Sofia (4 page)

Her first words to me were, “I’ll wager you wouldn’t have the difficulty of that poor cropped Turk. I’ll wager you could give a lady the pleasures of her life.”

Her accompanying laugh was loud and shrill. With my mind still dipping into my afternoon from time to time, it had occurred to me at first that this might be Baffo’s daughter taking on the freedom of a mask to escape from the convent by night. I had been hoping for such a meeting to the degree that I fully expected it, and at the most unexpected times. The laugh convinced me this was not she; the girl of my dreams did not laugh like this crackle of lightning but like the soft breezes of a spring garden. And yet, the figure, at first glance, was similar. The storm was here, now, with a most sultry presence and, force of nature that it was, I could hardly resist it.

My biggest concern became how to join in her laughter without letting my vocal chords betray me into registers higher than hers.

“I just adore the
intermedi
,” my new companion declared, easing her ministrations when the strains of an instrumental group warming up announced a lull in the action onstage. Singers and dancers would now give pause to the actors who’d been on a merry chase from dungeon to the highest tower in the Sultan’s palace.

A tapestry dropped over the minarets of Constantinople. It announced “pastoral” and gave me another mental brush with the convent garden in the afternoon. These fanciful trees were in full leaf, the illusion of a million tiny stitches taken by a dozen seamstress’s hands; real leaves and flowers were difficult to come by even for the very wealthy at this season of the year.

The scene devised to play in front of this drop caused something of a jolt, however. It featured Phlegyas, the boatman from Dante’s
Inferno
, who appeared naked, but flickering with red gauze flame at the vital parts. This apparition quite took my masked companion’s breath away. At least, she had none to spare for me.

Phlegyas steadied his boat to receive the Damned, who represented a wild confusion of theologies: fauns and satyrs along with Adam and a buxom Eve, more recent heretics of note, traitors to the Serene Republic and the particular enemies of the Foscari. The Turkish Sultan himself brought up the rear, a stretched attempt to make the
intermedio
have something to do with the play it interspersed. It gave the pious illusion that the eternal was in some way watching over the fooleries of the mundane.

The Damned sang a dirge as they approached in a solemn grapevine. Phlegyas shook his chains to mark the rhythm, and imps sounded suitably woeful chords on trombones and bass viols which an ingenious costumer had disguised as instruments of torture.

“And the music is an instrument of torture,” I commented lightly to my companion.

To my confusion, she did not share my opinion of the entertainment. With rapt attention and even the glint of a tear of remorse through the moiré slits, she counted up her life’s sins and contemplated her own fate at the crack of doom.

So much for my evening
, I thought.

Looking idly about for some other distraction, I noticed the tardy arrival of a pair of gentlemen who attracted my attention because they could well be my uncle and I: an older man and a younger. The similarity was further exaggerated by the fact that the younger’s black mask and white cone hat were the very image of mine. No mask, however, could conceal the graying, chest-length whiskers of the older man. All Venice knew them as sprouting from the chin of Agostino Barbarigo, head of the great Barbarigo family, one of the dreaded Council of Ten, in line for the post of Provenditor.

This identification saw through all attempts by the younger for anonymity. He must be the Barbarigo’s heir, Andrea. And as soon as the name Andrea Barbarigo passed through my mind, I recalled the last time I’d heard it pronounced, on the pouting lips of Sofia Baffo. My hand went automatically to my left hip. I must duel this man to the death, was my reflexive thought.

Young Barbarigo was looking anxiously about the audience as well. When his gaze met mine, like a mirror, he paused.

It was as if the very same thoughts of blood coursed through his mind, too. With a mask, however, it was impossible to tell. Presently he only gave me a stiff nod of acknowledgment, which such a lingering stare required even if we weren’t acquainted. I returned the nod, equally stiff. His eyes moved on.

By this time, our lovers were back on stage, romping through the seraglio with fantastic impunity once more. My companion in gold lace had forgotten all about hellfire in the time it takes to raise a tapestry forest. Or at least she’d decided to transfer perdition to play upon my person in a dozen places instead. It did in fact seem that her attentions were what drew Barbarigo’s elsewhere, convinced him that I was no threat. They certainly distracted me.

