The Four Seasons: A Novel of Vivaldi's Venice

by Laurel Corona

  A few days later, Vivaldi arrived for a conference on two concerti Maddalena would supervise. His hair was stringy, and his eyes were rimmed with red. His hands were trembling as he took the violin from its case, and she saw his arms jerk several times in the way hers sometimes did when she woke from a bad dream.

  “Are you all right?” she asked him.

  He shrugged it off. “It’s just nerves. L’Incoronazione di Dario is opening next week, and the scene painting is still not done, the castrato acts like he’s God, and the investors think I can produce an opera without money.”

  Vivaldi didn’t wait for a response. “I got an order for ten concerti,” he told Maddalena with a conspiratorial grin, “and I delivered them in three days.”

  “How could you do that?”

  “I didn’t sleep! And they weren’t entirely new, but what does original mean anyway? I took works I’d already done and changed them a little here and there. Everyone does it.”

  His laugh came out as a snicker. “Sometimes I just rip off the title page and write a new one, dedicating the work to the person who bought it. No one knows the difference. The client I sold them to is leaving Venice anyway.”

  It didn’t sound very honest, and Vivaldi noticed the dubious expression on Maddalena’s face. “I have no choice,” he said. “Music pays very badly. I have a house and two servants. I have to eat and so do they. And my father is not well and may be moving in soon.”

  He lifted his palms up and gave her a helpless look. “Maddalena, for you music can be whatever you want—dreamy, luxurious, sentimental, passionate, who knows? For me it’s a business, and when I’m sitting at my desk composing, most of the time I am strictly a mercenary, I’m afraid.”

  He saw her somber face. “Don’t despise me,” he said. “It’s not my choice. That’s just the way it is.”

  His words spilled out with tics and wild gestures. Without a word, Maddalena put down a pewter cup full of water on the table next to his violin case and waited.

  I have better things to do, she thought, picking up the new music he had brought. I could be getting this to the copyists. I have a concert to rehearse. I have a pupil to visit in the infirmary.

  He took a sip without comment. “The Congregazione isn’t very happy with me, because I’m spending almost all my time on my operas.”

  “Operas?” She pulled herself back, trying to sound more interested than she felt. “There’s another besides Dario?”

  “Penelope la Casta. You know, the story of Ulysses’ wife.” Vivaldi took another drink and thought for a moment. “A little like you, she is. Patient. Always there waiting.”

  Waiting? He thinks I have nothing to do but wait for him to show up? Maddalena began loosening her bow. “You need to sleep,” she said, trying to control the annoyance in her voice.

  Vivaldi leaned forward and, resting his elbows on his knees, he covered his face with his hands. “You are always so good to me. I think you’re right.”

  The endearments that had once sustained her now rubbed her raw. Go, she thought. Just go.

  He was already packing up. “If I’m not sick already, I should be,” he said, “and they are all so unforgiving. So unforgiving.” He snapped his violin case shut. “I’d better go home.”

  Maddalena watched from a window as he walked along the alley next to the Pietà, clutching his chest, whether from pain or habit she was not sure. She felt her stomach turn the way it had years before as she tapped in the cabinet for the missing bow. He was a difficult man, but ever since his return, the music the coro played had been divine, sometimes so exquisite she felt as if her heart were hovering just outside her body, experiencing music unmediated by any boundaries at all.

  “I didn’t mean it about you going,” she whispered, but even as she said it, the other part of her was glad to see his back disappear around the corner.

  When Maddalena next saw Vivaldi, he came bearing the news she didn’t want to hear. Dario was a financial success, but the opera itself had not received much praise, and the job of impresario in the cutthroat theater environment of Venice was more than he had bargained for. Even before the first performance of Penelope, he had made a decision to leave for Mantua as soon as Carnevale ended, to try his luck there. He was finished at the Pietà by mutual agreement, and he had just stopped in to say good-bye.

  As Maddalena lay alone in bed that night, she thought back to his last departure. It had almost destroyed her life, and it struck her as odd that she could no longer remember what she had been thinking and why she had been so distraught. I don’t recognize that girl now, she thought to herself.

