6 - Whispers of Vivaldi

by Beverle Graves Myers

  My grief was shot through with guilt. On the Rialto, when we’d first talked of The False Duke, Maestro Torani had expressed a longing for a life without care, much like Vivaldi’s Duke who gave up a gilded existence to sport in a glade with his lovely milkmaid. I’d failed to realize how weary the maestro must have been, how drained from herding selfish singers and supporting a theaterful of workers, how weak from fighting off assaults by unscrupulous rivals like Lorenzo Caprioli. My dear mentor had actually carried the marks of a beating he’d received in his desperate quest for the life he craved, yet I had failed to see through his facile excuses.

  I bowed my head. Not in prayer, but in shame. Once all Venice had reveled in my voice. I was the toast of any opera house where I chose to perform. I knew the dangers of fame and the difficulties of clinging to the pinnacle of my profession. Yet, I didn’t see that Maestro Torani was beset by similar evils. I’d failed him utterly.

  Someone touched my shoulder, and I jumped back to the present. Was I being dismissed from the service all ready? It seemed cruelly unfair to be shown the door when I’d taken pains to make myself so inconspicuous.

  It wasn’t a Passoni bravo, only Oriana, sharp-eyed soubrette that she was.

  Smiling a little too brightly for a funeral, she brushed her hat’s wind-whipped ostrich plume off her cheek. The feather was black, to be sure, but only Oriana would choose such a modish hat and fitted jacket when the weather and the occasion called for a cloak with a tightly drawn hood. “My goodness, Tito,” she said pertly, “what are you doing alone all the way back here? You must sit down front with us.”

  I flapped my hand to shush her, but the soprano plowed on without even stopping for breath, “You know we all love you. Others may say what they like, but no one from the company seriously believes that you killed Maestro Torani.” She gave an exasperated sigh. “After all, who was closer to the maestro than you? The Savio was quite wrong to remove you as director—even though Niccolo is doing a manful job, it forces him to do double duty at the San Marco and the Pieta. He’s been so terribly busy.” She turned to beam at the man who accompanied her.

  As I rose, I noticed her companion for the first time. It was Niccolo Rocatti, and Oriana was already calling him by his Christian name. She had never been one to let grass grow under her feet, where either men or casting were concerned.

  “Signor Amato.” Rocatti made me a small bow, which I answered with a nod. He wore the same white wig and severe suit that he had at the reception—perhaps it was the only one he owned. The young violin master continued, “I’m so glad to see that all is being done fittingly. Signor Passoni has obviously spared no expense—the cost of those tapers alone could feed an orphan for a year.”

  Suddenly I felt as sharp as a dagger and eager for an argument. “Ah, you must have known Maestro Torani before he gave me leave to produce…The False Duke.”

  Rocatti sent me a curious look.

  “To be concerned over his arrangements, I mean.”

  Rocatti shrugged. A bit too obviously, I thought. He said, “We did have a slight acquaintance, but mostly I admired Maestro Torani from afar. You know how it is. One knows the greats better than they know you.”

  I pressed on: “I thought perhaps you might have shown him a copy of your score before I saw it.”

  “No,” Rocatti answered slowly, as if he were speaking from far, far away. “What made you think that?”

  “Simply that the maestro took to it so enthusiastically—almost as if he were already familiar with it.”

  “Did Maestro Torani say that?”

  “No,” I said shortly. “It was merely an impression I formed. When did you first meet Maestro Torani?”

  Rocatti looked airily around the church before his gaze met mine again. His cheeks grew pink. “You know, I don’t believe I recall.”

  If that were true, I was the Bey of Constantinople. I passed a hand over my brow.

  “Are you all right, Tito?” Oriana’s elegantly gloved hand was suddenly at my elbow. The floor had seemed to sway, but it righted when I gave my head a good shake.

  “You don’t look well,” Rocatti added. “You’ve gone quite pale.”

  “I’m fine,” I replied, mustering more confidence than I felt. Perhaps Liya’s warnings were more accurate than I wanted to admit. My head was swimming, and it took a great deal of energy to stay upright. “You two go on. I’m better off here.”

