The Jewels of Paradise

Ten

CATERINA FELT NO REGRET AT SO PEREMPTORILY HAVING LEFT Manchester, but she did regret having had to leave her books in storage, an act that made her entirely dependent upon the Internet and public collections of books. Ezio had told her to come to the library at four, so after she stopped for a panino and a glass of water, standing at the bar as she had done as a student, she did another studentesque thing and went into an Internet café. It would take her too long to go home and use her own computer to do the basic research, and all she wanted was to have the basic chronology of Steffani’s life fresh in her memory when she went to the library.

Her grandmother had been famous in the family for keeping her memory all her life, and Caterina was the grandchild said most to resemble her. As she read through the information about Steffani, she justified family tradition, for most of the information came back to her as she read: born in Castelfranco in 1654, he was early seen to be a talented singer and musician, choirboy at the Basilica del Santo in Padova from the age of ten. A nobleman from Munich was seduced by the beauty of his voice and took him home with him, where he had tremendous success as a musician and a composer. After two decades, he moved to Hanover, where he had more of the same. He seemed to drift away from music while he devoted himself to politics, working for the Catholic cause in a country whose rulers had decided to turn it Protestant.

“Ernst August,” she said out loud as she came upon reference to the duke of Hanover: yes, she remembered him. Here the writer of the article opened a parenthesis (and explained that Ernst August’s people built him the most sumptuous opera house in Germany, not to delight him but to attempt to keep him from taking his yearly, and ruinously expensive, trips to Carnevale in Venice). His son, Georg Ludwig, was to become George I of England. Like most people trained in research, Caterina willingly gave in to its intoxication and sent Google running off after Georg Ludwig: wasn’t there some scandal about his wife? Soon enough, there she was, the beautiful Sophie Dorothea, the greatest beauty and most desirable marital catch of the era; married at sixteen to Georg Ludwig (another parenthesis explained that they were first cousins) before being caught in adultery, divorced, and imprisoned for more than thirty years until her death. It all made fascinating reading, but it didn’t tell her much about Steffani.

Caterina went back to the original window and continued to read about Steffani’s life after his virtual abandonment of music. He shuttled about endlessly on diplomatic missions here and there. He spent six years in Düsseldorf, concerned chiefly with political and ecclesiastical matters, producing his last three operas there. He appeared to have prevented a war between the Pope and the Holy Roman Emperor, both of them embroiled in the War of the Spanish Succession, and who remembered what that was all about? He had spent a good deal of his nonmusical life attempting to persuade various North German rulers to return to the arms of Holy Mother Church. She looked up from the computer and let her eyes trail to the facade of the church of Santa Maria della Fava. Suddenly her soul was enwrapped by Vivaldi, an aria for Juditha triumphans, what were the words? Transit aetas / Volant anni / Nostri damni / Causa sumus. How gloriously simple the score was: mandolin and pizzicato violin, and a single voice warning us that time passes, the years fly by, and we are the cause of our own destruction. What better message to give to the leaders of those empty churches? We are the cause of our own destruction.

“Would you like another half hour, Signora?” the young Tamil at the cash register called to her. “Time’s up in five minutes, but you can stay online for another half hour for two euros.”

“No, that’s fine. Thank you for asking, though,” she said and resisted the urge to look for the aria being sung on YouTube. Steffani moved back to Hanover in 1709, but there was no further mention of his music, only travel and political involvement. Almost no more music. Was genius painful, she wondered? Did it, at some point, simply cost too much for the spirit to continue to create? As she watched, the screen went blank, taking with it Steffani, his music, the church he served, and all of his desires to restore that church to her former power. She picked up her bag, thanked the young man at the desk, and started toward the library.

It took her no more than ten minutes to get there; to pass in front of the two caryatids and into the lobby of the Marciana was to pass from the constant crowding of the Piazza into the calm tranquillity that thoughts and the books that contained them were meant to give. She stood for a moment, as if she were a diver waiting to decompress, and then she approached the guard and mentioned Ezio’s name. He smiled and waved her through an apparently deactivated metal detector and into the foyer of the library.

