“I am almost…almost beginning to envy you, too, Flatscher,” said the third man, with a sneering laugh.
The publisher seemed not to understand why that girl was giving him such a radiant smile.
“You don’t know who I am?” Nannerl asked. “And if I say to you The Gallant Officer, nothing comes to mind?”
“Please forgive me, Fräulein, but I’m afraid I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“But how is it possible? Colonel d’Ippold says that you are eager to see the manuscript.” She looked around. “He was here himself, a moment ago.”
“Ah, the colonel. Of course. Frankly, what I am eager to see is the last installment of the money he owes me.”
Nannerl was speechless.
“Quite a man, that army officer,” Flatscher said to the other two. “He spends a fortune to publish the first opera of his dear fiancée. He’s bankrupting himself, literally, I’d say, eh?”
“Now I’m beginning to find you repellent,” the merchant said. “You publish amateurs for a high price?”
Suddenly the noise of the room became painful to Nannerl’s ears and her ego. She left the three businessmen and leaned against the back of a divan, then looked around, in every direction, in search of her fiancé he wasn’t there, nor could she see anyone of her family, only a formless herd of multicolored strangers, a crowd that was diverse yet all the same, which made her feel more alone than if she had been in a cell. There he was! She made her way, pushing and shoving. She wanted to speak to him right away, but as she drew closer, she saw that the officer was short with white hair—he was another colonel, not he, not her man. Suddenly a group of revelers carried her away into a new room, and then another; a girl in an Oriental costume took her by the hand and dragged her, laughing and shouting, and she was too weak or too defeated to resist, and suddenly she was in an empty room and didn’t know where they had all gone; she couldn’t even hear the music of the orchestra that would indicate the way back. She wandered through deserted rooms filled with furniture, pictures, and carpets, all different; she opened door after door—how could she be lost? There—a corridor with a door at the end, and that door will lead to the ballroom, directly or not. It must be so. She opened it…
A man and a woman were making love. Or something like that, something she imagined was making love. He was almost completely dressed. A shepherd. It was Wolfgang.
Too caught up, neither he nor the girl—Thekla, certainly—noticed her, and she stood on the threshold, disturbed and fascinated, curious and horrified, and hadn’t the courage to leave or to make her presence known. This was sex? It seemed something clandestine, rapid and stolen. The two were lying on a chaise longue. Thekla’s face wasn’t visible. Nothing of her was visible, for he was on top of her and covered her with his body and his cloak. Only her voice could be heard. They were not words but sighs that were exactly in time with the thrusts of her brother’s groin. But they were strange sighs—were they pain or pleasure? They seemed muffled—could he possibly be covering her lips with his hand? That would be cruel! He wasn’t sighing, no; he wasn’t emitting sounds, but the fascinating movement of his buttocks and thighs continued, an impetuous motion, a desirable motion. Enough. This is morbid. She had to go right away. And as she was thinking that she had to go, she went in, whispering, “Wolfgang, Thekla…”
It wasn’t Thekla’s face beneath Wolfgang’s, or the costume of a peasant girl partly covering the body. The costume was that of an Amazon, and the face was Victoria’s.
“No!” Nannerl cried. “No, Wolfgang!”
Wolfgang jumped up, away from his lover, and as she stood up, they both awkwardly adjusted their clothes. That silence, that tragic silence was more deafening than a full orchestra. Nannerl was transformed into a statue of wax; Victoria and Wolfgang waited for a reaction from her, a terrible reaction, which inexplicably didn’t come. She was trembling, her lips parted, but her gaze, fixed on them, didn’t see them, because she no longer saw anything around her.
Then, light as a leaf, she turned and went out of the room. She closed the door carefully, until the latch clicked, and with her open hand she lightly caressed the knob. Then she smoothed her ancient Roman costume with delicate touches and began walking. When she was halfway down the corridor she saw a butler passing. “Excuse me,” she said. Her voice was that of a child. “Could you show me the way out, please? I was following an engaged couple, but I lost them.”