  “If you’re sure…” Oriana said under her breath as her companion drew her away.

  I sank gratefully to my former pose and hooked my elbows over the next pew. Presently, an organ sounded from the rear loft, low and velvety. It was a mournful tune befitting the occasion, but heavy, so heavy that the windy notes pressed upon me with palpable force. A pair of acolytes threw the main doors open, making the church even chillier, and a steady stream of congregants entered. Black gloves and arm bands, black-edged handkerchiefs and fans, and silk veils the length of shrouds were the order of the day. Though my city of pleasure tended to gloss over death, the twin scourges of age and illness could not be denied, and every person of consequence possessed a decent stock of mourning wear.

  Out of the corner of my eye, I watched the luminaries of Venice’s musical world fill the pews. Majorano was one of the last. He hurried down the center aisle, dressed in a rumpled jacket of tan camlet, a decidedly informal costume for a funeral. With an irritated grimace, Giuseppe Balbi pressed shoulder to shoulder with Ziani to make room for the singer. The common workers from all the theaters except the Teatro Grimani came, too—the scene shifters, the seamstresses, the prompters, the curtain raisers—but they stood in back or filtered into the side chapels. Only a few individuals from both groups noticed me, sending reassuring nods or indignant scowls according to their lights. No one handed me an outright challenge until the Passoni party arrived.

  The Savio entered first, with his lady wife on his arm, and proceeded slowly down the center aisle in time to the organ’s dirge. Long-faced, they both kept their eyes trained on the funeral bier. Franco followed closely behind, one arm hugging a purple and gold tapestry cushion that his mistress would kneel on during Mass. The castrato’s expression was downcast; his brows tightly knit. I felt a stab of sympathy for the man. He was so completely Signora Passoni’s creature. Really nothing more than a servant, even if he did dress in silk and live in luxury. Did Franco have his own dreams, his own ambitions? Or had he already fulfilled them?

  Beatrice was next in the procession, lagging behind as if to distance herself from her parents and assert a small measure of independence. No dimples today! Her red-gold curls framed a sullen face before flowing down onto her green cloak. That cloak! The sight of it made me drop my hands and half rise. So that’s where Grillo’s cloak had got to. Beatrice must have removed it from the card room after I’d gone to tend my wounded chest at the water closet basin. How bold she was to display her lover’s cloak so obviously.

  I plopped down quickly, but my sharp movements must have caught the girl’s attention. She stretched her neck to look over the bowed heads in the crowded center pew. Oh, yes, she’d spotted me. She raised the leather-bound missal she carried in piously folded hands and shielded her face. From behind the holy book wrapped with her silver-beaded rosary, Beatrice fixed me with a stare and stuck out her sharply pointed, pink tongue.

  The little minx! I’d placed myself in jeopardy to keep her scandalous secret, and this is how she repaid me!

  I took a dry gulp—I felt so hot all of a sudden—and watched the Passoni family and their retainers proceed to the front of the church. Their party included Angeletto, Maria Luisa, and old Mother Vanini, who’d unearthed a fusty widow’s gown that must have seen duty since the turn of the century. The entire party gathered around Maestro Torani’s coffin as if they were the dearest friends he possessed. Several minutes of head shaking and dabbing handkerchiefs to dry eyes ensued.
Eventually an elderly priest lumbered out of the sacristy. After bowing to the Savio, he made a series of fawning, hand wringing gestures toward the front pews, clearly anxious to begin the service. While Signora Passoni used Franco’s long arm to steady herself onto her pillow, Beatrice plucked at her father’s sleeve. His noble profile swiveled her direction, and the girl whispered something behind her hand.

  Then Beatrice pointed directly at me. The Savio’s gaze followed her finger, his dark glare as heavy lidded as a lizard’s. Our eyes met, and the air between us seemed to vibrate with antagonism. Tedi Dall’Agata had taken Beatrice’s measure correctly. This over-indulged girl was beyond mischievous; she was a troublemaker of the first water. I grabbed my things and made my feet move toward the church doors before Signor Passoni could send his bravos marching down the side aisle.

