Hidden Voices

by Pat Lowery Collins

  Father has made great progress on Moyses Deus Pharaonis. There is even a part for me, a small one in my range. But the part for you is large and wonderful. So operatic that I know you will be pleased, as will your mother.

  And I would tell her, too, how Maestro Gasparini will soon leave his post and how it is taken for granted that Father Vivaldi will assume it, a situation that the strings, especially, will welcome. As you will, too, I’m certain, I would say. His operas are becoming known and sung throughout all of Europe. Just think of it, Luisa, your opportunity to see the world and have renown now rests with our own dear teacher. Could we ever have conceived of such a thing?

  After I place Signora’s additional parcels at her door, I go into the nursery, for there is still time between Latin and string ensemble in which to play with Concerta. She claps her hands whenever she sees me, and her smile is always one of purest happiness. Today, she crawls to me, pulling a tiny soldier with her as she goes. I sit upon a chair so she will try to stand, and I let her struggle till her golden head is even with my knee, whereupon her eyes search my face for my approval. At first I don’t express it, but wait until she squeals, and then I catch her up and lift her high into the air and tell her what a good thing she has done, how proud I am of her. Upon her feet again, she tries to hum a simple little tune, and soon is opening her tiny mouth and letting out the nearest sound to something like a song I’ve ever heard from her before.

  “She’s singing!” I exclaim to Sofia and the wet nurses sitting somber-faced along the wall, one with a bambina on each breast.

  “Those stumbling little noises,” says Sofia. “If that’s a song, I’ll eat my best cap, lappets and all.”

  “As well you may need to, for song it is, I swear upon my . . . my . . . friends.”

  “Who are not here to testify and cannot hear what you hear.”

  “But would if they were.”

  Oh, Luisa. Don’t you see? It’s happening the way I’d hoped and prayed. Concerta will be just like you. She’ll be a privilegiata like both of us and charm her audiences. Father will someday write grand oratorios especially for her, too.

  “And have you told your fine friends about the wealthy Duke of Viani, a pillar of the republic, a man with a fine wide forehead and grand nose?”

  “The beak was his only good feature, Sofia.”

  “Have you told them how you sent him away like some commoner, how you spoke up to him as if you were the duchess and he the orphan, how you squandered your best opportunity for a life outside these walls?”

  “How do you know it was my best opportunity, and why do I need a life outside these walls?”

  “Believe me, you will not want to stay here forever, as I have done. I was a commun girl once. Nursing was the only occupation besides lace-making that was offered me, and that only because I did not swoon at bloodletting and wasn’t squeamish at the sight of open sores. I was not pampered nor put on show and taught the finer things like you. I never had a chance to have a family of my own.”

  “Or someone else’s. He wanted me to tend the many babes he’d fathered by another woman, who was so worn out she’d finally died.”

  “Women die for many reasons that have nothing to do with the number of babes that they have borne.”

  “And he did not wish for me to have a tongue within my head. At least not one to be of use in speaking.”

  “And what else? What other frivolous reasons can you give for sending him away?”

  “His calves bulged in their tight hose, and, like an elephant, his legs did not taper as they should at the ankle.”

  “Frivolous indeed! Did no one tell you of his high position? Of his great wealth?”

  “It would not matter to me if they had.”

  Concerta pulls at my skirt, and a glance at the clock tells me I must run all the way to Father’s workshop if I’m to retrieve my instrument in time for the rehearsal of next Sunday’s concert.

  “I have to go, now,” I tell Sofia while leaning down to kiss Concerta. I pull her little arms from where they reach around my neck, and she begins to cry.

  “Go, then,” says Sofia, lifting her up.

  “If I see the duke,” I tell her, “I will send him and all his children to you.”

  “You’ll understand one day,” she says. “You will. You’ll see. But it will be too late.”

  I AM AWAKE at first cock’s crow, knowing full well that Alessandro will not rise until the milking time for Evangelina. The wagons with the vineyard workers will soon be going past this window, some of the pickers half asleep and leaning against one another, some conversing so loudly it will sound as if I’m once again upon the Riva. The sky appears to lift itself with the sun, which burns pink streaks into the vast blue space that seems painted across an infinite ceiling. I lie upon my feather bed, hands behind my head and eyes upon the scene, until it feels as if I travel with my gaze onto the slopes and pastures. Soon voices in the kitchen will tell me that Signor Ricci and some of the workers are taking their breakfast. I will wait until their words fade and there is silence in the house again before I dress and make my way to the privy.

  This morning I am slipping in and out of sleep when the word Alessandro surprises me. I do not know at first if it has come to me in a dream or has been spoken in the other room. But then I hear it once again, and it is clearly from the tongue of Signor Ricci. Rousing myself, I creep upon the cold tiles to the door and press my ear against it. It is minutes before I hear the name again and can distinguish any of the words that follow. This time it is Signora Ricci’s voice, and it is clearer than her husband’s.

  “They are both so young,” she is saying. “I find it hard to believe there is any danger.”

  Danger?

  “I’m telling you what Felipe saw,” replies her husband. “The two together in the little barn. It did not look so innocent.”

