Lucifer's Shadow

17 The Red Priest

Santa Maria della Visitazione — or La Pietà, as everyone seems to call it — is a crumbling piece of stone a little way along from the Doge’s Palace. They say the place is so feebly built that one day it will be pulled down entirely and replaced with something more fitting. The Venetians must have magnificence, you see, particularly in such a prominent location.

We stood on the doorstep in silence. Until now this was a prank. Had the city militia caught us, what reprimand might there have been for a Jewess who forgot to wear her red scarf and her foolish companion? A few harsh words for Rebecca and a clip round the ear for me. But to walk over the threshold of La Pietà was very different. The Hebrew would be entering Christ’s Church, and not for penitence or some instant conversion, either. Would God strike us down on the very steps? Would we be damned for eternity for some gross insult against the Lord’s house?

I cannot answer for the latter, but on the first I have to disappoint you. When we finally summoned the courage to march through the gloomy rectangle of La Pietà’s front porch, we were greeted by nothing more than the sound of stringed instruments scratching their way through a piece of middling difficulty. No claps of thunder. No roars from on high. We entered the nave of the church, and there sat a small chamber orchestra, mostly girls in dark cheap dresses, with Vivaldi waving his stick over them.

I must admit I expected rather more of the famed Red Priest. For one thing, the red hair is long gone — the poor fellow wears a dusty white wig to cover his bald head. True, there is a vivid scarlet frock coat, but his face is bloodless and pasty and his eyes forever squint crossly at the page. I peered at that high pale forehead, thinking about the miracle of creation (individual, not divine). Somehow all this wondrous music had escaped such a humble frame and ventured out to capture the world. For a while, anyway. They say Vivaldi has had scant success since he wrote The Four Seasons eight years ago and must now travel as a journeyman conductor to Vienna and beyond to pay his bills.

We stood in the shadows for a while until he rattled his little stick on the stand and waved silence over the small band of players.

“You,” he then yelled in our direction. “You’re late.”

Rebecca walked out into the light, her small violin case at her side, and I was amused to see an expression of admiration steal its way over Vivaldi’s face. Rebecca has this e fect upon people. I slid into a pew, the better to observe proceedings.

“Where are you from, girl? What use are you to me?”

She bowed her head modestly. “Geneva originally, sir. I cannot answer for the other. You must be the judge.”

“Hmmm. I know men in Geneva. Your teacher?”

“Only my late father, who was a carpenter by trade.”

His face sagged quite noticeably. “Very well, then,” he grunted in a most miserable fashion. “Play something. Let’s get it over with.”

Rebecca opened her case and took out a rough-looking instrument stained a rather disgusting shade of reddy-brown.

“Did he make that, too, girl?” Vivaldi demanded. “Must be the ugliest-looking instrument I’ve ever seen.”

She gazed at him with a firmness of purpose I found quite admirable. “He did, sir, and would have bought me something better if we could have a forded it.”

“Ye gods,” the old misery sighed, and placed a skinny, withered hand over his chin.

I could not take my eyes off Rebecca, for a variety of reasons. Something in this exchange amused her greatly. I felt already that she would best this grumpy old priest.

“A study we used to play, sir,” she announced sweetly, then raised her rough-hewn bow and brought it down on that ugly lump of wood like an angel felling demons with a sword. Well! You may guess what occurred next: a miracle. She wrung from that battered old thing such tones of sweetness, such surging passages of passion that I thought at one point our great composer might faint upon the floor in a swoon!

True, some of this was show (and what is wrong with that in the circumstances?). She dashed through scales, note perfect and at a flashing speed. She double-stopped, then treble-stopped, up and down the neck. A slip of a folk tune fell in here, some baroque finery there. Slow passages, fast passages, light and dark, loud and quiet, they dazzled us with their technical skill and yet carried a great sense of feeling too. I am no fiddler— having listened to Rebecca, I now doubt I am a musician at all — but I know genius when I hear it. Vivaldi was right about the instrument, which was not worthy of her. But none could doubt Rebecca’s brilliance, and it warmed my heart to see it wrung some emotion and generosity out of the old man, too, for when she finished this astonishing exhibition, the priest rose to his feet, broke into a broad, ingenuous grin, clapped his hands like a five-year-old, and yelled, “Hurrah!”

Rebecca, with that knowing smile still upon her closed lips, quietly placed the instrument back in its case, then looked at him and said, all innocence, “I hope I may be of use to you, sir. In some capacity.”

“Good God, girl!” he exclaimed. “You’re just the wonder I need.”

“Thank you.” She said this, I am happy to report, with a touch of firmly demure honesty, which Vivaldi took, I hope, as a small reprimand for his doubt in her.

“But what was it? I recognised Corelli. And some common studies. The rest?”

“I don’t know, sir. Things my father taught me.” She blushed when she spoke. I did not understand why.

The old priest clapped his hands. “No matter. Shame about that damned instrument of yours. Nevertheless, you are welcome to my little band of ladies.” At this the rest of the group, an odd-looking assortment, much like a bunch of nuns who had newly abandoned their wimples, smiled at her and clapped their hands by way of greeting. “Your name?”

“Rebecca.” My heart raced. A sharp look of panic had risen in her eyes. “Rebecca Guillaume.”

“A pretty name for a pretty face,” Vivaldi said pleasantly. “A shame that none shall see you.”

“Sir?”

Vivaldi pointed to the large gilt shutters that ran along each side of the nave. “This is a church, Rebecca Guillaume. Not a music hall. Can’t have ’em ogling the orchestra when they should be listening to the tunes. You play behind these golden eyelids, and I’m afraid they’ll stay tight shut while the audience swoon over your e forts.”