The butler led her, and she went straight home, without saying good-bye to anyone. She fell into her bed, stunned, and fell into a long, heavy sleep, which left her bewildered in the morning, and in the grip of a strange anxiety.
X.
Victoria, too, crept home that night, tore off her dress, and crushed it in the bottom of a drawer. She took a cloth, dipped it in the basin, and scrubbed her chest, arms, and legs; the rough gestures scratched the skin and turned it red. She got in bed and a moment later heard her father returning from the party. His steps, his movements, were hesitant. His silhouette appeared in the doorway.
“What happened, Victoria?”
“I don’t feel well, I’m sorry,” she murmured.
“You all disappeared suddenly.”
“Nannerl brought me home, then she left.”
“She came with you here alone?”
“Yes…My head is splitting…I can’t even speak. Every sound is like thunder.”
He approached on tiptoe and said gently, “Can I do something?”
“No, thank you. I’m sure I’ll feel better tomorrow.”
“Rest, then,” he said, and closed the door.
She didn’t rest at all. To say that she was sorry is to say nothing; Victoria was filled with shame, imagining a grim future in which Nannerl would never speak to her and, on the other hand, would tell Armand everything. He would be furious and would insist on a reparatory marriage…Marry Wolfgang? Would it be a good thing for her to marry a man of his type? Faithful he would never be, nor stable, and she strongly doubted that he would be able to guarantee her a solid future. The foolish thing she had done was taking up space inside her, invading her; her whole self was one with that foolishness, and in anguish she brooded that nothing in her life would have meaning from that moment on, neither her affections nor her music.
The following morning she waited until Wolfgang went to his work at the Palace, then she knocked at the door of the Mozart house, trembling and confused from her sleepless night. Nannerl was in her room trying on her wedding dress, and greeted her with a meek smile.
“Oh Victoria! What did you do in the end, last night? I didn’t see you. Did you go home early?”
She was silent, uncertain. She looked around. There was no one there but the two of them. So she said, “What do you mean? You know perfectly well where I was hiding, and with whom.”
That happy and childish expression didn’t leave Nannerl’s face. “Do you like the dress? It’s pretty, isn’t it? The flower pattern must be to your taste, I imagine. And also the color: it’s a beautiful shade of green, just as you would like,” she said. She spun in a circle, and the train twined around her feet. With an air of amusement she bent down to disentangle it, while Victoria couldn’t understand if she preferred to be silent or was making fun of her.
“Nannerl, I have to talk to you,” she murmured.
Nannerl looked at her in silence, with an air of momentousness, and sat down on the bed, taking care not to muss the dress. “And I need to talk to you, in fact. I’ve already discussed the matter with Wolfgang, which is proper; but, apart from him, with no one else. At the moment I would prefer that only you, my brother, and I know about it, since the matter concerns us three most of all, and only we can understand it fully; your father is also involved, by force of circumstance, but only indirectly.”
“Oh, thank goodness. Then you don’t intend to tell him?”
“Well, he will have to know necessarily: it was his initiative.”
Confused,
she stammered, “What are you talking about? What initiative, Nannerl?”
“Publishing my opera!” she said, radiant. “I’ve finished it—finished—and I really am satisfied with it! I still have to revise many parts, of course, and I suspect that the last part, in particular, will need quite a few corrections, because I worked on it with less intensity.”
“Nannerl, please! Why do you pretend not to understand?”
She seemed wounded. She sighed, a short, deep sigh, and asked, “Aren’t you happy for me? I hadn’t written a note in ten years, and you have been insisting, all of you, and finally you convinced me, and now that I’ve done something, won’t you enjoy it with me, and Wolfgang, and your father?”
“Of course. This isn’t what we have to talk about now, you and I, but about last night. About what happened.”
“Why, what happened last night?” she asked, genuinely surprised.
