The Case of the Orphaned Bassoonists

by Barbara Wilson

  Nine

  IN HIS FORTY-FIFTH YEAR, weary of literary life, Bashō sold his house and embarked on a journey that he would later describe in Narrow Road to the Deep North. It was at this time that he refined his notion that all poetry is based on sabi, a loneliness so profound it becomes no-mind. Along with this sadness comes a certain lightness. One casts off one’s personal burdens to better embrace the suffering of the world.

  I too am nearing fifty and tired of the literary world. Like Bashō I am near the end, not of my life, but of the hopeful period of my youth. When I walk down the Peruvian streets where I spent my childhood, it is as if my years of literary success in Japan never happened. I am one with the sorrows of the poor of this South American city.

  Sandals torn,

  Broken staff.

  In Japan, the end of autumn

  In Lima, spring.

  In spite of my love of afternoons, there is a moment when, unexpectedly, my mood can alter, and the pleasurable melancholy that comes with the lengthening shadows turns to true melancholy. I had motored across the lagoon to the long straight island of the Lido and back again, procrastinating about my book of nuns and ex-nuns on the pampas and enjoying the sight of Venice as it receded into a golden mist and then approached again. I’d disembarked at Arsenale and walked to the small campo in front of the great lions that still guarded the gate to Venice’s historic shipyards. There, at a café, I ordered an espresso and glass of water and took out my two novels.

  Everything had been perfect; suddenly it became sad as I read Bashō in Lima. Loneliness might be no-mind, but it was also lonely. I didn’t feel the lightness of casting off my burdens. In fact, I felt burdened as I hadn’t earlier, in the golden sunshine, skimming along the surface of the lagoon.

  Gunther was dead. As recently as last night he’d been alive and walking not far from here, along the Riva degli Schiavoni. Walking and arguing with Bitten—about something important, if I were to believe Andrew. A quarrel, and he was gone. A chill went through me, and I hastily put away the Bashō book. The shadows were softening into twilight. To stave off the void, I picked up Lovers and Virgins; but its unabashed lustiness was not the antidote, and my eyes kept drifting to the four lion statues in front of me as they caught the last rose-blue glow of the sky. Like so many things in Venice, they had been stolen. The two sixth century B.C. lions were taken from Delos. The others were also Greek; one had been part of a fountain long ago. Now the big cats guarded the triumphal arch (beyond which visitors could not go) leading into what had once been the world’s greatest naval yard. It had grown with the Crusades; in the sixteenth century fifteen thousand people had worked here. A new ship was launched every day.

  By the time Vivaldi was conducting the orchestra in the Pietà, however, at the beginning of the eighteenth century, the power of Venice was waning. It still looked and behaved like a sovereign state, with its doges, ambassadors and spies, its ceremonies and processions. The Arsenale still produced ships, but a growing source of revenue was tourism. Some came for the gambling and the courtesans, some came for the splendor of the music. The production of concertos came to outstrip the production of ships. At the end of the eighteenth century, Napoleon burned the boatyards and sailed away with Venice’s remaining fleet. In the dimming light, the Arsenale seemed the very essence of the city’s inglorious slide from prosperous, active middle age toward death.

  It would break my heart to spend the winter translating Bashō in Lima.

  I gave up trying to read and paid for my coffee. Perhaps it was time to go back to the hotel, though what I’d do this evening I wasn’t sure. I had no lover to dine with; my only friend in Venice was determinedly reclusive for the moment. All the same, I couldn’t leave Venice yet. I was relieved Nicky had had no part in Gunther’s demise, but there was no saying what mischief she might still get up to.

  Strolling back toward the Riva along the short stretch of canal, I saw a red-haired slip of a girl in a white shirt with a tall collar jump off the vaporetto and dash into the naval museum. Without quite thinking it through, I crossed over the bridge and went into the museum too.

