Hidden Voices

by Pat Lowery Collins

  Signora Mandano even allows me to engage the gondola and to settle its two occupants inside. Catina, wrapped too tightly in scarves and capes for such a warm day, squeals when she sees the plush interior, and in her exhilaration, she begins to cough. Luisa seems no longer an orphan but a fine young lady on her way to court. We have arranged her hair with small horns above the temple and even teased ringlets onto the forehead before putting on a gathered cap with lappets hanging down the back. I am pleased to see that there is some excitement in eyes that have been dim and often red-rimmed for many weeks. I’d like to clasp her in my arms the way I’ve seen her mother do, but such fond expressions have no place within the Ospedale, except, of course, with the infants, and even then we’re cautioned not to coddle them. And so I merely watch as she steps through the little doorway of the covered gondola, goes to a window, and shyly pulls the curtain back to wave at me. I am, truly, so happy for them both.

  Yet the emptiness I feel while watching their craft make its graceful way up the Grand Canal seems bottomless, a ballooning of the constant ache I have carried with me since Rosalba’s disappearance. Going back into the school building with all its noise and confusion is like taking a small potion of forgetfulness that only dulls a little of the pain. I must remind myself again and again that Luisa will be away only a short time, that she will be sending letters to me, that she will be, at long last, completely well.

  “Has the little invalid been sent on her way, then?” asks Silvia while tuning her violin. We have been waiting so long for Father to appear that the room is restless. Some girls practice their new parts oblivious to other sections being played. Unlike so many of the others, I must have silence in which to contemplate my own mistakes, and so I remain apparently idle, though studying the score all the while.

  “She has left, yes,” I tell her, and turn my back to her to try to look over my music in what peace I can make for myself.

  “You will need me for a friend,” she says behind me, “now that the two you’ve doted on have disappeared.”

  “Not disappeared,” I tell her with annoyance. “It’s true that my two dearest friends are temporarily away. It’s not true I can replace them, especially not with someone as ill-tempered as you always seem to be.”

  She feigns dismay. “Me? Bad-tempered? I only point out things to people for their own good that they may have missed.”

  “Well, point them out to someone else. I do not need to don the same cloudy lenses that you seem to look through at all times.”

  Before she can come back at me with her riposte, Father Vivaldi swings the door wide and rustles through it like a sudden wind. Almost always rather neat, today he is disheveled and quite red of face. He slaps a score upon the music stand and coughs into a handkerchief.

  “Sorry about the wait,” he says at once, “but this tightening of the chest has been plaguing me of late. Father Gasparini is not well himself, but I am here to run you through the piece we started yesterday as best I can.” He delivers this entire string of words in a halting, breathless manner.

  “Our instruments have already been tuned,” Anna Maria, the first violinist, tells him.

  “Fine then,” he says. “We will start right in.”

  We enter into the first movement’s vigorous contained rhythm without hesitation. Perhaps because of my own sadness, the score for the second movement seems more tender than it did even yesterday, and the repetition of its melodies is about to break my heart. There are tears streaking my face before the end of it. Father himself seems affected by his own notes, for he takes two short intakes of air after putting down his baton, then coughs and wheezes into a large rumpled handkerchief.

  “If you are not feeling well,” I overhear Anna Maria whisper to him, “I can rehearse the group for you.” She has done it before, and rather competently, I must confess.

  He thanks her, but instead of accepting the offer, he struggles through the next few hours, wheezing unmercifully. It is most discomfiting, and we are all relieved when the last of this earnest but unsettling rehearsal comes to an end. I, however, am not to be dismissed as yet, for Father motions me to the front and holds some pages in the air above his head.

  “The concerto for your viola d’amore,” he declares, waving the score about in triumph. “I stayed up all night to finish it.”

  His effort to make this announcement causes another breathing crisis, and he goes quite purple in the face.

  “What can I do, Father?” I say, distressed. “How can I help you?”

