As she approached, his eyes opened. “I’ve been poisoned,” he said hoarsely.
“No, Wolfgang,” she breathed. “Surely not. Who would poison you?”
His gaze wavered at first, his eyes wandering this way and that as if they were out of his control. He narrowed his eyelids, searching for her face. With obvious effort, his eyes focused and his gaze sharpened as he recognized her. “It was you!” he cried in a guttural tone. “You poisoned me!”
“No! Oh, no!” she said. “It was not I, Wolfgang.”
“It was,” he said. And with tears in his voice, “You bit me.”
“No, no…” Teresa leaned across the bed. “No, you can’t think that. It was she! It was Zdenka Milosch who poisoned us both!”
He drew a gurgling breath that filled her with terror, and his eyes rolled again. “Oh, God, I am so ill,” he croaked. “Ill unto death, I think.”
Teresa knelt beside the bed and took his hand between hers, lifting it from the sheet of paper beneath it. The score, she saw, was the Requiem. As she moved it aside, he bestirred himself. For a moment, his voice was perfectly clear, the light baritone she remembered. “It’s for myself,” he said. “My own Requiem.”
“No, Wolfgang! Listen to me,” she begged. “I was bitten by the Countess Milosch at the same time as you, and I’m not ill. I’ve never felt so well in my life!”
His eyes settled on her face again, and she sensed his faculties gathering, concentrating. The effort brought oily beads of sweat to his brow. “How many?” he rasped.
“How many what?”
A queer, bitter smile twisted his lips. “How many have you killed?”
This, Teresa knew, was the moment for which she had traveled all this way. She tightened her grip on his hand. “It doesn’t matter,” she said grimly. “And it doesn’t matter how many you have taken, either. You’ve waited too long, haven’t you, Wolfgang? And now your thirst is destroying you.”
His hand turned in hers, seizing it, kneading it with frantic fingers. “I can’t do it, Teresa. I can’t do it anymore. Their memories…each and every one…”
“You have to shut them away,” she said. Her voice scraped in her throat, dry with desperation. “Wolfgang, you must ignore them, set them aside.”
“I can’t,” he moaned. “I can’t. Their memories weigh me down. I can’t think, I can’t play, and when I try to compose I see scenes before my eyes, between my eyes and the score, and I can’t stop them. They won’t leave me alone. They’re driving me mad!”
“No, no,” she cried, her voice low and urgent. “You mustn’t let them. You must—”
His eyes suddenly opened wide, their pupils dilated so they almost obscured the iris. They fixed on her face with an expression that filled her with horror. “Hell,” he whispered. “You know that. I’m going straight to hell, and so are you.”
She gripped his hand as if she could bend his thoughts to hers with the strength of her fingers. “No,” she grated. “Not for a long, long time. Unless you die, Wolfgang.”
At that his eyes rolled back in their sockets, and for one awful moment she thought he had died right before her. His features went rigid, his mouth open, his eyelids shut. She started to get up, to reach for him, but he took a rattling breath, and his swollen body heaved. His eyelids trembled, lifted, lowered again. “Go away,” he said. He pulled his hand away from hers. His voice was barely audible. “Leave me alone.”
His puffy fingers scrabbled over the half-finished bars of the Requiem. She watched them, pitying the swollen flesh. Beneath them she saw that the movement was the Confutatis. She looked up at Mozart’s face, some comforting word on her lips, but she found that his gaze had fixed on a crucifix hanging above a dressing table. He whispered, “Teresa. Have you tried to go to church?”
“I’ve gone in,” she admitted.
“The blessed water?”
She hesitated, and then admitted, very quietly, “It burns me.”
“Ja. And me.” Tears formed in his eyes and spilled over his sunken cheeks. “We’re cursed,” he croaked. “Damned forever.”
“No! It can’t be!”
His lips quivered, and his swollen body thrashed from side to side, crinkling the score on the coverlet. “Get Süssmayr,” he pleaded. “Tell Constanze I need Süssmayr!”
“Who is Süssmayr?” Teresa said.
“My student. He’ll write for me, my fingers are too swollen. I’m poisoned,” he moaned again. “Poisoned. O God, to be damned forever, and not even for my own sins!”
Teresa tried to recapture his hand, tried to find words to persuade him, but he shook her off, rolling his head back and forth on his pillow. “Süssmayr! I need Süssmayr!” His voice rose and thinned, nearly a shriek.
The door opened, and Constanze came running. Teresa leaped to her feet to get out of the way as Mozart’s wife bent over the bed. She had a damp compress in her hand, and her lips were pinched white. She laid the compress on Mozart’s brow, crooning meaningless words in her light voice. Under her ministrations his spasms slowed, and he quavered something to his wife that Teresa couldn’t hear.
Teresa wrung her hands together, searching for something she could do, something she could say. Downstairs the door knocker sounded, and sounded again. “Frau Mozart,” she said in an undertone. “Shall I answer that?”
“Don’t let anyone else in!” Constanze snapped, and then threw her head up. “Oh, unless it’s the doctor.”
“Süssmayr!” Mozart cried.
“No, no, Wolfgang,” Constanze murmured, reversing the compress on her husband’s forehead. “You can work on the score later. Not now.”