  The Museo Storico Navale was much bigger than I’d suspected: four floors of gondolas and other marine vessels and equipment. I cursed my hip as I slowly climbed the stairs and wandered through the exhibits. I had always imagined, when I heard the story of the Doge performing the ceremony of Venice’s marriage to the sea, that the ring he threw into the Adriatic was a gold band off his own finger. But here, in a glass case, I saw rings the size of salad plates, rings the size of big glazed donuts, hollow inside, encrusted with jewels. A card in the case said the ring was attached to a long cord, so that after it was tossed into the sea, it could be retrieved. That seemed like cheating on the marriage vows to me. On another floor was a model of the last gold-encrusted Bucintoro, the ceremonial ship that the Doge, in golden cap and crimson, ermine-trimmed gown, had used when he went to the sea to pronounce, “We marry you, oh sea, in token of our true and perpetual dominion.”

  There was no sign of Francesca, and I wondered if I’d dreamed up her presence out of my own loneliness. Hardly anyone was in the vast museum at all. It was near closing time, and I suspected this was a museum most visitors never managed to get to, wonderful as it was with its models of fighting galleys, its full-size gondolas black as ravens, its figureheads. One figurehead represented Venice as a woman in a low-necked dress, dangling scales in one hand and accompanied by a lion. The scales looked tilted.

  I sat down on a wide wooden bench next to a gondola on display, and took out the two Latin American books, yet again (at least Simon could never accuse me of not trying to come to terms with this literature). I had a strong compulsion to hide Lovers and Virgins in the gondola, to remove myself from its pernicious influence, but I simply placed it to one side and opened Bashō in Lima. I couldn’t help thinking that when a woman renounced the world, as this narrator suggested she wanted to do, it meant something very different than when a man did. It was clearly in the interests of men that we renounce worldly goods and desires. Then they could have more for themselves. To want too much—to want anything—was the way to heartbreak and suffering. Yet for centuries women had lived such circumscribed lives. How could we ever know what too much was?

  “Cassandra!” said Francesca, coming around the corner with her arm linked in Roberta’s.

  “You’re here too?” asked Roberta in a less than welcoming manner.

  It was the first time I’d seen them since the events of last night. We all must have thought of that horrible moment on the bridge, because for a moment there was silence. I considered again how much Roberta looked like her brother. They were both very handsome. I wondered if Roberta and Francesca met at the museum regularly. It was certainly deserted enough for a tête-à-tête between two women who might have nowhere else to go.

  With an attempt at cheerfulness, I said, “I’ve always wanted to see this museum. You can’t really get a good notion of a gondola just by looking at them swarming around the Grand Canal, can you? You pretty much need to see the keel to get the true picture…I had no idea that I’d run into you and Francesca here. I’m delighted. And Roberta, I’m especially pleased to see you because I have some questions to ask you. A friend of mine is preparing a CD-ROM on women musicians of Vivaldi’s time, and she hopes to speak with you and get your assistance since you’re another musician, a very accomplished one, I might add.”

  “Which friend?” Roberta asked, but she looked a little less irritated than she had when she first saw me.

  “Nicola Gibbons.”

  “The one who stole my family’s bassoon?”

  “She didn’t steal it, and anyway, it’s been found. Sort of.”

  “I’m not an expert, but I can speak with your friend. We can meet tomorrow. Give me her phone number. I’ll call her.”

  The two of them seemed to be moving off. I supposed, because of Francesca’s work and her mother, they didn’t have much
time together. Still I was reluctant to be left alone quite yet. “She doesn’t have a phone…She’s so busy at the moment that she asked me to do some research for her, you know, just ask the initial questions, make the arrangements for interviews…”

  “What questions?” Roberta asked.

  “Tell me, just for a start, about the musicians at the Pietà. It sounds like a golden age.” I patted the bench next to me, but they remained standing.

  “It was no golden age for the women in the Pietà,” Roberta said. “Of course compared to some of the other options, like being a servant or prostitute, being raised to make music in a protected environment meant you had some degree of freedom within that limited sphere. But it was difficult to leave one of the ospedali without getting married, and even if you managed to marry a sympathetic man, you often had to sign an agreement that you would not perform in public or carry on with a musical career. Very few women managed to get out of the Pietà and find work as musicians. A few became singers. So you can see why women committed to music simply stayed at the ospedali.”