  He calms a little, but his words are rough and breathy when he speaks again.

  “The only thing that you need do for me is play my music well. I think you’ll find that this piece accents your skills. I think I’ve made a marriage here.”

  If he only knew the irony he speaks. Me and my instrument. United in a love match like no other. Still, the music is a wondrous gift and far more welcome than any duke it might attract. It is, perhaps, the best match I will ever make.

  I am not feeling hungry for the midday meal, so I go up to the nursery instead to help feed the babies. Concerta stands now if placed beside a little chair and thumps her bottom up and down if I sing to her.

  “She is musical,” I tell Sofia.

  “She had better be,” says the nurse, “if she wants any kind of life here. It’s the ones who play and sing who have a chance at something better than the life I lead.”

  I do not tell my thoughts to her, that a life entirely within the Ospedale would not be so bad, that tending the babies, watching them grow, loving them, continuing to love even when there’s no love in return. It is not so very bad.

  OUR GONDOLIER IS OLD and does not sing at all, but Signora says he can be trusted, that they have engaged him many times before. He simply guides his boat, and after seating us inside, doesn’t pay any attention to his passengers.

  I had not thought it would be so hard to leave the Ospedale behind, or Anetta. Especially not Anetta. But watching from the window of the gondola as they both fade from view, my eyes sting and a thin stream of tears runs down to my chin.

  When I try to wipe away the dampness with the back of my hand, wise little Catina notices and counsels me. “We will not be away for long, Luisa. In just a few months, this same sight we now leave behind will greet us.”

  Her attempt at consoling me would be amusing if I weren’t feeling so bereft and timid about this journey. I am, after all, the one who is supposed to be in charge. At other times she seems easily as young as her years, too excited to sit still, even though all the jouncing about makes her cough and wheeze the more. She rises repeatedly to point out the sights she has seen before when on a trip with Signora to a see a specialist in breathing disorders.

  “Look, Luisa, the Doge’s Palace! Look, Luisa, Cá Foscari! Look, Luisa, the Rialto Bridge!”

  I search fruitlessly for Calle del Carbon as we approach the area of my mother’s apartment and for anything that looks familiar — a building, a marketplace. I remember a small campo, some steep steps, the dark interior of what must have been a church, someone helping me to light a candle with a long wick. I remember how brightly it burned.

  After a while, I can’t help exclaiming over the beautiful houses along the water, with their own gondolas tied onto pilings at entrances from the canal, and over the filigreed gates and small gardens. We make up stories about who could be living in one or another, how the children in such places pass the time, what they wear on ordinary days.

  When passing other gondolas, we try to see inside or wave to the gondolier. It is such great sport that I almost forget my sadness, and we are at Santa Lucia in what seems to be no time at all.

  There is a market here with many stalls filled with colorful fruit and vegetables, all manner of freshly caught fish, their eyes staring dumbly, killed chickens tied together and hung by their legs. And there are many wagons. I had thought to be on the lookout for one wagon only. How will I know which one has been sent from the Ricc
i farm? Most are now empty but still fastened to a donkey or horse snuffling a feed bag and pawing the ground.

  I try not to alarm Catina, but I see no way to make an identification among them. The gondolier puts our small valises and my guitar and mandolin upon the dock and begins his little speech to entice another passenger aboard. I can’t help thinking how Rosalba would have flirted and cajoled until he’d found our wagon for us. Left to my own devices, I have no idea where to turn, and for the first time since departing, I wish Signora had at least come with us this far.

  We have been given a few florins, so I take Catina’s hand and we pass over the road to a bakery tent. We buy a small sugar cake apiece, which manages to make us so thirsty that we must then bargain for two cups of cider.

  “You keep looking all around,” says Catina at last. “As if you don’t know what we’re to do next.”

  I should have realized that I couldn’t pretend with this child.

  “I know what I was told to do. But . . .” I begin.

  “You can’t find the wagon,” she says.

