FOURTEEN
IN THE MERCERIA, next door to Costanzo’s Sausages, a painted plaque swung in the March air from a metal arm outside a new shop. The plaque was not an exact replica of Mino’s half token—Ana had painted it on the floor in her apartment—but it was close. Mino felt a proud ache to see it marking the entrance to his store, to see the words above it:
I Violini della Mamma.
It had been Ana’s idea to paint the plaque in the image of his half token, to name the fledgling shop after his mother.
“I do not wish to whore my token out,” he’d told her in a series of arguments beginning the night he’d fixed her sister’s violin.
“Think of it as a talisman, Mino,” she’d said, ever calm and steady, “to draw your family closer to you.”
Eventually he saw her wisdom. Between his work in the sausage shop, his renewed devotion to the violin, and Ana, there was less and less time to pursue his mother, especially with no leads to follow. But what could Mino do with the shame he felt at not searching for her?
“More people will pass by and see this painting than you could ever show her to,” Ana argued. “If anyone pauses to stare, is compelled to step inside, there you’ll be. And if they don’t know your family, maybe they’ll want your business.”
While Mino sought out materials—willow and spruce planks, clamps and blades, metal bending straps to shape the instruments’ waists—Ana worked on the shop itself. She had convinced her family to spare the storage room adjacent to their storefront. It had its own entrance and was just the right size for a man starting out. She detailed a plan for Mino to pay them rent as soon as his work turned a profit. She scoured the columns of San Marco to round up groups of facchìni, men for daily hire waiting near the docks. But for the grace of God and Ana, Mino would have still been one of them. The men brought their axes and their wood, cleared the room, and built a wall and a door between the two establishments.
She had Mino fitted for a periwig, explaining that no merchant wore his own hair. She chose wallpaper, patterned in blue like Mino’s eyes, and bought four plush blue receiving chairs on consignment. She threw down rugs and bought an expensive tea set, insisting Mino learn to steep and serve it, making him promise to offer a cup to anyone who stepped inside.
“Venice is small,” she said. “Everything you do must suit the gossips.”
She was the one who pushed him to open before Easter, kept him up until early in the mornings, constructing a prototype violin for the shop. Privately, Mino wished to model his prototype not on Stella’s instrument but on the one he’d rebuilt years ago: his first violin. He spent a week tinkering with the angle of the neck, making the strings arch higher and higher, drawing closer to the sound he remembered could match Letta’s voice on the roof.
When it was not ready by Easter, he felt anxious about disappointing Ana. She had invested so much in him. Her happiness was increasingly essential to his own.
Was this love?
She was generous, gave him things he didn’t know he wanted. In return she made her expectations clear. There were many, but they were reasonable, and most had to do with his work. He was to be frugal with his expenses. He was to honor the relationships her family had established with the other merchants on the calle. He was not to take his earnings to a tavern. Between the two of them, in the little bedroom they shared at night, with Sprezz, life was easy. They could please each other so simply. They could fall asleep fast in each other’s arms.
Every day he grew more confident in his work, his blade quicker at the wood, his fingers steadier at fine-tuning the strings. His prototype looked finished, but it still did not approach his first violin.
He sat at the table for two days, staring down at the instrument, mystified. He walked the streets with Sprezz. He avoided Ana’s probing questions about opening the shop. He snuck into a tavern. He ordered a drink, and then another, feeling guilty but in need of the jolt. He let his mind travel back to repairing his first violin.
Before that carnevale afternoon. Before he’d bought the masks and found the golden ring between cobblestones. Before he’d kissed her for an instant in the apartment.
Back to when he was just agreeing to the terms of his work at the squero. For a year before his full apprenticeship began, Mino had volunteered his time at the boatyard one afternoon a week. He was given small tasks, mostly hauling materials to and from the workshops. He watched old men sawing wood for gondolas, waiting for them to break for supper so that he could devote himself to that broken instrument.