  I am so startled by this word, innocent, that the ones that follow are all the more distinct.

  “But a chaperone? A chaperone out in the country? I’ve never heard of such a thing.”

  “Then keep her here. With you. Let her be of use.”

  “I am not paid so she can do our chores.”

  “If things get out of hand, you’ll not be paid at all. We returned the one child with her malady increased. We must return the other in the same state, at least, as when she came.”

  “Alessandro,” I whisper to myself. “What can be dangerous about Alessandro? He is the most gentle person I have ever known.”

  I hear the scraping of the chair legs against the floor, a clatter of plates one upon another. More muted voices. A door squeaking open and then slamming shut.

  What am I to do with this new information? How am I to comport myself now that the sweet idyll of my days here has been poisoned by another’s thoughts? Does Alessandro think of me with the same joy with which I think of him? Is he, at this very moment, waiting for me in the barn?

  When I first step into the kitchen, Signora is busy putting something in the small oven built into the bricks around the fire. She jumps back on seeing me, bids me buon giorno, takes a plate and starts to fill it with what she had prepared much earlier. There are cheeses and warm breads, a bowl of fruit from trees that touch the house. She pours a special tea from rose hips that I’ve grown to like. This time she fills a large cup for herself and sits across from me.

  “So,” she says at last, circling the cup with her hands to warm them, “how have you been amusing yourself without Catina?”

  “Oh,” I say, “it has not been hard. I roam about. Sometimes I help the boy who owns the cow.”

  “Alessandro?”

  “Yes.” I do not say his name, suddenly afraid he can be taken from me if it should escape my lips.

  “How did you meet?”

  “Catina and I. We watched him milk one day.” The half-truth comes so easily.

  “And now that Catina is gone?”

  “He is good company. I stay out of his wa
y.”

  “As well you should. He’s here to work, you see. You’re here to breathe the fresh air and get well. You must not distract him from his duties. It’s how he earns enough to keep the cow.”

  I had not thought of that, that he has duties for which he is paid.

  “I only try to help.”

  “Well then, you can help me. Today I bake the bread for the entire week. The kneading is the hardest part. A pair of extra hands will be a boon.”

  “I . . . I never baked before.”

  “It isn’t hard,” she says, and hands me a rough apron I must double at the waist to fit around me.

  “With the two of us working,” she continues, “we may be finished by the afternoon.”

  It is in fact the longest morning of my life, and doesn’t really end at noon, as she had promised. My hands ache from the constant kneading and squeezing and pounding of the vast amounts of dough. My forearms feel as if they have been pummeled. In truth, it was not hard to learn, but it was harder to endure than any practice sessions back-to-back, and so much less enjoyable.

  “There,” says Signora Ricci at last, filling a basin in which to wash the flour from my hands and the dough from underneath my fingernails. The loaves are stacked up neatly by the hearth. She’s managed somehow to prepare a hearty soup of vegetables in oxtail broth, and I collapse before it like an animal before its only meal in weeks. Afterward, she lets me take my ease out in the sun, where I fall fast asleep still sitting on a chair made from a tree with all its bark.

  I do not know the hour that I waken to a shower of dry leaves upon my head. Confused at such a happening in this growing season, I squint into the sunlight with one hand above my eyes. There, a dark shape in silhouette, stands Alessandro, smiling at me with great mischief in his face.

  Before my wits have awakened with me, Signora is outside the cottage door and greeting Alessandro with much affection, her plump arms encircling him as if he is her errant child.

  “I came to find what happened to your boarder here,” says Alessandro, “and to bring the milk,” he adds, handing a pail of it to Signora.

  “Luisa helped me with the bread,” she says, as if it had been my idea. “I’ll make a baker of her yet before she has to leave.”

  Leave. Why is she even using that word? I have been here such a short time. I cannot leave. I can never leave Alessandro.

  “While I had thought to turn her into a milkmaid,” says Alessandro.

  “And I have decided,” I say, finally collecting myself, “to remain a musician. Wait here.”

  I fetch my mandolin and sit back down again upon the scratchy chair and play for these two new people in my life, but I do not sing. I must be careful not to sing, for then Signora will believe that I am cured.

  With great concentration I direct my thoughts to Alessandro, the only recent witness of my gift returning. Don’t tell, I beg of him in silence. Please. You must not tell.

  ANOTHER LETTER FROM LUISA has arrived at last. It is so near the end of summer that I thought she would be home by now. In her absence, I am eager for a letter nonetheless and save it for a time when I am in the nursery, alone with all the little babes. It is their time to nap, and I can sit and rock and read without disturbance.

  Dear Anetta,

  Your story of the duke who came to claim you made me laugh. But then I thought of how you’ll need to search again and make a match before too long. I hope next time that he is handsome and a match to you in kindness as well as all your other good and comely virtues.

  There is a young man here who seems so much a twin to me in thought and understanding that I cannot imagine my future with anyone but him. Alessandro is his name, and he is beautiful in every way and well schooled for a boy who’s lived his life outside the city. For reasons that are not quite clear to me, there is some effort being made to keep the two of us apart, but it will do no good.

  It is to him I owe the resurrection of my singing voice, which, as you know, has been in hiding all these months.

