Antonietta Read online

  JOHN HERSEY

  Antonietta

  John Hersey was born in Tientsin, China, in 1914. He began taking violin lessons there when he was eight years old, from a White Russian emigré, who later moved to the United States and played for decades with the Boston Symphony. Hersey’s family returned to the United States in 1925. He studied at Yale and Cambridge universities, served for a time as Sinclair Lewis’s secretary, and then worked several years as a journalist. He published fifteen books of fiction, including the Pulitzer Prize-winning A Bell for Adano, and nine volumes of reportage and essays, Hiroshima and Blues among them. Mr. Hersey died in 1993.

  ALSO BY JOHN HERSEY

  Fling and Other Stories (1990)

  Life Sketches (1989)

  Blues (1987)

  The Call (1985)

  The Walnut Door (1977)

  The President (1975)

  My Petition for More Space (1974)

  The Writer’s Craft (1974)

  The Conspiracy (1972)

  Letter to the Alumni (1970)

  The Algiers Motel Incident (1968)

  Under the Eye of the Storm (1967)

  Too Far to Walk (1966)

  White Lotus (1965)

  Here to Stay (1963)

  The Child Buyer (1960)

  The War Lover (1959)

  A Single Pebble (1956)

  The Marmot Drive (1953)

  The Wall (1950)

  Hiroshima (1946; new edition, 1985)

  A Bell for Adano (1944)

  Into the Valley (1943)

  Copyright © 1991 by John Hersey

  Illustration copyright © 1991 by Irmgard Lochner

  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Vintage Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto. Originally published in hardcover by Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., New York, in 1991.

  Grateful acknowledgment is made to the following for permission to reprint previously published material:

  European American Music Distributors Corporation: Hindemith Sonata in D, Opus II, No. 2,

  Movement 1, measures 1 through 4. Copyright 1920 by B. Schott’s Soehne, Mainz.

  Copyright renewed. All rights reserved. Used by permission of European Music Distributors Corporation, sole U.S. and Canadian agent for B. Schott’s Soehne, Mainz.

  Faber and Faber Limited: Excerpt from Stravinsky’s The Wedding from Stravinsky:

  The Composer and His Works by Eric Walter White. Reprinted by permission of Faber and Faber Limited.

  G. Schirmer, Inc.: Musical excerpts and lyric excerpts from “L’Histoire du Soldat” by Stravinsky. Copyright 1924 (Renewed) by J & W Chester/Edition Wilhelm Hansen London Ltd. All rights for the U.S. and Canada by G. Schirmer, Inc. International copyright secured. All rights reserved. Used by permission.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Hersey, John, 1914–1993

  Antonietta / John Hersey.—

  p. cm.

  ISBN 0-679-74181-X (pbk.)

  1. Stradivari, Antonio, d. 1737—Fiction. 2. Violin—History—Fiction. I. Title.

  [PS3515.E7715A85 1993]

  813′.52—dc20 92-50626

  CIP

  Ebook ISBN 9780593080740

  v5.4

  a

  TO BARBARA

  “Cheerfulness keeps up a kind of daylight in the mind, and fills it with a steady and perpetual serenity.”

  Joseph Addison, The Spectator, May 17, 1712

  Contents

  Cover

  About the Author

  Also by John Hersey

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Author’s Note

  Act One · 1699

  INTERMEZZO ONE

  Act Two · 1778

  INTERMEZZO TWO

  Act Three · 1830

  INTERMEZZO THREE

  Act Four · 1918

  INTERMEZZO FOUR

  Act Five · 1989

  FINALE

  Note

  Musicians and musicologists who read this book will know for certain that it is a novel, because they will find so many “untruths” in it—the peppercorns of fiction, which, a novelist hopes, may give the reader a taste for possibilities that are not found on the everyday menus of fact. This book was written for the fun of it, and I trust that those who know and revere the literal record will find themselves able to read, too, for the fun of it, with forgiving minds. At the end of the book is a note on some of the background sources I have used and abused in writing it.

