The Four Seasons: A Novel of Vivaldi's Venice

by Laurel Corona

  “I bet she is!”

  Chiaretta came up and put her arm around Maddalena, who was frozen to the spot.

  “Mama, who’s that woman?” Donata asked.

  Anna put her face inches from Vivaldi’s. “I’ve had enough,” she said, her voice slurring heavily. “Get yourself another singer. Get yourself another nurse.” She swaggered as she spoke, so unsteady she had to reach out for his arm to avoid falling.

  “Anna. Annina!” he pleaded. “Stop!”

  Anna Girò gestured again in Maddalena’s direction with the practice of a diva. “Choose, Tonio! Her or me.”

  Chiaretta grabbed Maddalena by the elbow. “Let’s go.”

  Maddalena nodded but pulled away. “Wait.”

  She stood directly in front of Anna, looking her in the eyes. Anna took a step back, and her eyes flickered as if she wasn’t sure what Maddalena was going to do.

  “Signorina Girò,” Maddalena said. “I am not his to choose.”

  She turned back to Chiaretta and took her arm. They walked toward the dock where the Morosini gondola was waiting, without looking back.

  Inside the flece, Maffeo was whimpering. “I didn’t like her, Mama.”

  “I didn’t either.”

  “Maddalena?” Donata turned to kneel on her seat so she could see her aunt better. “What did you mean? Why didn’t you want him to choose you? Doesn’t he like you more than her?”

  Maddalena looked over her niece’s shoulder in Chiaretta’s direction, and Chiaretta recognized the plea for help. “He does like Maddalena more, my darling. But her life... and your life, and Maffeo’s, and mine—”

  “And my papa’s and Andrea’s,” Maffeo added in a solemn voice, as if he were reciting the list of people he prayed for every night.

  “Yes, my love. Papa’s and Andrea’s too. The point is that everybody’s life belongs to them. Nobody should say ‘I choose you,’ if you don’t want to be chosen.”

  “But I want to be chosen.” Donata had come over to sit next to her mother.

  “I know,” Chiaretta said, putting her arm around her. “It’s nice to be noticed, isn’t it? And it’s nice to see that someone thinks you’re special. But there’s something that’s a much bigger blessing than being chosen.”

  “What is it?”

  “Choosing for yourself.”

  PART SIX: SEASONS

  1730–1732

  TWENTY-THREE

  The lump in Maddalena’s breast hardly seemed worth noticing at first. Though the hair at her temples had dulled to a translucent gray, and some mornings her joints were stiff, at thirty-seven she walked with a light step and still played the violin with a passion that left her dazed and drenched with sweat.

  In less than three years, on her fortieth birthday, she would retire and join the giubilate. She would perform if they needed, and be part of a ripieno from time to time, and she could keep the money from outside pupils if she wished. A nice life, she supposed, although imagining how to fill it was difficult.

  But the lump kept growing, and when she felt another in her armpit, she went to the hospital wing of the Pietà to ask one of the nurses about it. The nurse ran her fingers over it through Maddalena’s dress. “Does it hurt?” she asked.

  “No. I notice it sometimes when I start to play, but other than that, it doesn’t seem to be anything to worry about.” The tone of her voice folded the end of the sentence into a question. “I just thought I should ask.”

  “This kind of ailment is caused by a blockage in the flow of the humors,” the nurse said. She went to a cabinet and looked through bottles and small boxes, pulling out a few and taking them to a table. “I’m going to make you a salve to rub on it,” she said. “It should be black to match the bile which has collected in your breast.”

  In a marble bowl she broke apart clumps of minerals into a fine powder and ground them together with herbs. “And to get the humors moving properly, I’ll mix in wet and warm elements, because black bile is cold and dry.” She went back to the cabinet to retrieve something else. “Were you born under Saturn?” she turned to ask.

  “No.”

  “Good, because this would be much harder to treat if you were.” The nurse came back with a dark tincture. “Drop your dress down,” she said as she mixed the contents of the bowl into a rough, inky paste.

