The Jewels of Paradise (13 page)

“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.

Twelve

S
HE WOKE AT NINE THE FOLLOWING MORNING.
A
FTER FINDING
that word,
musico,
the previous evening, all she had been able to do was make herself some pasta, finish the bottle of wine, and go to bed with the second of the books she had taken from the library. But by the time she got under the covers, she was too tired, or too sodden, to be able to follow much of what she read, and she fell asleep, only to wake in the night, close the book and put it on the floor, turn off the light, and go back to sleep.

There was no sign of the Bear family when she went into the kitchen to make coffee the next morning, and their kitchen looked as clean as her own did not. “I think it’s time you started having a life, Caterina,” she said to herself as the coffee began to bubble up in the pot.

“Or a job with a future,” her more sensible, pragmatic self added.

She wondered if this is what happened to unemployed musicologists: they ended up in rented apartments filled with Ikea furniture, looking into the windows of their neighbors for reminders of human life. In order to give herself a sense of purpose, she did the dishes from the night before and put the empty wine bottle—telling herself it had been less than half full—into the plastic container meant to hold glass and plastic garbage. That was one positive change in the city since she’d moved away, differentiated garbage collection. The thought depressed her, not that the city had such a thing but that she would measure progress in these terms. No new ideas, no new politics, no influx of young people with houses and jobs, only paper on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday and plastic on Tuesday, Thursday, and Saturday. On Sunday, God and the garbagemen rested. It would make a stone weep; so would the fact that most of her friends believed that it all ended up in the same place, anyway, and the whole thing was merely a scam to enable the company that did the collecting to raise the price. She abandoned these thoughts and went to take a shower.

A half hour later, after stopping for a brioche and another coffee, she walked out onto Riva dei Sette Martiri, having decided to take advantage of the sun and bask in beauty on her way to work. The golden angel seemed to dance in the breeze from his post on top of the bell tower of San Giorgio. The sight of it lifted her spirits to such a degree that she wanted to wave at him and ask him how things were up there.

She remembered something the Romanian, in one of his rare moments of sobriety, had asked her once: how was it that angels got dressed? In response to her astonished look, he had insisted he was quite serious, and she was the only person he could ask. “I see how their wings come out when they get undressed—that’s easy, the cloth passes the right way over the feathers—but wouldn’t it disturb their feathers to have to push them through their sleeves when they put them on?” It was evident that this lack of certainty troubled him. “Do they have buttons?” he asked.

Her visual memory had summoned up Fra Angelico’s Annunciation in Florence, the angel kneeling, starstruck, before the baffled virgin. His multicolored striped wings stuck out behind him. Of course the girl looked puzzled. The Romanian, she had to admit, had a point: a careful angel could probably fold them up and unbutton his side vents when he put his robe on, but slipping them through would still snag a lot of the feathers. Slipping them off would be easier, for the cloth would run along the feathers easily. Maybe, being angels, they never needed to change their clothes?

Illumination came and she had smiled at him with an all-knowing expression. “Velcro.”

“Ah,” had escaped his parted lips, and he bent to kiss her hand. “You people in the West know so many things.”

She turned in just before the Church of the Pietà and worked her way back past the Church of the Greci until she arrived at the Foundation. She let herself in, stopped in Roseanna’s office, but there was no sign of her. She opened the door to the stairs and went up to the director’s office, let herself in, and set her bag on the table. She unlocked the storeroom and took the packet of papers she had left in the smaller trunk. Leaving the doors open, she went back to the table, set down the folder, and took out her notebook. Whispering the word
musico,
she resumed reading the papers where she had left off the day before.

There was an affectionate letter from a priest in Padova, apparently a childhood friend, who told his “Dear friend and brother in Christ, Agostino,” that the various members of his own family were all well and, with the help of God, would so remain. He sent his wishes and prayers that the same would remain true for his friend Agostino’s family. In the absence of substance, all she could do was note the date of the letter.

The next was a document from October 1723, containing a list of the candelabra, books, relics, and paintings left to the church of Saint Andreas in Düsseldorf by a certain Johann Grabel. The candelabra were in brass and silver, the books all on religious themes, the relics a series of desiccated extremities, including the big toe of Saint Jerome. “Left or right?” Caterina asked aloud. The paintings were portraits of saints, with a heavy preponderance of martyrs. Below this list was written, in Italian, in that backward hand, “To the Jesuits. Fool.” She made a note and passed the document to her left.

She continued like this for another two hours, finding a random sample of letters from the later part of his life, and all addressed to him, that contained requests for help of one sort or another, praise, ecclesiastical news, and more than a few requests for payment for articles such as wine, books, and paper. The letters came in from all over Europe, but strangely enough none of them made any further reference to music or to Steffani’s work as a musician. For all the evidence found in these papers, he might have been a clergyman and only that all of his life. By the time she got to the last of the papers in the packet, there had been just that letter and the single aria to give evidence to a life beyond the Church.

She pushed the papers away from her and rested her chin on her palms and found herself thinking about her family. They had been lucky in one thing, that none of them had had to survive the death of a child. One of her aunts and two of her uncles had died relatively young, but not before their parents and not before having had children. Two of her sisters had children, whom they loved to distraction. And she still had time to have them. Here, her inner cynic broke in to observe that, in a decade, it would probably be normal for women in their fifties and sixties to have children, so there was no sense of urgency, was there?