Vivaldi's Girls

July 29, 1741 ViennaHe now rests beneath the soft brown earth. As I stare down at the newly shoveled mound at my feet, the notes of his last composition come back to me. I recall our meeting last night as I sat in a small chair next to the fire in his study. We chatted as if we were friends; he smiled and told small anecdotes, mostly about himself, and I had to hide my bitterness from him. Once more I am alone with him. The gravediggers are gone; all his girls and all his bootlickers have left me alone on this little hill in the Bürgerspital Cemetery to pay my last respects. But respect left long ago; I am here to look down on him one last time. He can no longer bother me with his arrogant stories. My mind is fixed on revenge – not the impulsive revenge that sparks an explosion of anger, but the type of revenge that is eternal. I look up at the blue sky and hope. Perhaps the angels who came for him when his breath failed for the last time recognized him. Perhaps they saw the face that the heavens had warned them about. Perhaps they then cast him down rather than lifted him up. Last night, I stared at him in the dim light of the candelabra on the piano as his head rocked gently with the rhythm of the music. The melody that he had written was soft, mournful, and – I admitted to myself – lovely. The vibrations that rose from the pianoforte created gentle movements in the air, weaving their way toward me. His great talent had always been making each person in a room believe he was the audience for whom the music was composed. But when I looked at Antonio and saw the thin smile on his lips, I was reminded once again that he only played for himself. I shifted in the chair and crossed my weakened left leg over the other, settling once again just as he too shifted toward the lower register of the instrument, softly caressing the keys and gently sliding his fingers off the edge of the ivory. I was there last night because he had just composed this new sheet of music and he had summoned me to his poor one-room flat near Stephansplatz to hear it. Antonio had an insatiable need for approval, and I supplied the audience so that he could prove that he was still the genius that the world remembered. He didn't claim it was his masterpiece, but he wanted an endorsement from someone, and I happened to be in Vienna at the time. I smiled impatiently and accepted, but I had my own personal reasons for visiting him. For an hour after I arrived, we sat and passed the news of the day with inconsequential stories, neither of us particularly interested in such small talk but using our back-and-forth conversation as a swordsman might parry his opponent's jabs until the right opening offered itself. The candle flickered and the short stubs of wood in the fireplace crackled. Warmth wasn't needed inside this room, not in July, but the low flames from the hearth threw off a dim and meager glow in the room, enough to light his face and the keys of the piano that his fingers rested upon. Our talk that evening had been as one between men of an advanced age who shared memories of life and time. If a stranger had stood in his doorway that evening he would be forgiven for thinking that Antonio and I were friends. But despite our years in each other's company, friendship was not the reason we were drawn together. The truth was that we both loved the same woman. She was only one of his 'adventures.' But she was my wife, a girl that I had loved since her birth in my twenty-first year. A young child I had watched grow into womanhood, whose sparkling eyes and long blond tresses endangered any man who caught her in his gaze. Despite all her suitors, she chose me, a man with a gimpy leg, thinning gray hair, and many more years on earth than hers. And the miracle of it was, she loved me. But she was also in love with the music he created. It enchanted her, and he used these sonorous tunes to lure Rachel just as he had lured other young girls into his arms. In the end, I was the one who would have to make Antonio Vivaldi pay for his sins.