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Grazie di tanto onore.
Thank him for his courtesy.
—Don Ottavio, Act One, Scene Three, Don Giovanni
Octavia smoothed Ugo’s opera scarves again and straightened his jackets on their hangers. It wouldn’t do for him to know she had gone through his things.
Despite all they meant to each other, there was a separation between them, a chasm no intimacy could bridge. Ugo had always had a deeply ingrained habit of secrecy. He never revealed anything he didn’t have to. She supposed he was protecting himself, and her.
Surely, though, in the current circumstances, he would understand her invading his privacy. He had been gone six days. She burned with need, and he wouldn’t want her to go out into the streets. Nevertheless, she took a last look at the closet before closing the door, to make certain everything appeared to be undisturbed.
She gave a final tweak to a pair of gray slacks, then paused.
There was a small safe tucked into one corner of the closet, the kind of safe most good hotels provided for their guests. Ugo never wore jewelry or carried much cash. But the door of the little safe was closed and locked. He must have had a reason for that.
Octavia backed away from the closet and sat down on the bed, wondering. She touched her teeth with a forefinger. A warning tingle ran through her jaw.
“Well,” she said aloud to the room. “I have to try. Sorry, Ugo. You’ll just have to give me a pass on this one.”
She rose again, went to the closet, and pushed the door as wide as it would go. She knelt on the thick carpet before the safe and examined it. It was a combination safe, with directions for choosing a combination affixed to the top. Four sets of two digits. People used birthdays, she knew, or anniversaries. 00-00-00-00. Ugo could have used her birthday, 01-11-1763. She tried it, without success. He might, she thought, have used the day he first revealed himself to her. In the American style, it would be 04-17-1906. She tried it that way and then reversed it in the European way, 17-04-1906. Ugo wasn’t entirely sure of his own birthday, but they had chosen a date to celebrate it. 31-10-1617, All Hallows’ Eve, their own private joke. She tried that, but it didn’t work either.
She sat back on her heels, shaking her head. “Ugo, Ugo. So secretive, and after all this time. What am I to do?”
She sat there for a long time, until her feet grew numb and she knew she would have to move. She stood and was halfway to the door when it struck her.
With a short laugh, she spun on her stockinged feet and went to kneel again before the safe. 27-01-1756.
Mozart.
Through the awful dawn of that day in San Francisco, Ugo and Hélène huddled beneath Ugo’s topcoat on the fog-damp grass of Golden Gate Park, listening to the great city fall apart below them. Hélène flinched with each new temblor and started with alarm as the bells of the fire wagons began to clang along Market Street.
Ugo held her hands tightly in his and said, “Don’t listen to it, Hélène. There’s nothing we can do now. Talk to me.”
“Talk?” she exclaimed. Her voice was tight with fear and shock. “Talk about what?”
He pulled his topcoat more securely about the two of them and answered her in as calm a manner as if they were still comfortably settled in the Palm Court at the Palace Hotel. “Tell me about Mozart.”
Hélène swallowed and hugged herself, trying to stop her shivering. “Mozart,” she repeated. “But…if you knew about me, you must have known about Mozart.”
“I never met him,” Ugo said lightly. “I watched him conduct several times. He was a nervous type, wasn’t he?”
“He was highly strung,” Hélène said, a little defensively. Mozart’s hand had trembled in hers the last time she saw him. But then he had been so ill.
“Oh, yes? Sensitive, then.”
She took a shaky breath, and then a steadier one. Ugo, this strange, dark man, was so calm beside her, no matter how much the earth shook or how terrible the sounds coming from below the hill. This odd scene would be added to her prodigious memory, this little haven of warmth and serenity in the midst of havoc. He had pulled his French-backed topcoat above their heads, a sort of makeshift tent, against the chill and against the sight of refugees streaming into the park. The growing light showed dimly through the fine black fabric.
“Yes,” she said. “Mozart was sensitive to everything—light, cold, emotions.” She sighed, remembering. “He loved chocolate.”