  “Nicky finds it fascinating that Vivaldi composed so many bassoon concertos. She wonders if there was a very talented bassoonist at the Pietà.”

  “Yes, possibly, but it may also be that the bassoon was just an instrument that drew out some of his best work, his deepest feelings. The cello and the bassoon have some similarities, you know. They both have deep registers and can create a very rich, melancholy sound. And then, you know, Vivaldi loved conversation among instruments, and the bassoon is capable of having a dialogue with itself. You can get high notes as well as low notes, back and forth, just like people talking.”

  “Do you think there were other composers, women, who wrote for the bassoon?”

  “There were certainly women composers in all the ospedali. Much of the library of the Pietà still exists, but no one has ever completely cataloged it. Some of that library might be at the Conservatory of Music. I have a friend, Giovanna, who teaches there who might be able to help.” Roberta looked at me impatiently. “But if your friend Nicky is a bassoon scholar like the rest of them, I’m sure she knows far more than I.”

  Francesca seemed thoughtful. “I heard several people last night at the bridge asking where Nicky was.”

  “She had to fly to Birmingham to perform in a concert,” I said quickly. “She returned this morning, but she’s not staying with Signore Sandretti any longer. She said—she doesn’t trust him.”

  Roberta nodded.

  “She’s really wild to get this CD-ROM project off the ground. Everything that’s happened—the theft of the bassoon, Gunther’s murder—has been an impediment.” Now I was talking like the single-minded Nicky herself. “I don’t mean that Gunther’s death was an obstacle. It was terribly sad—and mysterious.”

  Francesca was pulling at Roberta’s arm. “Arrange something with Giovanna,” she said.

  “All right. We’ll meet tomorrow, you, me and Nicky—if she can—at the Conservatory of Music, during my lunch break, at one o’clock. We’ll see what we can find in the library.”

  “Ciao,” said Francesca, giving me a little wave as Roberta pulled her off.

  Before you could nobly renounce something or someone you had to have it to begin with.

  I took the vaporetto back over to the Dorsoduro. The evening air was soft and all around me I heard Italian. It was the hour when the day-trippers had left and other tourists were perhaps resting at their hotels before venturing out again to restaurants. After my encounter with Roberta and Francesca, I had a reason to hunt up Nicky. I’d drag her out to dinner and tell her about the research date tomorrow at the conservatory. But when I alighted at Accademia, I encountered Anna de Hoog almost immediately. She was standing in front of a rack of postcards in the little square in front of the museum and looking more secretive than ever, but also a bit wild-eyed.

  “What’s up?” I asked.

  “Frigga has arrived at the palazzo.”

  “Gunther’s girlfriend!”

  “No,” Anna said. “Frigga is his grandmother, as it turns out. Frau Frigga Hausen.”

  She tried to seem surprised by that, but I didn’t buy it. I was also curious why she seemed to be hovering, coatless and purseless, by the vaporetto stop. There was about her something of precipitous flight. Or was she waiting for someone?

  “Why don’t you stop off at the palazzo?” suggested Anna.

  “I have no desire to meet Frigga.”

  “I wasn’t thinking of her so much as Bitten.”

  “What about Bitten?” I was a little startled. Anna could not possibly know that Bitten claimed to be Olivia’s granddaughter.

  “Bitten and Frigga have been quarreling. Bitten says she and Gunther planned to get married in Stockholm this week. Frigga says that’s nonsense: the two of them only met five or six days ago. Bitten is in a—how shall I say it?—vulnerable state of mind. She might need a drink. If you suggested it. Ah, here’s the vaporetto.”

  I didn’t think Anna had rushed out of the palazzo with the intention of taking a vaporetto anywhere. But as she blended in with the crowd surging onto the boat, I realized Anna had given me the impetus I needed to do a little sleuthing on Nicky’s behalf. I was less interested in who had killed Gunther than in stopping Bitten from destroying Nicky’s life. It had not yet occurred to me to wonder if the two things were in any way related.

  But it had occurred to me that if Bitten did manage to establish a claim on Olivia’s property and wrest the London house away from Nicky, that I too would have no place to live. Like Bashō after his home burned down, I’d be out on my ear.

