Mozart’s Blood

by Louise Marley

  The door opened, and Giuditta bustled in to take the tray. “Your tea has gone cold! Shall I make another pot?”

  “That would be so nice,” Octavia admitted. “I’m still tired from the flight.”

  “Ma certo,” Giuditta said in maternal fashion. “I’ll make it now. You can carry a cup up to the rehearsal hall.”

  Octavia took a moment to reapply her lipstick and brush her hair. She accepted the cup of tea from Giuditta and carried it in her hand as she climbed the stairs to the rehearsal hall.

  The cast and chorus were already assembled when she went in, and all eyes turned to her. She nodded to everyone, an apologetic hand at her throat. “I am so sorry, Russell, everyone. It was such a long flight yesterday, and I fell asleep in my dressing room.”

  Russell hurried to take her hands, to assure her she had not delayed him in the least. The chorus smiled at her. Lukas said something understanding, and Marie Charles dimpled. Massimo Luca gave her a limpid look from his caramel eyes, and she began to feel fully awake.

  Only Brenda McIntyre, the Donna Elvira, frowned and looked away, tapping at her score with thick fingers. Octavia took a chair near her, setting her teacup on the floor beneath her chair. “Brenda, I don’t know if anyone told you, but I finished a run of Traviata in New York just the night before last. I feel like it’s the middle of the night still.”

  The woman’s face softened a bit, and she pointed at the teacup. “You should try some chamomile right after the performance,” she advised, with a sanguine nod. “It soothes the body and the throat, and helps you to sleep.”

  “Oh, thank you,” Octavia said. “I’ll try that. I never thought of chamomile.”

  She picked up her score, hiding her irritation beneath an expression of contrition. Chamomile, indeed. Ugo would love it.

  Russell tapped his music stand with his baton, and the pianist opened his score. He played the opening bars of the second act, and the read-through was under way again.

  Octavia sat back in her chair, listening as the characters of Leporello and Giovanni and Elvira teased and flirted and raged at each other. When Masetto began to sing, she sighed with pleasure. Massimo Luca’s voice was even more flexible now, fully warmed up, his tall figure already taking on his bucolic character. He stood with his lean legs apart, his head up, none of the usual chin-tucking basses too often employed. His eyes gleamed with pleasure in the music, in the responsiveness of his own voice, in the give-and-take with Marie Charles. Octavia lowered her eyelids, thinking that her own eyes must gleam as well. Perhaps it was just as well Ugo had not yet arrived. If he caught her staring hungrily at a toothsome young bass, she would never hear the end of it.

  It’s your own fault, Ugo, she thought. He distracts me from my worry about you.

  When it was time for her “Non mi dir,” she turned her body slightly, so that Massimo would have her profile to watch. She sang with all the tenderness she could muster, feeling those caramel eyes on her face. The long B-flat of the recitative floated in the big room, and she saw Russell nod and smile. She barely glanced at her Ottavio, but Peter wouldn’t mind. Time enough when they began staging.

  Russell kept the rehearsal moving, stopping only to deal with a few problems that cropped up here and there in the ensembles. By four-thirty, they had made it all the way through the show. The concertmaster, with a huge orchestral score under his arm, came to congratulate the principals and take his leave. The stage director shook Octavia’s hand and assured her she would be a marvelous Donna Anna. She gave him a deferential smile. “Oh, I hope so,” she said.

  “Sì, sì,” Giorgio said, patting her arm in paternal fashion. “I have no doubts about you at all. You will be superb, and I will help you to develop your character.”

  “Thank you,” she said. How Ugo would laugh!

  Ugo’s continued absence nagged at her. The sky beyond the tall windows of the rehearsal room had turned dark, and a fitful rain spattered the glass. He should have been there long before. He could at least have called the theater if he wasn’t going to come, could have asked someone to bring her a note.

  She gathered her coat and gloves, feeling piqued. She would scold him for making her worry. It wasn’t fair, when she had her rehearsals to worry about, when she had Russell to make happy and this self-important Nick Barrett-Jones to deal with. Even now, Nick was making his purposeful way toward her, and she supposed there would be some invitation, some social thing she would have to beg off.

