“And you were promoted to Prima Clarinetto!” she said with delight.
But when I told her the story of Aldo and the wine cellar, her mood darkened. “Don’t worry about your friends,” she said. “Bartolomeo will do all he can.”
As it turned out, he did more than I expected. Several hours after Bartolomeo met with the Master, Aldo was expelled from the Ospedale. The Master was furious with Aldo, as much for his actions as the fact that he refused to divulge who his confederates might be. The Master forbade him ever to set foot in the Ospedale again. But because Aldo was blind, and ostensibly helpless in the world, the Master secured him a place in the boys’ orphanage of San Benedicto at the eastern end of the Castello, near an iron foundry where many of the boys were sent to work. The orphanage was one of those stark, dark establishments I had dreaded. For Aldo it was surely an infernal transition: after having had the run of the Ospedale, his own room, and the powers—much abused—of a minor functionary, he was now one of two hundred members of a rough-and-tumble population in gloomy wards, a newcomer with no status or protection. Still, I did not underestimate his ability to overcome such obstacles, ruthless and amoral as he was. And when I thought of Adriana and Julietta, any sympathy I might have had for him evaporated.
Luca and Marta evidently informed the Master that I had run away. They claimed to be baffled as to why, and they did not inform him of my true identity, which surely would have cost them their jobs. When Bartolomeo met with the Master, he did not disclose my secret—which he knew could only further damage my reputation—but managed to implicate Aldo without mentioning my own visit to the wine cellar. The fact that Aldo had refrained from telling the Master my true identity, and thus getting Luca and Marta in trouble, convinced Bartolomeo that Aldo must be in cahoots with one or both of them. Aldo either feared retribution from them or hoped to serve them again.
Puffing his pipe at his sister’s table, Bartolomeo said, “When the Master asked me if your disappearance could be connected to Aldo’s corruption, I lied and said no. As for your friend Julietta, I haven’t been able to find out anything. But I believe that Adriana and the other girls are safe for now. After what’s happened, Luca and Marta won’t dare to stir things up again.”
After dinner, Signora Botello asked if I would play the clarinet for her. After all she’d done for me, I was happy to oblige her. She and Bartolomeo listened to me run through a portion of the Master’s Sonata no. 6. I enjoyed playing for the two of them in that warm, quiet room. When I was finished, I saw the surprise in their faces.
“My god,” Signora Botello said, “no wonder Signor Vivaldi made you a soloist. You could perform at San Angelo, or anywhere else.”
“She’s right,” Bartolomeo agreed. “You do not need to be at the Ospedale to put your gift to use. There are many orchestras and chamber groups that would welcome you.”
“You really think so?”
“I’m positive. Vivaldi heard it immediately. You said he told you so at your audition. Let me think about this.”
This was the reason I sought out Signor Agnetti the following day: to discover anything I could about my clarinet, especially the origin of its powers and their true nature. If I was going to pursue the sort of career Bartolomeo suggested—which, I confess, felt like a wild fantasy—I needed to know if I could rely on my clarinet. With Agnetti gone, and the source of the clarinet revealed, I had an even better chance of acquiring this information.
I took a traghetto across the canal from the Giudecca to the Zattere and then followed the increasingly dense, zigzagging alleys into San Polo. By then, the snow was falling fast, disappearing into the canals and concealing the cobblestones beneath a shimmering carpet.
It took me two hours to find four funeral parlors, and none had a cobbler across the street. I thought my chances were better this way because I was sure there would be more cobblers than morticians in San Polo. I was wrong. Exasperated and cold, despite my new coat and boots, when I asked two porters carrying a table across the Campo San Boldo where I could find a cobbler, they directed me to an address, not five minutes’ distance, on the Calle Filosi. The cobbler’s name was Gamba, and I was delighted to see that his shop was directly across the street from a mortician’s parlor.
Signor Gamba was a thin, bespectacled man with rough, out-sized hands and a shiny bald head. Neatly hammering nails into the soles of a blue shoe, he paused to allow me to introduce myself.
