The True Adventures of Nicolo Zen

1
When the Master auditioned us, we were told not to speak.
Luca, his assistant, a heavyset man in a black coat, handed each of us a page of sheet music, from the first movement of the Master's latest concerto. "Just play this," he said gruffly, pulling at his black beard, "first in D major, then in B-flat minor."
Two girls stood alongside me, one a violinist, the other a flautist. We were at the center of a long, poorly lit room in the rear of the church. It smelled of beeswax and lemon oil. The worn oak planks creaked beneath our feet. On one wall, there was a large portrait of our Doge, Giovanni Cornaro, who never smiled, facing a small portrait of Pope Clement. Even at the age of fourteen, I knew that in any city besides Venice, in the year 1714, the Pope's portrait would have been the larger one. The Master was sitting in a high-backed chair against the wall, about twenty feet away. It felt like a mile, and I would learn that, even in close quarters, the Master seemed distant and remote. His head was bowed. His red hair flowed over his shoulders. He wore a yellow jacket, black pants, and boots with silver buckles. He never looked at us.
The violinist played first, but was so nervous she barely reached the middle of the piece before lowering her instrument and fighting back tears. The flautist played fearlessly, but made several errors, and out of the corner of my eye I saw Luca shaking his head.
When she was done, he nodded to me, and I stepped up to the music stand. My clarinet was constructed of ivory, its keys and spring gold, and even in that dim light the instrument shone when I raised it to my lips. I played the piece, an intricate saraband, in both keys as energetically as I could.
When I finished, the Master raised his head for the first time and peered at me. I felt his blue eyes were searching out my innermost self, and I prayed he would not find it.
"A clarinet," he said. "I have only heard the instrument played twice before. Never in Venice. Never so well. Come here and show it to me."
I tried to conceal my nervousness as I approached his desk. He examined the clarinet closely and handed it back to me. "A beautiful instrument. The ones I saw were ebony. This is unusual. Do you always play the part of the score written for flute?"
I nodded.
"Perhaps one day the clarinet will have its own part. Go back to your seat." He looked at Luca. "She will do," he said.
I sighed with relief, but not, as you might think, because he approved of my playing or was intrigued by my clarinet, but because Master Antonio Vivaldi had just admitted me, a boy named Nicolò Zen, to his orchestra, all of whose members were girls from the Ospedale della Pieta, the orphanage for girls attached to the Church of La Pieta.
When Luca asked for my full name and my father's name, I replied, "Nicola. Nicola Vitale. Daughter of Giacomo Vitale."
One lie after another, which he wrote down in the brown book he carried with him at all times.

2
How had I disguised myself?
With great difficulty.
I was slim-waisted, with large eyes and long brown hair. People thought me good-looking, but I had never been mistaken for a girl, and without altering my appearance, I never would be. I was fortunate to know something about girls, the way they dressed and moved and combed their hair, from having grown up with three sisters.
I was raised on the small, wooded island of Mazzorbo in the Lagoon, where my father eked out a living as a handyman and part-time tar mixer at the boatyard. He was also a fine fisherman--his own father's profession--and one of my fondest memories of him is our rowing out to the deeper waters off the island of Burano, just the two of us, to catch a basketful of striped bass, the tastiest fish in the Lagoon, which my mother would fry for dinner. Usually we brought home enough to feed the entire family for several days.
My parents and my sisters contracted malaria when it wiped out most of our village. As with the nearby, and more famous, island of Torcello, Mazzorbo's misty swamps were infested with mosquitoes. When they hatched in the spring rain, the mosquitoes carried the disease among us quickly, and dozens of people perished each day. I ran a fever so high that my eyes burned and my tongue stuck to the roof of my mouth, until eventually, dizzy and short of breath, I blacked out. It was a miracle I survived. Thus, in addition to my ability to play the clarinet, and despite my true gender, I met a crucial qualification for the orchestra: I was an orphan. Sadly, that was no lie.
When my fever broke, I awoke from a restless sleep and at first had no memory of what had occurred. I was lying on a straw bed in an unfamiliar house. There was a crucifix hanging from the bedpost and an icon of the Savior nailed to the wall across from me. An elderly widow, a stout woman with curly white hair, was swabbing my forehead with a wet cloth. I had seen her around the village carrying baskets of laundry, for that was her business, serving the island's rich landowners. Her name was Signora Capelli. Someone had carried me to her house when I was found wandering the streets two nights earlier. It was she who told me what I already knew but still could not believe: my entire family was gone. In quick succession, delirious with fever, they had succumbed to the disease. I was completely on my own. Signora Capelli had no idea where my family was buried.
"They were burying people a dozen at a time in unmarked graves," she said. "God help us."
Signora Capelli had kindly washed my clothes, and before I left her house she fed me a breakfast of cornmeal and honey. I thanked her, and promised myself that one day I would repay her kindness.
It was a hot, damp day, a foul wind blowing from the swamps. I walked down several lanes, to the other side of the village, the landmarks of my childhood--Signor Raguso's bakery, the produce market, the glazier's workshop--replaced by one scene of horror after another. Men and women wailing in grief, tearing at their hair; children in their death throes, their eyes rolled back in their heads; and corpses everywhere, giving off a stench that made me gag. There were corpses piled in carts, like Signor Raguso and his wife; laid on ragged stretchers, like Carla, the butcher's daughter; or just sprawled out in the baking mud, as I would have been had some Good Samaritan not carried me to the widow's house. I prayed I would never see such things again.
I reached my own home, and at the sight of it burst into tears. The house was empty. My family had indeed been buried already, and neither our one surviving neighbor, Signor Tramante, nor a grim, exhausted constable could tell me where. For an instant, I had a wild glimmer of hope that perhaps one of my sisters had also wandered off feverish, like me, and was being nursed back to health. But, no, Signor Tramante was certain he had seen the stretcher carriers take five bodies out of the house.
I had awoken to a nightmare that could not be escaped. I packed a few articles of clothing in the canvas bag my mother used to take to the market. Then I put in my father's knife, in its leather sheath, and my clarinet, which I kept hidden under my bed. Sitting at our kitchen table for the last time, numb with grief, I suddenly felt as if I had stepped out of my own body, which was why I didn't hear someone open the door behind me and enter the house.
It was our landlord, Signor Cardinale, a thin, hatchet-faced man with cold eyes who was suspicious of everything and everyone. Unlike any other man I encountered that day, he was shaved and neatly dressed, wearing a blue cloak and polished boots--as if nothing had changed and all was well with the world. With no word of condolence, no gesture of solace--not even a greeting--he informed me in his high, squeaky voice that he was reclaiming our poor cottage.
"Your father was two months behind in the rent, so this was going to happen one way or the other. I am boarding up the house, and no one will be permitted inside until I rent it again. Take your things and go on your way."
My mother, who had seldom spoken ill of anyone, detested this man, but until that moment I hadn't known just how wicked and depraved he was.
I added her bronze bracelet to my bag, and my sister Alessandra's wooden comb, but it was too painful for me to sift through the rest of my family's meager possessions, especially with Signor Cardinale watching over me--as if I were a thief and this was not my own home.
Following me outside, he reached into his pocket and offered me a single zecchino. I looked into his crimped face and fixed it in my memory, a reminder that I should always beware of men whose greed feeds, not just on treasure, but cruelty. Then, without a word, I turned on my heel and walked away.
"You won't get far in life with that attitude," he called after me.
In fact, I got as far as I needed to that day, riding the packet boat across the Lagoon to Venice. And I will not pretend I mourned when I learned sometime later that, after repossessing countless other houses from destitute survivors of the epidemic, Signor Cardinale had contracted malaria himself and died horribly, choking on his own blood. As the boat pulled away from the dock, I sat alone in the stern, clutching my bag, and gazed back over Mazzorbo one last time. It looked no different than before--mist rising in the forest, wild ducks navigating the reeds, light shimmering on the water--but its natural beauty was like some cruel joke to me, knowing as I did how much suffering and death had descended on the island.
It was sunset when the steeples and towers of Venice came into view, glittering gold. We sailed past the forbidding seawall that encircled the Franciscan monastery on San Michele, where the monks buried their dead one on top of the other in the crowded cemetery. I shuddered to think of my parents and sisters in a shallow grave, cold as the earth itself now. It was unbearable. But I was alive, and I imagined my mother saying that there must be a reason for this, and that I must make the most of it and live my life, not just for myself, but for them.
This was small comfort for a boy entering a city alone at nightfall, poorly dressed, hungry, with no money and no place to stay, and only two immediate choices before him: to become a thief or a beggar. Which, for me, was no choice at all.

