Venice, 1717
There is so much that Luisa doesn’t know. So much that Maddalena must tell her late at night, in whispers disguised as coughs when they hear the Priora stalk the hall. They lie together in a single bed in an airless dormitory in the Ospedale della Pietà, a home for foundlings since the fourteenth century, more recently a soil in which to cultivate the best young musicians in Venice. These musicians are girls, so they are told to play for God, rather than the many faces of La Serenissima, their Most Serene Republic. God excuses the fact that they are girls, that they play instrumental music, that sometime between the ages of eleven and fourteen they begin to desire and to bleed. They aren’t meant to lie together, two to a cot, whispering. Before, Luisa didn’t. Nights were spent asleep. All her dreams went unremembered.
They are newly fifteen. Luisa has always been here; Maddalena recently arrived from outside. To their left, Maddalena’s bed is empty. To their right, one of the other girls wheezes rhythmically, head hidden by her pillow. Moonlight proves no match for two small, shuttered windows, the candles long doused. At dawn the bells will ring and the girls will rise for prayer, they’ll eat and sew and take the air and play their music. Maddalena’s big toe tickles the tender inner flesh of Luisa’s foot.
“Every year for Festa della Sensa, the doge rows out to San Nicolò al Lido,” Maddalena says. “He drops a ring into the water, and all the boats line up to watch him. And then he says a prayer and goes to Mass, and then we’re married.”
“Who is?” asks Luisa.
“All of us. The city and the sea.”
“Why?” asks Luisa.
Maddalena presses a finger to Luisa’s lips.
“Does the doge love the water, or is he afraid?”
“There is no or,” says Maddalena. She curls her icy toes around Luisa’s ankle. “Once he’s tossed the ring, it’s celebration. All feasting and music and games. We’ll go together, when we’re older.”
They’ll go together, tutte due, a whole contained within the two of them. The girls press sole to sole, heel to heel. On Maddalena’s, a ripening blister where her right foot has recently grown larger than her left. On Luisa’s, the puckered P of the branding iron, claiming her for the Pietà.
“When I marry—” says Maddalena. Luisa waits, but Maddalena doesn’t continue. Several beds down, somebody whimpers in her sleep.
When I marry, I’ll wear pearls for a year, like every newlywed noblewoman, Maddalena might have said. She might have said: When I marry, it will be to a youngest son, the only noble sons who marry in Venice. She might have said: When I marry, it is likely you’ll stay here. She might have said: Will I marry?
Maddalena says none of this. The unfinished sentence sits over them, a haze.
Maddalena’s breathing slows and her eyes are shut, but Luisa can tell she’s awake. A noise from the floor above. The dark coils of Maddalena’s hair. Luisa rolls to her back and stretches her left hand flat across her stomach, lengthening each individual finger.
There has already been a bargain, and this is something else that Luisa does not know. A darkness takes its shape and fattens, coursing through the Ospedale della Pietà and its courtyards, past the gates, where the lagoon stretches out toward the sea. It rides down the canals in the whistling of the gondoliers, and it splashes the steps of the frescoed palazzi.
But before debts are collected, there are two girls breathing beside each other, legs entwined.
Luisa shuts her eyes. She pictures silty wedding rings, Maddalena’s long hair weeping down her back. A deep-sea dirge and barefooted girls in soaked nightdresses, lips pursed around their post horns, reams of brackish water falling from barnacled cellos.
Maddalena
It begins with Maddalena at the edge of the gondola. Not alone, of course—her father’s man to steer them, her eldest brother, Nicolò, leaning out from the cabin to watch the tail of the doge’s bucintoro as it moves toward the Adriatic, flag jutting from the massive state barge to marshal the crowds, the winged Lion of Venice fierce upon red velvet. Somewhere on board her father, in his bright red robe, will be taking his duties very seriously, talking to many important men about important affairs. Her middle brothers, Beneto and Andrea, have already absconded, off to sample courtesans from safely behind their tied masks.
“A coward’s choice, to wear the bauta for Festa della Sensa,” Nicolò had said as they donned the black cloaks and tricorn hats and tied on the false faces that made them anonymous—thick white visors hiding all but the eyes and the occasional shadow of the chin. Maddalena imagines her brothers as turtles protecting soft meat under their papier-mâché bautas, their true selves impenetrable. For almost seven months a year, the Venetian elite go masked in all her public spaces. The rest of the republic at least pretending anonymity, with Nicolò here sunning himself, belly up, as prey.