  Act One

  1699

  An April morning in Lombardy in all its brilliance. Antonio Stradivari, aged fifty-five, stands in the light-filled loggia atop his house examining wedges of maple in order to choose the wood for the back of a new violin. A woman dressed in black, with a huge black shawl drawn around her shoulders, walks alone across the cobbled Piazza San Domenico below. Stradivari’s sons Francesco, who is twenty-eight, and Omobono, nineteen, are with him, the one handing him the slabs his father asks for, and the other putting those he rejects back on the overhead racks with great care. All three look down when they hear the sounds of the woman’s clogs on the pavement.

  The sun is full on the striding woman’s face, making it glow like a peach ripened to the edge of readiness—a widow’s face, to judge by the weeds, but a face by no means lined by years or ravaged by bereavement. It is an early-morning face, brimming with expectation. The clogs tap a message of vim. The tassels of the shawl swing with the woman’s hips from side to side to side to side. Omobono, who is not allowed to speak to his father, draws in his breath and whispers to his brother, “Ai!”

  The father, who hears that sound, shoots a glance like a lead ball at Omobono’s head. As the tapping and the dance of tassels move on across the piazza, the three men in the airy rooftop space make a vivid triangle of concupiscence, the two sons defining a short base, the father very much at the apex. The loggia is an open gallery with a tiled roof supported by six brick columns, of the sort called in the dialect of Cremona seccadour, a place for the drying of fruits and laundry—though in this case it is for the dry storage of precious wood on high racks, and for the slow curing of layers of varnish on violins, three of which now hang by their scrolls up under the slope of the roof. The tittupping of the clogs echoes up under the roof with a fluttering sound around the violins. The woman leaves the square. As the chatter of the clogs diminishes, the geometric tension in the triangle increases. Its filial base shifts uneasily, wrenching the angles.

  The father is suddenly flinty. He has been moody for several months, ever since May of last year, when his wife, Signora Francesca Feraboschi Capra Stradivari, whom even her sons knew to be a terror, flickered away like a burnt-out candle after many an agony of imaginary and real ailments. He has made only those three drying violins in the past two months. The sons saw how it pained him, out of the obligation of his position as one of the wealthier men in Cremona, to dole out one hundred and eighty-two lire for a grand funeral of the woman he detested, paying for fourteen priests and a choirboy for the service at the church of San Domenico, and for the procession twenty-six Dominican Fathers and sixteen Franciscans, thirty-one Fathers of San Angelo, twenty-seven of San Luca, twenty-one of San Salvadore, nineteen of San Francesco, hatted orphans, hatted beggars, twelve torch-bearers, six gravediggers wearing capes, a bier and a velvet-and-gold pall, ringing of bell
s in four parishes, black draperies at the church and the house, and bribes to two magistrates. If he wept at the funeral, his tears were surely those of a penurious man who felt grossly cheated by the need for this splurge.

  Yet he has languished ever since, seeming to mourn his wife, or at least to begrudge her having deserted him, as the sons under his discipline all too sorely have known, feeling the sting of his tongue in the shop. Omobono recently suggested to Francesco that their father’s eleven-month bad temper was caused by his no longer having a female body aboard which to enjoy i diritti del marito—a husband’s conjugal rights—for despite his openly declared dislike of his wife, his exercise of these rights had been announced to the five children in the house, over all the years, no less after his passing the age of fifty, by telltale sounds emanating at night from the mother’s room on the third floor: clamorous, frequent, energetic. Gentle Francesco was shocked by Omobono’s suggestion—as he had also always been by the noises.