  “It’s going to sting a little, perhaps, as it settles in,” the nurse said as she smeared it on. “But don’t worry. It has to travel to the lump so it can neutralize it.” She fashioned a pad and tied a strip of cloth around Maddalena’s chest to secure it. “You’ll have to stay in the hospital overnight because we have to give you a purgative to clean out your bowels. Without it, the poultice won’t be enough.”

  The spot became pink and tender to the touch and grew raw and inflamed over the course of a month, but the nurse saw this as a sign that the treatment had been overly effective and had imbalanced Maddalena’s humors toward fire rather than earth. The tender and swollen skin, the nurse said, was now in perfect condition for cupping.

  A local surgeon was to administer the treatment. He arrived with a small case, inside of which were a set of small knives and several glass cups. He inverted one of the cups over Maddalena’s breast and lit a candle. Holding it at the bottom of the cup, he waited for the air inside the cup to heat, creating suction that pulled the skin tight enough to create a seal. The heat continued until blood began to rise in a blister under Maddalena’s skin, and when the proper amount had collected, he loosened the seal with his fingernail. He picked up one of the knives and broke the blister, draining the blood into a cup and swirling it as he contemplated it.

  “The cupping should help,” he said. “This blood is clearly tainted.”

  Over the months, sachets of basil and lemon were laid under Maddalena’s pillow and tucked in her bodice. She swallowed arsenic, myrrh, wormwood tea, and ground mandrake root dissolved in wine that had been reduced to syrup. Special prayers were uttered over her prostrate body in the chapel. She lay on a hospital bed while leeches sucked at her nipple. She became dizzy from bleedings at the prescribed spot on her arm where the particular imbalance of her humors was said to be most effectively influenced.

  Maddalena told Chiaretta only that she had an inflammation in her breast. What more was there to say? But every night in her bed, she touched it with growing alarm. Nothing to worry about, she tried to convince herself, pulling her hand away and laying it outside the blanket in an effort not to let it to wander back to the spot again. Just something to live with, she decided, probably no different than a knot on the knee or an irregularity of the skull. It doesn’t hurt, and that has to mean it isn’t serious, she said to herself every night, with the same monotonous regularity with which she said her prayers. And besides, with all these remedies, something is bound to work.

  A year later, shortly after her thirty-eighth birthday, Maddalena slipped on the wet steps of the chapel and broke her leg. “It was strange,” she said to Chiaretta, who visited her in the hospital of the Pietà. “It wasn’t much of a fall. Maybe I’m just getting old.”

  When Maddalena was able to return to her quarters, Chiaretta stopped visiting. Six months into a pregnancy, she had grown prematurely huge and, like her sister, was having trouble getting around. The reason was apparent two months later, when she gave birth to twins, a boy named Tomà and a girl, Bianca Maria. When she had recovered, the family left to spend the summer at the villa, where she was reduced to exchanging letters with her sister. Chiaretta thought it odd, but not a source of worry, when Maddalena said she was too busy to visit. Her letters gave no hint of trouble, f illed as they were with cheerful talk about the figlie and their concerts, and questions about the children.

  The first time she visited after her pregnancy, Chiaretta watched with horror through the grille of the parlatorio as her sister came toward her with Anna Maria holding her arm. Chiaretta put her hand to her mouth to avoid having anyone hear her gasp. Maddalena was leaning
on a cane, and her skin was the color of fireplace ashes.

  She’s dying. Chiaretta shook the thought away as she greeted her. “A cane?” she asked, trying to sound lighthearted.

  Maddalena sat down and sighed with relief. “Lucky I just have a little over a year until I can retire and sit in my room all day,” she said with a tiny laugh. Chiaretta could hear how the one sentence had left her breathless, but Maddalena’s voice was cheerful, as if her comment was meant to be taken as a joke.

  “I’ve been telling her to take better care of herself,” Anna Maria said. “She doesn’t eat enough, and that’s no way to help a leg heal properly.” Chiaretta recognized the same annoyance in Anna Maria’s tone that she had heard in her own just that morning when Donata pushed aside the mush of lentils and beets the cook had made to cure her stomachache, saying it looked too ugly to eat.

  “You’re too stubborn for your own good,” Chiaretta scolded.

  Maddalena looked at both of them with a hint of a glower. “I don’t want to talk about me. Tell me about the twins!” she said in a way that announced that the previous subject was closed. “They’re what—five months old already?”

