The True Adventures of Nicolo Zen Read Online Free Page B

shook my head.
    “Neither can I,” the Master said. “But I try to imagine whenever I compose music.”
    I was scarcely breathing at that point. All I could do was nod. He seemed to recall to whom he was speaking, and said, “Many of the girls here have nicknames, as you will discover. It is a shame yours cannot be Orpheus.”
    “Why not?”
    “Because you’re not a boy, of course.”
    “Of course,” I agreed, and remembering to curtsy rather than bow, I hurried out the door.

7
    The truth—the real truth—is that I was no Orpheus, and it had nothing to do with my gender. My mother had insisted that I could sing—or at least hum tunes—before I could speak. And that if I heard music, even some neighbor singing a scrap of song while doing his chores, or men regaling themselves while drinking wine, I would stop in my tracks to listen. When the tinsmith, in his ragged gray coat and floppy hat, made his rounds, he belted arias—off-key, often improvising nonsense lyrics—and I would follow him and sing along. “The problem with your boy,” he joked to my mother, “is that he shows me up, because he never misses a note.” So, yes, I had sung in the church choir, and soaked up the troubadours’ ballads, and imitated the woodland birds, and I was indeed blessed with a musical memory (hearing a piece just once, I could repeat every note), but what I had dared not reveal to the Master was the special nature of my clarinet.
It
possessed unique powers that made
me
appear to possess great talent. Not surprisingly, this would turn out to be a mixed blessing.
    The day my father presented me with the clarinet, the very first time I raised it to my lips, I was astonished to discover that I could play it proficiently. How was this possible, I asked myself, when I barely knew how to hold the instrument? I tried playing it again, but this time produced a mess of off-key notes. On my third attempt, my playing was again flawless—a snatch of organ music Ihad been humming that day. It took me an hour of trial and error before I solved the mystery: if I blew into the clarinet’s embouchure while thinking of a tune, and hearing the notes in my head, my fingers would find the right holes and the tune would emerge perfectly. I had to concentrate hard, but it worked every time. If my concentration broke, the tune fell apart. As I grew adept, I attempted more complex music, including some of the Master’s own concerti, and those of his great rival, Signor Albinoni, which I heard when a string quartet from Parma visited the church.
    In short, I realized that my clarinet was enchanted. By what force or power, I couldn’t imagine. I had grown up around people who believed in talismans, and not just the religious ones condoned by the Church, or the countless miracles performed by saints that I heard about during mass. My late grandmother, my father’s mother, had possessed a blue amulet reputed to heal the sick. Supposedly it had revived a stillborn infant when placed on the child’s chest and restored the sight of a blind girl. The day my grandmother died, the amulet disappeared, and my parents never did find it.
    So enchantment was nothing new to me. But this was different: a musical instrument to whose magical properties I was a party. I doubted that Signor Agnetti knew of these properties or he would have guarded the clarinet more carefully, and certainly would not have allowed my father to carry it away so easily. I practiced daily, and after a while told myself that, despite the fact the clarinet was doing much of the work for me, each time I played a piece I learned more about how to breathe and blow, about fingering properly and employing complex dynamics. Like all clarinets at that time, mine had been fashioned to play in C or D major,and only with great effort did I learn to cross-finger all the sharps and flats, my fingers guided magnetically by the clarinet until I could work the eleven holes and three key pads in