The Jewels of Paradise
Also by Donna Leon
Death at La Fenice
Death in a Strange Country
Dressed for Death
Death and Judgment
Acqua Alta
Quietly in Their Sleep
A Noble Radiance
Fatal Remedies
Friends in High Places
A Sea of Troubles
Willful Behaviour
Uniform Justice
Doctored Evidence
Blood from a Stone
Through a Glass, Darkly
Suffer the Little Children
The Girl of His Dreams
About Face
A Question of Belief
Drawing Conclusions
Handel’s Bestiary
Beastly Things
Venetian Curiosities
Donna Leon
The Jewels
of Paradise
Atlantic Monthly Press
New York
Copyright © 2012 by Donna Leon and Diogenes Verlag AG
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Published simultaneously in Canada
Printed in the United States of America
ISBN: 978-0-8021-9383-4
Atlantic Monthly Press
an imprint of Grove/Atlantic, Inc.
841 Broadway
New York, NY 10003
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For Markus Wyler
Oh mio fiero Destin, perversa sorte!
Sparì mia vita e non mi date a morte.
Oh, my proud Destiny, perverse fate!
To destroy my life, but not give me to death.
—Agostino Steffani, Niobe, Act 2, scene 5
One
Caterina Pellegrini closed the door behind her and leaned her back and then her head against it. First came the slight trembling of her legs as tension began to relax its hold on her muscles, then the deep breaths that helped relieve the tightness in her chest. The desire to wrap her arms around herself in an expression of wild, uncontrollable glee was almost irresistible, but she beat down that temptation, as she had beaten down many in her life, and stood with her hands at her sides, leaning against the door and telling herself to relax.
It had taken great patience, but she had done it. She had put up with a pair of fools, smiled at their manifestations of cupidity, treated them with the deference they so evidently did not deserve, all the while maneuvering them into giving her the job she wanted and which they held in their gift. They had no wit, but they had the power to decide; they had no grace of spirit, but they could say yes or no. They had little understanding of her qualifications and badly disguised contempt for her learning, but she had needed them to choose her.
And they had, both of them, and not any of the other applicants she had thought of—not without a wry consciousness of how much her language had been affected by the historical period in which she had spent the last ten years of her academic and professional life—as her rivals. As the youngest of five sisters, Caterina was endowed with a healthy sense of rivalry. Not unlike characters in a Goldoni play, the sisters were: Claudia the Beautiful; Clara the Happy; Cristina the Religious; Cinzia the Athletic; and, last born, Caterina, the Clever. Claudia and Clara had married fresh out of school; Claudia had divorced within a year and upgraded to a lawyer she seemed not to like very much, while Clara stuck to her first husband and was happy; Cristina had taken vows and renounced the world, then gone on to take advanced degrees in the history of theology; Cinzia had won some medals in diving at the national level but then had married, borne two children, and grown fat.
Caterina, the clever one, had studied at the liceo where her father taught history and had consistently won the yearly prize in Latin and Greek translation while picking up Russian from her aunt. From there she had gone to an ignominious year as a vocal student at the conservatory, then two years studying law at Padova, which disappointed, and then bored, her. The lure of music returned then, and she had chosen to study musicology in Florence and then in Vienna, where her thesis adviser, learning of her fluency in Russian, had arranged a two-year research grant for her to accompany him to Saint Petersburg to help with his research on Paisiello’s Russian operas. That concluded, she returned to Vienna and finished a doctorate in Baroque opera, the degree and her possession of it sources of delight and pride to her family. This qualification, after only one year of trying to find a job, had earned her a sort of internal exile to the South in the form of a position as lecturer in counterpoint at the Conservatory of Music Egidio Romualdo Duni in Matera. Egidio Romualdo Duni. What scholar of Baroque opera would not recognize his name? Caterina had always thought of him as Duni Who Also Wrote, the man who had written operas with titles identical to those of more famous or more gifted composers: Bajazet, Catone in Utica, Adriano in Siria. Duni had left as little trace in Caterina’s memory as he had on current opera production.
A doctorate from the University of Vienna, and then a job lecturing first-year conservatory students in counterpoint. Duni. There were entire weeks when she thought she might as well have been lecturing in mathematics, so far did this subject seem from the magic thrill of the singing voice. This dissatisfaction did not bode well, something she had known almost as soon as she arrived. But it had taken her two years to decide to leave Italy again, this time by accepting a position at Manchester, one of the best centers in Europe for the study of Baroque music, where she had spent four years as a research fellow and assistant professor.
