Below this, in a different, backward-slanting hand, was written, “Good man. See if this can happen.” Nothing more.
She reached into her bag and pulled out a notebook and pen. “1. Letter of request for position as choirmaster. Favorable comment in different hand on bottom. 4/1/1710.” Perhaps Marco would show up again; perhaps another letter would thank the “Most Worthy Abbé” for his help in winning the position for the young man.
She turned the two pages facedown beside the remaining papers and picked up the next paper. This was a letter dated 21 June 1700, addressed to Mio caro Agostino, the familiarity of which salutation brought the scholar in her to the equivalent of a hunting dog’s freezing at point. There was general talk of work and travel, mutual friends, the problem with servants. Then things turned to gossip, and the writer told his friend Agostino about Duke N. H.’s public behavior with his brother’s wife at the last ball of Carnevale. The third son of G. R. had died of bronchial trouble, to his parents’ utmost grief, in which the writer joined them, for he was a good boy and barely eight years old. And then the writer told his friend that he had overheard Baron (it looked like “Bastlar” but might just as easily have been “Botslar”) speaking slightingly of Steffani and making fun of him for singing along with his operas while attending them in the audience. The writer thought his friend should know of this, should he receive compliments or promises from the Baron. Then, with affectionate wishes for Agostino’s continued good health, the writer placed his illegible signature at the bottom.
She made notes of the contents and no other comment, though she felt something close to outrage that a mere Baron would make fun of a musician. She set the letter aside and picked up the next document. Her heart stopped. It was entirely involuntary; the shock of seeing it grabbed her heart and tightened her throat. On top of the pile now lay a sheet of music, the notes doing their visual dance across the lines from left to right. Making no sound that could be heard by anyone, she began to sing the music line by line, heard the bass line and the violins. When she turned to the second page, she saw the words and knew she was no longer giving voice to the instruments but was singing an aria.
She turned back to the first page and let her mind play through the music again. Oh, how perfect it was, that figure in the introduction, only to be repeated in the high register, right from the start of the aria. She looked at the words and saw the predictable “Morirò tra strazi e scempi.” And who had churned out that sentiment, she wondered? “I’ll die between pain and havoc.” If she could find a time machine, she’d go back and pick up most of the men who wrote libretti and bring them back to the present, though she’d set down and drop them off in Brazil, where they could all get jobs writing the scripts for telenovelas.
A glance at the opening words for the second line, “E dirassi ingiusti dei,” confirmed her temporal and geographical desires. She read through to the end of the aria, concentrating on the music, not the words. “Well, well, well,” she said out loud and then turned off the music by looking away from the paper. “Wasn’t he a clever devil?”
She wished now that she had paid more attention to his music while at university and had seen more than the single performance of the wonderful Niobe in London. The genius manifest in this aria proved him to be a composer with a far greater gift than she had before thought him to possess. She paused. Could it be that it had been sent to him by a colleague or a musician or possibly a student? She reexamined the manuscript, but there was no attribution and no signature, only the same back-slanting handwriting she had seen in the note on the bottom of the first letter.
Identification could be made in the archives of the Marciana. All she had to do was go there and have a look at one of his autograph scores, even find a book with a reproduction of a few pages of a score in his hand. She had a good visual memory and could take a clear image of the aria with her. But how much easier to stay here and read on; sooner or later, she was bound to come upon a signed score. She cheated by paging ahead to the bottom of the packet: no more music.
The beauty of the music drew her eyes back to the aria. She made a note of the probable title of the aria, then turned it facedown to uncover yet another document in ecclesiastical Latin, this a letter from 1719, addressed to him as Bishop and attempting to explain the delay in forwarding him his benefice from the dioceses of Spiga, wherever that might be.
After making a note of the contents of this letter, Caterina looked at her watch and saw that it was after two. Almost as if the sight of the time had released her from the spell of her own curiosity, she realized how hungry she was. She opened her bag and pulled out her wallet. She opened flaps and slots until she found her reader’s card for the Biblioteca Marciana. It had expired two years before. In a normal country, in a normal city, one would go and renew the card, but that was to be certain that a clear, prompt process for doing so existed or functioned. Though Caterina had not lived in Italy for a number of years, she had no reason to believe that things had changed, and so her first thought was to find a way to get what she wanted without having to waste time with a system that, if memory served and if things had remained the same, exulted in creating ways to block people from having what they deserved or desired.
She ran her memory through the gossip and news of the previous decade: who worked where, who had married, who had inserted themselves into the mechanism that kept the city going. And she recalled Ezio, dear Ezio, who had gone to school with her sister Clara and who had been in love with her for three years, from the time they were twelve until they were fifteen, and who had then fallen in love with someone else and subsequently married her, retaining Clara as best friend.
Ezio, by common agreement, was as clever as he was lazy and had never wanted success or a career but only to marry and have lots of children. He had them now, four, she thought, but he also had—and this is why Ezio came to mind—a job as a librarian at the Biblioteca Marciana.
Caterina replaced the papers in the packet, though she did not bother to tie it closed. She went to the storeroom and put it into the smaller trunk, then closed the door and locked it, using all three keys.
Only then did she go back to her bag and pull out her telefonino. The number, not used for a long time, was still in the memory. She dialed it and, after he answered, said, “Ciao, Ezio, sono la Caterina. Volevo chiederti un favore.”
Ten
CATERINA FELT NO REGRET AT SO PEREMPTORILY HAVING LEFT Manchester, but she did regret having had to leave her books in storage, an act that made her entirely dependent upon the Internet and public collections of books. Ezio had told her to come to the library at four, so after she stopped for a panino and a glass of water, standing at the bar as she had done as a student, she did another studentesque thing and went into an Internet café. It would take her too long to go home and use her own computer to do the basic research, and all she wanted was to have the basic chronology of Steffani’s life fresh in her memory when she went to the library.
Her grandmother had been famous in the family for keeping her memory all her life, and Caterina was the grandchild said most to resemble her. As she read through the information about Steffani, she justified family tradition, for most of the information came back to her as she read: born in Castelfranco in 1654, he was early seen to be a talented singer and musician, choirboy at the Basilica del Santo in Padova from the age of ten. A nobleman from Munich was seduced by the beauty of his voice and took him home with him, where he had tremendous success as a musician and a composer. After two decades, he moved to Hanover, where he had more of the same. He seemed to drift away from music while he devoted himself to politics, working for the Catholic cause in a country whose rulers had decided to turn it Protestant.