  Now, as the delectable movements of the tassels of the shawl down there still swish in the triangular memory, the father has become even more finicky than usual. He wants another look at two wedges he has already examined—no, not those! Before! Three and four before that. He remembers the grain of that pair of pieces. The sons have always had to live with this frightening memory. He remembers every one of the scores of slabs of maple and pine that have been aging in the loggia for years—where and when bought, for how much, and how long a-drying. He remembers the exact shape of every violin he has made in nearly forty years, even back to those he made while apprenticed to Nicolò Amati—the archings and tunings of their bellies and backs, the resultant tonal niceties, the patterns of the grains of the wood, and the particular shade of the varnish. Especially he remembers each violin’s mode of speech.

  He looks, frowning, at the two wedges that Francesco now holds up for his inspection. They are both of maple from Turkey, which he bought from a villainous swindler on a trip to Venice twelve years ago—cut from logs sent to that city as the strongest and most durable wood for the rudders, the interior trim, and especially the oars of gondolas. These wedges were cut on the quarter, from the edge of the log to the heart, perpendicular to the tree’s rings, and they show, even in this rough, axe-split state, a promise of the exquisite surges of color, like billowing waves of smoke, that the best quartered maple can yield for the back of a varnished violin. He studies the two wedges for a long time. At one point he looks down from the loggia into the square, his glance sweeping along the line of the woman’s recent walk. Brusquely, then, he points to the wedge in Francesco’s left hand.

  Francesco asks if he wants Omobono to saw the requisite length from the piece, and split it.

  To the surprise of both sons, the father says he will do that work himself. But first he wants to choose the pine for the new belly.

  Again he takes his time, looking at many slabs. He chooses for the belly, at long last, a board four and a half inches wide of red pine, of the variety known locally as azarole, cut from the south side of a tree on the south slopes of a mountain in the Tyrol where the pines get a heavy salt seasoning in the air from nearby saltworks. He bought it at a bargain in a consignment from a Milanese cheapjack, who didn’t know how good it was. Its grain is straight, even, and fine but not tight. The board has been cut on the slab—tangent to growth rings.

  Later, Omobono asks Francesco:—Did you notice how long the old man took today, choosing? He hasn’t been that particular for months, has he?

  Francesco says:—Thanks to God.

  Omobono:—Thanks to the woman in black.

  —What do you mean?

  —The way she walked. Did you see his face?

  —You have a filthy tongue.

  —I saw your face, too, Francesco.

  * * *

  —

  Now they descend to the ground floor, to the shop. As the three enter, Carlo Bergonzi, the father’s only apprentice aside from his sons, leaves off whisking the maestro’s workbench with a feather duster. That bench and those of Francesco and Omobono and the narrower one of the apprentice are immaculate. The father tyrannously insists on this. There is not one wood shaving on the floor.

  The tools have all been wiped and are at parade rest in their racks or on their hooks at the backs of the benches. The father thinks of these as his greatest treasures on earth, his beloved trinkets, the jewels of a liutaio. No, they are much more than that, they are capable of being brought to life as extensions of his hands, for when he holds them they quiver, as if on perfect pitch, in unison with the vibrations of his personality. His great gift is matched precision of mind and hand; the tools are the faithful messengers of his precision to the wood he shapes. He is a rather casual Christian, but he takes the trouble to pray over these objects the first thing every morning. Indeed, he has taught Francesco and Omobono and Carlo to revere their tools as if they were sacred, as hallowed as relics of martyrs of the church.

  There they all are: chisels for scooping, for shaving, for cutting mortises, for incising purflings; gouges and gauges; razor-edged half-moons of steel for scraping; calipers to measure thicknesses; sharpeners; wooden-handled knives for shaping f-holes; clamps of various sizes; bending irons; delicate tiny double-cut files—flat, half-round, rattail, three-square. Most beautiful of all are the parades of small elliptical metal planes, all laid out in processions of varying sizes, down to no bigger than the first joint of a forefinger, their hungry little blades set by wooden wedges into convex feet. On the maestro’s bench there is, besides, reposing in a chinaware cup, a small piece of hematite in the shape of a human eyetooth, which the father likes to use for burnishing.