“You know very well!”
“No, I have no idea. What should I know?”
“Stop this! You saw it yourself!” Victoria cried, exasperated, seizing her by the shoulders and shaking her.
Nannerl freed herself with a look of annoyance. “Don’t wrinkle my dress,” she said, and smoothed the sleeves. “I really don’t understand you. Why are you being so rude? Why do you have to make me worry, anyway?” Then she called Tresel to help her undress, and the girl left the house, more bewildered than when she arrived.
XI.
It wasn’t long before she discovered that she was pregnant, or, rather, that she became certain, since from the beginning she had felt it, or feared it, or thought she deserved punishment. And yet in that moment a sense of hope took possession of her, and in her thoughts the punishment was transformed into a sweet reward. The family that for her was Music, that had changed her, made her an artist, would welcome her into it through a bond of blood; now it belonged to her, on her own account, that family, and not only through the second marriage of her father. She would give Wolfgang a son and Nannerl a nephew, living proof of the creative capacity she had acquired, and a marvelous exchange for the supreme gifts she had received from them.
In this state of mind Victoria waited for Wolfgang at the door of the Mozart house. It was a luminous morning, and when he appeared at the exact center of the arched doorway, his redingote carefully buttoned, a bundle of scores under his arm, the sun struck his slightly protruding blue eyes, and he stopped for an instant to adjust the brim of his hat. To marry him, at that moment, seemed to Fräulein d’Ippold more than desirable. She would be able, surely, to transform his barbaric impulses and direct them toward the good; she would tolerate his excesses, in the knowledge that with the passage of time they would diminish; she would understand his lofty soul and enable him to express, for the joy of all, the best of himself…
He set off along the sidewalk, concentrating on some melody that he was revolving in his mind, and as soon as he saw her, he stopped. He didn’t seem pleased. “What do you want?” he murmured warily.
Victoria gestured to him to be quiet and persuaded him to retrace his steps; the two young people went back through the entrance, into the courtyard, and stopped at the base of the grand stairway. The vaults above them amplified every sound, and she had to lower her voice to a faint breeze that she blew into his ear so that the news would not rise to the top floor of the building.
His reaction, however, was thunderous. Wolfgang burst out laughing. Victoria felt ill treated by his raucousness, multiplied as it was a hundred times by the reverberation; he made no attempt to stop but seemed amused by his own laughter, and its echo. Gradually, his hilarity subsided, and he looked at her, finally still.
“I understand, and I feel for you,” he said. “But why, may I ask, are you telling me?”
And he burst out laughing again, but this was a lighter and more circumspect laugh. He kept staring at her, sneering, waiting for some response, shielded by his amusement. Since Victoria couldn’t find the words, he continued, “I mean, my friend—we both know perfectly well that we are not the first, for each other, and not the last; what I mean is, in essence, mater semper certa, pater incertus—oh, sorry, maybe you don’t know what that means.”
“I don’t know Latin, but I know that,” she said, offended.
“Then you also understand that no one on this earth can declare that I, and I alone, am the cause of your condition. And to look at you even now, dear Victoria, even now that your aversion toward me is clearly legible in your dark gaze, even now, I say, you are so pretty and pleasingly alluring that it’s hard to believe you aren’t available to anyone who asks.”
Her right hand flew out and delivered a strong and powerful slap, but he massaged his cheek with a composure that was more irritating than his insults.
“What do you want me to say?” he continued, disdainfully. “That I love you and wish to marry you? It’s not so, unfortunately. And in any case, even if I loved you, certainly at the moment I don’t intend to saddle myself with a wife and child—assuming it’s my child, which, I repeat, I don’t at all believe.”
“It is so, however, and you know it very well!”
“Are you telling the truth? Who in the world would confirm that there was a relationship between us? You say so, but, as I’ve already said, your word has no great value. Furthermore, I affirm the contrary, and I am, of course, more credible; besides, we have never been together in public.”
