The Jewels of Paradise

Thirteen

AFTER THAT, CATERINA PAUSED FOR A LONG TIME, FEELING strangely exposed by having so forcefully expressed her opinion. In situations like this, in which she found herself defending a position she knew that others would find extreme, she often tried in her subsequent remarks to pour unguent on what she had said, but this time she didn’t want to: she believed this. The art was the sound; the beauty was in the singing or the playing: to want to own the notes written down on paper, to place a greater value on the paper if it bore the signature of the composer, seemed to her an impure desire. She remembered something from her school catechism classes, about the sin of worshipping “graven images.” Or maybe it was the sale of indulgences she was thinking of. Or perhaps she wasn’t thinking at all and didn’t need a comparison; it was creepy and it was wrong to think that the written music was the real music.

The lawyer smiled. “I understand your position, really I do. But unless someone can write it down for the singer or the musician, they don’t know what to do.”

“But that’s not what I’m talking about,” she said. “I’m talking about turning a piece of paper or an object into a fetish. Like a letter by Goldoni or Garibaldi’s belt buckle. Goldoni’s important because he’s a great writer, and Garibaldi’s famous because he banged heads and made this into a country. But his belt buckle’s nothing. It’s not him. And a letter from Goldoni has only the value someone is willing to put on it.”

“Isn’t that true for music?” he asked. “I mean, a performance. If everyone thinks it was lousy and howls at the singer, then how good was the performance?”

She smiled. “Unfortunately, there isn’t enough howling.”

“I beg your pardon?”

Caterina smiled again, pulled out her chair and sat, waved to Dottor Moretti to take the chair opposite her. “I mean that audiences are too polite. I’ve heard playing and singing in theaters that was disgraceful, and people applauded as if they’d just heard something wonderful. I think what’s gone wrong isn’t that bad performances are howled at, but that performances that should be howled at, aren’t.”

“And the musicians? What about their feelings?”

This was a lawyer talking? “I thought you lawyers were supposed to be hard-nosed and coolly analytical.”

He had the grace to smile. “When I’m working, I’m as hard-nosed as they come and coolly analytical. It’s part of the package.”

“But?” she prodded.

“But now I’m expressing some fellow feeling with musicians.” When she didn’t answer, he said, “I’ve had bad days in court, when I haven’t presented things as well as I could have.”

“And?”

“And my client suffered the consequences.”

“And your point?”

“That people have good days and bad days, and it’s . . .” He sought the proper word. “It’s unkind to cause them embarrassment for what they do.”

“You ever take a malpractice case?” she asked.

“No. Why?”

“It’s the same thing, isn’t it? You get hired to do one thing, and you do it so badly that someone is hurt. Most people think it’s right that you should be punished for that.”

“Bad singing hurts people?” he asked.

“It hurts some people in the audience directly,” she said, smiling and pointing at her ear with her index finger. “But it hurts everyone more generally because it lets the entire audience think—at least if no one boos—that this is what the music is supposed to sound like, and that does everyone a disservice, the composer, the other singers, and finally the people in the audience, because it might stop them from learning what good singing can sound like.” She stopped abruptly, embarrassed to hear her didactic tone.

Dottor Moretti was silent for a long time and finally began, “I never thought of . . .” He stopped himself with a laugh. He looked at his watch and said, “It’s almost two. Maybe we’re both being so serious because we’re hungry. Would you like to go to lunch?”

Before she thought about it, Caterina answered, “It’s strange, but after only this short time, I feel as though I’ve got some sort of legal obligation to invite the cousins to come along if I say yes.”

Dottor Moretti, with full legal thoughtfulness, said, “Since they’d assume that they’d have to pay for their part of the meal, I think we can also assume they wouldn’t come.”

“That’s a lawyer’s judgment?”

“I’d stake my reputation on it,” he said, astonishing Caterina, who had come to think of Dottor Moretti as a man who would never stake his reputation on anything and who would never, moreover, make jokes about his professional integrity. Could it be that Dottor Moretti was not the man he seemed to be?

They went to Remigio, where lunch was easy and relaxed; he even unbuttoned his jacket when they sat down at the table. She didn’t pay much attention to what they ate, so much surprised at the experience of discovering that Dottor Moretti—he asked her to call him Andrea, after which they slipped into using tu with each other—was a man of culture and broad reading. He said he had studied history before deciding to transfer to law but that it had remained his—he hesitated before using such an inflammatory phrase—secret passion.

