Donna Leon - The Jewels of Paradise

He waved toward the papers on the desk. “Nothing?”

“So far, all I’ve found are documents about his career as a musician and a bishop and one aria that I think he wrote.”

“Aria?” he asked, quite as if he knew nothing about musical notation.

“I don’t know where it’s from, but it’s an opera aria, not one of his chamber duets.” She saw that this distinction was not one he understood and so glossed over that by adding, “I think it’s in his hand.” Then, before he could ask, she continued. “There’s a copy of one of his scores in one of the books I’m reading, and the handwriting looks the same,” she said, pointing back toward the paper that lay on the table.

When Dottor Moretti failed to comment, she said, “It’s probably his, but I’m not qualified to authenticate it.”

“You know what the first question from the cousins will be?” he asked.

“Of course: ‘How much is it worth?’”

Then, answering the question he had posed, Dottor Moretti said, “I imagine it’s at the whim of supply and demand, though you wouldn’t think it would be like that for art, would you?”

“It’s not art,” she said. “It’s just pieces of paper.”

“What? I’m not sure I understand.”

“The art is in the sound—the music, the singing. The score is just the way it’s passed on.”

“But if it was written down by the composer? Mozart? Handel? Bach?” He sounded astonished and made no attempt to hide it. This was her profession, after all; she should know this sort of thing.

“If you don’t know how to read musical notation, what good is the paper? If you’re blind but you can still hear, what good is the paper? Unless you can hear it, what good is it?” She saw that he was stumbling after her, trying to understand but perhaps not managing to.

“Would you try to tell someone what a painting looks like? Or say that a perfume smells like a mixture of lavender and roses? Or tell the plot of a poem?” she asked. He looked at her with complete attention and she realized he was following all of these examples. “If you can’t hear it, what is it?” she asked.

After a long time, Dottor Moretti smiled and said, “I never thought of it like that.”

“Most people don’t.”

AFTER THAT, CATERINA PAUSED FOR A LONG TIME, FEELING strangely exposed by having so forcefully expressed her opinion. In situations like this, in which she found herself defending a position she knew that others would find extreme, she often tried in her subsequent remarks to pour unguent on what she had said, but this time she didn’t want to: she believed this. The art was the sound; the beauty was in the singing or the playing: to want to own the notes written down on paper, to place a greater value on the paper if it bore the signature of the composer, seemed to her an impure desire. She remembered something from her school catechism classes, about the sin of worshipping “graven images.” Or maybe it was the sale of indulgences she was thinking of. Or perhaps she wasn’t thinking at all and didn’t need a comparison; it was creepy and it was wrong to think that the written music was the real music.

The lawyer smiled. “I understand your position, really I do. But unless someone can write it down for the singer or the musician, they don’t know what to do.”

“But that’s not what I’m talking about,” she said. “I’m talking about turning a piece of paper or an object into a fetish. Like a letter by Goldoni or Garibaldi’s belt buckle. Goldoni’s important because he’s a great writer, and Garibaldi’s famous because he banged heads and made this into a country. But his belt buckle’s nothing. It’s not him. And a letter from Goldoni has only the value someone is willing to put on it.”

“Isn’t that true for music?” he asked. “I mean, a performance. If everyone thinks it was lousy and howls at the singer, then how good was the performance?”

She smiled. “Unfortunately, there isn’t enough howling.”

“I beg your pardon?”

Caterina smiled again, pulled out her chair and sat, waved to Dottor Moretti to take the chair opposite her. “I mean that audiences are too polite. I’ve heard playing and singing in theaters that was disgraceful, and people applauded as if they’d just heard something wonderful. I think what’s gone wrong isn’t that bad performances are howled at, but that performances that should be howled at, aren’t.”

“And the musicians? What about their feelings?”

This was a lawyer talking? “I thought you lawyers were supposed to be hard-nosed and coolly analytical.”

He had the grace to smile. “When I’m working, I’m as hard-nosed as they come and coolly analytical. It’s part of the package.”

“But?” she prodded.

“But now I’m expressing some fellow feeling with musicians.” When she didn’t answer, he said, “I’ve had bad days in court, when I haven’t presented things as well as I could have.”

“And?”

“And my client suffered the consequences.”

“And your point?”

“That people have good days and bad days, and it’s . . .” He sought the proper word. “It’s unkind to cause them embarrassment for what they do.”

“You ever take a malpractice case?” she asked.

“No. Why?”

“It’s the same thing, isn’t it? You get hired to do one thing, and you do it so badly that someone is hurt. Most people think it’s right that you should be punished for that.”

“Bad singing hurts people?” he asked.

“It hurts some people in the audience directly,” she said, smiling and pointing at her ear with her index finger. “But it hurts everyone more generally because it lets the entire audience think—at least if no one boos—that this is what the music is supposed to sound like, and that does everyone a disservice, the composer, the other singers, and finally the people in the audience, because it might stop them from learning what good singing can sound like.” She stopped abruptly, embarrassed to hear her didactic tone.

Dottor Moretti was silent for a long time and finally began, “I never thought of . . .” He stopped himself with a laugh. He looked at his watch and said, “It’s almost two. Maybe we’re both being so serious because we’re hungry. Would you like to go to lunch?”

Before she thought about it, Caterina answered, “It’s strange, but after only this short time, I feel as though I’ve got some sort of legal obligation to invite the cousins to come along if I say yes.”

Dottor Moretti, with full legal thoughtfulness, said, “Since they’d assume that they’d have to pay for their part of the meal, I think we can also assume they wouldn’t come.”

“That’s a lawyer’s judgment?”

“I’d stake my reputation on it,” he said, astonishing Caterina, who had come to think of Dottor Moretti as a man who would never stake his reputation on anything and who would never, moreover, make jokes about his professional integrity. Could it be that Dottor Moretti was not the man he seemed to be?

They went to Remigio, where lunch was easy and relaxed; he even unbuttoned his jacket when they sat down at the table. She didn’t pay much attention to what they ate, so much surprised at the experience of discovering that Dottor Moretti—he asked her to call him Andrea, after which they slipped into using tu with each other—was a man of culture and broad reading. He said he had studied history before deciding to transfer to law but that it had remained his—he hesitated before using such an inflammatory phrase—secret passion.

Dottoressa Caterina Pellegrini was a woman in her thirties with a certain experience of life. To find herself sitting across from a man who confessed that his “secret passion” was the reading of history was not an experience with which she was much familiar.