The Jewels of Paradise

Twenty-five

CATERINA WAS IN NO WAY A GREEDY PERSON. SHE HAD LITTLE interest in the accumulation of wealth and spent most of what she earned on leading what she considered a decent life. Part of this might have resulted from the security that comes with happiness. She had always been loved and cared for by her family, so she assumed that being loved and cared for were things that would continue throughout her life, regardless of her salary or accumulated wealth. Many people were strongly motivated by the desire to accumulate it, she knew, but she found it difficult to muster the energy for the attempt.

Caterina did, however, have a sense of fair play. She had been promised a job and had left the relative security of Manchester to return to Venice in order to begin that job, she told herself, ignoring the fact that she was eager to leave Manchester and would have jumped at any offer as well as the fact that she had overlooked the time limitation stated in the contract she had been so eager to sign. She had, she admitted, been told from the beginning that the position was temporary, but she had chosen to believe it might last several months. Now she learned that it would last only one month, even though she had no idea how long it would take her to read the remaining documents.

She turned on the computer and checked her emails. There was an offer for unlimited local calls and high-speed Internet for only eighteen euros a month, the offer of a smart phone for next to nothing, and an email from Tina. She deleted the first two and opened the third, curious to learn how their conversation of the night before and the revelations prompting it would have affected Tina’s style.

“Dear Cati. As you might have expected, the interest of my friends has waned in the absence of new information or questions about Steffani. Even my friend in Constance has gone mute, so I guess you are on your own. I’ve been reminded of a deadline and so have to get back to my more recent events, but please understand that I’ll always abandon them to help, if you give me some idea of what to look for. You don’t even have to tell me why.

“Maybe the Marciana has some of those compilations of documents and letters having to do with musicians from the period. It’s the librarian’s equivalent of what the rest of us do with oddly matched socks: just throw them all in a drawer and forget about them. I’m sure the librarians could tell you if they have such things.

“Other than that, I have no advice to pass on to you and can hope only that you will discover more dark revelations about lust, adultery, and murder, so very much more interesting than my own tedious analysis of Vatican foreign policy. Love, Tina-Lina.”

It was a very limp attempt to sound limp, so perhaps it would convince whoever else was reading her emails to believe that Caterina and her sister were both bored with the research and everything surrounding it.

Caterina opened a new mail and answered, “Dear Tina. Yes, once we got beyond the thrills of the Königsmarck Affair, things have indeed become a bit dull. Blame it on the even tenor of Steffani’s life, I fear.

“I did, however, come on some papers today that have him, as well as members of the Stievani and Scapinelli families, involved in the transfer of ownership of some farms near Castelfranco, and I’m going to try to see if I can find more about it tomorrow. Right now, I’m too tired after almost an entire day of reading handwritten documents in Latin and German and Italian to see straight or even think. I’d like nothing better than to lie on the sofa and watch reruns of something uplifting like, for example, Visitors. Remember how we adored it? Good lord, it must be twenty-five years ago, and I still remember those giant reptiles gobbling humans as if they were large mice. How I’d love to watch it tonight, pretend I was a Visitor, and gobble a number of people.” She read over what she had written and canceled the last sentence. Though Caterina had no idea why, she wanted Dottor Moretti to read and believe that she was tired and bored with her research.

She continued the email: “You think they stole the idea from Dante? I’ve always wondered about that. On that note of unresolved attribution, I’ll go home—to an apartment where there is no television and thus no possibility of Visitors—have some dinner and get in bed with l’Espresso, which this week promises me revelations about garbage in Naples and the dangers of breast implants. Or maybe I’ll take the biography of Steffani—who had to worry about neither of those things—and finally finish reading it. Love, Cati.”

She switched to the site of Manchester University and opened the Romanian’s mail, whispering a silent apology to him for invading his privacy, his life, perhaps his secrets. When she noticed that there were one hundred and twelve unread emails, she smiled and retracted the prayer. She put the senders in alphabetical order and, seeing that there was nothing from Cristina, put them back in the order of arrival and left the site without having glanced at the names of any of the senders, very proud of her own force of will.

After that, she wrote to Dottor Moretti, saying that she was following the trail of land transfers near Castelfranco that involved both Steffani and his two cousins. These papers, she told him, might display some preference toward one side or the other of the family and thus be useful in her research.

She pushed the “send” key, thinking that a person could get to enjoy this James Bond stuff, locked up everything, and went home.

Her search for records of the land transfers took her two days. She worked in the Foundation office because she did not want to turn herself into a recluse in the apartment. She did not so much as open the door to the storage place where the trunks were kept. First she accessed the records of the Ufficio Catasto of Castelfranco, the city closest to the village where both parcels of land were located and where the titles were registered; then she searched in Treviso, the provincial capital. The online information from the first office stated that what records it had from the eighteenth century had been put online, though when she phoned to state the impossibility of finding these records, no one she spoke to seemed able to tell her just where online they had been put. When she was forced to call the office in Treviso to ask for the same explanation of its files, the woman she spoke to gave her the appropriate file numbers but could not tell her to which general file the numbers referred.

At last, doing what she should have done in the first place, she entered the three names into the records of land transfers currently online in the province of Treviso. When a flood of documents from the past few years began to arrive, she moderated her search to the last twenty years of Steffani’s life, which reduced it to a trickle.

