By my third day in Venice, I had accumulated enough money to pay for a bed in a room with two others in a ramshackle boardinghouse on the Calle Bontini, near the boatyard. The smell of boiling tar reminded me of my father, and my first night there I wept. But I kept my guard up, too, for I was sharing the room with two grown men, shabbily dressed, and I knew enough to be wary when the fat one, named Filippo, blew out the candles as we got into our beds. Especially after the scrawny one, Giorgio, with ferret teeth and blotched cheeks, told me I had “pretty hair, like a girl.”
This kept me from a good night’s sleep, but it also planted the seed—which might never have blown into my head on its own—that would come to fruition two days later when Luca stopped to hear me play before a knot of people by the Palazzo Dandolo. I had replaced my wool cap with a floppy black hat, from which my hair flowed, and a long coat that concealed my figure. Luca listened until I finished the piece—a Scarlatti sonata—then nodded approvingly.
When I stooped to pick the coins from my bag, he asked me my age.
“Fourteen,” I replied softly, and because my voice was naturally high, and yet to acquire timbre, I could make it very soft indeed.
“And what is that you’re playing—a chalumeau?”
“No, sir, a clarinet.”
“Where do you live?”
“I lived on Mazzorbo, sir, until a few days ago, when the epidemic carried off my family and the landlord took away our house.”
“Your parents are dead?”
I nodded. “And my sisters. I was the youngest girl,” I added.
“And you have no home?”
“No, sir. I have only my clarinet and these pennies you see in my bag.”
He scrutinized me closely. “And your name?”
“Nicolà,” I replied after a moment’s hesitation.
That moment was to alter the course of my entire life.
You see, I had recognized Luca. The previous evening, I had gone to the Ospedale della Pietà to hear the orchestra of orphan girls play. The usher had allowed me to stand in the back. The girl musicians performed in a gallery above the altar, partially concealed from the audience behind an iron grille. The Master conducted them with a fierce energy. And Luca sat in a box above, surveying them with a critical eye. I knew that a good number of these girls, when they came of age, were recruited into professional orchestras, not only in Venice, but Padua, Ravenna, and other cities. There were good musical ensembles in some of the city’s other ospedali—especially the Mendicanti and the Incurabiliti, on the Zattere—but none compared to the Pietà’s. As I listened to the girls, I thought how wonderful it must be to be one of them, and to play such music. And all at once I hatched a scheme. I saw an opportunity, not only to fulfill my father’s grand prophesy that one day I would become a famous musician, but also to attend to the far more mundane and urgent need to get myself off the street, out of danger, with a secure roof over my head. It was a wild, desperate chance that would require plenty of luck, but I had nothing to lose.
So it was no accident that the next morning, disguising my gender as best I could, I chose a spot not fifty yards from the Ospedale della Pietà to play my clarinet, hoping Luca or the Master or someone who worked for them would hear me. How lucky I was, indeed, that it turned out to be Luca himself.
I was an orphan, but there was no orphanage for boys comparable to the Ospedale della Pietà, and certainly none with its own orchestra. The local orphanages for boys were in a woeful state, some just a step up from dungeons. The best of them was a warren of overcrowded rooms in a run-down annex of the Dominican seminary, whose monks were reputed to take pleasure in punishing the inmates. The wards who survived these grim establishments were sent into the world when they turned sixteen to do thankless work as oarsmen on commercial galleys or night laborers in the bowels of the Arsenal, assisting the shipbuilders. Only a fortunate few were apprenticed to prosperous tradesmen. With due respect to his memory, I did not want to follow my father’s path in life, doing backbreaking work at the mercy of overseers and living in constant fear of poverty.
Now I had my chance at something better—even if I had to begin as an impostor. Having grown up with three beloved sisters—Carla, Rhea, and Alessandra—I knew a few things about how girls dressed, carried themselves, and spoke. I had even learned some of their more private habits, living as we did in three small rooms with a wooden bathtub and an outdoor privy. My sisters and I shared the same bedroom, which had two beds. Until the age of eight, I slept beside Carla, the youngest, who was ten, and dressed with all of them; only when Rhea was twelve and Alessandra thirteen did my mother sling a hammock for me near the fireplace in the kitchen, where I was also expected to dress.