  She rolled onto her side and looked around the room. As long as I am here, you will always be protected, she remembered him saying, but here she was, sleeping among the leaders of the coro, and she didn’t need that reassurance anymore.

  But why do I feel so empty? She had spent several years since his return bustling around pretending she didn’t care, and she had believed it herself. But now she envisioned a carriage on the road to a new city, with Vivaldi inside, his head full of music, and she wished she were beside him.

  She sat up to think. The covers fell to her lap, leaving her bare shoulders exposed in the cold air of the dormitory.

  He is the most brilliant musician of his time.

  He is a priest.

  I am an orphan who can play the violin.

  That was all. The rest was kindnesses and good fortune and no more.

  No more? She doubted it. She was an adult, and her judgment in such matters was better than the last time he left. He did care about her, of that she was sure, but why bother lying awake thinking about it, or about how she felt about him? Maddalena lay back down. It felt good to be where she was, and who she was. What difference did it make if he wanted to be with her? Why bother even wondering if she wanted to be with him? What would be the point of holding her past up to the light and asking herself whether the right word for whatever she had felt for him was love, or infatuation, or something else?

  He was gone, and even thinking about him would drag her down as surely as unwanted things tied to rocks went to the bottom of the lagoon.

  What is wrong with me? Her hands were cold and clammy as she held them to her face. Anna Maria was murmuring in her sleep, and Maddalena could hear a bed creak as one of the sotto maestre turned over. Perhaps my humors are out of balance. Maybe I should ask to be bled, she thought, to get rid of this war in my veins.

  But another feeling washed over her also, a surprising lightness, almost a giddiness. Vivaldi was exhausting, with his moods, his fragile lungs, his cutting of corners, and his little frauds. Life would be easier now, without him to take up so much space. She could concentrate only on the coro now, surrounding herself with music and with the next generation of putte. She would become the maestra in a few years, when Prudenzia retired. There would be more Elizabetas among her pupils, and she could love them for their purity and their simplicity.

  That should be enough, she told herself, but when she pictured her future, she thought she should feel more of a glow. And then it struck her. I want to love someone and be loved back in the same way. Not like sisters love each other, not like I love the putte and they love me but like— She stopped for a moment before acknowledging what she was thinking: like a man and a woman. Perhaps being around Vivaldi had given her a glimpse of something people in other circumstances got to feel, got to act upon. She noticed something was missing in her life only when he was absent from it. But it couldn’t be love she had for him. Love should feel different from the ache inside her.

  How would it feel to be drawn inside the warm aura emanating from another person, to crawl in and live there? She lay down again and tried to imagine it. The only person she had ever thrown her arms around and held tight was her sister. Now she was gone, and Vivaldi too. She felt something inside begin to fold in around her, the stirrings of despair and self-pity.

  “No!” she whispered into her pill
ow. I am never again going to feel as bad as I did the last time he left. Her breath was hot in the pillow. Never.

  SIXTEEN

  Antonia’s belly was big as a lute in her eighth month of pregnancy. Every morning Chiaretta secretly brought the sweets and other delicacies Antonia’s doctor and husband had forbidden out of fear of her mounting size.

  “When they have the babies, they can starve themselves if they want,” Antonia said as Chiaretta arrived one day toward the end of Carnevale. She beckoned Chiaretta to take the contraband from her pockets and lay it on her lap. Then, leaning forward as much as she could from the cloud of pillows arranged against the headboard of her bed, Antonia unwrapped the parcel. “Sugared nuts! And fruit candy!” she squealed, popping a square of dried, sweetened lemon into her mouth. “You are so good to me, but do you think you could smuggle in a little wine tomorrow? Some of that sweet stuff I like?”

  “Antonia!” Chiaretta slapped the knee that was poking up under the covers. “It’s a little hard to hide that, and what am I supposed to do? Go to the kitchen and say I need a bottle of wine?”

  “Why not? They’re your servants. They aren’t going to talk.”

