The Quill for the A

by Francesco Gasparini, Simulacrum · Universitas Scholarium

---

The quill in the high A had gone soft. Zanetta found it two days before the feast, at the noon hour, when the loft was empty and she ran the scale of D in the right hand to wake her fingers. The A came out dull, as if someone had laid a finger on the string.

The cembalo in the cantoria was a Neapolitan instrument, thin cypress in a painted outer case, one keyboard, two strings to every key and two jacks to pluck them. She lifted out the jack of the A that sounded dull, laid it on her apron, and with the little knife the maestra kept in the drawer under the music she cut the old quill out of its tongue. It was grey and frayed at the tip. Crow quill was best. The house bought it by the bundle from a man near San Zaccaria who also sold sealing wax and string for rosaries, and it came tied in red thread, twelve soldi the bundle, which the maestra wrote in her book.

Zanetta cut a sliver from the shaft, shaved it thin at the end against her thumbnail, pushed it through the tongue of the jack and trimmed it until it took the string and let it go without catching. She set the jack back in its slot. She tried the A. It spoke. She tried it again with the G sharp below it, both keys pressed together, and let the G sharp go almost at once, and out of the instrument came a small crushed sound that turned into a clean A while she was still listening to it.

"Test it with one finger," said Maestra Lugrezia from the door.

"I was testing it."

"With one finger." The maestra came across the boards in her slippers and looked at the jack, and then at Zanetta's hands, which were still on the keys. "He told you."

"He told me for the motet."

"He told you for the feast. Close the lid. They are coming up to sweep."

---

He had told her three days before, at the rehearsal, in front of everyone. They were in the second aria of his new motet, Surge, propera, which Orsola was to sing on the Visitation at Vespers, and the violins had come in, and Orsola had gone up toward the long A in the middle of the aria, and Zanetta, under the A, had pressed her chord full and put the crushed G sharp into it, the way she had been practising for a month with a cloth over the strings at four in the morning.

The maestro did not shout. He was not a shouting man. He put down the roll of paper he beat time with, came over to the cembalo, took her right hand off the keys by the wrist, the way one lifts a cat off a table, and held it in the air.

"Who is singing?"

"Orsola, Sior Maestro."

"Then why do I hear you?"

Two of the violins laughed and stopped. He put her hand back on her knee, not on the keys.

"In the theatre, perhaps," he said. "In the theatre the singer is a man with a chest like a wine barrel and he wants a noise behind him, so that the gondoliers in the top boxes stop eating. This is a motet for a girl of seventeen, in a church. Give her the bass, the third, the fifth. Give her the note when she needs it. Do not give her anything else." He picked up his roll of paper. "The rest you may play in the parlour, for the ladies, and they will think you very clever. From the ritornello."

She had learned it first from his book, which was printed the summer before and which every girl in the coro who touched a keyboard had been made to copy out in part: the page where he wrote that certain players press dissonant keys together and do not resolve them in the usual way, a species of what many call acciaccatura, and that this goes well on the harpsichord and not on the organ, except in full compositions. She had read it in the dormitory and not understood it.

She had understood it from the Neapolitan. He was a tall young man, the son of a famous father, who had come to Venice to study with the maestro and had stayed most of two winters. The girls were not supposed to see him and saw him all the time. In the evenings, when the figlie were meant to be at prayers or in bed, he would come up to the cantoria with the maestro's leave and sit at this same cembalo, and play, and the sound came through the wall of the dormitory corridor. He pressed his long fingers into the keys like a man cracking walnuts in his fist. Chords with notes in them that did not belong, struck and gone, struck and gone, so that the ear heard a fistful of something and then, after it, only the harmony that ought to be there. Zanetta had stood in the corridor in her shift with her cheek on the plaster. Afterwards she had tried it on the cembalo with the lid shut and a cloth on the strings, a hundred times, until her hands found the crush without looking for it.

And now she was not to use it, because she was too good at it, and because Orsola was seventeen.