3
Thus it was that, the moment I set foot in Venice, I began to beg. From the docks of the Canareggio I followed a succession of dizzying alleys to the Grand Canal. I often lost my way in the darkness, zigzagging and backtracking, sometimes passing the same doorway two or three times. The air was pungent with smoke and the smell of cooking, which made me linger whenever I passed a tavern.
Though my family had lived just three hours away, we used to visit the city together but twice a year: in March, to be blessed on the Feast Day of San Stefano, and in September, to watch the regatta, which the Doge himself initiated. Perched on a high platform in his gold chair, his robe adorned with every type of fish in the sea, he would drop his sea-blue scarf into the crowd below and toss a medallion, minted with his own image, into the canal.
My father traveled to Venice more frequently and, as I grew older, brought me along. We usually went first to a bacaro on the Calle Bartolomeo where he drank raboso wine from the barrel with a group of masons who were once his coworkers. Then I accompanied him to the boatyard on the Rio di San Trovaso where he bought a keg of tar that was sent to him in Mazzorbo. Once he took me to the Church of Santi Apostoli on the Strada Nuova, where he'd had his fateful accident one frigid morning, falling from a scaffold. In the coming days, I would revisit that church many times, sitting in the courtyard and gazing up at the steeple, one of the tallest in the city, knowing some of its limestone blocks had been hewn and mortared by my father's hands when he still had two good arms.
But that night, as the wind grew colder and the darkness deepened, on my own for the first time in my life, I found the city far stranger and more forbidding. My warm memories of my family and our former home already felt like part of another life, which I could never reenter. Though I had few possessions, in my grief and sadness I felt as if I were carrying a tremendous weight. If we're all allotted a certain amount of happiness in this life, I was certain that, despite my youth, I had used up all of mine and had only to look forward to a maze of fearful shadows and dead ends, resembling the maze of alleys I was trying to negotiate.
Finally I saw the lights of the Doge's Palace and the Campanile, whose bells were just striking ten o'clock. Skirting San Marco, where watchmen were making their rounds with swinging lanterns, and the Palace Guard in black capes marched around the perimeter, I made my way along the Riva degli Schiavoni and stopped just beyond the Rio dei Greci, where I began to beg. The dark waters of the Grand Canal glittered and the rooms of the great palazzi glowed with candlelight. The silhouettes of gentlemen in tall hats and ladies with mountainous hair glided back and forth. Streams of people swarmed past me, gaily dressed, talking and laughing. Scents of expensive powder and cologne filled my nostrils. Crowds gathered at the piers from which traghetti carried them across the canal to the Dorsoduro. Through the mist the windows of the Customs House were lit up, even at that hour, and on the roof, atop a golden ball, the bronze figure of Fortune served as a weather vane, moving this way and that in the wind.