Manchester had appalled Caterina by its physical ugliness, but she had been content enough at the university, digging into the music—and, to a lesser degree, the lives—of a handful of eighteenth-century Italian musicians whose careers had prospered in Germany. Veracini, Handel’s great rival; Porpora, Farinelli’s teacher; the practically forgotten Sartorio; Lotti, a Venetian who, it appeared, had been everyone’s teacher. It was not long before she began to see the similarity between their destiny and her own. In search of the work and fame they had failed to find in Italy, they had immigrated north. Like some of them she had found work, and like most of them she had suffered homesickness and longed for the air, beauty, and possibility of joy offered by a country that, she realized only now, she loved.
Salvation had come, as is so often the case, by chance. Each spring, the wife of the head of her department gave a dinner for her husband’s colleagues. The chairman always made it clear that it was a casual thing: come if you’re free. Older and wiser heads knew that the invitation had the same weight as a ukase from, say, Ivan the Terrible. Not to go was to cast aside all hope of advancement, though to attend was to sacrifice one evening of life to tedium so encompassing as almost to be fatal. Heated exchange of insult and vituperation, even blows, would have be
en a source of delight, but the dinner conversation was rigidly governed by caution and a tight-lipped politeness that failed to camouflage decades of rancorous familiarity and professional jealousy.
Caterina, aware of her own incapacity to be bland, avoided conversation and devoted herself to the study of the personal and sartorial peculiarities of her colleagues. Most of the people at the table appeared to be wearing the unwashed clothing of their larger-sized friends. The shoes appalled her. And then there was the food. Though she sometimes discussed the other subjects with Italian colleagues, none of them had the courage to mention the food.
Her savior was a Romanian musicologist who had spent the last three years, so far as Caterina could judge, in an alcoholic stupor: the fact that he was drunk in the morning and drunk in the evening never prevented him, however, from smiling amiably at her when they passed in the corridors or library, a smile she always gladly returned. He was possibly sober and unquestionably brilliant during his classes, where his analysis of the metaphors in the libretti of Metastasio broke new ground, and his explication of the Viennese court poet Apostolo Zeno’s correspondence concerning the foundation of the Accademia degli Animosi was a source of wonder to his students. He often wore cashmere jackets that fit him very well.
On the night of her salvation, the Romanian was seated across from her at the chairman’s dinner, and she found herself smiling back into his wine-dulled eyes if only because they could speak easily in Italian. Most of the other people at the table had learned Italian to facilitate their reading of opera libretti; thus few of her colleagues could hold a conversation in that language without descending into wild declarations of love, terror, remorse, and, upon occasion, bloodlust. Caterina preferred to converse with them in English. While she considered the use of the language of opera libretti as dinner conversation, Caterina studied the people at the table. Revelation occurred: how well a phrase such as, Io muoio, io manco expressed her current feelings. Even traditore infame would not be far off as a description of many of her colleagues. And was not the chairman himself un vil scellerato?
The Romanian set down his glass—he didn’t bother with food and thus had no fork to set down—and broke his silence to ask, in Italian, “You want to get out of this place?”
Caterina’s answering glance was filled with curiosity, as was her voice. “Do you mean this dinner or this university?”
He smiled, took his wine glass, and looked around for another bottle. “This university,” he said in a completely sober voice.
“Yes.” She picked up her own glass, surprised to hear her admission and struck by its force.
“A friend has told me that la Fondazione Musicale Italo-Tedesca is looking for a scholar.” He sipped, smiled. She liked his smile, though perhaps not his teeth.
“La Fondazione Musicale Italo-Tedesca,” she repeated. There was something with a similar name at home, she recalled, but she knew little about it. Dilettantes, amateurs. Surely he was speaking about something in the German-speaking world.
“You know it?”
“I’ve heard of it,” she said in the same tone she’d use if someone asked her if she’d heard about the infestation of bedbugs in New York hotels.
He finished the wine and held up the glass. Looking at it, he said, surprising her with the angry vehemence with which he spoke, “Italy.” The glass was from Italy? The wine?
“Money,” he added in what she thought he intended to be a seductive voice. “Some.” When he saw how little effect this had on her his smile returned, as if she’d just agreed with him about something he had believed for a long time. “Research. New documents.” He saw the jolt this gave her and glanced toward the head of the table, where the chairman sat. “You want to end up like him?”
In a voice that slipped toward possibility, she smiled and said, “Tell me more.”
He ignored her and looked in vain at the bottles on the sideboard. Perhaps he had already reached the point where the trip back and forth was impossible for him.
He placed his empty glass on the table next to the glass of the woman to his right, who was turned to her other neighbor. He switched glasses.
“Idiots,” he said in a suddenly loud voice. They were speaking Italian, so the slurring of his speech, though it did nothing to lower the volume of his voice, at least managed to disguise the hard dentals of that word. No one so much as bothered to glance in his direction.
