The Jewels of Paradise

Twenty-four

SHE RETURNED TO THE FOUNDATION AND FOUND ROSEANNA IN her office, sitting at her desk, reading, and looking quite the acting director of the Fondazione Musicale Italo-Tedesca. So fond of her had Caterina become in these days and so accustomed to seeing her that her hairstyle now seemed carefully executed and eye-catching.

“What are you reading?” Caterina asked as she came in.

Roseanna looked up and smiled in greeting. “A book about psychoactive medicine.”

“I beg your pardon,” Caterina said. “Why that?” Few subjects could seem farther from the business of the Foundation.

“My best friend’s been diagnosed with depression, and her doctor wants her to start taking these things.” From the harsh tone Roseanna used, Caterina was left in no doubt about her thoughts on the subject.

“And you disagree?”

Roseanna set the book facedown on the desk. “It’s not my place to agree or disagree, Caterina. I don’t have any medical or pharmacological training, so some of what I read I don’t even understand.”

“And the book?” Caterina asked.

Shrug-smile. “We’ve been friends since school, best friends, and she asked me what I thought she should do. So I thought I’d read about it, both sides, and see if I could make any sense of it.”

“Have you learned anything?”

“Not to trust statistics or numbers or the published results of experiments,” Roseanna said instantly, then added, “Not that I ever did. Well, not much.”

“Why?”

“Because the people who make drugs don’t have to publish the bad results, only the good ones, and medicines are usually tested against a placebo, not against another medicine.” She patted the back of the book affectionately. “This writer makes the observation that it’s not hard to make a medicine that is more effective than a sugar pill.” Her eyes went into half focus for a moment, and then she said, “I’ve never smoked, but I’ve seen how my friends who are smokers seem to relax as soon as they light a cigarette. So you could run a test and show that smoking a cigarette is an excellent way to reduce stress.”

“Better than a sugar pill?” Caterina asked.

“I’d say so.” Then, as if suddenly aware of how far afield this conversation was from their common interest, she asked, “I thought you had gone to the Marciana.”

Caterina shook the suggestion away. “No, I’m going to read through the papers, at least those in the first trunk, before I go to the library again.” She paused and then added, “I can’t make up my mind about him.”

“Because he was a priest?”

“No, not that. It’s because I don’t have any idea what he wanted. Usually we can tell that—what a person most wants—if we’ve been around him for a while or read about him. But, with Steffani, I just don’t know. Did he so desperately need to be accepted as an equal by the people he worked for? Did he really want to save the Church? He writes about his music and the pleasure he takes in writing it, but there’s no compelling desire to be famous for it, to be thought a great composer. It’s obvious that he loved it and loved composing it, but . . . but he gave it up so easily. If it were his compelling passion, he couldn’t have done that. Just stop, I mean.”

Caterina saw no reason why she couldn’t tell Roseanna what she had learned, or thought she had learned, so she added, “He might have been a castrato.” She tried to say it neutrally but she wasn’t sure she succeeded. It was not a remark that lent itself to neutrality.

“Oh, the poor man,” Roseanna said, pressing one hand to her face. “The poor man.”

“I’m not absolutely sure he was,” Caterina said immediately. “But he’s described somewhere as un musico, and that’s the word that was used for them.”

“To fill the choirs to sing the glory of God,” Roseanna said calmly, as if there did not exist sarcasm sufficient for the words.

“There’s only the one reference,” Caterina said, choosing not to mention the Haydn libretto.

Neither of them found anything further to add. “I’ll go back upstairs,” Caterina said.

Roseanna nodded, and Caterina turned and headed toward the door. She was almost there when Roseanna said, “I’m glad they hired you.”

Not turning back, Caterina acknowledged the remark by raising her right hand in the air. “Me, too,” she said and pulled her keys out of her pocket.

Upstairs, she sat at the desk and pulled her telefonino from her purse. On the way back, she’d considered what to do about the man who had followed her. Before she made the call, she wanted to be sure about what to say. She had no proof that her research was related to the fact that he followed her, and then waited for her, but no other explanation made sense of it. Any of the many odd men in the city might have followed her; in fact, it had happened to her once, years ago. But he knew which vaporetto stop she would take, which meant he knew where her parents lived and where she did. Or else blind chance had . . . She dismissed this possibility even before it was fully formulated.

She tried to tell herself he hadn’t done anything more than cause her some emotion between surprise and unease, but then she remembered kneeling in front of the toilet and vomiting and admitted that he had terrified her. Accepting that, she punched in the number of Clara’s husband, Sergio, who owned and managed a factory on the mainland in Marcon that made metal sheeting.

Sergio had been left an orphan at the age of eleven; part of his joy in marrying Clara was that she gave him back a family. She had four sisters, and two of those had children so, with glee, he had taken on the whole lot of them, becoming the big brother none of them had had and acquiring not only a wife but the endless set of obligations and responsibilities he had pined after for years.

“Ciao, Caterina,” he answered.

“Sergio,” she began, deciding to waste no time. “I have a problem, and I thought you would be the person to help me solve it.” By presenting it this way to Sergio, she knew, she was pandering to his desire to be loved by the family and his need to believe himself a useful part of it.

“Tell me,” he said.

“A few nights ago, a man followed me from where I’m working to Campo Santa Maria Formosa. I was on the way to Mamma and Papà’s” she said, conscious of using those names to reel him in, “and then he was waiting at the vaporetto stop when I went home.”

“The same man?” Sergio asked.

“Yes.”

“You know him?”

