks sweeping behind the castrato like a royal train.

  The same young footman who had announced me appeared to see me out of the landward door. After descending a flight of marble stairs, I found myself in a short calle. At any other time of day, the alley would have been deeply shadowed. But the sun had climbed over the surrounding buildings, and the alley’s inhabitants had come out to greet it. Glossy ivy formed a green backdrop for housewives talking themselves hot and hoarse while they watched children at play. A girl rocked a tattered cloth doll in her apron. A boy kicked a leather ball.

  Despite the noon warmth, I was determined to walk back to the theater, both to avoid a paunch like the Teatro Grimani’s lead castrato, and to have a good think. My brain was in a whirl. It seemed that poor Balbi and his Prometheus had been doomed from the moment Rocatti had placed his aria from The False Duke in my hands. Three people at the Ca’Passoni were surprisingly excited about this new opera, all for different reasons. The Savio craved his shipwreck, Beatrice her Angeletto, and the signora her…what? Sweating profusely, I loosened my cravat as I headed for the nearest traghetto stop to board a ferry.

  The air was cooler on the other side of the canal. Or perhaps putting some distance between myself and the polite stratagems of the Ca’Passoni only made it seem so. I was passing under the scraggly trees of the Campo San Samuele, pumping my legs and breathing fresh air, when my head cleared. Unbidden scraps of loose talk and backstage gossip popped into my mind.

  I realized that I had heard of Carlo Vanini before Beatrice mentioned his name.

  Secrets whispered in dressing rooms, then denied. A man’s knowing, ribald laughter. Gales of giggles from a pair of female sopranos. But what had the talk been about?

  The small campo darkened for a moment as an errant cloud obscured the sun. I stopped so suddenly, a bearded Turk with white linen wound around his head crashed into me. I was oblivious to his Arab curses and the flapping of rising pigeons.

  I had it now. I’d remembered. How could I have forgotten?

  Carlo Vanini, so the rumor went anyway, was no eunuch. Carlo was not an emasculated he, but a daring, cunning, masquerading she.

  Chapter Four

  And so, thanks to Signorina Beatrice’s passion to hear the latest castrato sensation, my companions and I were bouncing along the road to Milan in search of an angel of undetermined gender.

  It was impossible, of course, that Carlo Vanini was a girl. I knew that. At the Conservatorio San Remo, I’d lived in an austere dorm with ten or twelve other boys. Rather like orphaned children—destined never to produce any of our own—we lived under strict supervision for the sake of our artistic and moral development.

  A lay brother would awaken us before dawn by beating on a copper pan. Under his gimlet gaze, we would sing a Laudate—a prayer—while we washed,
dressed, and made our beds. Then it was Mass, a hunk of bread, and voice or composition lessons until we went, starving, to a silent dinner at the stroke of noon. If the weather was fine, as, thank the Virgin, it usually was, we went for a walk two-by-two in our black and yellow uniforms. The rest of the afternoon and evening was filled with more lessons, practice sessions, and rehearsals until our second meal at seven in the evening. After some rough-housing and a few games, we were sent to bed, a dozen boys in two facing rows of narrow cots. There was simply no way a female child could have progressed through this system without being found out.

  But what if Carlo Vanini had received private instruction? The grandmother of one of my early colleagues at the Teatro San Marco had donated her vineyard’s profits toward his surgery and subsequent training. While I’d been tricked into undergoing the knife, this boy had been so enamored with music that he’d actually begged to be made a eunuch. He hadn’t been subjected to the extended scrutiny of the conservatorio. Still any competent teacher with eyes in his head…

  “What is your opinion, Tito?” Gussie’s words snapped me back to our private carriage speeding toward Lombardy. The look in my brother-in-law’s inquiring blue eyes turned to mock accusation. “You’re off on another jaunt in your head. You haven’t even been listening.”

  “Not a bit,” I admitted, resolving to be more companionable with my fellow travelers. “But I’ll bet you’re debating Angeletto’s sex—that’s the question of the hour.”

