Mozart's Sister: A Novel

by Rita Charbonnier

  “Nannerl, I’m pregnant! Pregnant! By Wolfgang. Will you understand?”

  “Maybe it’s you who won’t understand. Maybe it’s only a small female problem…It happens. It’s a very common thing.”

  “Your brother and I have had a relationship!”

  “Maybe. But it could also be—forgive me—that you exaggerated his interest.”

  “But you saw us together! You saw us the evening of the masquerade. You opened the door and we were there and we were—”

  “Why do you lie, Victoria? What is your purpose? I don’t know what you’re talking about, and frankly I’m tired of listening to all this nonsense.” She put the cup down and rose. “Now do me a favor: go home and play through the program for the wedding reception. Go over every piece carefully, and if you have questions, make a note of them. Then tomorrow at this time come back here, and after clearing up your questions we’ll try a rehearsal: just as if it were the day of the concert, without my interrupting you. Go on now and try to calm down.”

  XIII.

  The church was cool and smelled of incense, and the few faithful prayed silently, kneeling before sacred images and gazing at them in yearning and fear, or hunched in meditation on the wooden benches. Victoria alone was speaking. She had burst into the confessional and a river of tears and words flooded that wooden cage; she herself was in danger of drowning, but she held on to the priest as if to a raft. Her eyelids were swollen blisters, the skin thin, reddened, and they seemed to have swallowed up her eyebrows. The tear ducts, exhausted, released a burning liquid, and her shoulders heaved as she strangled her sobs.

  She told him everything, without reserve, from the evening of the fête; of the betrayal of Wolfgang and even worse that of Nannerl, who knew everything but persisted in an absurd, incredible lie. He imposed on her fifty Our Fathers, fifty Ave Marias, and a week’s fasting, then let her go; she flung herself onto a bench, not at all relieved, and kneeling amid the veiled women recited prayers. She didn’t realize that she had been observed.

  Katharina von Esser had gone to church to deliver a generous offering (in exchange, certainly, for a prominent plaque that would make her generosity known). She stopped to observe Victoria with malicious interest, then, when the priest came out of the confessional, went over to him with a broad smile. It wasn’t Reverend Bullinger, who was too old now to practice, but the acid-tongued priest who was to celebrate the marriage: Father Jakob.

  XIV.

  “Hello, my love,” Nannerl said with a playful lightness that was reminiscent of her mother. In the small room with the floral walls she settled the scores on the shelves and carefully ran a cloth over the white keys of her old harpsichord. No longer empty of furniture, and smelling now of wood, wax, and fresh laundry, the apartment on the Salzach was ready, and awaited only the wedding day, when the new family would go and live there.

  From the doorway, Armand stared at her strangely, as if trying to grasp some meaning in a gesture, in the tone of her voice. Then, silently, he sat down at the instrument.

  “Would you like me to give you a lesson?” she asked, smiling.

  For a few moments he kept his eyes lowered on his own hands as he picked at the nails, which he had long ago stopped biting for love of her. So, as she continued to putter, he looked at her again and said, “Last night Katharina von Esser came to see me at the Palace.”

  “Oh, really? Why in the world? What did she want?”

  “The truth is, to tell me something that she had learned in various indirect, not entirely clear ways. In any case, what she said concerns you and me personally.” He jumped to his feet and went toward the door, as if in search of light; the small room had only a little window, high up and facing west.

  “What is that scheming woman sticking her nose in now?”

  “You’re right, she is a disagreeable woman, and I assure you that I long to keep my distance from her. But the fact is, in a difficult situation, the countess, without even intending to, has done me a great service.”

  She started to say something, but he, with a curt gesture, put a finger on her mouth: “Be quiet and listen.”

  She stood beside the harpsichord, speechless.

  “At this moment I find myself, dear Nannerl,” he said darkly, weighing his words, “with a daughter who is pregnant by someone who doesn’t want to marry her and, what is perhaps worse, with a betrothed who knew that she had been seduced and was silent.”