“I was told,” I went on, “that you could direct me to the address of Massimo the Magnificent.”
He looked me up and down. “Who told you that?”
“The former landlady of Signor Massimo’s cousin, Benito Agnetti.”
“And how would she know anything about it?”
“She said a relative of hers is the mortician across the street.”
“Gandolfo?”
“I suppose so, sir. She didn’t mention his name.”
He thought about this. “And why would you want to see Massimo?”
This was the question I was waiting for. I took my clarinet out from inside my coat. “Massimo gave this clarinet to his cousin, who gave it to my father, who gave it to me. I need to ask him about it.”
“It was Massimo’s clarinet?”
“I believe so.”
“Wait here,” he said, putting down his hammer and disappearing through a curtain, into the back of the shop.
A moment later, he returned with a boy half my age who barely glanced at me before running out the door and down the street.
Gamba pointed to a worn bench behind me. “Sit there and keep silent,” he said, and began hammering nails into the soles of the other shoe.
After about twenty minutes the boy returned, breathless, nodded to Gamba, and went back through the curtain.
“Come here,” Gamba said. “I’m going to give you these directions only once, so pay attention. First, put on these blue shoes—they will fit you perfectly.”
“But my boots—”
“Put them in this bag and carry them with you. And don’t interrupt me again.”
I hesitated, then pulled off my boots and slipped on the shoes. They had white soles. They seemed weightless. And they did fit perfectly.
The cobbler gave me directions. “When you arrive,” he concluded, “give this to the footman.” He handed me a small medallion embossed with a lightning bolt on one side and a closed eyelid on the other. “And do not remove those shoes until you are told to.”
2
The address to which the cobbler directed me was in a courtyard off the Ramo Regina, a dead-end alley overlooking the Rio di San Cassiano, an unusually blue, almost turquoise, canal that connected the Grand Canal and the Rio della Madonnetta. I knew this courtyard was not far from the cobbler’s shop, yet it took me an inordinate amount of time to reach it. I followed streets and alleys that, once entered, seemed to extend themselves with each step I took. The more I hurried my pace, the longer the streets grew. In fact, after turning off the Calle della Chiesa, putting the cobbler’s shop behind me, I had the strange sensation that these streets and everything on them—houses, shops, even the pedestrians I encountered, faceless in the falling snow—had materialized only seconds before I appeared. As if none of it was any more permanent than the thick mist rising off the canal. The snow stung my cheeks, and I felt light-headed, with a cold pit in my stomach. Thinking it might offer me relief, I was tempted to take off the blue shoes and put on my boots. But I remembered the cobbler’s warning. Venice is a labyrinth, where citizens as well as visitors can lose their way; but I seemed to have entered a more complex maze within the larger maze—at the center of the city, yet apart from it, so murky it was as if I were wandering inside someone else’s dream.
Finally I was so dizzy that I stopped and leaned against a wall and closed my eyes. I counted to twenty, to calm myself, but when I opened my eyes again, I became even more disoriented: no longer leaning against the wall, I found myself at my destination, a courtyar
d at the end of the Ramo Regina. There were four small houses on the ramo, then the courtyard, surrounded by a high wall with an iron gate. On a brass plaque beside the gate was the street number the cobbler had given me. Only one thing was missing: the house to which the courtyard should have been attached!
I could see the leveled rectangular plot where a house ought to stand, and the bushes that would have flanked it, and even the outline for a path from the courtyard to the front door. But no house. There was only a small park on the far side of the courtyard. At its center, there was a marble bench and a white statue. As I walked across the courtyard, I saw that the statue was a tall, mustached, long-haired man in a cape and boots. He was standing atop a lion and a leopard, one foot on each, brandishing a sword. His blank eyes were turned to the sky. There were statues of lions all around Venice, for it was the symbol of the city, but I had never seen one like this. I circled the statue twice before sitting down on the bench. The afternoon had flown by. Dusk was coming on, and though the snow was falling harder than ever, the gray clouds parted suddenly for a ray of orange light that turned the Rio di San Cassiano into molten lava and the brick walls and paving stones of the ramo into bars of gold. Everything became so bright that I had to cover my eyes, and it was only then, through the chinks between my fingers, that I saw the house to which the park and courtyard belonged.