  Gussie chuckled and Benito asked, in his high, fluting tones, “Did Angeletto ever sing in Rome?”

  “I don’t know.” I guessed where my manservant’s question was leading but, after another glance at the passing vegetation framed by the carriage window, I decided it would be more amusing to play dumb. We had hours to fill before our next stop. “Why do you ask?”

  Benito was a small man, as delicate as a sparrow, unlike most of my fellow castrati who grow decidedly tall. Across the small space that separated the carriage seats, he hunched his narrow shoulders and caved his chest like a man who’d just taken a blow.

  He said, “I was describing the dreaded examination to Signor Rumbolt.”

  “Is this true, Tito?” Beside me, Gussie had been lounging into the carriage’s rounded corner with one foot on the opposite seat and tricorne on his bent knee. Now he stiffened, and his usual frank, good-humored expression turned to an incredulous frown. “Do the castrati who sing in Rome really have to undergo a priest’s intimate probing and prodding?”

  “Benito is correct. A papal ban on women appearing on the stage anywhere within the Pope’s political realm has been in effect, off and on, for decades. The churchmen take the matter quite seriously.”

  “Men play all the roles?” Gussie scratched the yellow haystack barely tamed by a black ribbon at the nape of his neck. “I can scarcely credit it.”

  I wasn’t surprised at his disbelief. My English brother-in-law had ditched his Grand Tour before it had reached Rome, and it was odd, if you stopped to think about it. I explained, “In plays, natural male actors make tolerable stand-ins for leading ladies—if they’ve mastered the feminine walk and gestures. But where opera is concerned, only a castrato can match the true sweetness of a female soprano voice. Many of them carry on with the disguise outside the theater. On Roman streets, in cafés and taverns, I’ve seen singers who could fool their own mothers, so round in the hips and bosom, so tender and girlish their looks.”

  “I still don’t understand why the Pope insists on such a topsy-turvy masquerade.”

  “Oh, well…” I waved a hand in a rolling circle. “The church fathers consider a woman exhibiting herself in public as altogether too dangerous and decadent to be allowed, you see.”

  “They have a proverb in Rome,” Benito chirped up. “A beautiful woman who sings on stage and keeps her chastity is like a man who leaps into the Tiber and keeps his feet dry. Wasn’t there some similar practice in your country?”

  “Well,” Gussie harrumphed awkwardly, “back in Shakespeare’s time, I suppose there was. But that was a long time ago. England has moved into a more enlightened age—it’s 1745, after all.”

  Benito snorted. “Rome is always a century behind. Perhaps several.”

  “Did you sing in Rome?” Gussie asked of my manservant.

  Benito tossed his head proudly. “I sang secunda donna at the Teatro Argentina for two years.”

  Gussie gulped audibly. “You submitted to the…examination?”

  “It was a requirement of my employment. Before the director would sign my contract, I had to drop my breeches and let an old priest satisfy his eyes. And hands.” Benito grinned at Gussie’s obvious distaste, then added. “It wasn’t so bad, really. It’s just that his sight was poor and he insisted on holding a candle so very close.”

  “By Jove!” Gussie slapped his knee and jerked his head toward me like a mullet on a line, “Tito, you never…?”

  I shook my head. I was deeply grateful that my Italian performances had been restricted to Naples and Venice, two cities that reveled in their theatrical women and were as likely to give them up as they were to forego their daily bread. Thoroughly schooled in playing the hero, I wouldn’t have known how to begin to depict the heroine.

  “Well, then,” Gussie settled back against the worn leather upholstery, “if we can determine that Angeletto sang in a Roman opera house, that should settle the question of his manhood.”

  “No.” I sighed. “Not with absolute certainty.”

  “What? Why?”

  I removed my tricorne and fanned my face. The day had turned warm and humid. A haze hung over the distant green hills. “Gussie, in our world of illusion, you can never be sure of anything. I’ve played characters with outsized ears, and with noses as large as a cormorant’s bill. Remember the time I was supposed to be an Egyptian ibis-headed god. Quite realistic, didn’t you think?”