He’s removed his hat, and as they follow the bucintoro away from San Marco, his hair—his own—keeps plastering to his mouth. Their pace is slow across the vast lagoon, around the isle of the Lido, which buffers Venice’s main island from the Adriatic Sea. State gondoliers in their red velvet capes are too well dressed to do the actual work of rowing, so little boats filled with musicians tug the ambassadors’ gilt gondolas, while more sleek black carriages follow behind. Then a parade of other boats—merchants and fishermen, pleasure crafts with pampered dogs and women drinking wine, boys with drums and pipes, men singing. Maddalena expects Nicolò to criticize the profligacy, the Venetian predilection for turning the spiritual into spectacle. Surely we can show up Rome without these damned fireworks, he should be saying, or How much money did they spend to wrap that damask around those columns? But Nicolò is silent. Planning something, bothered by something. He keeps looking at her sideways.
The gilded flotilla slows, its music dwindles. Maddalena turns her head to see the city behind them, an impossible stone kingdom rising from the water. Venice fancies herself man against the elements, although this is the calmest of spring mornings, and if the sky showed signs of rain, the senators would have rescheduled the ceremony. Still, the elements: the churn of the sea, which lilts the boats. The inconsiderate squalls of the birds. A mosquito at Maddalena’s ear, humming.
All eyes are on the doge at the bow of his barge, his reedy Latin inaudible over the slap of water against the boat. Everyone knows what he is saying. “Desponsamus te, mare, in signum veri perpetique dominii.” We wed thee, sea, as a sign of true and perpetual domination.
There are two churches in Venice, Rome’s and the rule of the state. Maddalena reveres neither, though superficially she’s forced to bow to both. Religion is like duty to her family: inevitable, uninterested in her personal opinion. And yet this ritual, the water, the requisite renewal of vows, the wedding band held overboard, the breath held quiet. If ever she believes in more than people’s will to power, it is now, acting as witness to the love between a city and the sea.
Once the doge’s ring is lost to the waves, artillery fires and the politesse is overrun by cheers. Horns sing out, drums resume. Nicolò turns to Maddalena. He squints.
“Well?” she says. “Come out with it.”
“In light of … everything,” Nicolò begins, which seems foreboding. Maddalena wants to press this everything, find out how and why it has conspired against them.
Instead she just says, “Yes?”
“In light of everything,” Nicolò repeats, “we have decided you’ll go to the Pietà.”
She’ll go to what?
“The Ospedale?” Maddalena laughs. He’s joking, he must be. The Ospedale della Pietà, where orphaned and illegitimate Venetian daughters go to make celibate music? Abandoned girls come as nurslings, and mostly they stay. Maddalena’s father is on the board of governors, which must be why they’d even consider her, as she is not an orphan, not a foundling in material need. Once Venice’s four Ospedali Grandi were just hospices, but now they act as musical conservatories, their churches packed to the rafters on Sundays. A point of pride for her father to watch his girls at the Pietà outdo the Mendicanti or Incurabili with some haunting oratorio. For Nicolò, who’ll one day take her father’s place, to watch the neat economy of the concerts that pay for upkeep of the rest within the Pietà’s walls.
Nicolò likes a balanced equation. All morning, Maddalena has wondered if another of his marital alliances fell through. Two years of promises and parlays, and they always come to nothing. How much longer will he try? It must be well past time to send her to a nunnery. She thought perhaps she’d take the veil at San Lorenzo, where for enough money girls of her ilk can have well-furnished apartments and social lives that, while confined to the grated parlatorio, might occasionally stir gossip. Maddalena remembers visiting a cousin at San Zaccaria as a child and seeing all the Sisters’ gallants, the room delighting in displays of marionettes.
But this? The Pietà gives no puppet shows.
“You’re finally disowning me, then?” She means it to be cutting, a jab at the rumors that have surrounded the Grimani family since her birth, rumors rekindled by her mother’s disappearance three years ago. But Maddalena’s voice cracks, and, embarrassed by her weakness, she hardens against Nicolò’s look of sympathy.
The Ospedale della Pietà. Ridiculous. Impossible. He won’t say how he’s gotten her a place at the school, which is not really a school, no matter that it gives an education. Not a school, but a mill. A place to change Maddalena, to grind her.
“Why?”
“You’re good at singing,” says Nicolò. A stretch.