Dottoressa Caterina Pellegrini was a woman in her thirties with a certain experience of life. To find herself sitting across from a man who confessed that his “secret passion” was the reading of history was not an experience with which she was much familiar.

“I didn’t tell you one thing, though,” he said, glancing away in near embarrassment. “I never finished my degree before I decided to come back to study law.”

“Came back? From where?”

“Well, in Spain. My mother’s Spanish, you see, so I was raised speaking both languages.” Caterina was so surprised to hear him sounding—was this the right word?—apologetic that she said nothing and waited for him to continue his story.

“I didn’t finish,” he said.

“What happened?”

He set his fork down and ran his right hand across his perfectly combed hair. “My father got sick, and someone had to come back to be here. He was a lawyer, my father, so one of us had to be ready to take over his practice. Both of my brothers are older than I, so they already had their professions.” He paused here to look at her, as if to see if she were still sufficiently Italian, even after all her years abroad, to understand the compelling necessity of his return.

Caterina nodded and said, “Of course.” Then, “But you were a historian, not a lawyer.”

He shrugged, took another sip of his water, smiled, and said, “Not a historian but a young man who had spent two years reading history. They’re not the same thing.” He paused but Caterina said nothing, waiting for him to tell her all of this in his own way and at his own speed.

“I’d had two years of doing what I loved, so perhaps it was time to . . . to come home and grow up.” Leaning forward and making his voice deeper and more sinister, he added, “Slaves to their families, these Italians.”

In ordinary circumstances, she would have laughed, but something stopped her from giving more than a grin and a nod.

“Law was . . . different,” he went on.

“Easier?”

He shrugged again. “Different. Less complicated. I did the courses in three years, passed the exams, then the state exams, and here I am, two decades later and none the worse for it.”

She wondered about that but merely smiled and poured some water into both their glasses. After some time had passed and she had returned to her pasta, he asked, “What is it about music that attracts you?”

Without thinking, she said, “It’s so beautiful. It’s the most beautiful thing we’ve done.”

“We, as in humans?” he asked.

“Yes,” she said. “I believe that.” Surprised to hear herself sounding so uncharacteristially absolute, she added, “Or maybe it’s no more than that music is the one art that most thrills me. More than poetry and more than painting.”

“And why this Baroque music? Why not something closer to us in time?” he asked, sounding honestly curious.

“But it is modern,” she answered without thinking. “It’s got strong rhythms and catchy tunes, and the singers are free to invent their own music.” Seeing the question appear on his face, she went on, “When they come close to the end of an aria, they can sing variations on what’s gone before. The conductor writes them or they find a score with variations in it or they can write their own.” Involuntarily, she raised her hand and drew a series of arabesques in the air with one finger.

He smiled. “No copyright infringement?” He smiled to show he was joking.

This nudged her toward confession. “I’m a musicologist, so I shouldn’t admit this sort of thing, but I love the spectacle of it, too: dragons, people and monsters flying through the air, witches, magic all over the place.”

“Sounds like fantasy movies.”

He meant it as a joke, but she gave a serious answer. “That’s what a lot of the operas were like. It was popular entertainment, and the producers put on a show. The singers were the Madonnas and Mick Jaggers of their times. They delivered the hit tunes. I think that’s why the music is becoming popular again.” She saw his skepticism and added, “All right, all right, not mass popularity. But most opera houses do a Baroque opera every season.” She thought about this for a moment, realizing that she had never been asked these questions by an attractive man, perhaps by any man. “Or maybe it’s only that singing’s so close to us. We do it with our bodies.”

“Isn’t dance the same?” he asked, reminding her that he was a lawyer.

She grinned. “Yes. But I can’t dance, and I once thought I could sing, or wanted to sing.”

“What happened?” he asked, setting down his fork.

“I don’t have the talent,” she answered simply, as though he had asked the time. “I had the will and the desire, and I think I have the love of it, but I didn’t—and don’t—have the vocal talent.” She rested her fork on the side of her plate and took a drink of water.

“That’s very dispassionate,” he observed.

With something less than a smile, she said, “It wasn’t at the time.”

