When the arbitrator, who had some weeks ago invited her to Venice for an interview, had explained all of this to her, Caterina had decided that he was joking or had taken leave of his senses, possibly both. She had, however, smiled and asked him to explain a bit more fully the particular circumstances, adding that this would help her more clearly to understand the duties the position might entail. What she did not tell him was how the sight and smell and feel of Venice had so overpowered her that she knew she wanted the job, regardless of the conditions, and to hell with Manchester.
Dottor Moretti’s explanation contained elements of myth, family saga, soap opera, and farce, though it contained no names. The deceased cleric, he told her, was a Baroque composer who easily would be within her competence; he had died almost three centuries before, leaving no will. His possessions had been disbursed. Two chests believed to contain papers and, perhaps, valuables had been found and brought to Venice. One undisputed element in all of this was the claimants’ descent from the relatives of the childless musician: both had produced copies of baptismal and marriage certificates going back more than two hundred years.
Here Caterina had interrupted to ask the name of the musician, a question that obviously surprised Dottor Moretti in its rash impropriety. That would be revealed only to a successful candidate, and she was not yet to be considered that, was she? It was a small snap of the whip, but it was nevertheless a snap.
Would the candidate, she asked, be told the name of the musician before beginning to examine whatever papers might be found?
That, Dottor Moretti had explained, would depend upon the nature of what was found in the trunks. Another snap. The two heirs, he surprised her by saying, would interview all likely candidates. Separately. No longer able to contain herself, Caterina had interrupted again to ask Dottor Moretti if he were making this up. With a look as sober as his tie, the arbitrator had assured her that he was not.
Her task, he had gone on to explain, would be to read through the documents that were believed to be in the trunks and that were likely to be in Italian, German, and Latin, though others might well be in French and Dutch, perhaps even English. Any passages referring to the deceased musician’s testamentary wishes or to his affection for or involvement with various members of his family were to be translated in fulclass="underline" those papers relating to music or other areas of his life did not have to be translated. The cousins would expect frequent reports on her progress. It seemed that Dottor Moretti experienced a certain embarrassment in having to say this. “If you send these reports to me, I will forward them.”
When Caterina expressed a certain difficulty in understanding why no one knew the contents of these trunks, Dottor Moretti told her that the seals appeared to be intact. Assuming this to be true, then the chests had not been opened for centuries.
Caterina had the good sense to say that all of this sounded interesting, adding that, to a researcher, it sounded fascinating. As she spoke, she ran through the names of composers in search of whom it might be, but since she didn’t know either his nationality or where he had died—or lived, for that matter—there was little chance of identifying him.
She must have impressed Moretti, for he told her he would like her to speak that afternoon to two men he suggested she treat as gentlemen. He asked only one thing of her, he added: once she learned their family names, she could easily trace them back to the composer. He trusted she would not do so until the decision about the position had been made, then explained, before she could ask, that this was a request from the two presumptive heirs, “men with a certain fondness for secrecy.”
Caterina said she would begin research only if granted the job and would not pursue it in any way were she not chosen.
That same afternoon, she had met the contesting heirs, introduced to them, separately, by name. They met in the “library,” which turned out to be a room holding photocopies of the libretti and the scores of the operas and orchestral works of the dozen or so composers who had most delighted Signor Dardago. The library had a large table and bookshelves on which the photocopies no longer made the attempt to stand upright. There were just three or four books on the shelves, lying flat as though placed there in haste. She looked more closely and saw that one of them was a historical novel about a castrato.
Nothing either of the two men said or did suggested that they were anything but gentlemen. The evidence that such an attribution was mistaken had come that evening from her parents, with whom she was staying, and who, in the best Venetian way, told her what was common knowledge about each of them.
Franco Scapinelli was the owner of four shops selling glass in the area around San Marco. He was also—though nothing that happened during the interview would have suggested this—a convicted usurer who was forbidden from owning any business in the city. But who to forbid a man from giving his sons a hand in their shops? What sort of law would that be?
The other contender, Umberto Stievani, owned water taxis, seven of them, and declared, according to a friend of Caterina’s father—a friend who happened to work in the Guardia di Finanza—a yearly income of just over eleven thousand euros. The combined income of his two sons who worked for him as pilots did not reach that of their father.
During the interviews, both men claimed great interest in the manuscripts and documents and whatever else might be contained in the chests, but as Caterina listened to each of them, she realized their interest was not in any historical or musicological importance the purported documents might have. Both had asked if any manuscripts would have value, meaning would anyone want to buy them. Stievani, no doubt because of his time spent among taxi drivers, had used the elegance of their language to ask, “Valgono schei?” Caterina wondered if money was real to him only if named in Veneziano.
They must have approved of her, for here she was less than a month later, both her position and her apartment in Manchester abandoned, standing in an office at the Fondazione Italo-Tedesca, eager to begin work. And she was home again, her spirit salved by the sounds and smells of the city, by the enveloping familiarity.
She took a closer look around the room. Three small prints hung to the left of the window behind the desk. She moved across the room, not a difficult thing to do, and took a closer look at these bewigged men in their plastic Ikea frames. She recognized Apostolo Zeno by the length of his wig and the long white scarf popping out from his robes. Familiarity with prints of the bewigged Handel made it easy to recognize him. And farthest to the left was Porpora, looking as though he’d stolen his wig from Bach and his jacket from a naval commander. Poor old Porpora, to have been such a high flier and then to have died in penury.
Caterina examined the window behind her. About the size of one of the prints, 15 × 20 centimeters, it had to be the smallest window she had ever seen. It might even be the smallest window in the city.
She put her face close to the glass and saw the shutters of the apartment on the other side of the calle: green, weather-stained, shut, as if the inhabitants were still asleep. It was ten in the morning, surely time that respectable people—hearing herself think it, gente per bene, she felt as though she were channeling her grandmother’s voice—would be up and about, off to the office, off to school, busy, doing, working.
Caterina, a victim of the work ethic, had always thought she must be a throwback to some northern European invader, a blond-haired Goth whose genetically fueled lust for industry had lain dormant for generations, centuries, only to burst into bloom with the birth of the last child of Marco Pellegrini and Margherita Rossi. How else explain the atavistic desire for serious work that had driven her even when she was a child? How else explain her response when once offered a job as a city counselor for music education by the mayor, an old friend of her father? She saw no sense in diverting money from one school to another, nor in overseeing music instruction in schools that had no books, no musical instruments, and teachers of music who, though unable to read musical notation, found perfectly legible the intentions of the politicians who offered them the jobs. She had refused.