  You are the only one to whom I have conveyed this news or told of Alessandro. But I needed to tell someone whom I trust, for I know that you will not divulge it. If Prioress should find out that my voice has been returned to me, I would be sent back to the Ospedale just as quickly as they could arrange it. Your generous soul I’m certain will delight in my great happiness and be joyful knowing of the cause of it.

  These past few weeks I’ve been consumed by Alessandro, but I have not forgotten our Rosalba and her plight. Has there been any news of her? Please tell me, too, of how Catina fares when next you write. It was with so much sadness that I watched her leave.

  Your friend,

  Luisa

  No Dearest friend again. But no matter. There are other things about this missive that do not cheer me in the least. It seems a country boy has claimed her heart. What future can there be for her in that? And at the very point that her glorious voice has been returned to her. Also she has sworn me to keep secret something I would sooner shout to one and all. Was not such a cure the reason for her villeggiatura? Shouldn’t she return to us at once? Should not Father Vivaldi be the first to know? But it will be just as she wishes. For a while. I will in fact destroy the letter, tear it into little bits, to keep it from the prying eyes of Silvia.

  I am lost in this troubling conundrum when Father stops me on my way to a sectional in chapel. My head is down, and he must reach out and put an arm across my path, an action that indeed arrests my woolgathering.

  “We’ll try again,” he says most earnestly.

  “What do you mean?”

  “I’ve composed a new concerto for your wily instrument. We’ll make another stab at landing you

  a paramour.”

  “Signore.” I laugh. “Is there no end to this? Must I go angling for a fish I do not wish to catch?”

  “I have my orders, child. If it were up to me, I’d much prefer to keep you here, brandishing your bow, singing your harmonies, and spoiling the bambine.”

  He hands me pages that have not yet seen the copyist. His mysterious markings still adorn the margins. The many ornaments denote another aspect of his style that anyone would recognize.

  “We won’t debut this for another month or more. So take your time.”

  “Time is what I do not have right now,” I tell him, but in truth, I am quite pleased that he has written something just for me again, and I make promises within myself to learn it well and cause him to be proud of both the work and me.

  He climbs the stairs into the loft that is my destination as well, where there’s a sectional for altos with Maestro Scarpari.

  “Children,” Father says when he arrives there out of breath. He claps his hands and gasps for air a moment. “You must bear with me this afternoon. Maestro has been called away.”

  Anna Maria goes at once to the continuo, ready to accompany our efforts, while Father wields his small baton and taps the music stand. It is his own composition that we sing, a short cantata with some places that are difficult where melody and harmony cross and sound most dissonant. The contralto solo opens this new work and is sung legato by Brigitta, but at the tutti, Father jumps about and shouts, “Agitato, Signorine! Molto agitato!” He makes us try the passage many times before he moves ahead to the next section, which is marked dolcissimo but which he urges us to sing ancora espressivo. At the marcato, he asks for un poco allegretto, which is not marked within the score. We please him, however, at the passage marked sforzando and are beginning to feel in synchrony with him and with the music when he suddenly becomes the true violinist, directing us to “sing with longer bows,” while rising on his toes and gesturing into the air. “That’s right, Signorine,” he calls out to us. “Much longer bows.”

  He asks me later if I’ve had any new letter from Luisa, and I tell him yes. But when he also asks about her voice, I say as little as I can and feign no knowledge of it. I very much regret deluding him. Is someone truly sworn who does not wish to be
and has not herself agreed to it? Whom can I ask who will not make me give the truth away?

  It’s not until I’m passing by the kitchen that I see an opportunity. Catina sits upon a stool and watches Cook. The child’s so thin, it looks as if she’ll slip right off her perch into the pot of soup. Her face is ashen and her tiny body stooped. Her raspy breathing colors all her speech. It doesn’t stop her constant questioning, however, which seems to drive poor Cook a little mad.

  “I told you, dear,” she tells Catina, “the water has to boil before you put the pasta in.”

  “It takes so long,” Catina says. “Isn’t there a better way?”

  “Just watch me, and you’ll learn how it is done.”

  On seeing me, Cook takes her chance.

  “Anetta,” she says, “Catina here is getting tired. Take her out into the air a bit. Go help her find some marjoram and thyme to dress the fowls for supper.”

  “I don’t know one herb from the next,” I tell her, but she winks at me and gives silent permission to return with anything at all.

  “Just go,” she says.

  We start out for the little patch in back that is abloom with leafy things that must be herbs and gated by a squat white fence — to keep the rats away, is my guess. It’s well beyond the lines for drying clothes and up against a higher fence along the street.

  At first Catina seems quite happy to be outside in the air, but at a grassy place beneath the trees she drops to her knees.

  “I’m very tired now, Anetta. Will you pick the herbs?”

  She curls up on her side and plucks at dandelions. I sit beside her and stretch out my legs.

  “What about Cook?” she asks.

  “I’ll get the herbs she wants. I’ll do it in a while.”

  For quite some time we stay this way and do not talk. I think she may, in fact, be falling off to sleep when I decide to whisper, “Today I had another letter from Luisa.”