It was a large white house, four stories with a white-tiled roof and tall windows with white shutters. In fact, every aspect of the house—doors, chimneys, cornices, metal fixtures—was white, including the limestone path to the front door.
The house must have been there all the time, I thought with a shiver, invisible to me until that orange light appeared. Yet as the clouds closed up again, and the light faded, the house remained, and the amber lamps on either side of the door began to glow.
I gathered my courage and walked to the door. The door knocker was a white lightning bolt. A footman answered my knock. Short and bald, he had a flat, impassive face. His hands and feet were no bigger than a child’s. His face was pale and his irises black, as if they were one with his pupils. He wore an ivory earring in his left ear and was dressed in white from head to foot.
“Coat,” he said.
I removed my clarinet from the inside pocket before he took my coat and hung it in a closet.
Then he held out his hand, palm up. I had forgotten about the medallion. I dug it from my pocket, and before he closed his fingers on it, I could have sworn the eye on the medallion was now open.
He pointed toward a long hallway and said, “Inside.”
He led me down the hallway, around a corner, and through a low archway. We were in a small white room, containing only a white carpet and table on which there was a vase of white flowers. This room, in turn, led to a slightly larger room, with a larger table, carpet, and vase, on and on, through a series of Moorish archways, five rooms in all, each a purer white than the last, so that by the fifth room the table and carpet were barely distinguishable. In that room, too, I discovered that the carpet was composed, not of wool, but hundreds of butterflies that every few seconds fluttered up to the ceiling and returned to the floor in unison. And I realized there were other creatures present, an owl that swooped by and a lizard skittering into the corners, they, too, so white that they were only visible, three-dimensional, for an instant before literally disappearing into the woodwork. I could barely discern the footman anymore, until he stopped and turned around in the last archway, even his pale face standing out against that whiteness. He beckoned me into an enormous, four-storied room filled with marvels even more spectacular than the butterfly carpets.
On platforms hung by wire from the ceiling beams there were white trees on which doves were perched, singing, preening, darting between branches. The ceiling itself was glass, but the snow falling outside was passing right through it, dissolving before it reached the floor. In the center of the room three marble mermaids stood atop a circular fountain, poised to dive into the milky water. Incense was burning in braziers. There was a pyramid of birch logs in the fireplace, ready to burn. And everywhere I looked, elaborate stage props: silver hoops, birdcages, swords and daggers, ropes, nets, chains, a small mountain of trunks and boxes, and the only colored objects in sight, relegated to a half-hidden alcove: a set of frightful masks and two red and green Chinese cabinets adorned with dragons and tigers. I was trying to absorb all of this when I came on a succession of wall mirrors that reflected me as I passed—that is, some image of me that did not belong to my body or wear my clothes, but instead was white and transparent, like a ghost. I froze before the last of these mirrors, my heart pounding so loudly that the footman had to shout to get my attention.
“Sit,” he repeated.
I took the chair he indicated, clutching my clarinet. I understood now why it had been fashioned of the whitest ivory, rather than wood.
“Wait,” the footman said before disappearing through a low door.
It was clear he only spoke one word at a time, out of choice or necessity I didn’t know. But there were more compelling mysteries to occupy me in the minutes I spent alone in that room, gazing at the birds and watching the snow fall, and, after hearing a splash, turning to find one of the mermaids missing. If all of this is an illusion, I thought, the magician who created it must be unimaginably powerful, and as if on cue, a booming voice echoed from behind me.
“Good evening. Didn’t Lodovico offer you tea?”
To my astonishment, the speaker was the man depicted in the statue outside, tall and imposing, with the long hair and mustache, which were jet-black. In fact, except for his face, everything about him was black: velvet robe, silk pants, leather gloves, boots. He was powerfully built, with broad shoulders and large, nimble hands. His huge eyebrows, like streaks of black paint, converged over his nose and curved back to his temples.
