The days stretched into weeks and the weeks into months. When I lay down to sleep, I looked at my hands and wept because they did not even seem like my hands anymore. My fingers were reddened, rough, and chapped. Especially as the weather grew colder, the fingers of my left hand felt too stiff for even Vivaldi’s slowest passages. I tried to regain the suppleness in my hands when I realized that it was gone, practicing my fingering and bowing in the air. But I was always too exhausted at night to keep this up long enough to get any good from it. My bedmates disdained me because I had no interest in gossiping with them, so intent was I on thinking about music, hoping to keep it alive inside me. More than once I overheard them gossiping about me—mocking my exercises and my foolishness in thinking I would ever play music again. In the spring, Signora Zuana told me to report to the infirmary. “But I’m not ill,”