One of the guards must have phoned him, for by the time Caterina got to the head of the stairs, Ezio was there, coming toward her with outstretched hands. There were lines around his eyes, and he seemed both thinner and shorter than he had been the last time she saw him, almost a decade ago. But the brightness and the smile were the same. He wrapped her in a tight hug, pushed her free of him, kissed her on both cheeks, and then they took turns saying all of those sweet things that old friends say when meeting again after many years. All of her sisters were fine, his kids were growing, and what was it she wanted him to do?

She explained the need to find information about a Baroque composer for a research project she was doing for the Foundation, of which he had heard, though vaguely. There was no need to explain more than that to him. He said she was welcome to use the stacks as much as she liked, then excused himself and said he’d go and organize a reading card for her as a visiting scholar.

“No,” he said, turning back toward her. “Let me take you up to the stacks. You can get an idea of what’s there.” When she began to protest, he refused to listen, saying, “You’re a friend of mine, so don’t worry about the rules. Once I get you the card, you have access to almost everything.” Without waiting for her answer, he set off to the right and led her into the long gallery she recalled from her student days. The marble floor might have served as a chessboard for two opposing tribes of giants; there were far more than sixty-four squares, and a giant could stand on each of them. The glass viewing cases displayed manuscripts, but they passed through so quickly she could distinguish nothing more than the even lines of script and the large illuminated letters on some pages. The enormous globes of the earth appeared to be the same, as did the outrageous vaulted ceiling without an inch of empty space. Why were we Venetians so excessive, she wondered? Why did there always have to be so much of everything, and all of it beautiful? She glanced out the windows and had a momentary sensation that the Piazza was hurrying past her stationary self.

She followed him from the gallery, like Theseus on his way to slay the Minotaur, thinking that she, too, should leave a trail of string behind. Turn and turn and turn about, and soon she had no idea where they were. These were inner rooms, so she could not orient herself by looking out and seeing Saint Mark’s Basilica or the bacino.

At long last, they entered a room that had a row of windows, and beyond them she could see the long expanse of windows on the Palazzo Ducale across the Piazza. “How do you find anything?” she asked when Ezio pointed to a wall of shelves.

“Do you mean a room or a book?” he asked.

“Both. I’d never find my way out of here. And how do I know what’s here?” she asked, looking around for the computer terminals.

Smiling a broad smile, Ezio led her over to a shoulder-high wooden cabinet the front of which was entirely filled with small drawers. “Do you remember?” he asked, patting the top of the cabinet. “I saved it,” he said, obviously boasting.

“Oddio,” she exclaimed. “It’s a card catalogue.” When had she last seen one? And where? She approached it as a true believer would approach a relic. She reached out and touched it, ran her hand along the top and side, slid her finger under a flange and pulled a drawer out a few centimeters, then slid it silently back in place. “It’s been a decade. More.” Then, in a conspiratorial voice, she said, “I love them. They’re so full of information.” Then, lower still, “What did you do?”

In the voice of an actor in a war film suffering from shell shock, he said, “They were going to destroy all of the cards. My superior told me. It was a direct order.” He paused and took in two very melodramatic breaths. “First I threatened to quit if they removed it.”

She covered her mouth with her hands, though it was insufficient evidence of her horror. Then she said, “You’re here, so you didn’t quit. What happened?”

“I threatened to tell his wife he was having an affair with one of my colleagues.”

Instead of laughing, which would have been her normal response, she asked, “Would you have done it?”

Ezio shook his head. “I don’t know, really. Maybe.”

“But he gave in?”

“Yes. He said we could keep them, but we weren’t to let anyone use them. The bulletin he sent said that the catalogue was to be fully computerized and the only access to the collection was to be via the computer.” Ezio made a gesture that looked suspiciously like spitting on the floor. “He told us to do it, and then he cut our funding. So there’s no money.”

“And the computer catalogue?”

He paused, smiled, changed roles, and became any diplomat when asked a direct question. “It’s being worked on.”

“And your superior?” she inquired.

Again, the gesture. “He’s been reassigned to a provincial library.” Before she could ask, Ezio explained: “It seems three of the last people he hired were relatives of his wife.”

“Where is he working now?”

“Quarto d’Altino.” He smiled. “It’s rather a small library.”

As so often happened when Caterina heard the tales told by friends or colleagues who had remained to work in Italy, she didn’t know whether to laugh or cry.