Nothing less than a servant’s tap on my shoulder brought more than my codpiece upright again, and made me straighten my mask. The servant, like everybody else, was masked and identified by no more than the scarlet Foscari livery. Wordlessly, he pressed a tightly folded piece of paper in my hand and, with a conspiratorial nod, vanished among the milling numbers of his species.

My companion in the moiré mask had still not righted herself from her attempt to make a bed of our stiff and high-backed chairs. She’d worked my chemise out of its tuck between hose and doublet and was tickling my bare skin with pricks of gold lace.

“Perhaps we need to go find out if this palace has a room that is not quite so crowded,” she murmured.

Her languid “Hmm?” might indeed have made me pocket the note to read later, but my first inquisitive unfolding had revealed a signature. It was a single feminine S elaborated with curlicues and flounces. Now the note burned in my hand more than the chafe of any gold lace.

Ignoring the gold lace mask, I opened the note, caught it in the glow of the nearest torch, and strained against darkness to read:

My love — Second
intermedio
. In the lobby as planned.

And then, that far more communicative
S
.

“My love,” the moiré mask cooed in my ear. “What is it?”

I snatched the note away from her groping fingers, realizing now, as I hadn’t when they were on my codpiece, how aged they were, and spotted. I realized, too, how, for all the gems she did wear, one jewel was conspicuously absent, one on her left hand that now exposed a telltale band of white.

“My love—?”

Her use of those words irritated me. “Business,” I replied brusquely.

I looked to my uncle for confirmation as I did reflexively whenever “business” was mentioned. My uncle’s eyebrows were even higher than before. In retrospect, I have to admire his restraint. In spite of all the inept fumbling with gold lace going on in the seat next to him, he’d managed no comment. Or at least he’d managed to match his guffaws to the general rise and fall following Columbine and her Harlequin.

“Oh, business. Yes!” He started as if with sudden memory.

And then, off the silken hose of his knee, he pointed a finger to the opposite arm of the audience. My friend in moiré did not see this signal, but I followed the line of Uncle Jacopo’s fingers across the room, realizing that he knew whence the note came.

They were late arrivals I hadn’t noticed until this moment, seated in a far section of the audience reserved for women who wanted to keep to the convention of separation that was usually the rule. They were almost alone there, masks and Carnival erasing the lines between courtesan and honest woman that were otherwise observed.

Blinking against the dim light, I recognized the chap-faced nun first. She looked angry to be the only unmasked face on three tiers, uncomfortable with the worldliness about her and the bawdiness on stage. Although both young ladies with her were identically masked, it didn’t take me a moment to reject the nun’s right-hand charge as too giggly, and lay claim to the taller one on her left.

It was exactly the conclusion the very form of the S and my mind’s constant echo had set me to from the start. She seemed to steal torchlight from the stage. And her intense gaze coming back to me left no doubt whatsoever. Oh, how long could these buffoons on stage keep it up? How long till
intermedio
?

“Say you mustn’t go. Can’t we escape together for a few moments? Can’t the business wait?”

I brushed at the sting of gold lace as at a bothersome mosquito and tried to clear my head enough to think straight. But all I could do was to wallow in the wonder of it. I lost all consciousness of the stage.
Me? Baffo’s daughter calls me “her love”!

The refrain of my thoughts began to have musical accompaniment. The tapestry had dropped again and the rewards of the Blessed were now revealed in song and dance. Seraphim were joined by a celestial nonet of Muses on lutes, double harps, bowed rebecs, recorders, transverse flutes, one straight and one curved cornet. The continuo sneaked on stage as a harpsichord within a gauzy cloud.

No host of heaven could compete with what was ringing through my mind. Or rather, the stage was my mind’s perfect, if less extravagant, complement. I got ready to excuse myself.

And then, the host and their clouds parted to reveal divinity. No patriarchal Jove, but an Apollo in golden armor and corona was flown in on ropes you could see only if you were spoiling for them. The continuo hit two crashing chords to bring him in, and Apollo opened his mouth to address us.