  “Except to your mother.”

  “Oh please, don’t remind me.” Antonia groaned. She clutched her stomach. “Sancta Maria, this hurts. I can’t wait for it to be over.” She leaned back and took a few deep breaths. “So,” she said, “tell me what my brother’s been up to.”

  Chiaretta’s face clouded. “He didn’t come home again last night.”

  “And how many times is this?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Good. You’re not counting anymore. That’s progress. You didn’t say anything to my mother, did you?”

  “No, of course not!” The first time she’d found Claudio’s bed undisturbed, Chiaretta had gone to Giustina in a panic, certain he had drowned in the canal or was lying in a prison cell after being denounced and arrested. Giustina had been merciless. Chiaretta was foolish and ungrateful. Claudio would do what husbands had a right to do, and she would know this if she had been raised to be a patrician’s wife. Chiaretta had vowed from that day forward that, even if Claudio didn’t come home for a week, Giustina would not hear about it from her.

  “I wouldn’t know if Piero was home or not. And I don’t care either.” Antonia’s discomfort made her whiny and cross, eager to launch into tales of her husband’s gambling, his whores, and his unforgivable dullness.

  Today she just shrugged. “Help me into my chair, would you?” When she was settled, she started. “Believe me, the unusual part is how much attention Claudio pays you, not how little. You don’t have your own friends yet, but by next Carnevale you will, and I’d be surprised if he takes you out at all—or if you want him to. Husbands aren’t very much fun.”

  “But I see married women out all the time!”

  “Not with their husbands!” Antonia looked at Chiaretta as if she had lost her mind. “When I have my figure back, I will find myself a cavaliere servente, or maybe two or three, to bring me presents, and take me to the opera and dinner, and go gambling at the Ridotto.”

  “A cavaliere servente?”

  Antonia opened her eyes and dropped her jaw in feigned amazement.

  “Antonia, don’t mock me.”

  “I’m sorry,” Antonia said. “I’m just an old crab.” She winced and pressed her hand into the side of her belly. “The baby moves around, and sometimes it really hurts. Do you want to feel?”

  She reached over and pressed Chiaretta’s hand against her side. Chiaretta felt the baby move away from the pressure and settle again on Antonia’s other side. “What’s it like?” she asked.

  “Being pregnant? It’s horrid, but I think I will like having my little accomplishment around the house.” She fell back in her chair and lifted her swollen feet onto an ottoman of velvet and brocade. “God, I hope it’s a boy. I pray for a boy every night.”

  “Why?”

  “Chiaretta, maritar o monacar? You can’t have failed to notice that!”

  Marriage or the nunnery. If Bernardo were my father, I could have been forced into a convent or married to a man almost twice my age whom I didn’t love at all, Chiaretta realized. It was no exaggeration. That was exactly what he had done to Antonia and her sister. In some ways, odd as it seemed, she and Maddalena had been lucky to be abandoned. At least they had made some choices for themselves.

  Antonia’s tone when she spoke about Piero was already tinged with sarcasm and bitterness. Still, she exuded optimism, a sense that, though marriage was a disappointment and a bore, life didn’t have to be. Behind all her grousing lay the specter of the alternative, Antonia’s sister’s lifeless face looking out from the grille of the parlatorio in the convent of San Zaccaria when the women of the family made their visits.

  Antonia was still talking. “When I am out of my confinement, I’m going to have all new dresses made. You never get your waist back, they say, and I am going to cost Piero a fortune.” She had already shown Chiaretta swatches of a dozen fabrics she had chosen for herself from the most expensive in her husband’s inventory. “And then, I am going to put on my bauta and go show off those beautiful dresses to my lover!”

  “Lover? You have a lover?” This day was turning out to be full of surprises. “Is that what they are then, these—what did you call them?—cavalieri serventi?”

  Antonia looked at her with astonishment. “You really don’t know any of this, do you?”

  Chiaretta shook her head.