  “Yes. But I was watching from the second tier and you were down on the stage.”

  “It’s all a matter of scale.” That was Benito again. On creating illusion, he could speak with authority. Besides dressing me for the day, Benito had also transformed me into my opera roles.

  “You must exaggerate for the stage,” Benito continued, “in whatever attribute is called for. But if I were intent on fooling the Pope’s examiner, I’d strive to create a lifelike effect. Wax is a wonderfully adaptable medium for any appendage. Some people use bayberry, but I prefer beeswax mixed with powdered pigment to create a flesh tone.” He nodded wisely, raising a forefinger. “First I’d pour the melted wax into a mold of the proper size. Finding a model for the size I wanted, now that would be the fun—”

  “You needn’t spell it out.” Gussie held up a large hand. “I understand. Sometimes I’m glad I’m a simple painter with only my own daubs to worry about.”

  Hardly a simple painter, this transplant from English soil. Gussie’s keen eyes were adept at capturing his subject’s inner essence on canvas. Surely my artist brother-in-law would be able to discern Angeletto’s gender, even if the singer possessed a servant as skilled in theatrical artifice as my Benito. Thus, I expected both of my companions’ talents to prove valuable in Milan.

  Maestro Torani had dismissed the rumors questioning Angeletto’s God-given identity as pure nonsense. When I’d returned from the Ca’Passoni, the maestro had been more concerned about the Savio’s insistence on creating a spectacular storm and shipwreck than about my hiring Angeletto. Time was short, with only a few weeks to go until the barely controlled hysteria of provo rehearsals and opening night. With official approval in hand, Torani had immediately canceled rehearsals for Prometheus, sent The Duke’s score to the copyist, and put our machinist and scenic artists to work on the new illusions.

  To me, he gave a generous allowance of gold zecchini and several letters of introduction to his musical acquaintances in Milan. I was hearte
ned by his obvious confidence, but even so, I had no desire to engage a singer whose artistry was based on a lie.

  My mission was to revitalize the Teatro San Marco, not bury it in disgrace.

  ***

  Our party reached Milan on the first Friday in September and entered the walled city by the Porta Renza. A customs officer halted the carriage for the usual inquiries, but a zecchino persuaded him to pass us and our baggage through the ancient gate without needless delay. It was afternoon, the sun still peeking from behind a mantle of clouds which held the promise of a cooling rainstorm, and yet the city seemed dark and close within its walls. The smell of ripe fields and rich country dirt gave way to the pervasive stench of the city. As we navigated Milan’s narrow streets and cramped squares, strangers met our gazes through the carriage windows, tight-lipped and unsmiling. The city’s new Austrian overlords seemed to have brought suspicion and hostility with them. I wasn’t sorry when we came to the cul-de-sac near the old Castello that contained the house of Signor Leone, Maestro Torani’s longtime friend.

  Leone answered the bell surrounded by five children, as alike as eggs, with huge brown eyes and wrists poking out of their shirtsleeves. After scanning Torani’s letter of introduction, he welcomed the three of us into his home. His wife, a sloop-shouldered, sad-eyed woman with messy hair, made a place for Benito in the kitchen boy’s cubby hole. Leone himself installed Gussie and me in a small room on the second floor. Not without apologies.

  Though we were delighted to be spared another night at an inn where the sheets were suspect and the food worse, Signor Leone wrung his hands over the thin mattress, the frayed coverlet, the cheap candles. “You deserve wax, my friends, but alas, my household must make do with tallow.” For dinner, Signora Leone served a thin cabbage soup, bread, and dried cod. Proudly, no apologies from her. Before we returned to Venice, I resolved to leave a liberal sum in her apron pocket.

  Hours later, as Gussie and I made the best of the thin mattress, trying to ignore the rain dripping from a broken gutter and the neighboring church bells tolling the interminable hours, my thoughts turned homeward to Liya.