  “Yes, that’s right. I can’t find the wagon.”

  “It should not be so difficult,” she continues, “if you look in the right place.”

  “I should think that would go without saying.”

  “But we aren’t in the right place. We’re in the market now. The wagons are out by the trees.”

  “I was buying some time.”

  “If we stay here too long, Luisa, the man from the farm will think we have never arrived.”

  I had not thought of that possibility, so we quickly head back to the dock. Remaining clearly visible proves to be the best solution, because soon a large conveyance, more cart than wagon, pulls up in front of us, and a ruddy man dressed in the dark and shabby clothes of a farmer doffs a battered hat.

  “Ciao,” he calls in greeting, and uses one side of his open toothless mouth to make a clicking sound with his cheek and halt the small horse.

  “You are the signorine from the Ospedale, capisci?”

  “Sì,” we both say at once.

  He jumps down and swings our small trunks and my instruments into the back with great agility for one so old.

  “One of you can sit up here with me,” he says, “but the other will need to sit in the back.”

  “We will both sit in the back,” says Catina, and I’m glad she’s made that decision for us, as I would not have desired to sit next to such a man, smelling of earth and sweat and garlic and heaven knows what, or to travel all alone with the bounty of odd things that he transports.

  “Bene,” he says, and spreads a tattered blanket over rags and baskets of every sort. It is a lumpy place on which to sit, and the entire cart is raised in the front and tips toward the ground in the rear. To keep from sliding off, we must scoot up and put our backs against the driver’s seat — downwind of him, I fear. Otherwise there is a great freshness to the air, and I notice that Catina has not coughed during all the activity of getting settled. When we pull away from the marketplace and onto country roads, we both breathe deeply, and it is like filling our lungs with sky.

  Such an expanse of it overhead, such fresh green plots of land dotted with olive and eucalyptus trees. Here and there are peaceful milk cows grazing close to the road, their calves nearby. Sometimes a few bulls in separate fields, well muscled and brawny, laze off by themselves in the sun.

  For all the tranquil beauty of the countryside, it is an uncomfortable trip, bumpy and rough from start to finish. When we finally pull onto a muddy narrow lane and in front of the whitewashed farmhouse we had seen from a distance, I am filled with relief. We climb down as fast as we can and both head for the little privy we have noticed in the yard.

  After this necessary duty, we return to the entrance, where a round and rosy woman stands with arms crossed over her ample stomach. The set of her lips is stern until she sees us scurrying back over the weeds and grass. Then her mouth widens slowly and reassuringly into a warm smile that seems to shimmer; she laughs and claps her plump little hands together and all but jumps up and down with excitement.

  “Benvenuto,” she exclaims over and over, opening her arms and gathering us into them as if we’re her very own children. Neither of us hesitates. It is as if we had known she would be waiting for us, as if we had always known it.

  I OPEN MY EYES to an unfamiliar room, spare of everything but a rim of dust motes along the walls, a small old table and basin, one broken chair, and the cot on which I am lying, covered by a coarsely woven blanket with the unpleasant smell of someone else’s sweat. From a yellow cast to the pale light slanting through two high windows, I suspect it may be morning. Right away I raise a finger to my lips. They are still swollen and scabs have developed where the teeth pierced me. My clothing is torn and bloodied and damp just as I remember. And I remember everything, even wandering through the streets for hours and finally collapsing in a cluttered doorway that smelled of cat piss. The odor of it, and that of my attacker, linger on my clothing. It was not a dream. None of it was a dream.

  But I have no idea how I came to this place, to this plain and dirty little room, and have no desire to arise and discover where the one door leads. A new heavy sensation — shame — keeps me prone and fills my entire body like hot lead. Am I still in Venice, somewhere in Venice? How near am I to the Ospedale? Have they sent someone to look for me? What streets do I travel to go back?