  Ten

  FRIGGA WAS NOT what I expected. I’d imagined one of those sleek German girls, blond, buxom, thin, with a dark indoor tan, who was just beginning to thicken around the middle from years of cream-laden tortes. Even when Anna had said that Frigga was Gunther’s grandmother, I had merely done a little mental rearranging and added fifty pounds instead of ten.

  But Frigga was old, eighty at least, with wrinkled, spotted skin and red-rimmed dark eyes. She was wearing a smart pink Chanel suit from the 1950s, with a black shawl over her shoulders, heavy support stockings and well-polished orthopedic shoes. When I arrived, she was sitting in the garden speaking in stilted English to Marco. There was no sign of Andrew, or of Bitten, but from upstairs came the mournful adagio Bitten had played this morning.

  “I will not leave Venice until I find out who murdered him.”

  From the expression on Marco’s face, I had a feeling that Frigga had said this more than once.

  “Ah, Cassandra,” he said. “This is the grandmother of Gunther, Frau Hausen. We have been to the police station, and we have heard the results. Gunther died of water in the lungs, very sad. To date the police have no witnesses and no motives. So perhaps Gunther only had a misstep, they think.”

  “I know he was killed,” said Frigga. “I begged him to be careful, always to take special precautions with his stomach when he traveled and not drink too much coffee. I tried to protect him, his whole life, just like I tried to protect his family. I failed. They all are dead. All dead. And I live on and on. I don’t understand.”

  I didn’t really understand either. Gunther hardly seemed like the type to have enemies. Unless of course he’d been a drug courier or had a criminal past. But as far as I knew from his biography in the program, and from what Nicky said, Gunther had been playing and teaching the Baroque bassoon for the past ten years in Düsseldorf.

  “I will not leave Venice until I find out who murdered him,” she said again, and Marco’s eyes glazed over. With an effort he said, “We go out to dinner now, yes? To the local restaurant with many Venetian specialty dishes. Have you ever had squid in its own ink, Mrs. Hausen? You will like to come too, Mrs. Reilly?”

  In spite of my sympathy for Marco, I couldn’t think of many worse ways to spend the evening.

  “I have a tremendous amount of work to do. But I’m sure Andrew would love
to join you. Meanwhile, I’ll just have a quick word with Bitten.” I went into the palazzo.

  It was difficult to believe that when I’d first met Bitten a few days ago, she’d seemed a lusty Swede, in ripe middle age, bursting out of her silk shirt. Now her skin was no longer soft and plump; she was like a slice of orange that had been left out overnight. She’d put her bassoon to the side and was sitting in a corner of the room with a glass of wine. I asked her if she’d like some dinner. She shrugged and gestured to me to sit down on the bed. I could see there were two suitcases in the room and wondered if one of them was Gunther’s.

  “Did you know Frigga was Gunther’s grandmother?” I began, not exactly where I’d planned.

  “She calls herself his grandmother, but she’s really his great-grandmother,” Bitten said. “Gunther’s mother was her granddaughter; she took her in as a baby and raised her. Gunther’s mother died when he was a child, and Frigga took him in.”

  “That’s a sad story,” I said.

  “Gunther’s was the third violent death in three generations. Unbelievable,” said Bitten, rubbing her forearms. “If anyone, you would have thought Gunther could have broken the spell. He had the spirit of an angel.”

  “Do you think he was murdered then?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “You said violent death.”

  “No one goes into a canal easily. Unless they commit suicide. But why would he do that? He had everything to look forward to. We had everything to look forward to.”

  In the face of her obvious grief, I felt unsure how to continue. This didn’t seem like quite the right time to ask her about the quarrel Marco and Andrew had overheard her having with Gunther the night he died. Nor did I feel quite right grilling her on a few other aspects of the case, such as why she’d always seemed so put out when Gunther got a phone call from Frigga. I didn’t want to appear unsympathetic and lose her. My only recourse was to keep up the concerned front and press on, even though it made me feel a bit of a fraud. “You haven’t had such an easy time of it yourself, I imagine,” I said.