She set her bag on one of the tables at the center of the room and opened it to take out notebook and pencil. When he saw her do this, Ezio said, “I’ll go get you your entrance card.” He pointed to an empty carrel that stood between two of the windows. “You can use that one if you want. Leave the books there while you’re using them. When you’re finished with them, put them on the desk near the door over there,” he said, pointing to the desk, “and they’ll be reshelved.”

She nodded her thanks. Ezio said, “This might take some time,” and left.

Caterina went over to the window and looked down at the Piazza. People passed to and fro, no one much bothering to look to the sides of the Piazza. Everyone entering was intent on the facade of the Basilica, as Caterina thought they should be, and those leaving often turned around to have another glimpse of it from a distance, as if needing to assure themselves that it was not an illusion. To her right, the flags flapped in the freshness of springtime and she relaxed into the ridiculous beauty of the place.

Turning from this, she went to the catalogue and found the drawer that ran from Sc to St. From Scarlatti to Strozzi, which would also contain Stradella and Steffani. Under “Steffani,” she found entries in many different handwritings and just as many different spellings of his name. She also found a cross reference to “Gregorio Piva,” which a feathery note on the card explained was the pseudonym Steffani used for the musical compositions of his later years. She retrieved her notebook and wrote down the call numbers for the books that looked like biographies of Steffani or might be more concerned with his life than with his music, then went to the shelves and began to hunt for the volumes.

By the time Ezio came back, more than an hour later, Caterina was sitting in the carrel with about forty centimeters of books lined up on the shelf in front of her. She turned when she heard him come in, keeping her finger in the book she was reading. He placed the card on the open page, bent down to give her a kiss on the cheek, and, saying nothing, left the room. Caterina put the card in the pocket of her jacket and went back to reading.

The habits of the scholar had dominated Caterina’s selection. First check the publisher to see how serious the book was likely to be, and then a quick check for footnotes and bibliography. Anything that appeared to be self-published or that lacked notes or bibliography, she left on the shelves. What scholars were thanked in the acknowledgments? The culling process had taken some time, leaving her delighted that so much had been written about him.

She started to take notes. Same information about the family: humble but not poor. Early gift for music. At twelve, so beautiful was his voice that, while still a choir student in Padova, he had been sent to sing some opera performances in Venice. Was it success that had made him outstay his leave by several weeks? Despite his curt letter of apology, no punishment was given when he returned to Padova.

The Elector of Bavaria heard him singing in Venice and invited him to Munich, where Steffani was appointed musician to the court. To perfect his art, he was sent to Rome for a time and no doubt began his ecclesiastical training while there. His upward rise continued, all fairly normal for an ambitious young man of his era.

His career took wing with his move to Germany. Soon he was an abbé, though Caterina could find no reference to his ever having said a Mass or administered any of the sacraments. Was abbé merely a title or did it entail clerical obligation as well as status?

She pulled her thoughts from speculation and returned to Munich and to Steffani’s growing fame as a composer. He was in the employ of a Catholic elector and much in his favor, but in 1688 he chose to leave when the position of Kapellmeister, which he believed he deserved, was bestowed on Giuseppe Antonio Bernabei, the son of the composer who had been his teacher in Rome.

Luckily, he had been seen and heard in Munich by Ernst August, the Protestant Duke of Hanover, who headed a court thought by some to rival that of France. Invited there as a musician, he accepted and was soon moving in the highest intellectual circles, a friend of philosophers—Leibniz, for one—musicians, and aristocrats.

His talent apparently flourished, his reputation grew, and he turned out yearly operas to ever greater success. But then, in the early 1690s, when it seemed he could become no more famous than he was, he suspended it all to go on a delicate ambassadorial mission, which two writers attributed to the need to “convince other German states to look with favor on the accession of Ernst August to the title of Elector of Hanover.”

After the death of Ernst August, Steffani moved for a few years to the court of the Catholic Elector Palatine at Düsseldorf, where he worked as a privy councillor to the Elector and at the same time as President of the Spiritual Council—another mystery to Caterina. His social stature must have risen because he used a pseudonym for the operas he still continued to write, no doubt to avoid popular suspicion that a high-ranking clergyman would engage in behavior as morally and socially compromising as the writing of operas. As for writing under his own name, there were only the chamber duets and the Stabat Mater, which he wrote toward the end of his life.