A tremor shook the park, and a few voices reached them, crying out in panic. Hélène caught a sharp breath, but Ugo seemed to be indifferent to what was happening beyond the shelter of his topcoat. “What kind?”
“What?”
“What kind of chocolate did Mozart like?”
She gave a shaky laugh. “What a question! Viennese, of course. He loved truffles.”
“Do you like them, too?”
Hélène shook her head. “No. I used to, before I…When I was young. Now I don’t like the taste of sweets at all. And after Mozart and I—he lost his taste for them, too. When someone sent them to the theater, he gave them to the stagehands.”
“What else?”
The noises around them intensified. Children wailed in their mothers’ arms. A woman’s high-pitched voice screamed grief, and many others soon joined her. A man barked commands in deep tones, trying to organize the crowd. Another tremor shook the park, and Hélène began to rise, but Ugo held her back.
“It’s not safe,” he said. “Just stay here. We’ll hold our little bit of ground, and when the quake is over—”
As if to punctuate his words, a new temblor rolled beneath them, and shrieks in every vocal register filled the park.
“But shouldn’t we do something?” She lifted the cover of his coat enough to look around her. Streams of people were still flooding into Golden Gate Park, away from the now-burning city. Off to her right, stretchers were being laid on the grass, and a makeshift hospital was being set up. Other people were taking cover as she and Ugo were, holding blankets over their heads or propping up bits of furniture they must have carried from their homes.
“You can’t fight an earthquake,” Ugo said as calmly as if huddling beneath a topcoat in an open field were an everyday occurrence.
Hélène sank down again and wrapped her arms around her knees. “This is awful.”
“Yes. And it’s going to get worse.” He pulled the coat up again, until it covered their heads. “Just keep talking.”
Hélène closed her eyes. Mozart’s face rose in her memory, as clear as the first day she met him, or the last day she saw him. He was much changed by then, of course. Illness had made him puffy. His fine hands were swollen and useless. His eyes were shadowed, his ruddy cheeks gone gray.
But when she first met him, he was delightful, with sparkling eyes and a funny sort of staccato laugh that no one could resist.
“His hands,” she began, “were soft as a woman’s. They were small, even tiny, but his fingers were long—he could reach a ninth on the harpsichord without any effort. He spoke quickly, as if his mind were always several steps ahead of his tongue. It made him stammer sometimes.”
The sounds and sensations of the disaster beyond their slender shelter dropped away from her as she let herself drift back to those strange days after Zdenka Milosch had revealed the truth, and she learned that she and Mozart shared the same fate.
Nothing in those succeeding weeks had diminished her longing for him. She wanted to touch him, to breathe in his scent, to possess him. She dreamed of their solitary encounter, their ménage à trois with the Countess. She suffered through memories of Mozart and Constanze, memories that weren’t hers but that tortured her with sensuous details and made her long to experience them for herself.
Mozart avoided being alone with her, turning away if he was about to encounter her in the corridor, avoiding her at receptions or dinners. It was so painfully evident that the rest of the company assumed they had had a falling-out over some detail of
music or interpretation.
Bondini even asked Teresa one night, at the penultimate performance, what she had done to offend Mozart. Teresa, growing edgy again with thirst, snapped, “Our maestro is impossible to please!”
Bondini sniffed. “Who are you in comparison to Mozart?” he said.
“I’m not comparing myself! I wouldn’t dream—”
“We have to keep him happy,” Bondini said. “Prague adores him, and so does Count Nostitz.”
“And they don’t adore me, isn’t that what you mean?” Teresa said, her voice rising. “Because Mozart is angry with me, everyone must be?”
Bondini shrugged. “This is theater life, Teresa.”
She put her hands on her hips and glared at him. “No more the piatto saporito! One moment you all love me, the next you hate me.”
He glared back. “I don’t need two prima donnas, I can tell you that! My company can manage without you. You can go back to Milano when the run is over.”
Teresa cried, “Con piacere!” and fled the theater.