  “What do you mean?” she murmured, in dismay.

  “Do you want me to repeat everything? I see no need for that. You have got the idea—of that I’m sure. What I urgently need to know is if what the countess says is true.”

  “It’s all false!”

  “You don’t know how I hope you are being honest, Nannerl. On the one hand, I think, it’s plausible that Countess von Esser has invented everything for some malicious purpose of her own; but why, explain to me if you will—why would Victoria support her hypothesis?”

  “What does Victoria say?”

  “That you saw her with him. That—just to be absolutely clear—the night of a masked ball that I don’t even remember the details of, you surprised my daughter as the victim of the lustful desires of a certain man…”

  “It’s not true!”

  “And you have behaved as if it were nothing; and what is more serious, what I cannot accept, Nannerl, is that you didn’t tell me, her father! You should have informed me instantly.”

  “But none of it’s true, I swear!” she cried desperately.

  “Why do you insist?”

  “I’m not lying, Armand!”

  “So it’s Victoria who’s lying? And why do you think she would do that?”

  “I don’t know. There must be a reason, yet I don’t see it…”

  Nannerl was agitated, like a windup toy whose mechanism is slowing down. Flailing, she flattened herself against the wall, just opposite her old harpsichord, and suddenly Armand went to her and took her face in his hands. With immense gentleness he whispered, “Nannerl, please, enough. Don’t you understand yet that we have to rewrite everything, you and I? My daughter, my own daughter, is in danger of ending up in a convent, or worse; and I can’t let that happen. I have to devote my life to her, dear Nannerl, and her alone. Because, distracted by my love for you, by my egoism, I didn’t protect her as I should have. And now how can I even think of having a new family with you when I have to take care of the one I have and have always had?”

  He took his hands from her face slowly, as if in a last caress, and said, “I didn’t come to tell you that we can no longer marry, because that’s obvious—beyond discussion. I’m here because, my sweet Nannerl, I want to keep a good memory of you. More than anything now I want to know why you said nothing to me.”

  The mechanism suddenly wound down, in a convulsive shudder that shook her limbs. She turned red and began sweating, and an infinite weariness took possession of her so that her legs gave way and she crumpled to the floor, sliding along the wall.

  He took her in his arms and carried her, trembling and weeping, to the bedroom and laid her lovingly on the bridal bed. Then he closed the curtains, and a restful shadowy light filled the room. For a long time Nannerl lay curled up, and her lips let out only a long sob, while her closed eyes, little by little, saw again an unacceptable memory. And meanwhile Armand held her in his arms, and slowly the ice inside her melted.

  “Yes, it’s true,” she murmured finally, finding words again. “It’s so—it happened. There was a long corridor,” she continued laboriously, “with hunting scenes on the walls, it seems to me, and a door at the end. I opened it and found Wolfgang and Victoria…in a situation that I would never have expected to find them in.”

  “Go on,” he urged her kindly.

  “At that moment, Armand, at that exact moment I understood that our marriage was in danger—that what I had longed for my entire life had been destroyed in an instant. And I felt as I did when I was a girl, when my brother lef
t for Italy, or even earlier, when my father forbade me to play the violin. Yes, I felt just the way I did then: prevented from grasping happiness by someone else’s actions. But this time it was worse, because with all my soul I had hoped to redeem that pain in a life with you. And then—I don’t know how it could happen, Armand, but I swear it happened—then I forgot it completely. And now…now there’s another memory that is coming out.”

  She sat up. She was no longer trembling. She looked her betrothed right in the face and murmured, “You paid to publish my opera. You paid a fortune—is that true, Armand?”

  He assented, bowing his head.

  “I met that man, and he told me. I had also forgotten that.”

  “I shouldn’t have done it. It was a foolish mistake.”

  “Oh, I felt so humiliated.”

  “Not only for that reason, Nannerl. Because being with you, in time, I entered into a game that was completely wrong, in which only your fulfillment counted.”