  “A cavaliere servente is a man who’s always there to take you out, and buy you little gifts, and come calling so you don’t get bored. Much more useful than a husband. And they don’t expect sex. In fact, it all depends on them not getting any.”

  She reached over and patted Chiaretta’s hand as if she were reassuring a child. “And of course you do know what a lover is, don’t you?”

  “That I have figured out, thank you.” Chiaretta leaned forward and whispered, “You have one of those too?”

  “Not yet, but I will. Honestly, Piero...” She wrinkled her nose as if she had just smelled rotting garbage, completing her thought by crossing her eyes.

  Chiaretta went to the window to gather her thoughts. I don’t want a lover, or a cavaliere servente. I want my husband.

  “Chiaretta?” Antonia was looking at her quizzically, and Chiaretta realized she must have been lost in thought for quite a while.

  “Sorry,” she said. “It’s just—sometimes I wonder if I should ever have married Claudio.”

  Antonia was shocked. “You seem so happy.”

  “I am happy. I love him. He’s very good to me.”

  For once Antonia didn’t fill the silence with jokes or teasing but waited for her to continue.

  “I just want Claudio to be with me. I didn’t know about all of this. Nothing makes sense to me. Maybe I should have stayed at the Pietà.”

  Antonia laughed. “You can’t actually picture yourself an old crone there, can you? And besides, it’s done now.” She leaned toward Chiaretta as far as her large belly permitted, and her voice became solemn. “Marriage isn’t what you think it is. It’s what gives you the freedom to amuse yourself in this world, that’s all. Trust me, Claudio is doing that.”

  Seeing Chiaretta’s stricken face, she rushed to explain. “The only real mistake you could make would be to expect Claudio to be different from the others. You’ll be miserable if you do. And it’s a waste of time not to get busy learning how to play the game yourself. Life in Venice is meaningless without risk. Are you going to sit on your loggia alone for the rest of your life, trying to figure out which of the couples on the gondolas is your husband and his lover?”

  Chiaretta covered her mouth with her hand. “How did you know?”

  “I just guessed. I did it myself, until I decided I didn’t care.”

  The afternoon sun was lighting the other side of the canal, and Antonia needed to rest. For once, Chiaretta was
glad the late hour gave her an excuse to leave.

  Who is this person who cries all the time? Chiaretta wondered as she rode home in the darkened felce. What has happened to me? And what am I going to do about it?

  She rubbed her forehead to rid herself of the torment of what Claudio’s secrets might be. Perhaps he would be there when she got home. Perhaps she would not have to spend another evening picking at her supper and trying to banish thoughts about what he might be doing. Perhaps Bernardo would invite her down to share their meal. Having to put up with Giustina was worth it for a dose of her father-in-law’s humor, even if Claudio’s chair was empty. But Bernardo also was rarely there, perhaps for the reasons Antonia had begun to explain.

  Claudio was at home, and his face brightened when he saw her. He kissed her and spent half an hour before supper in her sitting room talking with her about his business and the next opera season at the Teatro Sant’Angelo. He accepted a vague response from Chiaretta about her time with Antonia, and then he jumped to his feet.

  “I almost forgot!” he said, pulling from his jacket a small box containing two large pearls attached to hairpins. Bending over her to place them in her hair, he kissed each ear, nibbling on the lobes until she squealed and pulled away.

  This is what I want from you, she thought. This is what makes my life perfect. She felt a familiar tingling in her breasts as her nipples hardened, and she turned her face up to place her lips on his, lingering to play with the tip of her tongue on his mouth.

  “Shall I tell the servants we’ll eat later?” he asked.

  “Please do,” Chiaretta said, taking his hand as she rose and turned her back to him so he could loosen the laces of her dress.

  Later, they stood outside watching as a chamber group on a burchiello serenaded someone in the house next to theirs. A young man holding flowers stood up and sang in the direction of a balcony, although Chiaretta could not see if anyone was there.

  “You are made for kisses,” he sang. “A man would die of rapture if he could but glimpse your face tonight.” He raised his voice and pleaded in a repeated chorus, “For pity’s sake, don’t say no.”