“Lodovico!” he shouted, and the footman appeared from the low door. “Bring the boy burdock tea, with a plate of figs and jam.” He looked at me. “Would you care for anything else, Nicolò?”
“No, thank you, sir.” I saw that his eyes had immediately gone to my clarinet.
“Call me Massimo. And come, warm yourself by the fire.”
What fire? I thought, until I realized the birch logs had started burning on their own.
I sat on an ottoman near the fireplace, and Massimo in a high-backed chair whose arms were carved into serpents. Seated, he somehow appeared even taller, looking down on me. His gaze was intense, but I tried to meet it, and not shy away. Lodovico brought me my tea and figs. Inhaling the vapor off the tea, I wondered what burdock was.
“It’s a medicinal root,” Massimo said. “Drink this tea every day with honey and you will strengthen your mind. Try it.”
I took a sip. Even with the honey, it tasted bitter.
“Before we go any further,” Massimo said, “I would like to hear how you acquired the clarinet.”
Though this was my reason for being there, I hesitated. The landlady had made it clear that Massimo wasn’t fond of his cousin; I was wary that the story around my clarinet, and Signor Agnetti’s role in it, might somehow offend Massimo and incur his wrath.
“Don’t be afraid. Just tell me.”
I did so, and he listened closely. Nothing seemed to surprise him, but he did betray a faint smile when I mentioned my brief stint with the orchestra at the Ospedale.
“So Signor Vivaldi made you Prima Clarinetto. Would you play me something?”
I froze. I hadn’t expected this, and with his eyes upon me, I wasn’t sure I could concentrate.
“Play anything you like,” he said.
I put the embouchure to my lips, closed my eyes, and launched into one of the solos I had played with the orchestra. The sound carried well in that room, and when I finished, Massimo nodded approvingly.
“Excellent. I am so pleased to find the instrument in such deserving hands.”
“Thank you, sir.”
“Only a man like m
y cousin would never have tried to play this clarinet,” he said with a frown. “I made him a gift of it, and he thought it could only be valuable because it is ivory. I told him it had more significant qualities, but I knew he wasn’t listening because he only measured value in karats—and this clarinet is very light, is it not? He had no imagination. And he was a terrible businessman, always just a step ahead of the debt collectors. At any rate, after your father chose the clarinet—fortuitously for you—my cousin would have comforted himself by calculating the value of the ivory in relation to the labor your father rendered him and deciding he had gotten the better of the deal.” Massimo chuckled. “If this were a typical clarinet, of ebony or rosewood, or even the elephant tusk from which it was carved, that might have been the case. But it is not, as you discovered within moments of receiving it. No doubt you have a wonderful ear, and a real talent, but would you like to know how you came to play so beautifully, so quickly, an instrument you had never laid eyes on?”
“Very much so.”
“I assume you had never even heard of the clarinet.”
“No, sir. Even the Master had little knowledge of it.”
“Is that so,” he said, clearly pleased to hear this. “I acquired this one in Leipzig, from a famous instrument maker, on my last tour of Germany. It was the ivory that attracted me. I was assured it was one of a kind. Then I learned what a unique instrument the clarinet is, so new to the world. I felt I could make this one even more unique, so when I arrived home, that’s what I did.” He paused. “Do you know what a spell is? Forget about the tricks of hypnotists and witches. A true spell is rooted in chemistry and physics, not trickery. All things are composed of particles, and all particles are composed of atoms, which are invisible, even through a microscope. If one can rearrange those particles, and rechannel the energy that animates them, he can make an object—or even a living thing—behave differently. Everything is changeable because atoms are constantly in flux. A fallen leaf decays into soil, a fish is eaten by another fish, stones and shells break down into sand. All of nature is governed by laws. But if someone has the focus and concentration to bend even one of those laws, he can alter its connection to all the others. Do you understand, Nicolò?”