Not wanting him to see her cry, Victoria turned and ran breathlessly up the stairs, stumbling again and again on the damn lace of her dress. She heard him shouting after her, “Forget it; it’s completely pointless!”
Then, with the scores under his arm, Wolfgang started off again toward the Palace; but he no longer felt like laughing, and no more notes lodged in his mind. His step became irresolute, and as he parted from Victoria the guilty thought that he had abandoned her took shape in him. On the other hand (he made an effort to reflect), the idea of making official a bond that, while fun for them both, had been only a game without rules was completely ridiculous; and it was even more unacceptable that the consequences of a folly committed consciously by two should weigh upon him alone. It wasn’t impossible that that had been Victoria’s aim from the first moment: to snare him and then arrange things. That was not how Wolfgang imagined his life, certainly not as the prey of some calculating whore. Now on the threshold of adulthood, he had very different priorities: to assert his matchless art freely in the world; every interest or insincere affection or distorted and unhealthy sense of justice had to be sacrificed in this pursuit. This was the essence of the matter; and his father, besides, would unconditionally approve such reasoning. And so any vexing sensation of having committed an injustice was buried again in the place from which it had emerged unbidden, and Wolfgang’s walk became decisive again, and the road to the Palace appeared to him downhill.
XII.
Tresel opened the door and at that moment, at the sight of Victoria, guessed what had happened. Mute as always but, for once, less severe, she accompanied her to Nannerl, who was gathering up her scores in a large folder on which appeared, in swirling letters, the legend The Gallant Officer. Then she closed the door and disappeared.
Fräulein Mozart glanced carelessly at the sheets of paper. “Hello, Victoria. Would you mind, as soon as you can, delivering the folder to your father? I would have called a messenger, but since you’re here…And I, forgive me, I’m too tired to go out. I’ve been working every night, until last night, and now I’ve had enough—I’m really anxious to be free of this opera and move on to another. I’m already thinking of my next work, you know? Who can say if this man Alois Flatscher will be interested in publishing another. I am so curious to meet him, for I haven’t yet had the opportunity. Sometimes I try to imagine what sort of man he is, my patron, but I can’t imagine what he looks like or what he’s like. Have you ever seen him?”
The young woman stood silent, in the doorway, trembling and in tears. Nannerl looked at her fi
nally, and in an instant her expression became surprised and pained. She ran to her: “Who hurt you?”
“Wolfgang.”
“What did he do to you?” she cried angrily. “Tell me!”
She was too upset to explain. So Nannerl made her sit down, called Tresel and asked her to prepare a tisane, then gave Victoria a handkerchief and waited patiently for her to calm down. Meanwhile she placed one hand on her knee and moved it back and forth, patting her lightly and affectionately as one quiets the crying of a child.
Victoria at last managed to unburden herself, and as she explained the reason for her suffering, and the injustice she felt had been inflicted and the sense of impotence that suffocated her, Nannerl observed her with a grieving and understanding look. Victoria told her everything: how the seduction between her and Wolfgang had developed, how he had both repelled and attracted her, and the series of secret rendezvous—whose very secrecy was exciting—they had had, reaching an intimacy that she had been unable to stop. And then the epilogue, and his indifference and scornful rejection.
When she finished, Nannerl said nothing but poured the warm tisane into the cup, handed it to her, and made her swallow it down to the last drop. Then she poured the other and sat with the cup in her hands, savoring the warmth it gave her, and without taking her gaze from the liquid, she said, “Victoria, for once I agree with Wolfgang. I don’t think, for your own good, that you should get married and have a family.”
To Victoria it seemed that the world was turning upside down. No, this was not reality.
“If you did,” she continued, very serious, “your career as a pianist would be dead. What goal have we worked for in all these years? To make you a good little wife? If I had known that was your aim, I certainly would not have devoted my energies to teaching you. If that was always your objective, in effect, you should have told me the first day.”
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