Vienna Nocturne by Vivien Shotwell Read Free Book Online Page A

and I don’t have to sing tonight
.
    Mama and I are all amazement to read you’ve moved to the country. Next we know you’ll be a monk! How can you be my only brother and so unlike me? How silly I am. I was very bad to stay out so late. Mama said so
.
    But here is Lidia with my tea! Dearest, sweetest, brown-eyed Lidia! Straight as a rod! How she cares for me—no matter that I’m a giggling creature. I would make her add a line to this letter so you could see her hand and meet her in that way, but she is so modest she’d run over the hills and dales
.
    Tonight we dine with Benucci and Michael Kelly. Benucci just got back and we’ll reprise our opera. I have missed my Titta, and he has missed his Dorina. Don’t frown, I’m not in love with him, I mean with Benucci. Only Titta. Titta is my love. But Michael is my best friend, apart from Lidia and you. Don’t be a monk, my Stephen. Do don’t be. I should need you too much. Now tea!
    Yours ever, Anna

Columbina

    The people of Venice sang as much as they talked, sang as they worked and wooed and slept, in gondolas and barges, on market squares, lubricated by drink and company and the place itself, a city in the water that waked by night and slept by day, that prized folly over sense, and saved itself for nothing, but spent all, risked all, for beauty’s flowering and pleasure’s gratification. A city that directed its people to go masked, that friends might meet as strangers and strangers as friends.
    You might have found Anna, on nights she wasn’t performing, playing faro at the Ridotto, with her darkly fringed eyes shadowed by a golden half-mask, a
columbina
. She sometimes sang at the table—everyone sang in Venice—and that was how one knew her, even masked, even in so crowded a place as the Ridotto. Anyone who considered himself anyone in Venice in December 1782 could identify the voice of Anna Storace, so warm and sweet it was, so personal and beguiling. Names for her hung in the air like thesmells of the lagoon and the songs of the gondoliers: La Storace, L’inglesina …
    She loved to play faro but never risked much. Her mother thought she was too young for it, but Anna insisted it was politically necessary. She must mingle with her patrons and benefactors and be known. She enjoyed the game for the way it made her feel as alive as she felt on the stage, with a racing heart and warm jovial bodies all around her and sensations of peril and security rolling in delicious contradiction in her belly. She loved, too, how everyone at the table knew and praised her, and blushed, some of them, to be in her presence. Young men grown bored of throwing away money in their own names placed bets in hers, leaning over her cards and urging her to bid another hundred, another thousand, until they had no more.
    If not at the Ridotto she might be found at the private casino of a friend or patron, playing the same games with smaller and more select company. Sometimes she would be asked to sing. At three or four in the morning she would leave for home with Lidia. Drowsily they’d float along the crowded torch-lit canals and disembark into the apartment where Anna’s mother was waiting, there to take off their sweat-stained masks (Lidia’s a hooded
bauta
), and then Lidia, suppressing her yawns, would undress Anna, and help her put on her nightgown, and comb her dark fragrant hair, and Anna, tired and intoxicated, would lean into Lidia’s flat chest as if she could not stand, and so they would fall into bed like sisters and sleep into the afternoon.
    In the weeks since she’d arrived in Venice, Anna had resolved to forget all about Francesco Benucci, to disdain and torment him, but the moment he walked into the theater and kissed her cheeks, surrounding her with his smell and his touch and his warmth, with his ringing voice, bright upon dark upon bright, wholly his own,wholly recognizable, thrilling to heart and bone, there was no hope for her.
    He smiled broadly, his eyes