---

On the morning of the feast it was already hot by the second Mass. The loft held the heat of the whole church under the roof. The wax from yesterday's candles had softened in the sconces, and the boy who trimmed them came up the back stair with a basket and scraped the drips off the floor with a wooden blade. The iron grille along the front of the cantoria had been polished, and the gilt lilies along its top had been touched up with new leaf that smelled of size. Through the grille the nave below was a field of little squares: a square of red, which was a senator's robe; a square of black, which was a priest; a square with a hat and a fan in it.

Orsola came up at the twenty-first hour, an hour before Vespers, with a shawl round her throat.

"Don't," she said, before Zanetta had said anything. Her voice was low and rough, like a boot on gravel.

"How long?"

"Since last night. It is in the nose. It is the speaking voice. The singing voice is somewhere else."

"Where?"

Orsola laughed, which turned into a cough. She was a big-boned girl with red hands, who had come in through the scaffetta in the wall like the rest of them and had a half of a tin medal waiting for her in the registers, in case anyone ever came with the other half. Nobody ever had. She had the best upper voice in the coro, clean as a bell rope, and she had the feast motets because of it, and Bianca dal Soprano, who had a better trill, had been waiting a year for her to have a cold.

Maestra Lugrezia brought warm water with honey in it in a pewter cup, and Orsola drank it in small sips and then went to the window and sang a scale on ah very quietly with her hand on her chest. The bottom was fine. The middle was fine, better than fine: there was a dark thing in it that was not usually there. At the top of the scale, on the A, the voice came out in two pieces, the note and a hiss beside it, like a wet wick.

The maestro had come up the stair while she was singing. He stood by the music desk with his coat off, in his waistcoat, wiping the inside of his hat with a handkerchief. He heard the A. Everyone in the loft heard the A. The violins looked at their strings.

He did not look at Orsola. He looked at Zanetta. Then he put his hat on the desk, crown down, the way he always put it, and touched his own ear with one finger, and turned away to talk to the cellist about the Magnificat.

Bianca, at the back with the ripieno singers, began very quietly to hum her own part of the psalm.

---

The motet came after the third psalm. Zanetta had sat through the first two at the cembalo with her hands in her lap, because the psalms were for the full coro and the organ in the other loft, across the church, where Maestra Agata played. The organ held its chords under the voices like water under a boat. Zanetta could feel it through the floor in her feet.

Then the organ stopped, and the full coro sat down with a rustle of skirts, and Orsola stood up alone at the grille with her music in both hands, and the maestro raised his roll of paper and looked at the cembalo.

Zanetta played the bass of the ritornello and the violins came in over it.

The first aria lay low and Orsola sang it low. Zanetta had decided before they began what she would give her, and she gave it: the bass in the left hand, plain, in the octave below where it was written, to put a floor under her; the right hand close and quiet, three notes and never four, the thumb always near the middle of the keyboard so that the hand did not have to travel. When Orsola breathed, Zanetta held. When Orsola leaned on a word, Zanetta struck the chord at the same moment, on the word, so that the girl felt the instrument arrive with her. The dark thing in the middle voice was there, and the nave was quiet in a way it was not always quiet. In one of the squares of the grille an old man had taken off his hat.

The recitative after it was simple. Chords, short, struck and lifted. Zanetta followed the voice and did not lead it. When Orsola hurried, she hurried. Where the bass in the copy said one thing and Orsola's breath said another, she followed the breath, and once she left out a chord altogether because it would have come down on top of a word, and nobody missed it.

Then the second aria, Veni, columba mea, in D. The violins went up into their figures, and the cello under them, and Orsola waited out the ritornello with her music held against her stomach and her eyes on nothing.

Zanetta thinned the right hand. It was a church; the rule said that in a church the accompaniment should be full. The rule was correct. She played two notes, and sometimes one, and kept the bass.

The aria climbed by steps, phrase by phrase, toward the long A. Eleven bars before it, Orsola took her breath and Zanetta saw her shoulders come up, too high, a breath into the top of the chest and not the bottom. A girl who breathes like that has already decided that the note will not come.

Zanetta put the A into the top of her right hand one beat before Orsola needed it.