  Before the three came down from the loggia, the father cut the two slabs he had selected to a length of fifteen and a half inches, and he split each exactly in two with a hatchet as sharp as a fortune-teller’s tongue. He announced upstairs that he intends to make this violin entirely himself, every step of the way, with no help from the sons, and in order to give them work to do in the meantime he has less painstakingly chosen slabs for two more backs and bellies on which they can do the usual preliminary work.

  Francesco and Omobono now see that their father meant what he said, for he even lights a fire himself for the gluepot—a chore the apprentice has always done—and sets some hide-and-hoof glue to melt. He uses a flat plane to face down the wedges for the back and the slabs for the belly, and when the glue is ready he joins and clamps the pieces together, so that when they have been shaped for the finished violin, both belly and back will have halves that more or less twin each other.

  Something else unusual: he hums as he works, popping his lips on staccato notes. This is bizarre; he is usually broodingly silent at his bench. But hearing the humming, Omobono nods, as if he knew this was going to happen. Francesco, with his sensitive ear, recognizes a sprightly theme from a violin trio they have recently heard*1 by a promising young redheaded Venetian priest-violinist—“il prete rosso,” as he is nicknamed. The composer’s father, a friend of Stradivari from Brescia, proudly sent the violinmaker a hand-copied score of the piece.

  * * *

  —

  Two whole days pass before the father, seated at table a pranzo with his sons and Carlo Bergonzi, looks up from his plate, where he has been attacking a delicious pope’s-eye of veal with diced ham that Feliciana the cook knows to be his favorite dish, and says to no one in particular:—Do you know who the woman was?

  Francesco says:—The woman?

  The father says:—The one in the early morning, the widow.

  Omobono, who is not allowed to speak to his father, says to Francesco:—Tell him it was the widow Zambelli.

  Francesco dutifully tells his father that it was the widow Zambelli, as if his father had not been able to hear Omobono.

  The father says very sharply to Francesco:—Ask him how he knows.

  Francesco ask
s the question.

  Omobono lazily sops up the gravy on his plate with a piece of Feliciana’s peasant bread made from a mixed meal of corn, rye, millet, and beans, lifts it and bites into it, and then says, with his mouth full and a dribble of gravy on his chin:—Tell him that I inquired.

  Having received this answer, the father shifts in his seat, obviously wanting to ask another question, but Feliciana comes in with a plate of fruit and cheese, and he waits until she has put it on the table with a clatter and has gone back to the kitchen. Then he says to Francesco:—What inquiries? Ask him.

  Francesco to Omobono:—What inquiries?

  Omobono:—After work, last evening, just before sunset, I took a walk.

  The father’s face is red. He swallows a sip of half-and-half wine and water. Then he says angrily to Francesco:—What business did he have gossiping?

  Without waiting for Francesco’s transmission, Omobono looks his father directly in the eye and with great audacity says straight to him, as it is forbidden to do, in a melting tone of voice:—I did it for you, Babbo.

  The father’s face looks like a sky in which peculiar, turbulent winds are blowing clouds this way and that. What will there be, hailstones and trees bent by gusts, or patches of blue and then sharp shadows on the grass? Suddenly the eyes soften, the frown becomes unstitched, and Antonio Stradivari, speaking to Omobono for the first time in more than two years, says:—I forgive you, son. I forgive you. It has been long enough. Now tell me what you learned.

  And Omobono, showing neither pleasure nor excitement at having been released from his father’s long censure, says that her name is Antonia Maria Zambelli. He learned this from an apprentice of the Guarneris who was at Leopoldo’s billiards last evening. He says that there were seven or eight men around the tables, and he casually mentioned the woman’s passage through the piazza and tried as carefully as he could to describe her face, but no one could think whom he meant. Then—another swipe with the bread at the gravy—he told the players as exactly as he could how she walked, and in fact he began to go swaying across the floor himself in mimicry of her walking. He had not taken more than three paces when the fellow from the Guarneris said Zambelli. Then at once others chimed in, agreeing.