He surprised her by taking his napkin and wiping methodically around the edge of his neighbor’s glass. Only then did he take a long drink from it.
Seeing that he had all but emptied what had now become his glass, Caterina leaned across the table and poured what was left of her white wine into the small quantity of red at the bottom. He nodded.
His smile faded and he muttered, “I don’t want it. Maybe you’d like it?”
“Why?” she asked, confused. Did he mean her wine?
“I told you,” he answered, giving her a sharp look. “Aren’t you listening? It’s in Venice. I hate Venice.”
So it was the one at home: a job in the city. She didn’t know everything, but she knew a lot: how serious could this place be if she’d never heard anything about it save the name? Italians cared little for the Baroque. No, only Verdi, Rossini, and—God help us all, she thought, as a small shudder walked a descending cadence down her spine—Puccini.
“You’re talking about Venice? The job’s in Venice?” His eyes had continued their retreat from certain focus all the time he had been talking, and she wanted to be clear that this possibility existed before she opened her heart to hope.
“Hateful place,” he said, making a sour face. “Disgusting climate. Horrible food. Tourists. T-shirts. All those tattoos.”
“You’ve said no?” she asked with wide-eyed wonder that begged for explanation.
“Venice,” he repeated and swilled his wine to wash away the very sound of it. “I’d go to Treviso, Castelfranco. Friuli. Good wine.” He looked into his glass, as if to ask the contents where they had come from, but finding no answer, he turned back to her. “Even Germany. I like beer.”
Having spent many years in the academic world, Caterina did not doubt that this would sufficiently explain his acceptance of a job.
“Why me?” she asked.
“You’ve been nice to me.” Did that mean half a glass of white wine or the fact that she had spoken to him with respect and had smiled at him occasionally during the last years? It didn’t matter. “And you’re blonde.” That at least made sense.
“Would you recommend me?” she asked.
“If you get me a bottle of red from the sideboard,” he answered.
Two
Greater changes had resulted from stranger things, she reflected, calling herself back from memory. The research job was hers, and she was back in Venice, though hired only to complete a single project. She looked around at the office where she was to wait for the acting director. If an office could be a small, high-ceilinged cubicle with two tiny windows, one behind the desk and one so close to the ceiling as to provide some light but no view, then this was an office. The desk and chair added to that possibility, though the absence of computer, telephone, and even paper and pen suggested more a monk’s cell than anything else. The location—in what had once been a two-floor apartment at the end of Ruga Giuffa—could be used to argue either case. But it was a cold day at the beginning of April and the room was warm; thus it had to be an office that was meant to be in use.
What little she had been able to learn about the Foundation before applying for the job had prepared her for this dismal room: nothing in it—and nothing not in it—surprised her. The Internet had provided her with some information about the Foundation: it had been established twenty-three years before by Ludovico Dardago, a Venetian banker who had made a career in Germany and was a passionate lover of Baroqu
e opera, both Italian and German. He had left money for the creation of a foundation to “disseminate and promote the performance of the music of composers who traveled and worked between Germany and Italy during the Baroque era.”
However modest the rooms, the location was propitious, only a ten-minute walk to the major collections of the Biblioteca Marciana, where manuscripts and scores were to be found.
When she thought about the events that had brought her to this room and viewed her situation in a certain way, Caterina concluded that she had been hired for a bit part in a bad nineteenth-century melodrama: The Rediscovered Trunks? The Rival Cousins? For more than a year, two cousins, descended from different sides of a mutual ancestor’s family, had been embroiled in a dispute over the ownership of two recently rediscovered trunks that had once belonged to their ancestor. Both possessed archival evidence proving their descent from the former owner, a cleric and musician who had died without issue. Unable to find legal redress, and with great reluctance, they had finally consulted an arbitrator, who suggested that, in light of their refusal to divide equally the still-unknown contents of the trunks, a neutral and competent researcher be hired, at their shared expense, to examine the historical record and any documents contained in the trunks for words that showed a preference for one side of the family over the other. In the event that such a document was found, both agreed—in a contract drawn up by the arbitrator and signed in front of a notary—that the entire contents of the trunks would become the exclusive possessions of the person whose ancestor was so favored.
When the arbitrator, who had some weeks ago invited her to Venice for an interview, had explained all of this to her, Caterina had decided that he was joking or had taken leave of his senses, possibly both. She had, however, smiled and asked him to explain a bit more fully the particular circumstances, adding that this would help her more clearly to understand the duties the position might entail. What she did not tell him was how the sight and smell and feel of Venice had so overpowered her that she knew she wanted the job, regardless of the conditions, and to hell with Manchester.