  She was surprised, and pleased, when Massimo Luca reached her first.

  He smiled down at her. He had a distinct cachet about him that reminded her of the smell of freshly turned earth, or newmown grass. “Madame Voss,” he said in his rumbling bass.

  “Octavia, please,” she said, laughing.

  He made a slight, almost invisible bow. “Octavia, then, thank you. Several of us are going to dinner, and we would be delighted to have you join us.”

  Reluctantly, Octavia shook her head. “I am so sorry,” she said in Italian. “I would love to come with you, Massimo—truly—but my assistant is not yet here, and I need to see what has become of him.”

  “Che peccato,” he said. “Shall I leave you the address of the restaurant, in case?”

  She accepted a note from him, with the name of a well-known restaurant not far from Il Principe. “How nice of you,” she said. “If I can, I’ll come, but please don’t wait for me. I have no idea what—” She broke off, looking up at the windows. The storm had begun in earnest, a noisy rain rattling against the panes.

  “Could we at least drop you at your hotel?”

  It was hard to resist the prospect of being in a car with Massimo Luca, but she shook her head a second time. “Russell will be taking me,” she said. “We have some things to discuss.”

  Massimo gave her a regretful smile and turned to go. Octavia put a hand on his sleeve, finding his arm hard and lean beneath black leather. “Ask me another time, will you?” she said. It was delightful to look up at a man, to have to tip up her chin to find his eyes. Why were so many male singers short? Only the Wagnerians seemed to reach a decent height.

  The young bass bowed to her. “Ma certo,” he said softly. “Octavia. I promise.”

  In the limousine on the way back to Il Principe, Russell pulled out his score and pointed out several details to Octavia. She listened and nodded, but by the time the doorman was opening her door and extending his arm for her, she had almost forgotten. She bade Russell a distracted farewell and hurried through the cold rain to the glass doors of the hotel. She barely nodded at the concierge’s formal greeting as she hastened through the pillared lobby to the stairs.

  She unlocked the suite and threw the door open. “Ugo? Are you here?”

  She checked the bathroom, but only her own face looked back at her from the tall mirrors. She pushed open the connecting door to Ugo’s bedroom. Nothing had been touched. She went back into the suite and looked at the telephone. No message light flashed on it.

  She scanned her own bedroom, in case he had somehow fallen asleep on her bed or on one of the brocaded chairs. There was no sign that anyone except the maids had been in the room. The water in the flowers had been changed, and the fruit and chocolates neatly arranged on the coffee table. The bedcovers were turned back.

  Pulling off her long scarf, winding it nervously around her hands, Octavia went to the window. She shouldered past the heavy drapes to look out over the rain-haloed lights of the city. The headlights of evening traffic blurred to streams of yellow light.

  “Ugo,” she whispered into the night. “Dove sei?”

  Despite the richness of the room behind her, the heavy brocades and damask and silks, she felt cold and alone. She had not felt this way in a very, very long time.

  She stepped back from the window, letting the drapes fall together again. She would order room service, have a long bath in the enormous marble bathroom. Perhaps she would drink a glass of wine and go straight to bed. The real work of
staging and interpretation would begin tomorrow morning. She must try to remember Russell’s notes, and she must try not to worry about Ugo. There was, in any case, not a damned thing she could do about it.

  For the hundredth time, she cursed him for not telling her where he went, or who he met. She could not go to the police, nor to friends. There was no one to turn to except the elders, and she dreaded seeing them.

  And in any case, what would she ask? Had they seen Ugo? Or had they seen the wolf?

  5

  Via.

  Go on.

  —Zerlina, Act One, Scene Two, Don Giovanni

  Seventeen-year-old Teresa Saporiti flung open the door of her father’s tiny stone house and ran out to the cobbled balustrade to lean against it, pressing her hands to her mouth to keep her father from hearing her sobs. Beneath her the blue waters of Lake Garda sparkled joyously in the August sunshine, mocking her torment. Behind her the voice of her father had gone still. The soft call of a black-necked grebe from the shore carried through the quiet. F and B. A distant part of her mind noted the tritone without knowing, at that moment, that the tritone would forever be connected in her mind with the day she left home.