  Unfamiliar voices come from somewhere in the distance, as if swaddled in gauze, and quick footsteps sound on a bare wooden stairway. I have just begun to fear what may lie beyond that door when it opens and a woman sidles in as if she hesitates to wake me. When she sees my eyes are open, she brings up the one chair and sits beside me. Her face is creased by time and weather and some merriment, I think, for at the edges of her eyes, there are these scratchy lines from laughing. But she isn’t even smiling now.

  She puts a hand upon my arm that holds the blanket to me and leans in closely till she’s speaking right into my face. Her breath is strangely acrid and sweet all at one time. There is still no smile upon her thin lips.

  “How are you feeling now?” she asks. “We didn’t dare to clean you up last night because, for a certain, you would have been awakened from your deep sleep. Pasquale carried you just like a little babe. You didn’t stir.”

  I don’t know what to say. She must know what has happened to me then. The smell of it is about me still. Pasquale, whoever he is, must know as well. I wait for some harsh words, but they don’t come.

  “Whoever did this to you is an evil man. A devil.”

  The wig-maker’s assistant? Truly evil? And yet what else am I to think? I can no longer hide from the brutal truth of it or continue to court love as I did, the way it had appeared to me within the plays and all my beautiful fantasies with such smug abandon.

  “I will get water and some cloths for you to clean yourself. For now, you can wear my other dress. It will not fit too well, but I can wash and mend the things you’re wearing and perhaps borrow something for a while from another musician we know who is about your size.”

  “You are a musician?” I ask before I realize that I have seen her face before. A violin had been beneath the chin. The eyes, more tired than I remember, had looked out from a small mask. Up so close, the same strong hands that had fingered the strings and held the bow have crooked fingers and swollen joints.

  “We play at Carnival and other festivals. My sons and I. We play to earn our bread and keep a roof — this roof — above our heads.”

  “This is your house?”

  “Half a narrow house, really, and we are temporary lodgers only. Three rooms, one above the other, and a stairway. Nothing more. You and I can share this bedroom.”

  It is her room. And there is only one bed. Why does she speak as if I plan to stay?

  “I will be leaving when I get cleaned up,” I say, getting to my feet. The room whirls a bit, but soon settles. I’m not sick, just battered and unbeliev
ably tired, and as dirty as a lard, one of those thieves who work the streets.

  “Where will you go?” she asks.

  “Back to the Ospedale della Pietà, on the Riva. You must know it.”

  “I thought as much. You are too refined to be from the neighborhood around here, yet you’re not dressed in the manner of royal folk. A runaway, I told Pasquale, and Salvatore, he thought so, too. Carnival, it is a time for such things.”

  “It was a foolish thing to do,” I tell her.

  “More foolish than you know.”

  “What do you mean?”

  She sighs and takes my hand. Hers is thin and knobby and not warm to the touch.

  “Only that it isn’t the first time I’ve seen the likes of what happened to you. Oh, not the ravishment. But other girls have run away, thinking to find . . . whatever romantic dream they have in their foolish heads.”

  Knowing that others have done the same is some comfort.

  “What happened to them?’

  “I don’t know for a certain. Except for one who kept hanging around our campo. She began to sell herself, you know, sold her favors on the street, until she took quite sick and died.”

  “Did none of them go back?”

  “They may have tried. The Ospedale doesn’t take back runaways.”

  My heart drops, and I need to sit again to think. What does a street musician know? She hasn’t met Signora or Prioress. She doesn’t realize how fond they are of all of us. I’m sure she must be misinformed.

  I tell her this, and she just shakes her head. Some tufts of hair about the ears suggest that she will soon be as gray as all the ladies who wear shawls to Mass. Will she still play her violin, I wonder, when she is stooped and really old?

  “What is the instrument you play?” she asks.

  “Chiefly the oboe,” I tell her, “but sometimes the continuo when it is needed, and often the mandolin and lute.”

  “And do you sing?”

  “Yes, of course. We all sing.”