At this her head went to one side, as if to lean upon her shoulder, and I found myself perplexed once more. It was quite impossible to judge what she was thinking.

“Now…” Vivaldi announced, beaming from ear to ear. “To the new pieces!”

With that he distributed a score among the orchestra, explaining it carefully, instrument by instrument, with the skill and attention one should expect of a master (none of the “Print that right, lad, or I’ll boot your backside out of the window straight into the stinking canal” that I get from Leo). Rebecca’s presence moved the old man greatly. He threw himself into the music, becoming quite absorbed as they practised it passage by passage, change by change, until the whole began to emerge from what was, at the beginning, mere chaos. They played for almost three hours. The light was failing when we went back outside. I was anxious to return Rebecca to the ghetto before the guards pulled up the drawbridge and kept the world safe from Jews for the night.

We walked onto the jetty and set up a brisk pace to catch the first gondola. I sought some sign of happiness in her face. She had just been praised by the greatest musician in Venice and welcomed into his band of players. None was there.

“Rebecca,” I said as the boat swung into the volta of the canal and the leaning form of Oliver Delapole’s rented home, Ca’ Dario, with its odd rose windows, came into view. “You’ve made your mark this day. You play like an angel and he knows it.”

“Yes,” she replied in a low, fierce tone. “An angel that stays locked behind shutters where none may see. I’ve just swapped one prison for another to let someone else take the glory.”

Her anger startled me. “I don’t understand. It’s such an honour… ”

“What? To be shut away like some caged bird? Who does this condescending priest think he is?”

“Vivaldi. More than a musician. A composer. A conductor. An artist who towers above men.”

Those dark, penetrating eyes bored straight into me. I felt quite naked before their power. “And you think I can’t compose? Or conduct? You think I don’t want to stand in front of the orchestra like him and watch your mouths open in wonder when they do my bidding?”

The white arch of the Rialto grew larger before us, humanity swarming over it.

“He wonders what music I play, Lorenzo? Mine.”

I sat in the rocking boat, above the greasy waters of the Grand Canal, unable to marshal my thoughts. Rebecca was opposite me, on the narrow seat, and leaned forward to grasp my knee and whisper anxiously in my face.

“But there I’m doubly cursed, aren’t I? Not just a woman, but a J—”

There was nothing else for it. As gently as I could, I covered her mouth with my hand, shocked by the damp sweetness of her lips. Her eyes seemed, for an instant, frightened. Then I saw understanding there. No one is more free with gossip than a gondolier. If we continued in this vein, someone would be feeding the lion’s mouth tonight.

“Our stop is soon, cousin,” I said loudly, then, when her eyes told me she understood, removed my hand from her lovely mouth. “We must count our blessings and get on with the job.”

Ten minutes later we ducked into an alley by the ghetto and she put the scarlet scarf over that mass of curls once more.

“And there’s more,” she hissed before we went back into the fading day. “It’s impossible anyway. I hoped to persuade him that I might perform in the afternoon alone, but Vivaldi said I must play the evening concerts or none at all. I can never get out of the ghetto at night. I am a Jew, so it is my jail.”

For a moment I thought she might cry, but her composure held and I wondered unkindly whether she was playing with my emotions. Then she added slyly, “Tell me, Lorenzo. Has a Jew no eyes? Hands, organs, dimensions, senses, a fections, passions? Don’t I eat the same food, hurt with the same weapons, suffer the same diseases? Am I not healed by the same means, warmed and cooled by the same winter and summer, just like a Christian? If you prick me, don’t I bleed? If you tickle me, don’t I laugh? If you poison me, will I not die?” Then, most seriously, “And if you wrong me, shall I not seek revenge?”

My own expression mirrored her earnestness. “Of course,” I replied. “And I am but a humble farm boy from Treviso. Shall I not read an English playwright, too, and steal his wit for my own purposes when it suits me? And if you are ever false with me, Rebecca, then Heaven mocks itself. I’ll not believe it.”

We stood in that dark, cramped alley, so close our hands almost touched, feeling like two clowns, not knowing whose turn it was to laugh and whose to make the jest.

“You are an odd one, Lorenzo,” she whispered, eyeing me with that curious, crooked expression of hers.

“I shall take that as a compliment and make the same remark to you in return.”

She snorted and, briefly, she took my hand. Her touch was warm and soft and delicate, and a sensation stole over me which I have never before encountered. “And I made you risk so much. All for nothing.”

At that I had to laugh. “Nothing? Rebecca, I…” Oh, dear. There I was, briefly tongue-tied again. “I wouldn’t have been anywhere else in the world this afternoon. As for what happens in Venice of an evening, let me think a little. It’s easier to hide secrets in the dark than in the day.”

“But…?”

“No.” I was adamant. “One thing at a time.”

In silence, we dawdled back to the ghetto. I stopped at the bridge, with an ill-mannered guard who watched her walk across the drawbridge, then noted, “Five minutes later and that little kike would have been in deep shit, boy. Not that I’d mind an hour or two in the cell with her, eh?”

I refuse to follow the city fashion and carry a small dagger in the waistcoat. If one chooses where one walks, there is, I believe, no need of such a weapon. Nor do I much fancy the idea of wearing some hidden jewellery designed for no other purpose than to wound my fellow man. Nevertheless, at that moment I fancied I had just such a blade inside my jacket and, in my imagination, I withdrew it, slowly stuck the swine in the chest, then heaved his bleeding corpse into the canal.

“Yes, sir,” I answered lamely as this regrettable daydream played in my head.

Then I walked back through the dark and narrow streets of the city, over the bridge, back into San Cassian, where the whores stood around the campo whispering filthy come-ons to any who chose to hear. When I walk I think. By the time I opened the door to Ca’ Scacchi, I knew how it might be done.