  I didn’t mind leaving—truly not. Prayers for Maestro Torani’s eternal soul were all very well, but I could leave those to the priests. I meant to fasten my mind on the living, on the shadowy one who’d taken Maestro Torani from us. On the villain who roamed Venice while my mentor’s body slowly rotted in the crypt. Finding justice for Torani was the last gift I could give him, and that goal could be better served by asking questions instead of kneeling in church. It was just that my legs were so unsteady and my thinking so clouded.

  “Has Tito taken to drink?” I heard someone whisper as I lurched toward the vestibule. Dio mio! I tried to quicken and straighten my steps at the same time. I had to get out of San Nicoletto’s smothering atmosphere and breathe fresh air.

  Someone else had also decided to depart before the funeral began. As I paused in the vestibule to wrap my scarf around my neck, the church doors parted, drawn back by black-robed acolytes. A woman was hurrying out from the opposite side of the sanctuary. She was more appropriately garbed than Oriana or Beatrice. A zendale edged in beads of jet swathed her hair and shoulders, a delicately embroidered veil hid her averted face, and her full black cloak almost covered her gown.

  Almost.

  As the veiled mourner gathered her skirts and darted down the stairs, I noticed a narrow strip of a delphinium blue dancing along the stones.

  “Wait,” I cried, fumbling with my own cloak and scarf.

  The woman paused, as stiff as a statue. The pretend mourners clustered around her, but she ordered them away with a bold command. For an instant, she glanced back over her shoulder. Her look was direct, but the veil shielded her visage.

  Stumbling forward, I raised my hand and called her name. I wasn’t mistaken—was I?

  One of the doormen grabbed my elbow: “Is the signore ill? Here, let us assist you.”

  I shook him off and hurried down the church steps with hat in hand. The woman had bolted. Her cloak caught the wind and billowed out behind her like a sail. She’d covered nearly half the distance across the small campo.

  Growling at the facchini to let me pass, I followed on shaky legs. My quarry ducked into a narrow slit between two buildings. The sky above our island had darkened, and the light on the campo held a curious yellow tinge. Fighting the rising wind, I entered a short alley bounded by sheer brick walls. There she was! The woman turned as she reached the end. In her flight, the veil had dislodged. Now I saw her stricken face plainly. I wasn’t mistaken. My throat closed in a tight spasm.

  I limped the rest of the way, holding my side, and came out upon an unfamiliar riva by a deserted canal. A whimpering moan escaped my lips when I saw bearers liveried in French blue assist the woman into a gilded sedan chair. Without taking time to attach their shoulder straps, they manhandled the awkward box into motion. As they made haste away, I staggered backwards toward the alley.

  I was in trouble. I couldn’t catch my breath, and the wind whipping down the canal cut through my woolen cloak as if it were the most delicate silk, making me shiver uncontrollably. I clawed out for a handhold as gray spots whirled before my eyes.

  My last thought before I crumpled onto the cobblestones: Tedi hadn’t left Venice, after all.

  ***

  For some days, time made me its plaything. I existed in a dream impossible to measure in minutes or hours.

  Often Maestro Torani sat at the foot of my bed, observing me from under half-closed eyelids. He looked younger, much as he had on the day we’d first met. He still had his hair—frizzled gray curls that wreathed his face in the shape of a young girl’s cap. His jaw was taut and his cheeks were smooth and unwrinkled, not age spotted and withered as they’d become. I told him, over and over, “I recognized Caprioli’s sedan chair, Maestro. I’d committed it to memory, just as you advised. I followed Tedi out of the church and saw her climb into Caprioli’s chair. The chair of your enemy,” I’d finish on a moan.

  With each repetition, Torani merely nodded sadly, and I drifted along on my cotton-wool cloud until it was time for Liya to make me drink some of the opalescent liquid or, with the muscular maid’s help, apply a poultice and wrap my chest. Her mysterious poultice possessed an icy heat that dissected its way through layers of skin and muscle like a legion of tiny icicles. Surprisingly, it wasn’t as painful as it sounds. “Open yourself to its healing,” my wife whispered as she placed a feather-light kiss on my forehead. I imagined myself laced with the cold burn, much as Gussie’s milky Christmas syllabub was laced with fire-warmed brandy.