That night, as Mozart had done, she went across the river. In the warren of lanes around St. Vitus, she found a young man, hardly more than a boy, reeling drunkenly out of a tavern. When he saw her he grinned and hung his arm around her neck, groping at her bosom with his other hand. He dug in his pocket for money and offered her what he had left after his night of drinking. She led him into an unlit alcove beneath one of the flying buttresses that supported the outer walls of the Cathedral, and he stumbled gleefully after her.
As he fumbled with her skirts and struggled to undo his breeches, she caught a glimpse of his face in the light of a passing torch. Her heart quailed. He had the round chin and full cheeks of youth. His lips were slack with beer and his eyelids drooped unevenly, but his neck was firm and smooth, and his body was hard with muscle. She pulled back, hating herself.
“Whassa matter?” he slurred. “Don’t—don’t change your mind now, miss, I’m just—” He giggled. “I’m just having a bit of trouble with these goddamned buttons.”
It was the curse that persuaded her. It seemed she no longer had a god, at least none she could turn to. The boy grasped her around the neck and pulled her down on top of him, thrusting aimlessly at her with his hips.
She let her body go pliant, let him throw his arms around her and pull her tight against him. Even as his fingers still struggled with the fastening of his breeches, she found the hollow of his neck with her lips. He gasped with pleasure and then with pain as she struck, driving her canines through the skin to the sweet, generous vein beneath.
Just as the last button of his breeches broke free of its threads, she began to drink. The boy’s body had its own will, it seemed, and it sought her even as she slaked her prodigious thirst on its life force. He lasted longer than the stagehand had, his youth and his strength resisting to the last. The grinding of his hips against hers ceased, little by little. His breath came in shallow gasps, at first ecstatic, then desperate. He never fought her. His embrace slackened and his body grew limp, but he never tried to push her away or to struggle against her.
She knew, when she drew away from him, that he was dead. She stood up, rearranging her disordered clothes, and looked down on him, a youth lying on the pebbly ground beneath a church window, his breeches undone, his eyes staring at nothing. She bent and pulled his breeches closed.
As she started back toward her rooms, she felt so full of life it seemed she could hardly contain it. She felt enormous, as if she could stretch her arms above her head and touch the stars. She felt powerful, as if her voice could fill the entire city without effort. She fairly danced across the bridge, only stopping herself from running because there were other people there, men giving her appraising glances, one or two couples raising their brows at the sight of a solitary young woman tripping through the streets in the middle of the night as if the darkness were nothing to her.
She paused in the center of the bridge, looking down into the dark, moving water. A memory came to her, but this one was dim, its colors and sounds and feelings faint, as if very far away—or very old. It was not vivid and immediate like the memories of Mozart she had been experiencing.
She remembered a boat floating on this very river. It was a plain wooden craft such as she had never seen in her life, with splintered oars and crude bench seats. There was a man rowing it, a tall, thin man. He turned to look at her, and as if through a dark mist, she saw his teeth as he smiled.
His teeth were long and white, reflecting moonlight on their elongated tips. Somehow, Teresa knew this was Zdenka Milosch’s memory. She had not only shared the tooth with Mozart, but with the Countess. She had acquired Mozart’s memories, but she had also absorbed those of Zdenka Milosch, dim and dark and ancient.
She left the bridge and walked on more slowly toward her lodgings. As she walked up the stairs to her room, the young man’s memories began to invade her mind. He had a mother, and a father, and an older brother who teased him about being virginal. He was a bricklayer, hired to work on the very church under which he had lost his life. He was in love with a girl who wanted none of him, because she was pretty and had a good dowry, and he was only a poor, plain laborer.
Teresa went into her room and shut the door. As she lay down on her bed, still fully clothed, she thought that she must find a way to close off these memories as surely and firmly as she closed and locked the door to her room. She couldn’t restore the young man to life, though she regretted being the cause of his death. It did her no good to carry his memories alongside her own.