Mino remembered varnishing it, but now he wondered why he would have done it. The violin would have already been varnished. Then he remembered the plague of worms that had swept through the squero’s store of wood. He remembered being tasked with dousing the shipbuilding oak and fir and elm with a potent, protective brine. When no one was looking, he had submerged the violin in the brine as well. He would not surrender his most prized possession to worms.
The violin had sounded different ever after.
Now, in the tavern in Cannaregio, Mino paid his bill and raced back to Ana’s apartment.
“Mino!” Ana sounded shocked when she found the prototype in pieces once again.
But he was heating canal water over the hearth, too consumed with his work to answer.
BY THE BEGINNING of April, two weeks after Easter, Mino was ready to open. Ana wore her best dress and had ordered a new light blue suit for Mino. She brewed tea, brought in oranges and dry sausages on a tray as Mino counted the minutes until his first appointment. Stella was sending her friend Elizabeth and her husband, John, from the opera house in London.
At eleven o’clock, the three of them entered in a whirlwind of high voices and blond hair, flitting about the shop as Ana showed off Mino’s prototype.
“The angle of the neck is his signature,” Ana said, running her fingers down the instrument’s body. They had agreed to let customers know about the neck but not the brining; Mino wished to keep his greatest innovation still a secret. “Notice how high it is. It produces a stronger, far more brilliant sound than the traditional shape.”
“What we need is repair,” John said. “We have half a dozen violins in need of attention.”
Mino was watching Elizabeth, remembering the rumor that she knew every musician in Venice. He stayed close to her as Ana poured tea and led John to a chair, suggesting prices that made the man shift uncomfortably in his seat.
“Your wife is good at this,” Elizabeth said to Mino.
He flushed, and Elizabeth raised her chin slightly, understanding his embarrassment. “Never mind, Mino. You can marry anytime, or not at all. This is Venice, isn’t it?”
“Yes,” Mino said. The idea of marrying anyone but Letta still surprised him sometimes.
“Hmm . . .” Elizabeth smiled and picked up his violin from its stand near the window. She held it expertly and drew the bow across the strings, drawing out a beautiful, trembling C minor. “Wonderful!”
It struck Mino that Elizabeth had played the opening chord of his mother’s song. He thought of what Ana had said about the plaque being a talisman. The British woman’s candor set him at ease.
“May I ask you something?” he said.
When Elizabeth set down the violin, Mino pulled out the half token. “Maybe you saw this outside.”
She nodded. “It’s very pretty.”
“My mother left it for me. She was a singer, I think, and I . . .”
“You were hoping I would know her,” Elizabeth said kindly. “I am sorry.”
“Excuse me.” Mino put his token away, wishing he had never shown it. He had ruined his first appointment with this personal request. He felt ashamed, watching Ana smoothly serving the tea to John.
“What if Mino made us new violins, John?” Elizabeth called across the shop. “He might spend as much time repairing your old, decrepit instruments as building an orchestra from scratch.”
“That’s a huge commission, darling,” John said. “The man has just opened shop today. Give him a moment to catch his breath.”
“Didn’t you hear the way it played? If we give him a moment, he’ll be booked for years.”
John looked at Mino and laughed. “In all of Europe are there two women with stronger convictions than ours?”
Mino pushed Letta from his mind.
“I’ll do it,” he said.
“In that case, we’ll need champagne.” Ana grinned at him.
When Mino returned with the bottle, he was still trying to reconcile his gloom over the token with his pleasure over the commission. Ana worked out the financial details with John while Mino popped the cork and filled the glasses. Everyone drank heartily but Ana, who tasted hers and returned to her accounting. Mino wished she would give in to the moment a little more.
At the door, Elizabeth kissed his cheek in parting. “I hope you find her, Mino.”
When the English couple left, Ana caught him by the wrist, concerned. “What’s wrong with you?”
Was it his mother? Was it Ana? He didn’t know, and so he told her, “I wish they were Venetian. I don’t like to think about my violins traveling to England, somewhere I’ll never see.”
“Mino, this is only the beginning. And an incredible one! We must thank Stella.” She looked up at him tenderly and kissed him. “There will be many more violins.”
