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One

CATERINA PELLEGRINI CLOSED THE DOOR BEHIND HER AND leaned her back and then her head against it. First came the slight trembling of her legs as tension began to relax its hold on her muscles, then the deep breaths that helped relieve the tightness in her chest. The desire to wrap her arms around herself in an expression of wild, uncontrollable glee was almost irresistible, but she beat down that temptation, as she had beaten down many in her life, and stood with her hands at her sides, leaning against the door and telling herself to relax.

It had taken great patience, but she had done it. She had put up with a pair of fools, smiled at their manifestations of cupidity, treated them with the deference they so evidently did not deserve, all the while maneuvering them into giving her the job she wanted and which they held in their gift. They had no wit, but they had the power to decide; they had no grace of spirit, but they could say yes or no. They had little understanding of her qualifications and badly disguised contempt for her learning, but she had needed them to choose her.

And they had, both of them, and not any of the other applicants she had thought of—not without a wry consciousness of how much her language had been affected by the historical period in which she had spent the last ten years of her academic and professional life—as her rivals. As the youngest of five sisters, Caterina was endowed with a healthy sense of rivalry. Not unlike characters in a Goldoni play, the sisters were: Claudia the Beautiful; Clara the Happy; Cristina the Religious; Cinzia the Athletic; and, last born, Caterina, the Clever.

Caterina, the clever one, had studied at the liceo where her father taught history and had consistently won the yearly prize in Latin and Greek translation while picking up Russian from her aunt. From there she had gone to an ignominious year as a vocal student at the conservatory, then two years studying law at Padova, which disappointed, and then bored, her. The lure of music returned then, and she had chosen to study musicology in Florence and then in Vienna, where her thesis adviser, learning of her fluency in Russian, had arranged a two-year research grant for her to accompany him to Saint Petersburg to help with his research on Paisiello’s Russian operas. That concluded, she returned to Vienna and finished a doctorate in Baroque opera, the degree and her possession of it sources of delight and pride to her family. This qualification, after only one year of trying to find a job, had earned her a sort of internal exile to the South in the form of a position as lecturer in counterpoint at the Conservatory of Music Egidio Romualdo Duni in Matera. Egidio Romualdo Duni. What scholar of Baroque opera would not recognize his name? Caterina had always thought of him as Duni Who Also Wrote, the man who had written operas with titles identical to those of more famous or more gifted composers: Bajazet, Catone in Utica, Adriano in Siria. Duni had left as little trace in Caterina’s memory as he had on current opera production.