She must even, she thought, block the memories of Zdenka Milosch. The only ones she wanted to keep were her own.
And, of course, Mozart’s.
The final fête to celebrate the closing of the opera was held at Count Nostitz’s palace. Carriages lined up in the street outside the theater to carry the singers to the celebration. Mozart lingered in his dressing room after the curtain calls, and Teresa loitered in the doorway of hers, hoping to catch him before he left. When he finally hurried down the corridor toward the waiting carriages, she followed on quiet feet and managed to be handed into the same carriage as he. They were very late, the last to leave the theater, and they had the carriage to themselves.
When Mozart saw her, he turned his head away, staring fixedly out into the dark streets of Prague.
“Sir,” she said, the moment the door closed on them. “Can we not talk a bit?”
“There’s nothing to talk about,” he said. His voice had a dull sound to it, a lifelessness that chilled her.
“I beg your pardon, but there’s everything to talk about!” she said urgently. “I’ve been discharged from the Bondini company. This may be our last chance.”
“I’m going home to Vienna,” Mozart said. “I need to be with my wife.”
Teresa pressed her fingers to her lips to stop their sudden trembling. “You blame me, don’t you, Wolfgang?”
He turned on her suddenly, his eyes dark with suffering. “If you had not brought her to me…that horrible woman…”
“I didn’t!” Teresa protested, her voice catching on tears. “She was there, but it was you I wanted—”
“I’m a married man!” he thundered. The inside of the coach vibrated with his voice, and she stared at him, open-mouthed. “You knew that!”
“But you—” She stammered, and tried again. “But, Wolfgang, I’ve seen you with other women, and I thought you and Constanze…perhaps an understanding…”
The misery in his eyes grew, and they reddened. He hung his head. “Yes,” he said. “You’re right. I wanted to lie with you, too, though I would not perhaps have done it so publicly. But now God has punished my libertine ways.”
Teresa put out her hand to touch his, but he snatched it away. She took hers back and cradled it against her chest as if it were injured by his scorn. “Wolfgang,” she whispered. “We can bear it, surely? God has turned His back on us. But there are these…these gifts, as the Countess cal
ls them.”
“Gifts?” he said, and gave a despairing laugh. “You mean carrying around your memories, and hers? It’s a curse!”
“My memories are not so terrible,” Teresa said.
“Hers are.”
“Yes. I know.” She paused, and then said, tentatively, “But yours, sir, are magnificent.”
His eyes came up to hers, startled. “They are?”
“The music. I hear it differently now. I hear things I never knew were there.”
“And my other memories?”
She gave him a tremulous smile. “Good and bad, as everyone’s are, I suppose.”
His gaze fixed on her, and his face hardened as if he had suddenly aged. “And what are you going to do about your teeth, Teresa?”
Her face suddenly burned, and she involuntarily lifted her hand to cover her mouth.
“That does no good,” he said. “When you sing, you have to open your mouth, don’t you?” His voice rose again, making the windows of the carriage rattle. “Look at this!” He used one forefinger to lift his upper lip.
Teresa, hardly able to breathe, leaned forward to see better in the dim light.
The change was nearly imperceptible. Mozart’s teeth were not so white as her own, but stained faintly with the coffee he drank so much of. His canines were marginally longer than she remembered them, although she doubted, if she weren’t looking for the change, that she would notice it. They were sharper, though, surely, more pointed than they had been.
With a sudden thudding of her heart, she put her fingers against her own teeth.
“Yes,” he said, with a grimace of a smile. “Yours, too, Teresa. Had you not noticed?”
“I—” She couldn’t go on. She had tried not to notice. She had ignored the tingling of her jaw, resisted the compulsion to stroke her teeth with her fingertip.
“But I could hardly miss it,” he said, with a sort of grim satisfaction. “I stood below you, at the harpsichord, as you sang ‘Or sai chi l’onore’ and ‘Non mi dir.’ What will you do about them?”
“They—they aren’t so bad, really,” she said weakly.
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