The sound that flung itself suddenly to the furthest corners of the theater was beyond belief. It riveted me to my chair and washed my mind blank to any other thought. At first I raked the stage with my eyes, looking for the full woman’s chorus that must be concealed somewhere to make the noise Apollo’s lips only pretended to. Then I was beaten back to the realization that this torrent of sound was a full octave above the normal range of women. The notes were brilliant, painfully so, showering like slivers of shattered crystal on the ear. They sparkled and ran glancingly through the most breakneck cadenzas as if they required no effort at all. That it was this fine figure of an Apollo who tossed his golden locks with every breath was impossible. Absurd. My first reaction was to laugh out loud as no harem escapade had induced me to till then.

But this was hardly the reaction in the rest of the audience, so I had to stifle mine. My companion in moiré leaned forward, transfixed as if it were indeed divinity she heard.

“It is!” she exclaimed in her rapture. “It is!”

“It is what?” I demanded.

She said a name I cannot now remember, but definitely a man’s name, then added: “Messer Foscari promised me he would lure this singer out of his church in Florence and onto our stage. He has done it. And oh, isn’t the voice just as divine as reported?”

I struggled with this definition of divinity and its music for a while. Even so, all I could find to say was: “But how—?”

“He’s a castrato. A childhood injury, poor man,” my companion enlightened me.

Mariners miss a lot at sea, I realized. And then, since the host of heaven had decided to render their lord praise in their common, mundane voices for a time, she continued.

“At least, that’s what they say. But I have it on good authority that he was a choirboy in Florence and his family was too desperately poor to let him grow out of a good thing. There are physicians, I understand—”

“I won’t believe it. That a family would do this to their heir?”

“Oh, you must believe it. And you must tell me, honestly. What else is to be done? The Apostle tells us ‘Let women be silent in Church.’ But it is the soaring, high voices that draw our thoughts most nearly to God. Boys’ voices are soft and clear, but boys will be boys”—she gave me a nudge—”hard to discipline, and impossible to keep in the required range long enough to gain much proficiency. I understand His Holiness the Pope has heard this man sing—and is looking for his like for his own choir. His Holiness grows weary of the strained notes of these Spanish falsettists which have otherwise been so popular. And, if His Holiness approves—”

“But that’s—that’s unnatural!” I exclaimed.

My companion shrugged her shoulders up into the gold lace about her throat so that their lack of youthful firmness was evident.

“Society puts unnatural claims on us all,” she said simply. “We find ways around them. Then who is to say what is natural and what is not? You are but young yet, or you would know.”

Thoughtfully she rubbed the blatant, naked finger on her left hand.

The continuo struck two more warning, introductory chords and then fell silent, unshackling Apollo from all ties to the ground. And he soared, skipping notes from cloud to cloud like the lightest of sparrow flocks catching the setting sun on their wings.

The music affected me deeply, but I cannot say that I was struck with open-mouthed awe like the rest of my company in that theater that night. From my present perspective, I am tempted to suggest that the sparrow-flight of notes hung in the air over my head like some grave consequence, as yet unborn, as yet even undreamed.

At the time, the juxtaposition of a creature the butt of cruel jokes one moment, the same creature adored for his unnatural, otherworldly nature the next—I found it too perverse. God that this Apollo was, he was limited. There would endlessly never be any two-year-old for him to father. What kind of god was this, who knew limitations? Like many another contradiction many another fifteen-year-old has perceived in his surroundings, it niggled me with fear. And to escape fear—to which age soon grows blind—I turned it quickly on its head as scorn.

Desperately, I looked across the hall, hoping youth, even in another sex, would have sympathy with what I felt. Then through all the wild ether of sound came the hard bass of realization in my heart: Sofia Baffo was no longer cloistered at her aunt’s side.

“Business!” I exclaimed, as much to convince myself as my companions.

I jumped to my feet. It was, I suddenly remembered, the second
intermedio
.

A man in scarlet livery directed me through the lobby, disappointingly empty save for glowering Foscari portraits and the Titians, to a chamber on the left. “Gentlemen retire this direction,” he said.