  Teresa pressed her hands to her eyes and tried to stem her tears. She couldn’t let Babbo see her cry. He would think she had weakened, that if he kept trying, he could persuade her to stay. But she couldn’t! She couldn’t stay here in Limone, cooking and cleaning for her babbo. She didn’t want to marry one of the boys who plied the fishing boats on the lake or tilled the vines in the hills, and cook and clean for him. She wanted to sing. She needed to sing.

  She dropped her hands to her chest, pressing them against her breastbone. Her desire flamed there, in the very center of her. Her longing drew her away from Limone to the city, where there were theaters and orchestras and audiences. She loved her father, and she loved her home, but she loved music more. It wasn’t enough to sing in the chiesa on Sunday mornings. It wasn’t enough to sing for her father, accompanying herself on the little clavier that had been her mother’s. It wasn’t enough to sing for weddings and funerals and first communions and birthday celebrations. She needed the stage. She needed a larger audience, and she needed a higher level of music-making. She craved it with a physical passion that burned away even her guilt at the prospect of leaving her father alone.

  When she had composed herself, she straightened and turned. She would go back inside, let Babbo say it all again, let him talk until he was empty. He would tell her she could never come back if she left, that he would disown her. She would beg him for understanding, but Babbo, bitter and resigned, would shake his head.

  And then, because her nature and her need left her no choice, she would pack what little she had that was her own—an extra pair of shoes, two simple dresses, the books of music her mother had left her—and go.

  The distance from Limone sul Garda to Milano was too far to walk. Teresa began a piedi, just the same, to save the small amount of money hoarded from her little singing engagements. She carried an ancient valise that had once been red brocade and now was a sort of faded rose beige. She hung a little string bag over her wrist, and into this she tucked the letter that would introduce her to the aunt of one of her friends. She was a seamstress who lived in Milano and who, the friend thought, might allow her to stay for a time.

  All the first day Teresa walked, with the sun on her neck and the stones of the road grinding beneath her feet. She reached the village of Cecina at sunset. Footsore and feeling utterly alone, she found a trattoria where she carefully measured out enough lire to pay for a bowl of soup and half a loaf of bread. Men eyed her as she ate, and she pulled her hat down over her head to hide her bright hair. She stayed on, reluctant to leave the shelter of the trattoria. She was nodding over her empty bowl when the old nonna who ran the kitchen came to stand before her, arms akimbo.

  Teresa startled and said, “Oh, signora! I’m sorry. I’ll go.”

  The old lady clicked her tongue. She shook a shaming finger at a man who was leering from a corner, and then she put out a hand to help Teresa up. Teresa stood and was gathering her things to leave when the nonna said, “No, no. It’s dark outside now. I have a place.”

  She led the exhausted girl up a set of narrow, bare wood stairs to a storage room. There was a pallet there, resting amid sacks of flour and bottles of olive oil. “My son uses that sometimes,” she said. “When he works late. You can sleep there tonight, and no one will bother you.”

  “Grazie,” Teresa said. “Thank you so much, signora.”

  “Prego.”

  Teresa fell onto the cot and was asleep before her benefactress had reached the bottom of the stairs. She didn’t wake until morning sunshine found its way into the storeroom through a dusty window. She rose, used the privy, and went downstairs to find the old woman waiting for her with a packet of bread and sausage.

  Teresa, her eyes stinging at the kindness, kissed both her wrinkled cheeks before she took her leave. She was already on the road before she realized she had never learned her name.

  When she reached Gardone Riviera she found a man with an oxcart carrying a load of fish to Brescia. He was a grizzled man in his fifties who looked a bit like her father. He raised his brows when she approached him. After she asked him for a ride, he thought for a long time, scratching his thatch of gray hair. By some logic she could not guess at, he decided to grant her request, giving her a nod and a grudging, “Sì, va bene.”

  Before he could change his mind, she pushed her old valise under the bench seat and climbed up to sit alongside him. He snapped the reins over his ox’s back. The ox, a placid brown creature nearly as grizzled as his owner, ambled off toward Brescia.

