The parties and performances continued on into February, keeping Vivaldi and myself occupied and therefore separated more often than not. I was out more and more with Tommaso Foscari, and yet no proposal of marriage had been made.
“What in the name of God and Mother Mary can the boy be waiting for?” my father fumed one day as another note from Tommaso arrived, inviting me to the opera—again at the Teatro San Giovanni Grisostomo. “He continues to seek out your company—and exclusively, I might add—and yet he has not made you an offer.” He turned to look hard at me where I sat sedately in my sitting room. “You have not been allowing him improper intimacies, have you?”
“Of course not,” I said, offended in spite of myself.
“Hmph,” he said, pacing before me. “What, then, is the problem?”
“Perhaps…” I began hesitantly.
He stopped pacing and looked eagerly at me. “Yes?”
“Perhaps the problem is his family,” I said. “Perhaps they object to a match with a girl who is not of noble blood.”
“Outrageous,” he scoffed. “We come from old Venetian stock, and what is more, we can far outstrip most noble families in the republic in terms of wealth. No family will turn their nose up at a girl with a large dowry in favor of an impoverished noble one.”
I remained silent. Truthfully I had asked myself the same question. Why had Tommaso not asked for my hand? Betrothals were arranged every day between brides and grooms of far less acquaintance than we had. Somehow, I was both relieved and worried that he had not proposed. After all, had I not become painfully aware on that first night at the Teatro Sant’ Angelo how well suited Tommaso and I were for each other? I might not relish the idea of marriage, but I relished far less the idea of my father being forced to find a replacement for Tommaso, should things not work out as he planned.
* * *
Before long, Shrove Tuesday came and went, and the Lenten season was upon us. The city, deprived of parties, excesses, and pleasure for forty days and nights, sank into a gray, lifeless sort of melancholy. The weather seemed infected by the same listlessness, and turned damp, gloomy, and chill.
Relieved as I was that things had quieted down—at least for a time—I soon descended into my own personal dejection, for an entirely different reason. One night not long into Lent, I arrived at Vivaldi’s house to find him in a frenzy of activity. A trunk filled with clothes sat open on the floor, and on the table was a worn leather folio with scores spilling out of it.
“What is going on?” I asked, my heart in my throat. For a moment, I thought with dreadful certainty he was leaving Venice for good. After all, what was truly keeping him here? What man would let himself be bound by a woman who was going to leave him as soon as her suitor asked for her hand in marriage?
“I received an invitation to play at several churches in Brescia during Lent, so I depart the day after tomorrow,” he explained as he shuffled through his music. “My father is to accompany me.”
I let out a shaky breath, relieved.
“Your father?” I asked cautiously. Neither of us had brought up our horrible fight since our reconciliation, but I wondered what had passed between him and his father afterward.
“Yes,” he said, distractedly, hunting about his desk for something. “He is to play as well.” He glanced up, caught sight of my expression, and straightened. “He is—we have nothing to fear from him, cara,” he said. “The day after he … discovered us, he returned, and I told him that it was over, because…” He trailed off uncomfortably and looked away. “At the time, I thought it was.” He smiled tightly. “That did not stop him from reading me quite the lecture, however. He is very pious.”
“I see.” I looked away, feeling as if Signor Vivaldi’s disapproving gaze had fallen on me again. “And how long will you be gone?” I asked, changing the subject.
“I am not certain yet. Two weeks, perhaps? Maybe a bit more.”
“Oh,” I said. “Well. I shall miss you.”
Finally he stopped rummaging and turned to face me, giving me his full attention. “I shall miss you as well, cara,” he said. “I wish you were coming with me—for more than the obvious reasons,” he said, catching the playful smile that slid across my face. “It is at times like these that I wish women performers could be heard somewhere other than from behind the curtains and screens of the ospedali.” He gave me a smile so full of warmth and pride I felt as if I could accomplish anything, if only he would keep smiling at me like that. “Truly the bigots are punishing themselves, for they are depriving themselves of the pleasure of hearing you play.”
“Even you cannot change the world that much, caro mio,” I said. “No matter how badly you may want to.”
His eyes searched mine for a moment. “I want it for your sake more than anything else,” he said. “If there is one thing I still pray for, it is that there may be another way out for you.”
I did not know what to say to this. “Maybe I should go,” I said finally, glancing once more around at the general disarray of the room. Is this how the ending begins? I wondered, the heat of his smile just moments before having vanished as surely as winter chases away the summer sun. I sighed. “You clearly have much to do, and I—”
“No,” he cut me off. “Please stay. I wanted very much to see you before I left. And,” he added, brightening, “I have something new I would like you to play. If you are willing, that is.”
“And when have I not been willing?”
His smile widened at the suggestive double meaning of my words. “Eccellente.” He crossed the room to me and removed my cloak, his fingers brushing briefly over my collarbone, my breast, my hip. He draped the cloak over the back of a chair and plucked a few sheets of parchment from his desk, placing them on a music stand. I fetched my violin, tightened the bow, and applied rosin to the bow hairs. When he saw that I was ready, he gestured to the pages. “Go on, then. Play.”
* * *
Two days later he was gone.
“He will be back, madonna,” Giuseppe assured me, on a day when I could not seem to hide my misery.
I did not reply, nor could I explain to him that my sorrow was over more than Vivaldi’s mere absence. This is how my life will be. Someday soon we will be apart permanently, and I will live in these suffocating shadows forever.
I returned to the harpsichord, painstakingly hunched over my splotched and smeared staff paper, which I had been forced to begin drawing myself. Each time I began a new composition, I would think, Perhaps this is the one that I finally show to Tonio. Yet inevitably, the tightly woven tapestry that each composition began as, with each note precisely placed and agonized over, would begin to unravel, starting to seem trite and uninspired. I was a merciless critic of my work, even as I was forced to concede that I was consistently improving.
Everything I wrote while Vivaldi was gone was in a minor key—A minor, G minor, E minor, B minor—until even I grew weary of my own melancholy and forced myself to write something in A major. It sounded forced, unnatural; and so I learned to let the music come out in whichever key it chose.
In my darkest moments, I angrily wondered why I bothered at all. There were even fewer opportunities for female composers than there were for female musicians—indeed, I had never heard of a female composer before; not one whose music was performed in public, anyway. My music would never be played from behind the grille at the Pietà, or in an opera house, or in a church or anywhere else. Indeed, no one but I would likely ever know of it. Why, then, did I waste my time?
All women, I realized, on one such dark day, are shadow creatures. We all stand in the shadows of our fathers, our brothers, our husbands, our sons, our lovers. The sun shines only upon men. And a woman who would play or write music is in the deepest shadows of all, for her existence is usually not even acknowledged.
The violin was the voice I had been given; yet that voice was doomed to be silenced. And I came to realize that was what bothered me the most about my life, as a sheltered, supposedly privileged Venetian woman. Not marriage, not childbearing, not the inability to choose my own husband; all of these things could be borne, if only there was music. If only I might choose that much, at least, for myself.