  “But I wrote the opera about you, for you.”

  “Exactly. You wrote it for me, and I wanted to publish it for you. But together, in common, we made nothing, and never could have.”

  “You still don’t want to marry me?” she cried. “But I’m not guilty. I had truly forgotten everything, truly.”

  “You think that I don’t want to marry you to punish you? It’s not that, Nannerl. Now, rather, it seems definitively clear that we have nothing, absolutely nothing in common.”

  “How can you say that? We have loved each other for years.”

  “I came to you with the intention of saving you, of perhaps making up for the mistakes I made with my first wife. But I’m unable to; it’s evident. And you, for your part, came to me in the hope that I would save you. We have failed, Nannerl. We have to accept it. Now we are two strangers, nothing else. And I cannot have a stranger near my daughter. You understand, don’t you?”

  He seemed to her suddenly a different person, and in anguish she tried to see again the Armand she knew and the self that had been together with him. But he was not willing to go back.

  “Perhaps you don’t understand,” he continued in an affectionate tone. “No, maybe it’s impossible, unfortunately. Because you, dearest Nannerl, have never created anything. You have no children and you brutally killed your musical soul. You don’t have a solid moral center, and it’s perfectly logical that you don’t, since you’ve had no models to help you. I couldn’t have saved you, ever—only you could, if only you had wanted to. But in this effort no one, not even the next man I hope you love, can replace yourself.”

  Nannerl felt her body become vapor and disappear, and in its place she felt a void, a black, empty void that sucked in and swallowed up everything around her and turned her to dust.

  “I will ask for a transfer to Munich, far from these troubles, and I will take Victoria with me. As soon as possible, she will go back to giving concerts, and perhaps lessons, too, like the ones you gave her. She will be grateful to you for that teaching; and I am, too, Nannerl, with all my heart. Let us part now.”

  XV.

  Salzburg had never seemed so alien to her. No longer did any corner of those streets belong to her, those buildings made opaque by the cloudy, cold day, as if they had been soaked in a dense, sticky liquid. The idea of returning to the wood, to seek the comfort of her tree, didn’t even occur to her. She headed toward home, but her steps, with a will of their own, followed a convoluted, tangled route, so that more than once she found herself at the same intersection vainly trying to figure out where she was. Finally, without knowing how, she reached the street door, and then the foot of the stairs; but halfway up, she had to sit down on the steps to quiet her breathing. Her legs hurt as if she had run for miles uphill, and when she opened the door she wished only to sink into her bed and remain there for the rest of her life.

  In the music room she found her father and brother. They were engaged in a serious conversation. Herr Mozart was dictating, and Wolfgang diligently took notes. A mirage of resolve drew out her last ray of energy.

  “It’s all ready,” she said from the doorway in a distant voice. “Everything is set: the church, the new home…But the marriage that must be celebrated will not be mine. It will be Wolfgang who marries, and he will marry Victoria.”

  The two men were silent. She went to her father, sitting in the chair with the old blanket over his legs; she arranged it carefully, knelt, took his gnarled hands, and said, “Wolfgang seduced her. You perhaps will not believe it, but I know for certain, because I saw them together. And now he must repair the evil done, as soon as possible, before the news spreads—”

  He said gravely, “It has already happened, Nannerl. The rumors have just reached this house.”

  “What have you heard, then?”

  “Many things about your dear Fräulein d’Ippold and her promiscuous ways.”

  Then Nannerl hid her face in the fleshless legs of her father and abandoned herself to grief. She became a knot of suffering, clinging to the man who should have been with her, on her side, she was sure of it; and she implored him to show his love, at least this one time, when it seemed most important. “Please,” she sobbed, “don’t you, too, give in to this deception.”

  He was embarrassed. “Daughter, stop it. You know what I think about tears.”

  “You must help me—what is right must happen. Wolfgang behaved terribly with Victoria, with Armand, and with me, too, and he cannot escape unharmed.”