Grateful for all his services, the Elector Palatine interceded on Steffani’s behalf with the Vatican. The pope finally gave in and made him a bishop. When she read that this was, unfortunately, only titulary and produced almost no income, Caterina muttered, “The wily bastards.” Then, unexplained, Steffani abandoned the Catholic duchy and returned to Protestant Hanover, where he remained until his death.

The books contained two pictures of him, the most common a lithograph made a century after his death and said to be a copy of an original, though in the ensuing century someone had added a goatee to his chin, as unflattering and unconvincing as those added to the photos of unpopular politicians. The other was the contemporary portrait of him that she recalled, wearing his bishop’s cap. In the first, he looked earnest and busy, with his bishop’s miter and crosier visible behind him. In the second, he was dressed in his ecclesiastical best. He looked reserved, but chiefly he looked well fed.

If there was no mention that he had ever said Mass or performed a marriage ceremony or buried the dead or heard a confession, then why was he pictured both times in the regalia of his clerical position? He had spent the bulk of his life as a singer, composer, and diplomat, yet neither author could find a visual record of any of these, and one claimed that such images did not exist.

More important, for her immediate purposes, how could such a man accumulate “treasure,” and what form would it take? And, if he did have it, why then did most accounts state that he had died in debt and poverty after first selling off most of his possessions? Why would he sacrifice a passion for a duty and then die poor as a result?

Caterina glanced at her watch and saw that it was after seven. She felt the sudden, irrational fear of being locked inside overnight and snapped the book closed. She took out her telefonino and dialed Ezio’s number. It rang five times before he answered, saying, “I’m on my way to get you, Caterina. Be there in three minutes.”

Pretending, even to herself, that she had known he was there and would come to get her, she put the book back on the shelf, put her pencil and notebook in her bag, and had a more careful look around the room. She went to stand in front of the card catalogue, filled with the names of the people who had given music to the world, and she was filled with a pride that surprised her: we have done so much; we have made so much beauty. Subtract Italy, wipe it from history, perhaps even cancel the peninsula from the continent, and what would Western culture be? Who would have painted their portraits, or built their churches, designed their clothing, given them the concept of law? Or taught them how to sing?

Ezio’s entrance broke into these reflections, which she decided to keep to herself. “Did you find what you wanted?” he asked.

“Too much,” she said. “I found four biographies, endless histories of the music of the period, of the politics of the times.”

“Will it be enough to answer your questions?” He sounded very interested. She remembered that Ezio had a degree in history and had more or less learned about libraries as he worked in one.

“That depends on what I find in the documents,” she said. Then, on an impulse, she asked, “Am I allowed to take books with me?”

“Which ones?” he asked.

Turning back to the shelf, she pulled out one book, then another, then replaced that with a different one. “These,” she said, showing him the two books.

He studied them, studied the bindings and not the titles, as if there were some sort of secret library code hidden in their call numbers, then said, “No.”

“Oh, sorry,” she said, realizing she had asked too much and reaching toward the books.

“But I can,” Ezio said, slipping them under his arm.

Caterina laughed but then the scholar in her said, “But you have to log them out.”

Still smiling at his own joke, Ezio said, “Don’t worry about it. I’ve known you for so many years, I know you’re not going to disappear with the books. Believe me, it’s easier this way.” He took her arm.

“What happens when I try to bring them back?”

“You just carry them in and put them back on that table down there,” he said, turning to point toward the restacking table.

“But how can I bring them in if they haven’t been checked out?”

His confusion was written across his face. “Just keep them in your bag and show them your card.”

“Won’t they register when I go through the metal detector?”

“Of course not,” he said. “It registers only metal.”

“Ah,” she said. “Of course, a metal detector.”

Then, perhaps to keep her from getting ideas she shouldn’t, he said, “The machines at the public exit register chips in the bindings, so you can’t take books out.” Of course, she thought, who’d sneak a book into a library?

She stopped. They had somehow come again to the front of the building, and there, ahead of them and off to the left, was the facade of the Basilica. “What an absurd building that is,” she said. “Look at it, all those domes and the arcs and the pillars all different from one another. Who’d build a thing like that?” she asked.

“We’re in Italy, cara mia. Anything is possible.” He handed her the books.