  “I can’t wait for you to meet them. Tomà is a little mischief maker,” Chiaretta said, trying, despite how much she loved talking about her children, to accept the change in subject.

  “Like his mother when she was little.” Anna Maria laughed.

  “And Bianca Maria is a little version of you,” Chiaretta said to Maddalena. “The sweetest thing. Dark hair with a little red. Doesn’t cry much at all.” Her face grew solemn. “Are you all right, really?” she asked. “I know how you hold everything in.”

  “I’m fine.” Maddalena took a breath as if she were going to say more but didn’t. Chiaretta waited, and eventually her sister went on. “I don’t know why I feel so sick all the time. I’m having some trouble breathing at night, and I don’t feel much like eating. It’s probably all the disgusting things I have to swallow to make me well.”

  “You would tell me, wouldn’t you?”

  “Of course.”

  The light through the windows had begun to dim, and Chiaretta got up to put on her cloak. Maddalena motioned her back to the grille. “The stairs,” she said. “You know how dark the stairwells are, and how slippery they can be, and it hurts to go up and down them. You know I love your visits, but can we write for a while until my leg is better?”

  Chiaretta looked at Anna Maria to see what she was thinking. Her friend’s expression was blank, as if she too was not sure why Maddalena was making such a suggestion. “But how will you see Donata and Maffeo then?” Chiaretta asked. “And the babies?”

  “It will just have to wait. But not for long.”

  Chiaretta shook her head. “I know you, Maddalena. You don’t look well at all, and all summer you let me think you were fine. I want to see you for myself.”

  “Chiaretta, please. The pain...”

  I don’t know what to do, Chiaretta thought. She stared into Maddalena’s eyes as if she could force them to give her an idea. Neither said a word.

  Then Anna Maria broke in. “I could come down every so often to tell you how she’s doing,” she suggested.

  Maddalena and Chiaretta broke their stare. “That’s a wonderful idea,” Maddalena said.

  Chiaretta was not so sure. After all, Anna Maria had gone through the whole summer without writing, when obviously something was wrong. Still, Chiaretta knew her sister well enough to think she had probably pressured Anna Maria not to worry her. At least this way she might find out something. “All right,” Chiaretta said. “But it had better not be for long.”

  The time had come to leave, and Chiaretta moved her cheek close to the grille for their ritual good-bye. Maddalena kissed her cheek and then turned her own to Chiaretta. Nothing remained between the flaccid skin and her skull, and Chiaretta once again fought back panic.

  “Next week. The same time,” she said to Anna Maria. “Or sooner. Send word and I will be here, no matter what I’m doing.”

  Anna Maria nodded her head. Her brow was furrowed, and she could not manage to meet Chiaretta’s eyes for more than a second without looking away.

  Back at home, Donata and Maffeo were at their lessons and the twins were asleep. Chiaretta stopped in the portego to look in the mirror, leaning forward to examine her reflection. Around her temples the hair was growing even finer, and though the hints of gray did not contrast enough with the blond to be noticeable, she could see how in her thirties her appearance was changing. The skin had begun to crinkle around her eyes, and her lips were thinning. The face looking back at her was still pretty but clearly older, and now strained with worry about her sister.

  Claudio was not there to confide her worries in. He had been gone for more than a month on business. Giovanni Antonio Canal, a former scene painter for the Teatro Sant’Angelo, now painted vedute in Claudio’s workshop under the name Canaletto, and his paintings were becoming so fashionable all over Europe that Claudio was staying away longer, gathering commissions in more and more cities. His last letter predicted he would be home within a week or two, and Chiaretta tried to brush her anxiety about her sister away until his return, busying herself mothering her new twins, and watching over her eight-year-old son and eleven-yearold daughter.

  Maffeo had grown into a dark and handsome child, with the same strong build and thick eyebrows as Claudio. Donata’s hair, as blond as Chiaretta’s when she was a baby, had turned a strawberry hue, somewhere between her mother’s and her aunt’s. She had not inherited Chiaretta’s blue eyes but something closer to Maddalena’s hazel ones, which surrounded by long, dark lashes, gave her coloring of the kind Titian had gloried in.

