The Jewels of Paradise

Eleven

THEY WENT INTO FLORIAN’S, TO THE BAR AT THE BACK, AND each ordered a spritz. The barman recognized Ezio and, smiling at Caterina, put a dish of cashews in front of them.

Taking one, she asked, “Is this your reward for being an habitué? The most I ever get is peanuts.”

He laughed and took a drink. “No. He’s an old friend. We went to school together, so he always gives them to me.”

“It doesn’t end, does it?” she asked, a remark that confused him.

“What doesn’t end?”

“The advantages of having been born here,” she explained. Then, more soberly, “I saw in the paper this morning that there are now fewer than fifty-nine thousand of us.”

Ezio shrugged. “I don’t see what we can do. Old people die. Young people get jobs in other places. There’s no work here.” Then, tilting his glass in her direction, he said, “You’re the lucky exception. You got called home to take a job.” Then, before she could say anything, he asked, “Are you staying with your family?”

“No,” she said. “An apartment came with the job.”

“What?”

“An apartment. It’s not much, and it’s down in Castello, but it has three rooms and it’s on the top floor.”

“Are you making this up?” he asked.

“No, not at all. It’s just on the other side of Via Garibaldi, so it’s easy enough to get to work.”

“How’d that happen?”

Here Caterina gave him an edited version of the facts, saying that the Foundation had an apartment it offered to visiting scholars. This was not true, and the apartment belonged to Scapinelli, who had agreed that she could stay in it while she did the research. It was usually rented out to tourists and was decorated—though Caterina thought that word an exaggeration—in the style Venetians thought tasteful.

“Lucky you,” he said, “job and apartment.”

“Both temporary,” she reminded him.

He ate a few cashews and asked, “You have any idea how long it might last?”

She shook her head. “God knows.” She reached toward the books he had set on the counter. “May I?”

“Oh, sure, sure,” he said, handing them to her.

“The more I read, the sooner it will be done.”

“And then?”

She shrugged, then slipped the books into her bag. “No idea. I’ve got job applications out all over the place, in four countries.”

“Where?” he asked, interested enough to set his glass down.

She counted them out on her fingers. “Here, though I might as well forget about that. It’s only teaching. No time for research.” Then, seeing how real his curiosity was, she went on, “Germany, Austria, and the United States.”

“You’d go?” he asked, astonished.

This time, she waved the question away with her hand. “If the job is interesting, yes. I’d go.”

“Well, good for you,” he said, meaning it. “You’ve got the advantage of the language, haven’t you?”

If the remark had come from another person, Caterina might have heard it as a criticism of the advantage she had, but from Ezio it was only admiration.

It came to her to say that she had the advantage of more than one language, but it would have sounded like boasting, and she didn’t want to do that, so she contented herself with nodding in agreement.

He finished his drink. Half of the cashews were still in the glass bowl but neither had any further interest in them. Caterina finished her drink and pulled out a ten-euro bill. She placed it on the bar and caught the waiter’s eye.

The waiter shook his head and made no move to approach them.

To Ezio, she said, “Please let me pay. It’s the least I can do.”

“No,” he said, pulling out his wallet. “That would be to come close to taking a bribe, and you know how unthinkable such a thing is in our society.” He went on, and she remembered the clowning that had so charmed them all for years. “I could not live with myself were I to believe, even for an instant, that I had somehow profited from my professional situation or shown favoritism in any way to someone who is a member of my family or a friend.” He pulled out a note and placed it on the counter, then looked at her, raised his hands as if to push away the approach of the devil himself, and said, “It would shame my ancestors.”

She gave him a soft punch in the arm and said, “I’d forgotten that about you.”

“What?”

“How ridiculous you are.”

He heard the praise in her voice and laughed.

It was almost nine when Caterina got back to the apartment. After the cashews, she wasn’t very hungry, so she decided to read for a while before eating anything.

She pulled the two books out of her bag and walked to the sofa, a pale thing covered in rough, oatmeal-colored cloth that silently screamed Ikea, as did the tables, bookcases, light fixtures, curtains, and chairs. It had the single grace of being comfortable, so long as a person put herself lengthwise, propped against the equally drab cushions.

She looked at the cover of the first book for a long time, studied the portrait of Steffani in the robes of Suffragan Bishop of Münster, whatever a suffragan bishop was. Plump of face and probably of body—the robes made that hard to distinguish—Steffani had a look of almost unbearable sadness. Thick-nosed and double-chinned, this man who was no longer composing music stared directly at the viewer, his long-fingered hand suspending the bejeweled cross he wore on a thick chain. His bald pate disappeared under his cap, leaving only puffs of hair on either side. It was a badly painted thing. Were she to see it in a museum, she’d walk past it without bothering to learn the name of the subject or the painter; were she to see it in a gallery or shop, she wouldn’t give it a second glance. It was interesting only because she knew the subject and hoped to decipher something from the painting.