“Was it difficult?”

“If you’ve ever been in love, and the person turns and walks away from you, saying that you aren’t the right one, well, that’s what it’s like.”

He looked down at his plate, picked up his fork, set it down again, looked back at her, and said, “I’m sorry.”

Caterina smiled, this time a genuine smile. “It was a long time ago, and at least the training helps me now. It’s easier to understand the music, at least vocal music, if you think of it in terms of music you’ll have to sing or want to sing.”

“Will you excuse my ignorance if I say I believe you without really understanding you?”

“Of course,” she said, and then to lighten the mood she added “Besides, it gives a person the chance to see how very strange people can be.”

“Musicians?” he asked.

“And the people around them who aren’t musicians.”

“Could you give me an example?”

She thought for a while, allowed stories to run through her memory, and then said, “There’s a story about King George the First, but before he went to England, having a conversation with Steffani and saying he wanted to change places with him. This went on until the King actually tried to run an opera company. And this is why I’m sure this story is apocryphal. After three days, he gave up and told Steffani it would be easier to command an army of fifty thousand men than to manage a group of opera singers.”

Dottor Moretti laughed and said, “I’ve always admired people who can do that.”

“What?”

“Think of giving up.”

“You think the King was serious?” she asked, amazed that he could be so literal-minded.

“No, of course not. But that he could think of it, want to do it.” He stopped for a moment, then added, “I envy him.”

She didn’t want to talk about this anymore, so she asked, “Did you have a century? Or a country?” Then, after a moment’s thought, “Or a person?” When he looked confused at the sudden change of subject, she added, “As a historian?”

He smiled and the mood lifted again. “I did.” Seeing that he had captured her attention, he said, “And I have a confession.”

This stumped her. “About what?”

“Monarchy.”

Caterina waved her hand in front of his face. “Are you going to tell me you’re the lost son of Anastasia, and that you’re really the Czar of all the Russias?”

He laughed out loud, put his head back and laughed so loud that people at other tables shot glances at them. The laugh changed to snorts, something Caterina would never have thought possible in connection with Dottor Moretti, though perhaps it fit with Andrea.

When these subsided, she said, “Wrong guess, eh?”

“At least you didn’t ask if I’m the son of King Zog of Albania.” That set him off again, and he ended removing his glasses and wiping his eyes with his napkin.

She waited. She uncovered a scallop from beneath her spaghetti and ate it, then a piece of zucchini, and then she set her fork down and asked, “What are you confessing about?”

“The Spanish Habsburgs,” he said.

“Is that a rock group?” she asked mildly.

This time she failed to make him laugh and seemed only to confuse him. Quickly, she corrected herself. “Sorry. It was a joke.”

He nodded, serious for a moment, then amused. Finally he said, “It’s because of a fidanzata I had there.” Then, to prevent any question she might have asked, he added, “We took some classes together.” She said nothing, thinking silence would prod him more than would a question.

So it proved to be. “She was an aristocrat. The daughter of a duke, and distantly a Habsburg.” He shook his head, as if to ask how it was that a man who had once known the daughter of a duke could end up in a trattoria in Venice talking about her to a musicologist.

“She always went on about her father’s right to the Spanish throne. After a while, I guess I got tired of listening to it.” Then, with a quick glance at her, “Probably because I got tired of listening to her. But I didn’t know that then. I was too young. I never met her father, but I disliked everything she said about him and her everlasting insistence that he was meant to be the King of Spain.” Then, as if he’d just heard himself saying all this, he added, “And as I began to dislike more and more what she said about him, I realized I disliked her, too. But boys don’t realize that when they’re eighteen.” He smiled at the boy he had once been, and she joined him in it.

He broke off to thread some tagliatelle around his fork, but he set it on the edge of his plate, untasted, and went on. “So I started reading about kings—not only the one her father insisted had stolen the throne from him—and their ancestors and where they came from, and how they got to be kings, and what they did while they were. And then I found myself fascinated by the way so much of their behavior led to such misery. Wonderful art, but endless human misery.” He looked across at her and smiled. “But I was eighteen, as I said, so what did I know?”

She raised her water glass, though she knew it was improper to do so in anything other than wine, and toasted him. A man who so deeply regretted human misery deserved at least that much.