  “Wolfgang will leave tomorrow for Vienna. I have arranged all the details. He must get away from this nasty little scandal and find his way in a capital of great Europe, where finally his music will be able to take flight.”

  “Enough of this! Enough, father! You push Wolfgang to seek success only so that you will be able to redeem your own mediocrity!”

  They were all struck dumb, and suddenly Nannerl noticed the ticking of the clock and the aching of her knees on the floor, but she couldn’t get up. Herr Mozart slowly turned his head, his mouth twisted in disgust. Then he moved the blanket to one side, rose, pushing himself up with his arms, and walked to the door, leaning on his cane. There he stopped.

  “You have taken down all my instructions, Wolfgang?” he asked, impassive.

  “Yes, Papa.”

  “Very good,” he answered, and disappeared through the doorway.

  Stunned, Nannerl rose from the floor and sank into the same chair. Her brother shook his head in her direction: “My compliments. If you want him to hate you to the end of his days you have achieved your purpose.”

  He went to sit beside her, and she felt her heart beating very slowly, a tired piston in time with the pendulum of the clock. After a moment she said hoarsely, “How could you do this to me, Wolfgang?”

  “If you’re referring to your Victoria, I assure you that I didn’t mean to harm her or you.”

  “But you did, and now you abandon us—how can you?”

  “My music needs other horizons, Nannerl. Haven’t you understood that yet? I have to free myself, finish something grand, I have to say everything I still haven’t been able to say because I haven’t had the opportunity. Otherwise, dear sister, I am in danger of coming to the same end as you.”

  “And what is that? Tell me, please.”

  “Poor in spirit, a slave of your victimhood, and forgetful of your talent. The queen I loved is lost.”

  He rose, took a folder of scores, and held it out to her. “Your Gallant Officer is the mirror of what you have become. The music is just decent, in fact, neither good nor bad. I would have preferred it to be worse rather than of such mediocrity. But the text! Oh, the text, Nannerl. The text is an outrage. With an irrational faith in your abilities, which alternates with the low opinion you have of yourself, you wanted to tell the story, too. And what has come out is a shapeless construction without the least spark of humanity. You intended to tell the story of your life, I imagine; but of life you know absolutely nothing because you have never liv
ed, and you don’t even know it. You could have done great things, but you weren’t capable of them.”

  “Then go, go to Vienna!” she cried, tearing the folder from his hands. “Go on, try to get free of us. But one thing is certain: you’ll never succeed. You’ll never have lasting success. You’ll be surpassed by mediocre people. You’ll never even earn a living, and you’ll die poor and alone!”

  XVI.

  With a wild light in her eyes, she walked, staggering, hampered by her skirt, her shoes, the cobblestones; the people she met made a wide circle around her as if she were mad. And perhaps she really was—or was about to do a mad thing.

  She reached the bridge over the Salzach and stopped in the middle. There was no longer anyone around, so she leaned over the parapet and watched the water flowing, like life, which flowed around her, she who had always been unmoved. She lifted her skirt and with a great effort, hugging to her breast the folder containing The Gallant Officer, climbed up on the balustrade.

  She stood there a long time, eyes closed, hanging on to a pillar, letting the breeze run over her skin and blow through her thoughts as well, emptying her mind. Then, with a resolute gesture, she untied the ribbon around the folder, opened it, and turned it upside down into the river.

  The pages made a sinuous flight, like lazy birds pleased with their own wings; they scattered like confetti and, like confetti, gained meaning by being thrown. They landed on the water, floated there for a while, became soaked, and then disappeared, forever, amid the waves.

  One score only Nannerl could not bring herself to throw away, and she kept it in her arms, folding it against her chest. It was the only aria that Wolfgang had not despised: “I am grateful for your hand.”

  I Am Grateful for Your Hand

  I.

  “What in the world is she doing in there all the time?”

  “Nothing, Herr Mozart.”

  “What do you mean, nothing? Try to be a little clearer, Tresel!”