She opened the book and started to read. Family background nothing special, a repetition of what she’d already read about his musical beginnings in Padova and Venice. Same story about overstaying his leave in Venice, although this time she learned that he claimed the delay resulted from an invitation to sing for a very important person, perhaps in private.

Not only was Caterina considered to be the intelligent daughter, she was also deemed the hard-nosed cynic of the family, though this was not a difficult title to earn in a family of decent, optimistic people. Thus the fact that an adolescent boy had chosen to remain behind in Venice to sing at the expressed desire of an older man who might have been an aristocrat and who was, at least, “un soggetto riguardevole” opened to her a possibility that the average person perhaps might not have contemplated at the combination of a young boy and an important man. She turned back to the cover. Almost fifty years had passed between the time of Steffani’s prolonged stay in Venice and the painting of the portrait. It was hard to imagine this puffy-faced cleric ever having been a young boy with a beautiful voice.

She read on. Transferred to Munich at the invitation of the Elector of Bavaria, Ferdinand Maria, who had heard him sing, the young Steffani joined the court at the age of thirteen. Caterina began to nod as she read the names and titles of the people he met there, the musicians with whom he worked. Maybe it was time for dinner, for a coffee, for a glass of wine? The list of names and places continued, and then she found a passage from a letter Steffani had written late in life, describing his meeting with the Elector, who, according to Steffani, “was attracted by something he must have seen in me—to what end I do not know—and, having taken me immediately to Munich with him, placed me in the care of Count Tattenbach, his master of horse.”

“I beg your pardon,” Caterina heard herself say aloud in English, repeating the language of the book. She went back and read the passage again. “. . . was attracted to something he must have seen in me—to what end I do not know.”

She set the book down and got to her feet, went into the small kitchen and opened the refrigerator. She pulled out a bottle of white wine and poured herself a glass. She raised it in a toast, either to the air or to Steffani, or perhaps to her own perfervid imagination, and took a sip.

The kitchen had one small window that looked across the calle to the house on the other side, directly into the kitchen of the family that lived there. She leaned back into the living room and switched off the light, leaving herself in the darkness, glass in hand, looking out and now invisible from beyond the window.

There they were: Mama Bear and Papa Bear and the two Baby Bears, a boy about eight and a younger sister. They sat around the table, still eating; they all looked relaxed and happy. Occasionally, one of them would say something, and one or two of the others would react with a change of expression or a smile, often a gesture. The boy finished whatever it was he was eating, and the mother cut him another piece of what Caterina now saw was a cake—tall, light in color, with darker-colored chunks that, this time of year, were likely to be apples or pears, perhaps both. It looked good enough to remind her of how hungry she was. But, while they were still there and still eating, she did not want to turn on the light and become as visible to them as they were to her. The boy suddenly reached his fork across the table and speared a piece of cake from his sister’s portion. He held it up on the end of his fork and waved it in front of her, then brought it, in narrowing circles, toward his mouth.

Caterina heard nothing, but she saw the father lower his own fork and glance aside at his son. Instantly the circling stopped, and the boy leaned across the table and replaced the morsel on his sister’s plate. The father turned toward him again. The boy bowed his head and finished his own piece of cake, then got down from his chair and left the room.

She left them to finish their meal and took her wine back to the sofa. She set the glass down and picked up the book, continued reading at the place where she had left off.

There was no record of Steffani at the court the first year he was in Munich, neither as a salaried musician nor as a member of the orchestra. When he did begin to appear in the voluminous records, he was being given organ lessons by the Kapellmeister, Johann Kerll, who received a significant sum beyond his normal salary to teach him. By 1671, Steffani was being pampered with “a daily ration of one and a half measures of wine and two loaves of bread.” Further, he had advanced to the position of what was termed Hof und Cammer Musico.

“Oddio,” she said out loud, setting the book aside. There it was, the thing she had only suspected while at the same time reproving herself for thinking such a thing. She picked up her glass and finished the wine; then, turning the light on and not giving a thought to the three people who were still at the table in the house across the calle, she went into the kitchen and poured herself another glass.

“Musico. Musico,” she said aloud. She remembered a patter aria from a riotously funny production of Orlando Paladino she had seen in Paris that spring in which the word was also used. Even after the era of their greatness was finished, Haydn had still used the code to make fun of them. She’d read the word in scores and letters; when certain Baroque singers were described by contemporary writers or listeners as musico, they had always been castrati.

“Oddio,” she repeated, thinking of the man in the portrait, with his pudgy, beardless face and his look of patient, unbearable sadness.