“Why?” Maddalena asks again, though they both know the answer. She is still being punished for her mother’s sins. It doesn’t matter how demure she is, how modestly they keep her. She can swallow her resentment, her frustration, she can curtsy at her father’s table for her father’s guests, and still they say, “Ah, but her mother.” She can smile until her mouth is a puppet’s slit, and still they say, “How can we trust what she’ll become?”
“You think without this I won’t find a husband.” Maddalena stares out at the crowd, readying itself for the customary regatta, men goading one another between boats, flicking their oars. A vessel approaches, packed with pigeons protesting captivity, legs already weighted with the heavy paper that will keep them flying low and close to the crowd when they’re released after Mass. Some puff their chests and sound pitiful coos, others stand frozen. Their ferryman tuts at them, laughing, lifting an oar to douse a particularly ornery bird.
“It isn’t that you won’t find a husband,” Nicolò says over the drums, “but if we’re gambling—”
“You’re never gambling. It’s why you’re no fun.”
“Well, I’m not going to play your future at a gaming table. We’re going to give you an advantage. You’ll cultivate a talent, and you’ll prove that you’re devout and take instruction, and if a husband doesn’t come…” Nicolò coughs. “What would you prefer? To be a nun? To go immediately to a nunnery?” The tops of his ears are turning pink. People think Nicolò too sober for the casino, too clever. No, he has too many inborn tells.
“I would prefer for things to be the way they were,” says Maddalena, although she knows the question is rhetorical, the desire impossible.
“Maddalena.”
“I’m not going to do it. You’ve made the offer and I’ve listened, and I decline.” She gives a pinched smile, to show him she does not need refinement. Then, to drive the point home, she says, “Thank you.”
“Maddalena.”
“You can’t force me.” Unspoken between them: that he can.
They sit, both looking out at the bucintoro, a gaudy golden pastry of a ship with its massive figurehead and rows of red oars, bobbing proudly at the center of the gathered crowd as it waits for the doge to finish hearing Mass. Finally his entourage emerges from the monastery, and Nicolò moves to the far side of the gondola to see the senators off to their celebratory feast. Maddalena uninvited, unmoving, as he waves to the passing barges.
She should have seen it coming. They rarely bring her out for Carnival or feast days, determined to keep the daughter from her mother’s reputation. Nicolò views the world as an accountant’s scale, and never offers pleasure without consequence.
The afternoon’s perfection rankles her. The sky looks almost the same blue as the lagoon, spilling over with voluptuous clouds and that salted breeze sailing in from the Adriatic. Laughter escapes a nearby gondola, a voice raised over the rest: “Meet me at the Fiera, near the glass peddlers.” A lone heron barking through the gentler birdsong; a woman pretending to be scandalized, her ooh and ahhh. The final two weeks of the Carnival season have begun, and all are giddy not because Jesus readies rooms for them in heaven, but because His Ascension brings them earthly delights.
This is the sort of day that Maddalena lives for—gentle, sun-dappled, significant. The city overflowing from the canals, from the lagoon out to the sea. Here is Venice, wedded to the water, still strong, despite the powers in the west, the newfound trade routes and the English shipbuilders and the money that Nicolò claims bleeds from the republic by the minute. Here is Venice as the rest of the world should remember her. The doge’s oarsmen begin to sing, to row in rhythm. The bucintoro recedes.
Since her mother left, her life has gotten smaller. Gone are the visits from her former friends, her scandal too infectious. No more not-quite-secret trips with Andrea to the coffee shop, or picnics with Beneto’s cohort, nothing that could be interpreted as flashy or untoward—only dull old Aunt Antonia to shuffle and chaperone. Once Maddalena enters the Pietà, there will be no political guests at the dinner table, no sunning on the roof of the palazzo, no leaning out over the canal at dawn to watch a drunken Andrea appear with the sun. It could be years before she’s back at the Lido, years before she sees the sea. The water, the narrow beaches, the distant trade ships that wait for inspection, mere toys in the distance, the misty view of the main island from afar. They want her to exchange it all for an old church school, with no gardens. An assortment of orphans, who eat plain foods and attend no balls and make boring conversation about violins and God.
She won’t do it. She’ll run away. She’ll hide out in a bell tower. She’ll lock herself in her room and refuse all food and water until Nicolò takes pity and sets aside his plan.