  Once, when the wind rattled the shutters and its eerie howling mixed with the screams of the seagulls, my father’s face loomed up over Torani’s shoulder. While the maestro faded to the background, Papa floated closer, puffed up like an operatic Zeus about to hurl a thunderbolt. I told Papa about chasing Tedi, too.

  As it had so often in reality, his face registered a sneer. “You had her in your sights, boy. Why didn’t you go after her?”

  I raised my head as far as my strength allowed. “I did, Papa, but I was ill. I couldn’t catch up to her…and then she was in the chair disappearing down the fondamenta.” I flopped back to my pillow with a sigh. “Lorenzo Caprioli must have the fastest chair in Venice.”

  “Weak.” My father sniffed, fiddling with the lace at his disembodied neck. “Weak as watered wine—you always were.”

  Yes, I always was. My older brother Alessandro was the robust son, the one who’d taught himself to swim when he was all of five years old, who’d climbed to the topmost branch of our campo’s tree when I could barely clamber onto my chair for supper, the one who never backed away from a fight. And now Alessandro was a wealthy Constantinople tobacco merchant with a beautiful Muslim wife and a houseful of children. What was I? An emasculated singer who couldn’t sing—with a wife I couldn’t marry honestly and a son who was mine by adoption only—whose house was falling down around me—and who now had no way of supporting my unconventional household.

  Against my better judgment, I looked to my father for solace. He had none to offer. As I searched Papa’s face, it began to change. His staring eyes grew wild. They glittered like rubies flaming with an inner fire, then abruptly extinguished to a barely smoldering orange.

  I cried out in grunts, twisting and thrashing in my cocoon of bedclothes.

  The transformation continued. Papa’s domed forehead stretched up and up, his lean cheeks took on an alabaster hue, and his jaws broke in a cavernous smile—the visage of death I’d always feared.

  I could no longer move. An invisible weight pinned me to the bed, and all the while my father’s dreadful image grew larger and stretched above me like an all-encompassing canopy. I heard a staccato drumbeat and realized it was my own frantic heartbeat. Where was Liya? Why wouldn’t she come?

  Maestro Torani was my savior. He came around from the foot of the bed and mutely extended his hand. With great effort, I managed to work one hand free and grasped his. It was surprisingly warm for a dead man’s. His warmth spread through me, assuaging my fear and shredding the horror above me into wispy streams of mist.

  With the thumb and m
iddle finger of his other hand, the maestro closed my eyelids, and I fell into a blessed sleep

  Thankfully, not all of my sickroom visions were so unpleasant. I will always carry the exquisite memory of being visited by a quartet of boy sopranos. The beautiful youths wore white tunics with delicate, feathery wings attached to their shoulders that allowed them to fly like the cherubs on many a ceiling fresco. Each boy carried a gilded candlestick sporting an unquenchable flame. The quartet sang as they flew from corner to corner, varying their pattern from crisscross to circular; their pure voices swelled, and their melodies floated about the ceiling like the mingled scent of lilies and lilacs. The most spectacular of the individual tones hung in the air as slowly falling drops of liquid gold. Thus I was showered with a gentle rain of music that I believe healed me every bit as much as Liya’s burning poultice.

  Eventually, spirits no longer came to my bedside and my walls no longer throbbed with song. Small, everyday things nibbled at the edge of my awareness. One morning, I awoke to the sounds of the maid’s heavy step in the corridor and the rattling of the chocolate pot and cups on her tray.

  I’d returned to the real world. I greedily drained the cup she served me, reveling in its mix of bitter and sweet.

  Later that day, I found myself enchanted with a crack on the ceiling that resembled a mallard duck. Why had I never noticed it before? Despite a persistent headache, I cast my attention beyond the bounds of my chamber. I knew that Benito had not returned. He would have been tending me if he had, but I wondered if my wandering manservant had sent any word. I asked Liya the next time she came in. When my wife shook her head at my question, the look on her face was so miserable that I sat up and put my arms around her.

  Liya responded to my embrace for a moment, then gently pushed me back and stood up. “Don’t fret over Benito. You must look to yourself for once. Rest.”