Luca told me the Master was about to conduct auditions, open to “outsiders,” who of course must be orphans, for two places in the orchestra that had been vacated unexpectedly.
“Can you read music?”
“Yes, sir. I learned in the church choir.”
“Good. Those who are chosen in the auditions will become residents of the Ospedale as well as members of the orchestra. Consider this an invitation to attend.”
“Thank you, sir.”
“Get yourself a clean dress, Nicolà,” he said, dropping two soldi into my bag and glancing disapprovingly at my rough shirt and pantaloons. “And be on time. Friday, at noon.”
4
I did not like the idea of dressing up as a girl—really dressing up, not just hiding behind a greatcoat—but I swallowed my pride and stuck to my plan. When I wavered, I had only to remind myself of the alternatives: playing on the street for coins and sharing a room with the likes of Filippo and Giorgio, or entering a boys’ orphanage.
I bought my dress that afternoon at a cluttered shop off the Campo San Polo. It cost me everything I had in my pocket, including Luca’s contribution, so I had no supper that night, and the following day ate only some discarded produce—an overripe apple, a turnip, and some carrot greens—that I found at the market by the Rialto Bridge. I told myself it didn’t matter that, waiting for Friday to come, I was too nervous to eat, anyway—and maybe I was. At the same time, I didn’t want to faint from hunger at the audition.
I was looking for a dress that was not just adequate, but eyecatching, as my sisters would have advised. The one I picked out with Signora Gramani, the dressmaker, was green linen trimmed with lace. With her trained eye, Signora Gramani was suspicious of me, but asked no questions.
She clearly thought something was amiss when I insisted on using the curtained-off changing room reserved for her well-to-do clients.
“Come, child, you can try it on right here,” she said. “It’s quite private, and men seldom enter my shop.”
But I insisted on going into the changing room, and when I emerged and she wouldn’t look me in the eye, I knew I had confirmed her suspicions. Venice was a city of exotic tastes and loose morals, so I would certainly not have been the strangest customer she ever served. But I believe the reason she treated me kindly was simply that she was kindhearted. She chose the proper stockings to go with my dress, and a blue shawl, and persuaded the shopkeeper next door to sell me a pair of green brocaded slippers at half price.
Margarita Gramani was a handsome, dark-eyed woman, widowed when her husband, a Navy captain, was killed in a sea battle with the Genoans. At forty, I thought, she was too young to be a widow. She sent me on my way with a kiss on the cheek, and as with Signora Capelli, I swore that someday, somehow, I would repay her kindness—a bold vow for someone who couldn’t even buy a crust of bread.
5
On Friday morning at my boardinghouse, I waited for Giorgio and Filippo to leave—both of them badly hungover from the previous night—then prepared myself with care before a broken piece of mirror I had salvaged. I washed and combed my hair, and, courtesy of Signora Gramani, brushed a touch of rouge onto my cheeks—the faintest blush—and extended my eyelashes with a small lead stick. After putting on my new outfit
, I went out the back door, so as to avoid the residents who might recognize me.
Walking along the canal to La Pietà in my dress, I had my first lesson in the indignities suffered by girls. Of course, I had seen the way men looked at my sisters, especially Alessandra, who was very beautiful. And I had overheard some of the rough men my father worked with talk about women. But it is different when you yourself are the target of oglers, and men who offer up crude remarks, and worst of all, men like the fat baker I encountered in an alley who was free with his hands, pinching my bottom and grabbing my dress where my breasts would have been if I had breasts. I kicked him in the shin and ran. And I realized that if I was going to pull off this masquerade, such abuse was the price I would have to pay, and it wasn’t going to get any easier.