  Donata had already been studying the harpsichord for more than half of her life. Almost every afternoon, she sat contented and dreamy at the keyboard, moving her fingers with growing assurance, her thighs touching Chiaretta’s as she listened to the sounds that emanated from some secret wellspring inside her mother. Andrea joined them often, and occasionally Luca did as well, and Donata would squirm with delight as they shared the bench with her and sang one harmony after another.

  A few months after her last visit with Maddalena, Chiaretta and Donata were sitting alone at the harpsichord when Zuana came in to tell her that one of Claudio’s business associates was waiting for her downstairs in the sala d’oro.

  “I’m not dressed,” she said. “Ask him to wait.”

  “He says it’s urgent, Madonna.”

  Donata felt her mother’s body tense. “Mama?” she asked.

  “Keep playing, cara,” she said, smoothing her skirt and checking her hair in the mirror before hurrying from the room.

  A man was standing at the window of the sala d’oro. The light poured in, bouncing off the gilded walls and making the red brocade curtains glow. He jumped when he heard her voice. When he turned around, Chiaretta saw that his face was grave.

  Maddalena, she thought. “Is it about my sister?”

  “Maddalena della Pietà?” He looked confused. “No, Madonna, it’s about your husband.”

  Within an hour, Chiaretta called Donata and Maffeo into her apartment. With a swollen face and a barely audible voice, she told them their father was dead. Somewhere outside Munich the coach in which Claudio was riding had lost a wheel. The carriage and horses had tumbled down an embankment, and his neck had snapped. Claudio’s body was on its way back to Venice for burial.

  She held them each for a long time and then got up. “You’ll both sleep in my bed with me for a few days, until after the funeral. Right now, I need to go to the Pietà.”

  She went to her dressing table and stared, unable to connect herself with the face in the mirror. She picked up a pot of rouge and began daubing it on her cheeks, but she had taken too much and it smeared into the hollows of her skin. She rubbed at it, uncomprehending. Donata came to her side and took her hand, pulling it away from the garish blotches.

  “Mama,” she
said, “let me do it.” She took a handkerchief and rubbed until Chiaretta’s face was clean. “Just wear a veil,” she said in a choked voice. “You’ll be pretty again some other day.”

  The priora ushered Chiaretta into her office. “We’ve just received the news,” she said. “I am so sorry.”

  Chiaretta thanked her with the stiffness of a novice actress reciting lines for the first time. “I know there’s a great deal to discuss, but right now, I want to see my sister.”

  The priora flinched almost imperceptibly and drew in a quick breath. “I’ll call her down, but you know she is not well.”

  “I know. I was going to ask Claudio about her when he...” Her voice trailed off as she began to weep into her hands.

  The priora put an arm around Chiaretta’s shoulder and led her to a chair. “Wait here,” she said. “I’ll have Anna Maria help her down.”

  A few minutes later, Maddalena walked into the room. It took a moment for Chiaretta to understand that the ghostlike figure on Anna Maria’s arm was her sister. Broken wisps of brittle hair had come loose from the bun at the nape of her neck and lay like cobwebs around her cheeks. Her eyes had grown huge in her thin face.

  “She made us promise,” Anna Maria said, almost in a whimper.

  Chiaretta did not hear her or see the priora acknowledge the truth of what Anna Maria had said. Throwing her arms around Maddalena, Chiaretta felt the sharp bones of her sister’s shoulders under her limp dress. The enormity of all that was happening swallowed her up, and she began to sob in Maddalena’s arms.

  “Chiaretta, I—” Maddalena’s voice broke off as she began to cry as well.

  They held each other for a long time. Then Chiaretta pulled back to look at her sister. She spoke with a tone that was simultaneously an order and a plea.

  “Come home with me,” she said.

  Claudio’s private effects were moved into his study, and his bedroom was prepared for Maddalena, to keep her as close as possible to Chiaretta. Another bed for a nurse was put in a small anteroom. Maddalena’s appearance frightened Maffeo, who at first shrank back and for a week would not come near enough to kiss her, but Donata came and sat on her bed every day to read to her, and Besina brought the twins for a daily visit.