He nodded, but something nagged at him.
“I’m off to help Mamma,” she said. “I’ll be back at closing time.”
With Ana gone next door, it puzzled Mino that he had the next year of his life sorted. He glanced around the storage room, where he would now be every day. He felt immense gratitude, but then something else, something stifling that he didn’t want to look at too closely for fear of what he might discover.
TWO WEEKS LATER, as Mino was measuring the cut he would make to the ribs of the first violin, the shop door opened. When he looked up from his worktable, his chest constricted. The prioress of the Incurables and Laura stood in the middle of his store.
“Mino?” the prioress said, seeming as struck as he was by their meeting. She rushed forward to embrace him and held him close. Mino could not move. Over her shoulder he saw Laura studying him.
Was Letta nearby? Waiting outside? What would Mino do if she stepped through his door? Would he fall to dust?
“What are you doing here?” he asked, his voice a whisper.
“We’ve just come from auditioning a trumpeter at San Apostoli,” Laura explained. For parts like the trumpet, deemed unsuitable for women players, the ospedali commissioned external musicians to play with the coro.
“He’s good,” Mino said. Ana loved the trumpeter at San Apostoli, though Mino had always preferred strings over brass.
“We heard about a new shop in this neighborhood,” the prioress said, “but I never dreamed we’d find you.” At last she released him, keeping his hands in hers. “Look at you. How marvelous. But—what about the squero?”
He shook his head. “Things changed.”
The prioress looked stunned, her mind working as she glanced back out the window. “I recognized the painting outside but wasn’t sure why. Now, of course, I remember.”
“My mother—”
“Your half token—”
“I’m still looking for her.” Mino found himself looking at Laura. They did not know each other. They had never spoken in the thirteen years they’d both been at the Incurables. But Letta used to talk about Laura. Mino was surprised to feel Laura looking at him pointedly. What would Letta have told her?
“Did you make this?” Laura asked, approaching his prototype. “The bridge is so unusual.”
Mino moved to her side, placed the instrument in her hands. “Please.”
She began to play a measure. He closed his eyes, aching to hear the old sacred music again. Ana and Mino went to church in their sestieri on Sundays, but the music was nothing compared to that at the Incurables.
“It’s remarkable,” Laura breathed when she was finished. “I’d love to hear how it sounds in the church.”
Mino bowed his head. This was significant praise from an Incurables musician—and from someone Letta had spoken of so highly. “Thank you.”
Laura raised an eyebrow, as if getting an idea. “Many of the coro violins are in need of repair.”
“Laura, I’m not sure we have the funds—” the prioress started to say.
“That violin outplays any I have ever touched. Think of the Sensa concert, siora. At least let us discuss it with the maestro.”
The prioress’s face took on a stubborn set. “The Pietà girls do try to outshine us every year.” She looked at Mino, raised her shoulders as if helpless. “Come by. We will talk.”
Mino’s heart was racing. He had been back to the Incurables to hear Letta sing, but anonymously, briefly. He’d had to face no one and left the church feeling shattered. To return at someone else’s request, as a merchant, when Letta might see him? He could not trust himself to act professionally in her presence. He would do more harm to his fledgling business than good. Ana would sense something. It was impossible.
“Tomorrow?” Laura said.
“I’ll be working.”
“Come when you can then,” the prioress said.
“It’s difficult. My customers—”
“Make us your customers,” Laura said. “Your violins could transform our coro.”
“Sunday,” he blurted out against all reason. Before he could change his mind, he added: “After mass.”
As soon as they left, chattering excitedly, Mino collapsed in a chair. He closed his eyes and heard Letta’s voice. He yearned for her, still, with such ferocity that he could no longer deny he’d yearned for her every moment of these recent months with Ana. That his instruments might accompany Letta’s voice, might share the air she breathed, was too much.
He didn’t know how long he sat there petting Sprezz, but when Ana returned to the shop and he rose to pretend nothing had changed, it was dark outside.