She waded through these for the rest of the first day and most of the second and learned that some years had not been entered into the online records but that, during the years for which there were records, the two families inherited, sold, bought, borrowed money again, and lost countless lots of property. She extrapolated some familial relationships when inheritances were left to “my beloved son Leonardo” or “the husband of my much loved sister Maria Grazia’s second daughter.” Steffani inherited three pieces of land during this time, then two of them were sold, but from none of the documents could she infer any preference on his part toward either side of his family; pieces of earth passed into and out of his ownership and that was that.

Caterina was diligent and sent a daily email to Dottor Moretti to report on her findings and was careful to list every reference to either cousin’s ancestors. His responses were always pleasant, although he explained that he was sending them from Brescia, where he was working on a complicated case, and looked forward to seeing her when he got back to the city. The first day she went to lunch with Roseanna, but the second day the other woman did not appear in the offices.

On the morning of the third day—aware that she did it because she wanted to enjoy the long morning walk along the Riva—Caterina returned to the Marciana and entered by means of her by now standard invisibility. Her carrel was just as she had left it—even the wrappers from her chocolate and power bars were still in her wastepaper basket.

Following a suggestion from Cristina, she decided to take a look at the two outsized volumes of manuscripts the librarian had delivered to her days before and which had remained there untouched. To open them on the small space, she first had to file the other books on the shelf above.

She slid the two large volumes to the center of the desk and opened the first. She read quickly through the opening pages and discovered just what Tina had said, that this was the sock drawer and there was little matching that could be done. There was a marriage contract between a “Marco Scarpa, musicista” and “Elisabetta Pianon, serva.” She found a bill from a “supplier of wood” to the “Scuola della Pietà,” though in the absence of anything other than price, Caterina had no idea if the wood was for burning or for making musical instruments.

There was a contract between someone listed as “Giovanni of Castello, tiorbista” and “Sor Lorenzo Loredan,” setting a price to be paid for the playing of a series of three concerts during the wedding ceremonies of “mia figlia, Bianca Loredan.” The next document was a letter addressed to Abbé Nicolò Montalbano. Caterina’s hands tightened into fists and she sat up straight, her chest pushing the volume against the back of the carrel. The jabbing pain caused by this sent a second shock through her system. She looked at the name: “Abbé Nicolò Montalbano.”

In the references she had found to Montalbano, the title of abbé had never been attributed to him. Though known chiefly as a librettist, Montalbano had remained, for the researchers she had read, a figure of shades and shadows. The Countess von Platen had referred to the abbé as the person “who gained from the fatal blow and who had made it possible”; it was Montalbano who had received the 150,000 thalers soon after Königsmarck’s disappearance.

The letter, the letter, the letter, she told herself, read the letter that is lying here under your eyes. It was dated January 1678 and was a list of criticisms of Montalbano’s adaptation of the libretto for Orontea, the first opera to be presented in Hanover. She knew the music had been written by Cesti, the composer of il Pomo d’Oro. The writer, whose name was indecipherable, was harsh in his criticism of Montalbano’s text and said that he much preferred the original libretto of Giacinto Cicognini.

The next page in the collection was a list of the singers in the first Venice performance of Cesti’s Il Tito. She continued reading through the documents but found no further reference to Montalbano, though she did find many more cast lists and letters from men who seemed to be impresarios and musicians trying to organize performances of operas in different cities and countries. They wrote to ask if a harpsichord would be provided by the theater or, if not, could one be rented from some local family and, in that case, who would guarantee the quality of the instrument? Was it true that Signora Laura, the current mistress of Signor Marcello and said to be with child by him, was still going to sing the role of Alceste?

She read through to the end of the first volume, filled with a sense that the real life of music and opera was contained in these papers and not in the dry things her colleagues spent their lives writing and reading.

The second volume interested, and then disappointed, her by containing the entire libretto of an opera entitled Il Coraggio di Temistocle, which, from what she could make out from the prologue and the list of characters, extolled the virtues of the leaders of the Greek forces at the Battle of Marathon but was not the libretto of Metastasio. Caterina held out against the thumping and thudding of the verse for eleven pages before giving in and giving up.

The libretto took up the entire volume. She closed it and set it on top of the other, then took them both over and stacked them where they would be taken off to be refiled. She resisted the impulse to take another look at the libretto for fear it would become worse. If this was an example of what had eventually led to the death of opera seria, Caterina had no uncertainty about the justice of its demise.

Now, standing at the window and looking across at the windows on the opposite side of the Piazzeta, she throbbed with uncertainties about the demise of Count Philip von Königsmarck and the identity of the abbé whose fatal blow had sent him to his maker.

Her mind wandered from this and turned to the fate of the woman involved in the search, and then it passed involuntarily to the strange loneliness of her life. She was in her hometown, with relatives and friends all over the city, yet she was living the life of a recluse, going from work to home to bed to work to home to work. Most of her school friends were married, with children, and no longer had time for their single friends or their single pursuits. She blamed her failure to contact old friends on the urgency with which she had invested her research. She might as well have been one of those miners British novelists were always writing about, who never saw the light of day save on Sunday, when they had to go to church in the rain and dark and cold, and who were probably happier in the mine, where at least they could spit on the floor. She was in the work pit, her link to the outer world her cyber contact with Tina, a few apparently friendly conversations with a man who was betraying her, occasional phone calls with her parents, and precious little else.

Her link to the outer world rang and she answered it gladly.