“No. But I know where he works. I walked past a shop, near the Basilica, and he was sitting behind the counter.” She started to describe the man and was astonished to realize all she remembered was light hair, cut very short.

“What do you want me to do?”

That was the essential Sergio: no time wasted asking if she was sure or if she had considered the consequences of getting him mixed up in this. Blood was thicker than water. Had he asked this question while she was being sick into the toilet, she probably would have told him to rip the man’s head off, but time had passed and the menace had been let out of the situation, the same way air could be let out of a balloon.

“Maybe you could stop by and ask him what he wanted?”

“You want to come?”

Caterina remembered a time, decades ago, when she had come home from school after hearing someone use the expression “Vengeance is a dish that is best eaten cold,” and told her mother how clever she thought it was, forgetting that her mother’s generation had been brought up in a different epoch. Caterina had been surprised by her mother’s failure to laugh, then more surprised when she said, “It doesn’t matter, darling, if it’s hot or it’s cold, vengeance still destroys your soul, either way,” and had asked her youngest daughter if she’d like a piece of chocolate cake.

For a moment, Caterina considered the possibility, toyed with the thought of the man’s expression when she walked into his shop with Sergio looming at her side. “No, he didn’t hurt me. He scared me, but it was just the one time, and I haven’t seen him since. Except in his shop.”

“All right. Tell me where he is and I’ll go talk to him.” Then he asked, “Is there any hurry?”

She was about to say that there was, but, since she had not seen the man again, good sense intervened and she said, “No, not really.”

“Then I’ll go past it on my way home. Not today and not tomorrow. I’m sorry, I can’t, really. But I will, I promise.”

Caterina had no doubt of that and reassured him that there was no hurry, none at all. She described the location of the shop and did not allow herself to remind Sergio that he had a factory to run and shouldn’t spend his time coming in to the city in the middle of the day. She wanted an explanation, and if Sergio could provide it for her, all the better. To suggest that she had no sense of urgency whatsoever, she spent a few minutes asking about the children, all possessed of genius and beauty beyond that usually bestowed upon even the most gifted children. Then a voice called Sergio’s name and he said he’d call her after he’d spoken to the man.

Caterina returned to the documents and read through the three remaining sides of paper listing the names of the people Steffani successfully brought to or back to the Church. She forced herself to do the basic historical research and was rewarded by identifying all but six of them. Even if the result of her research turned up nothing meaningful about Steffani, the professors who had taught her how to do research could still be proud that they had taught her so well.

She plodded on, all but aching for something to come and save her from the tedium of these letters.

As if to wish for it were to make it materialize, the next paper was the manuscript of a recitativo, “Dell’ alma stanca.” Caterina had perhaps spent too long a day reading through papers of a certain banality, and so to come upon this title pushed her, if only for an instant, beyond the limits of her scholarly patience and she said out loud, “This alma is certainly very stanca.”

Recovering from that moment of truth telling, she took a closer look at the score and recognized both the music and the handwriting. She sang her way through the soprano part, remembering that it was scored for—wonder of wonders—four viole da gamba. She joined her voice to the silver shimmer of the instruments and heard how well it worked and then heard how wonderful it sounded. As often happened, the quality of the music far outclassed the libretto, and she felt a moment’s sympathy for Steffani for having had to use these threadbare sentiments over and over. She remembered the performance of Niobe she had seen, where in the following aria strings and flutes had joined the viols. She realized that the score must then be printed and thus the sale of this page would not condemn it to some private archive, never to be heard. Smiling, she made a note of the document, listing the packet number and counting through the sheets to get the right page number. This way, either the victorious cousin or the two of them together could easily find one of the salable documents and do with it as they pleased.

The next paper was a letter from Ortensio Mauro, whose name she recognized as Steffani’s best friend and librettist. Dated 1707, it must have been sent to Steffani in Düsseldorf and seemed to describe events in Hanover, which he had left four years before. She read a few paragraphs of gossip and then found this: “Here there is singing and playing every evening . . . You are the innocent cause of this. This music has more charm than Sympathy itself, and all that are here feel the sweet ties that stir and exhilarate their souls. You might issue a blessing, confirm or consecrate, excommunicate, whatever you like; neither your blessing nor your curse will ever have such force or charm, such power or pathos, as your agreeable notes. There is no end here of admiring and listening to them.” She ran her hand across the surface of the page, as if to caress the spirit of the man who had been generous enough to write that.

Another two hours passed as she read her way through more of the documents left behind by a busy and active life. Some of them could be there only because of a random gathering up of documents. There was a series of land transfer documents from a farm in the town of Vedelago; the names Stievani and Scapinelli appeared on all of them as sellers. A quick look at a map showed her Vedelago was about ten kilometers to the east of Castelfranco, the town where Steffani was born. Then there were more about the sale of another farm in the same town, these too bearing the names of the ancestors of the cousins. There was a single letter dated 19 August 1725, from Scapinelli, saying that, of course, their cousin Agostino would be sent his share of the money received from the sale of the houses, but he must understand that these things took time. There was only the one letter. And then there were no more documents. She had read through all of the papers in the first chest and found nothing that in any way expressed a “testamentary disposition” on the part of Abbé Agostino Steffani, though she had found tantalizing mention of the two families.

She put the papers back in order, tied up the bundle, and took it back to the open storeroom. She put the papers, all read and tallied, back inside the trunk in the order in which they had been when it was opened. She closed the trunk, flirted with the idea of beginning with the papers in the other, but decided her time might be better spent considering her immediate future.