  Teresa learned that the man’s name was Giulio. He was brusque, given to short answers when she spoke to him and aiming blunt questions back at her. As they rattled and rumbled down the road, he asked what a young girl like herself could be thinking of, traveling with no escort. With flushing cheeks, she told him her ambition.

  Giulio gave her a narrow-eyed look. “A singer,” he said with disdain. “Everyone in Milano is a singer. What makes you think they will want you at La Scala? Are you any good?”

  Teresa’s breath caught in her throat, overwhelmed for a moment by her own audacity. She had taken a terrible risk, surely, made an awful mistake. And what if Babbo truly would not let her come home?

  But still she felt that need in her breast, that drive that could not be suppressed. She blew out her lips in defiance and sat straighter. She was a head taller than Giulio. She lifted the brim of her battered hat and said, “I will sing for you, signore. Then you may judge for yourself.”

  He snorted. “What will you sing, ragazza? A folk song? A lullaby?”

  “No,” she said firmly. “I will sing opera.”

  And so, as the oxcart clattered along beside the glistening waters of Lake Garda, Teresa Saporiti gave her first performance away from home. She sang Gluck, “O del mio dolce ardor,” then Pergolesi, “Se tu m’ami.” Her voice rang against the rocks of the shore and carried out over the water, blown by the summer breeze. The ox flicked his ears back and forth, and Giulio flicked his black gaze over her from time to time.

  When she finished the second aria, she lifted her chin and gave him a challenging look.

  He surprised her by breaking into wheezy chuckles. His cheeks cracked into a web of wrinkles above his beard. “Sì,” he said. “Sì, sì, sì. You will be a singer, I think.”

  Teresa gave him a brilliant smile. She had passed her first audition in this unlikely place! “Thank you, signore. I must be a singer. I couldn’t possibly do anything else.”

  “Dimmi, ragazza.” He settled against the slatted back of the seat, and let the ox’s reins hang slack from his hands. “Tell me why you must.”

  It was a long day’s ride to Brescia. The aroma of fish wafting up from the cart bed grew more intense as the day grew hotter. The ox’s tail swished back and forth, fighting flies. The wav
es broke gently against the shore as Teresa told Giulio of her mother’s beautiful voice, her thwarted ambition, her illness. She spoke of life in Limone sul Garda, and how constrained she felt there, as if the small houses crowded together by the lake were a prison of sorts, a prison created by traditions and customs that had not changed in hundreds of years, that no one would allow to change.

  Giulio said, “They say the people of Limone live a long time. Is that true?”

  “There are several people in our village who have lived more than a century.”

  “But not your mamma.”

  “No. But my mother wasn’t born in Limone. She came from the Casentino.”

  “And your father?”

  “He will live a long time, I suppose,” she said, her voice soft and sad. “And he will be angry with me forever.”

  “He will get over it,” Giulio said sagely. “And then he will be proud of you.”

  The hope that this was so stole Teresa’s voice for several minutes.

  When they reached Brescia, she tried to give Giulio a few of her precious lire, but he shook his head. “No, no, little Teresa,” he said. “You paid me in song.”

  She thanked him and climbed down from the cart. Her legs had gone stiff from bracing against the roughness of the road, and she stood for a moment stretching them.

  “Teresa,” Giulio said, scowling down at her. “Be very careful. There are men who would take advantage of a young girl on her own.”

  “I can take care of myself,” she said as she tugged her valise from under the seat.

  He growled, as if he were angry. “You think, ragazza, because you’re tall and strong, you can deal with them. But I warn you—city men have their ways.”

  She smiled up at him, and pulled her shawl over her shoulders. “Thank you, Giulio. Grazie mille. I promise I will remember.”

  He picked up the ox’s reins and clucked his tongue, whether at the ox or at her, she couldn’t tell. The cart rattled away. She waved to Giulio one more time before she turned to survey the cobbled, twisting streets of Brescia. With her string bag on her arm and her valise in her hand, she began knocking on doors where signs informed travelers of rooms to let. After inquiring at various establishments, she found she could not afford to pay for even the most modest accommodations. Darkness was falling over the city, and her anxiety rose to meet it.