At the church a blind boy named Aldo led me to the room where I would audition. He must have been around sixteen, broad-shouldered, with a long face and large ears. His sad, sly eyes seemed to be coated with a thin white film, like milk. His hands were oversized for his body and hung so heavily that they seemed to weigh down his arms and shoulders so that his fingertips reached well below his knees. He wore a sheepskin vest that smelled of sheep and a blue skullcap of rough wool that barely concealed his black curls. I thought it odd that a blind boy should be my guide, but would discover that Aldo knew his way around every nook and cranny of the church, from the basement to the steeple, and never missed a step or bumped into things. It was as if he had antennae, like an insect, and a detailed map of the Ospedale in his head. He came and went in the vestry, the rehearsal rooms, the Master’s quarters, and even the dormitory, where, after all, there was no chance of his seeing the girls undressed or otherwise. In fact, the girls were led to believe that his presence was no more threatening than that of a eunuch in a Turkish harem.
Like many blind people, Aldo’s lack of vision had sharpened his other senses: he could hear and smell things the rest of us couldn’t. Perhaps that was why he sniffed the air around me in the audition room with a puzzled expression. He is more suspicious of me than Signora Gramani, I thought, taking a seat beside the violinist and the flautist, as far from Aldo as I could get. Can he actually smell that I’m a boy, not a girl? I asked myself.
I would soon find out.
6
Shortly after I passed the audition, Luca informed me that the Master would now interview me in his office. In my ignorance, I hadn’t expected this, and I grew anxious trying to imagine the questions he would ask. More importantly, I realized that speaking softly would no longer be enough: from now on, beginning with the Master, I would have to disguise my voice during every conversation. I knew the best course was to answer his questions truthfully, adhering to my actual history, except for the matter of my gender. That way there was only one lie I could be caught out in. It was a big lie, and I wasn’t much of a liar, with no experience of lying on a scale like this, but I told myself that if I stuck to a simple set of answers, no matter how complicated the questions, I would be all right.
This shaky logic left me uneasy as Luca escorted me down a corridor and ushered me through a tall yellow door. In the Master’s office the heels of my new shoes clicked sharply on the brick floor. It was a sunny day, but heavy drapes were drawn over the windows and a pair of burning candles flanked a cluttered desk. Bent over a piece of sheet music, humming to himself, the Master was writing with a black quill.
He nodded toward a chair wedged between two piles of books and musical scores. “Sit, Nicolà, and tell me how you came by your clarinet and where you learned to play it.”
Again I was caught off guard. Preoccupied with my masquerade, fearful of exposure, expecting trick questions, I was not prepared for such an obvious one. Nor for the shock of finding myself alone with Venice’s greatest musician, and hearing him utter my assumed name. Trying to grasp the fact that I was there because he was interested in me. After suffering through the worst week of my life, I couldn’t believe my good fortune.
“Well?” the Master said.
“I come from Mazzorbo,” I began. “My father was a mason. A good one. One day he fell from a scaffold while working at the Church of Santi Apostoli. He was lucky he wasn’t killed. But he broke his arm and it never healed properly. So then he mixed tar at the boatyard and did small jobs to support all of us. Last year he was hired to build a fireplace for a glovemaker, Signor Benito Agnetti, who lived in the Giudecca. When Father completed the work, Signor Agnetti confessed that he didn’t have the money to pay him. Father threatened to complain to the local constable and, if necessary, to the Giudecca’s commissioner, who is one of the Doge’s councillors. Signor Agnetti grew fearful and, without thinking, told my father that, in lieu of ducats, he could take any object in his shop as payment. He soon regretted that he hadn’t been more specific, for expecting my father to pick out the most expensive pair of gloves, Signor Agnetti was stunned to see my father—who wore only masonry gloves—eyeing objects with which Agnetti had dressed up the shop: a crystal pitcher, a Moroccan dagger with a silver handle, and most valuable of all, an oval mirror from Murano. But Signor Agnetti breathed a sigh of relief when my father chose this clarinet, which caught his eye suddenly on a high shelf.”
“You must know it is a relatively new instrument,” the Master said.
I shook my head.
