Caterina let the page drop back onto Roseanna’s desk. “It might be enough just to know this, that a presumably complete aria is worth at least nine thousand euros.”
Both of them sat and considered this fact for some time until finally Roseanna reached forward and put her finger on the highest sum. “I hope the cousins don’t think to do the same thing I did and find this out.”
Caterina looked across the desk and smiled at her. “They’d start sleeping in front of the door, wouldn’t they?”
“With a gun,” Roseanna added.
Peace restored, Caterina went back upstairs, telling herself not to be such a fool because of an invitation to lunch. “Lock the papers up, lock the door,” she muttered to herself as she went back into the room. Even though she knew she had to be methodical and take the papers in the order in which she found them in the packet, she paged through the remaining documents—about six centimeters of them—looking for musical scores. Near the bottom, she unearthed a sheet of paper half of which was filled with bars of music, neatly written in a very small script, obviously not written by the person with the back-reaching hand. Below were two paragraphs and then the signature: “Your brother in Christ, Donato Battipaglia, Abbé di Modena.”
She set the paper down and looked across at the wall, her mind suddenly alert or alarmed but unable to tell the cause. She looked at the signature again. Battipaglia was a new name; this was the first letter from him she had seen, and she could not recall any previous reference to him. Still standing, she turned her attention back to the letter. It began with a description of a concert—not Steffani’s, the writer hasted to clarify—which had sounded like “the scraping of a badly oiled carriage.” From there, in the excessively complimentary style of the period, the writer praised Steffani’s Le Rivali concordi, a copy of which the writer had had the “inestimable fortune” to see in the library of his patron, Rinaldo III, Duke of Modena. He praised the score in its entirety as well as the seriousness of the sentiments expressed in the text, and then turned his attention to an example of “a singular mastery of musical invention.” The bars he quoted, he said, came from the duet Timori ruine, which he found sublime. Caterina looked at the musical extract, which he provided in full, and fell into agreement with the sentiment of the Abbé. She hummed through it. Oh, he was good, this Steffani, she thought, with his fourteen operas, divertimenti, duets, and religious music and his glorious feel for what the voice wanted to do. Then she went back to staring at the wall, trying to nudge herself toward what it was in the letter that had caught her attention.
She looked again at the signature. Wasn’t it said that people revealed themselves in the way they wrote their names? But the flourishes and squiggles were in no way unusual for their epoch. “Donato Battipaglia, Abbé di Modena.”
“Abbé,” she said out loud. “What the hell was an abbé?”
Liszt came to mind. He was an abbé, and if he had lived the life of a priest, it was Caterina who was the heir to King Zog.
She switched to her email account and typed in Cristina’s address at the university. It was a professional question she was asking, and Cristina was always sure to check that address rather than her personal one.
“Ciao, Tina-Lina,” she began.
“I hope this finds you overworked and happy. Look, I’m working at that job in Venice, examining the papers of the Baroque composer who worked and died in Germany and I need some information. He was an abbé. What’s an abbé? Does he have to be a priest, or can he be something else and be called a priest? (A bit of deceit, of course, that your Employer would never think of tolerating).” Old habits die hard, and Caterina had spent more than twenty years of their lives baiting Cristina for her decision to become a nun.
“Also, I’ve come to think this man might have been a castrato. I have it in my memory baggage that a castrato could not be a priest. Would making him an abbé be a way to get around this? (Not that your Employer would . . .) Could you let me know about these things with something other than your usual glacial pace?
“Mamma and Papà are both very well and as happy as ever. Clara and Cinzia are fine, and so are their kids. Claudia looks sensational and seems to be getting on better with Giorgio, though who knows how long that will last? Why didn’t she get the same happy genes the rest of us seem to have inherited? I wish there were some way to . . . you know what I mean, but I don’t know what to do. I’m fine, the work looks interesting, and . . .” She paused here, wondering if she should mention Avvocato Moretti, but her good sense prevailed. They had gone to lunch together, for heaven’s sake, that’s all. “. . . it’s sure to keep me here for some time, and by then one of those other jobs might well have come in. I hope this finds you happy and busy and giving Deep Thought to the Totally Erroneous Path You Have Chosen in Life. Love, Cati.”
Cristina, who had been the only other one in the family to opt for a professional life, had always been her favorite sister. The closeness explained Caterina’s shocks and, yes, horror at Cristina’s decision to enter a convent, but it also permitted the irreverent tone that characterized her every communication with the Professoressa Dottoressa Suora.
She was about to put the computer to sleep when she remembered that Cristina had no background information at all. She started another email and added, “His dates are 1654–1728, if that helps,” and sent it after the other.
She closed the computer and slid it along the table until it was out of reach. She pulled the notebook close and went back to reading.
After an hour and a half of taking notes about various ecclesiastical benefices granted, requested, or refused, Caterina got up and walked over to the windows. She opened a window and wrapped her hands around the bars; she pulled at them and, when they refused to move, did the same with the bars of the other window. Was this what it was like for Steffani, she wondered, trapped inside a body that had had physical limits placed on it? That’s what prison was, wasn’t it? Physical limitation, a restraint on what a person was free to do. But prison was usually temporary, and the prisoner had, if nothing else, at least the hope of someday being free again.
That’s the hope Cristina could have, were it not that Cristina did not—to listen to her—see it in this light. If anything, she welcomed the limitation on her freedom, said it helped her concentrate on what was important in her life. Could Steffani possibly have come to think this way? But Cristina, for good or ill, had made the decision for herself. All right, she had made it at nineteen, but no one had made it for her, and no one had forced her into it. Quite the opposite, and she could always, wanting to, walk away. And if she did decide to leave, she’d keep her doctorate and her job, wouldn’t she?
But Steffani? He couldn’t walk away from what Caterina now believed him to be, nor could he have walked away from the Church that gave him definition and position and importance, even though that same Church had been complicit in making him what he was. Surely his genius would have provided him work and fame as a composer. Yet, the thought came to her, would it have provided him the respectability that the Church could give him? And would his genius have draped him in the crimson of a bishop and thus kept him hidden and safe from the jokes and contempt of men?
Whatever the reason, he had made the choice to stay. Her thoughts went back to that duet in the letter: was it meant to be a hidden message from a man who had suffered and survived? She flipped the pages over and searched for the letter from Abbé Battipaglia.
Non durano l’ire