But then what? What will happen when Beneto is finally married, when there’s no one to keep her and she has nothing to call her own? Maddalena would not prefer a nunnery. She sees Nicolò’s logic, and she knows that if he’s made the proposition, it’s already been decided with their father, who will spoil her in the days before she goes, and act as if he has no say in the matter. As always, Nicolò has been left to do the difficult things. As he desires it, Maddalena thinks, because if he is the one doing the difficult things, he at least approves of how they’re getting done. And there are many difficult things these days, with the nouveaux riches ascending, the noble families anemic, spread too thin. There are too many daughters and not enough sons, and there’s no room for a girl with suspect parentage, Grimani name or no. Her father will never let her marry below her station, and within and above it are a smattering of youngest sons with the brightest of Venetian women to choose from, all with demure mothers and clean blood. Maddalena supposes she is desperate, that Marcantonio and Nicolò are desperate. Yet she herself has not felt actual desperation until now, being told she must go.
The Pietà musicians are rumored to be angels in their white dresses, standing in the choir loft above the church, behind their shadowed grate, anointing their audience. Who could refuse an angel? Or, concedes Maddalena, a pretty enough girl with a title, who has studied with the angels.
The vessels turn back to the Molo, a slow procession of giddy celebrants ready to feast. Nicolò finds someone to talk to in an adjacent boat, gesticulates such that one false step would send him toppling. Maddalena tries to hate him, but she doesn’t. She doesn’t envy Nicolò in the way that she does Beneto or Andrea. That he is a man, yes. That his peers seem to respect him, even like him. But he’s so often at odds with himself, so often anxious and uncomfortable. Instead she hates herself, so ineffectual.
Maddalena turns from Nicolò, looks down at the now-empty place where the doge wed the waves, not twenty feet from where the Grimani boat rests. She finds no sign that the sea has sworn fealty to Venice, no manifestation of the awe she’s just felt. The water is placid and formless, reflecting a perverse sketch of her own pinned hair, her dark dress. Her father has explained the Sensa ceremony as a mutual agreement rather than an ownership, a bond that supposedly benefits both parties, even as it appears to enrich only one. Venice asks of the sea its protection from invaders, its salt and its steady level, its proximity to trade. What does the sea want of Venice? What does the doge sign away with his yearly vow? We wed thee, sea, as a sign of true and perpetual domination. But who dominates? Do they dominate together? Maddalena has trouble believing that they do. Maddalena has trouble with that word, together. She is more like Nicolò than she cares to be, seeing the universe as transactional. Open to life, but never trusting it.
And what is there to trust? A mother who runs out on you? A brother who sells you like chattel and a father too busy to care? Whatever power the sea gives Venice doesn’t extend to Maddalena, who can refuse with all the fury she can summon yet still find herself trapped in the Pietà compound on the Riva degli Schiavoni, as her family demands. She has no influence, no one who’ll listen. Her only sovereignty over her body, and barely that. What would Nicolò do if he found her hanging from the glass chandelier in her bedroom? She pictures him racing toward her apartments, flinging open the door, seeing her. She could never go through with it. Besides, the chandelier would come down with her, too delicate to handle her weight. Could she jump into the lagoon? Maddalena imagines the inhalation, wonders if she has the will to submit. She leans down, trying to see herself clearly, but the light is wrong.
There, against the tide. Lapping, lapping, at the edge of the black gondola. If asked, Maddalena could not describe it, not its color or its size, the way it moves below the water, the way it glistens up at her.
She pulls back, looks around quickly. Does anyone else see? Surely someone should see, someone should help. Someone should row them away from this thing, the way it reaches and writhes, asking her to move closer, asking her to bend down and look. When she does, she sees a girl here with the darkness, or the semblance of a girl. About Maddalena’s age, fully submerged, neither swimming nor drowning. Her hair floats up in fronds about her head, the white-gold color all the courtesans use bleach and sun to master. She wears white, and holds a violin aloft like a torch, its neck grasped so tightly Maddalena can almost feel the strings slicing the insides of her fingers. Can this girl see Maddalena? Her eyes are clouded over with what could be tears or cataracts or might just be the water, silty when the sea floor is disturbed. But she is looking in Maddalena’s direction, she is turning toward Maddalena and opening her mouth, and as she opens it the water rushes in and she is sinking, heavy with the weight, until she has sunk past where Maddalena can see. The released violin drifts up to the surface. Maddalena leans farther, reaching out an arm to rescue it, but the f-holes are filling and it’s lowering, too low, and then gone. Before she can raise her torso back onto the boat, that first shadow returns. Solidifies. It clasps her hands, its touch cold.
And the thing asks Maddalena, without speaking: What do you want?
Copyright © 2023 by Julia Fine