“You don’t. Do you know anything about its origins?”
“No, sir.”
“You know only how to play it,” he said skeptically. “All right. I’ll give you a short history. Twenty years ago, in Nuremberg, Germany, a man named Denner took the chalumeau, which was like a shepherd’s pipe, with a single reed and nine holes, and improved upon it. He gave it a proper embouchure and added two holes above the duodecime key, enabling the clarinet to produce both upper and lower registers, pitched somewhere between an oboe and a trumpet, but with greater range than either. I wondered when I would encounter another clarinetist, but I never dreamed it would be a girl your age. Your instrument is more beautifully crafted than the one I saw in Milan. It must be worth a great deal.”
More than my father ever imagined, I wanted to say. “Signor Agnetti told my father the clarinet was a gift from his cousin, who lived in San Polo and had no use for it. Signor Agnetti gave my father the impression that he and his cousin were not on the best of terms. Knowing I loved music, and had learned to read scores while singing at our church, my father chose the clarinet for me, though he didn’t know what it was. He encouraged me to play it. We were a poor family, and he could easily have sold it instead.”
“He was a good man,” the Master nodded approvingly, and I could see he had enjoyed the story. “So that is how you acquired the clarinet. And now I’ve given you its history. But I asked you where you learned to play it—in just one year, apparently,” he added with a raised eyebrow. “Who was your teacher?”
I became tongue-tied, trying to invent a name.
“Who taught you?” he prodded me.
I decided to tell the truth. “I had no teacher.”
He sat back in his chair. “You would have me believe you are self-taught, and on such a unique instrument?”
I nodded.
His eyes narrowed. “All right. I would like to hear more about that.”
My mind was racing, but I spoke carefully. “As I said, I learned music from Father Michele at the Church of Santa Caterina on Mazzorbo.”
“I know Father Michele,” the Master said.
“You do?” I said, barely getting the words out.
“We were ordained the same year. I am acquainted with most of the priests in the archdiocese.”
I knew the Master was a priest—“the Red Priest,” people called him, on account of his hair—but even there in his own church he didn’t look or sound like one to me, not like Father Michele or any other priest.
“I don’t see Father Michele often,” he went on, “but at Christmas we dine at the Bishop’s residence with our brethren.”
I began to p
anic. My mouth went dry. And it took all my energy to appear calm. Christmas was nine months off, but if the Master should mention to Father Michele that a girl named Nicolà Vitale, who sang in his choir, had recently joined the orchestra at the Ospedale, and Father Michele replied, as he must, that he had never heard of such a girl, the game would be up. At best, I would appear to be a conniving and deceitful girl; at worst, I would be exposed as a brash impostor. Either way, it would result in my expulsion from the Ospedale.
“After choir practice at my church,” I continued, “I attempted to play the hymns we sang on my clarinet. When troubadours visited Mazzorbo, I played along with them from a distance—where they couldn’t hear me. I also went into the woods each day and echoed the birdsongs, note for note.”
“Birdsongs?”
“Yes, the sparrows and starlings and the wild canaries, with their high pitch.”
The Master smiled. “And in what key do the sparrows sing, Nicolà?”
“G major, usually.”
He tucked his thumbs into his vest pockets and studied me more closely. “So you’re another Orpheus, eh? Do you know who Orpheus was?”
I shook my head.
“No? Well, tell me about your family. Luca said they died in the epidemic. I am sorry to hear it. You had brothers and sisters?”
“Three sisters. And a brother, Alessandro,” I added hastily, thinking I had better make sure to establish that there was a boy in the Zen family of Mazzorbo, in case inquiries were made. Except that the inquiries—and who exactly did I imagine would be making them?—would be about the Vitale family, Nicolà’s family, which did not exist; the only Zen on Mazzorbo with a name like Nicolà was one Nicolò Zen, who had disappeared. It was all very confusing. After having convinced myself there was only one lie I could be caught out in, I quickly discovered that one lie leads to another, and another, and another, until finally it’s not just the truth, but your own lies that you can’t keep straight.