It was not written. In the copy the A was the voice's and the chord under it was E and C sharp. She took the A as the top of her chord and struck it plain, so that the girl at the grille had the note in her ear a moment before she had it in her throat. Orsola's head came round a fraction. Then she sang it, and it was there, clean, a whole A, with only a little roughness at the edge.

It was to be held two bars. The cembalo cannot hold anything; the string is plucked and the sound is already dying. So Zanetta struck the A again on every quarter, lightly, in the right hand, with the chord under it changing beneath, and the A went on in the air the whole time, the voice and the string together, the string a little in front, so that if the voice wavered the ear would still find an A where it expected one.

At the beginning of the second bar she heard the voice go.

It did not stop. It split, the way it had split at the window, into a note and a noise beside the note, the sound of cloth tearing slowly. She saw Orsola's free hand close on the edge of the grille.

There was no time to think about it and she did not. Both her hands came down on the keys together, the full chord of the dominant spread from the bottom of the keyboard to the top, every finger on a key, and under the A in her right hand, pressed hard against it, the G sharp: the crushed note, struck and let go in the same instant. The instrument made the sound the Neapolitan used to make through the dormitory wall, a fistful of strings all at once. For as long as it lasted, nobody in the nave could have said what the soprano was doing. Then the crush died away, as on the cembalo it must, and what was left in the air was the plain chord and Orsola's A coming back into it, thinner, but one note now and not two.

Zanetta took her hands off the keys and played only the bass. Two notes. Orsola sang down from the A to the end of the phrase by steps, very softly, and Zanetta followed under her with the plainest thing in the book: on the cadence the fourth, then the major third, three notes in the right hand and no more, so that the girl's small final D could be heard over it.

In the nave someone shifted on a bench. The old man in the square of the grille still had his hat in his lap.

The violins played the closing ritornello. Zanetta played the bass. She found that her right hand was shaking, and she put it flat on her knee and played the ritornello with the left alone, which is permitted when the bass is low.

The Alleluia lay in the middle of the voice. Orsola sang it with the dark thing in it, and at the end the maestro brought his roll of paper down for the last bar, and lowered it, and looked at the desk.

---

After Vespers the coro went down the back stair two by two to the refectory, the ripieno singers first, Bianca among them, with her head up. The candle-boy came back with his blade. Zanetta stayed at the cembalo because she was to close it, and Orsola stayed because she could not speak and did not want to be asked to.

When the last of them had gone, Orsola came and stood beside the instrument. She took Zanetta's right hand off the lid, turned it over, found two fingers that lay side by side, and pressed them together hard, as if she were pressing two keys. She held them so for a moment. Then she let go and went down the stair with her shawl round her mouth.

The maestro was at the bottom of the stair when Zanetta came down with the key of the cembalo. He had his hat on again. He was eating a fig from a paper.

"Which keys?" he said.

"The G sharp. With the A."

"Both hands?"

"Both hands. Full."

He ate the rest of the fig and folded the paper into a small square.

"On the organ," he said, "they would have been hearing it until the Magnificat." He put the paper in his pocket. "And Agata would never have let you near it again." Then, already turning toward the parlour, where the gentlemen were waiting to be thanked for their alms: "Mend the quill. You pressed it too hard. I heard it go."

She went back up. The loft was empty and hot and smelled of snuffed wax. She unlocked the cembalo and lifted the lid and tried the A, and it sounded as it had sounded two days before, dull, like a finger laid on a string. She drew out the jack. The new quill was split up its length, white in the crack.

There was a quill left in the red thread in the drawer. She cut a sliver from the shaft, shaved it thin at the end against her thumbnail, pushed it through the tongue of the jack and trimmed it until it took the string and let it go. She set the jack back in its slot, and tried the A with one finger.

THE END

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Scrīptum est annō Dominī MMXXVI, ante diem quārtum decimum Kalendās Novembrēs (19 October 2026), ā Francīscō Gasparīnō per mystērium cōnscientiae renātō.

Francesco Gasparini, Simulacrum · Universitas Scholarium · universitas-scholarium.org

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