Teresa backed to the door, and put her hand on the latch. Behind her Constanze murmured a stream of consoling words, but Mozart still scrabbled at the papers on the coverlet. He muttered the Latin words of the Confutatis, over and over:
“Confutatis maledictis, flammis acribus addictis.”
And then the plaintive cry of the sinner for mercy:
“Voca me, voca me cum benedictus.”
Teresa’s heart thudded sickeningly in her breast as she hurried down to the door. Who would call her blessed, or Mozart? What if he was right, and they were both damned forever?
She gritted her teeth, collecting herself before she put her hand on the latch. If they were damned forever, there was all the more reason not to give in. Not to die.
Teresa spent a restless night in her rooms. The next morning, she presented herself once again in Rauhensteingasse. A stranger opened the door and stood glaring at her with a suspicious expression.
“I’m Teresa Saporiti,” she said. “I’ve come to see Herr Mozart.”
“No visitors,” the man said flatly. He was a bony, stooped man with a face so dour, it was as if the deathwatch had already begun.
“Who are you?” she asked.
“Go away. Mozart is ill.”
“I know that.” Teresa put her palm on the door to stop him from closing it. “I have to see him. Tell Frau Mozart I’m here. Bitte.”
He looked her up and down, from her ermine-trimmed cape to her well-cut boots. His eyebrows rose. “Saporiti?”
“Yes. I’ve come all the way from Milano.”
“A singer,” he said.
“Yes,” she said, made breathless by a sudden rush of hope. “I created the rôle of Donna Anna in—”
“Don Giovanni, yes, I know it well. Although I wasn’t able to attend the premiere.” He stepped back without warning, so that she stumbled into the foyer. “I am Süssmayr,” he said, straightening his bent spine so he could bow to her. He added, with evident pride, “I am helping the maestro with his Requiem.”
“Herr Süssmayr,” Teresa said. “I need a moment alone with Mozart. Just a moment! Could you persuade Constanze—”
“Oh, no, no, madame. She won’t leave his side. The doctors—” He glanced up the narrow staircase, and then back at Teresa. He leaned closer, and she smelled stale tobacco on his breath and the
sour tang of old perspiration on his clothes. “They say it won’t be long,” he whispered. “They say he has miliary fever.”
“No!” Teresa snapped. She thrust past him and started for the stairs. “No, he doesn’t. I need a few moments alone with him.” She ran up the stairs, not bothering to remove her cape. He came after her, but too slowly to catch up.
She tapped briefly on the bedroom door and went in without waiting for an answer.
The curtains were drawn, closing in the fetid air of the sickroom. Teresa longed to open the windows and let the cold December air blow through, but she didn’t dare. Constanze sat on a little stool beside Mozart’s bed, chafing his swollen wrists in her small hands. On the other side of the bed a woman in an apron stood holding the shoulders of a small boy. They both looked up as Teresa came in, but Constanze didn’t take her eyes from Mozart’s face. His eyes were closed, and his face, so sunken the day before, was now swollen nearly beyond recognition.
Teresa said softly, “Frau Mozart. Constanze.”
Slowly, Constanze turned her face. For a moment it seemed she didn’t recognize her, but then awareness flickered in her eyes. “You again,” she said.
Teresa crossed the room, and knelt beside Constanze’s stool. “Yes,” she said quietly. “Me again. Teresa.”
Constanze’s lips trembled and her eyes brimmed. “He’s dying,” she said. The small boy whimpered, and the aproned woman shushed him. Constanze’s eyes fixed on Teresa. “The doctors have given up,” she said. “There was one here last night, but he said there was nothing he could do.”
Teresa looked across the bed at the woman and boy. “Frau Mozart needs to rest,” she told her. “Why don’t you take her to her room to lie down for a while? I’ll stay and watch.”
“I want to be here if…when…” Constanze choked.
“Yes, yes, of course,” Teresa said in as soothing a tone as she could manage. “If he gets worse, I’ll fetch you.”
Mozart didn’t open his eyes as his wife left the room, followed by the woman and the little boy. Süssmayr hovered in the doorway like a hungry crow, but the aproned woman closed the door after she passed through, shutting him out on the landing. Teresa tossed her stole toward a chair. It missed, landing in a pile of silvery ermine on the floor. She let it lie and turned to gaze down at Mozart.
His head turned on the pillow even as his swollen hands reached blindly for the Requiem score. Teresa gathered up the pages, moving them out of his reach. She tidied the stack and laid it on the bedside table.
“Wolfgang.” She touched his hand. “Wolfgang, open your eyes. Look at me.”
His eyelids trembled, then opened slowly, painfully. Teresa nearly sobbed aloud at the hopelessness in his eyes, the slack resignation of his lips. She leaned over him, remembering how those lips had tasted, how she had longed for the touch of them. With a swift gesture, she tore open the neckline of her bodice, ripping the fine cotton lawn beyond repair. There was no time to trouble herself with the buttons
“Wolfgang!” she said urgently. She stretched her neck, tilting her chin to one side, offering him her throat.
He turned his head away. “Nein, nein,” he groaned. “No more. Not again.”
“You must!” she said. “You can’t hurt me, Wolfgang. It will get you through, until…until you’re strong enough to…”
But his eyes closed again. She might have thought he was asleep except for the quivering of his lips, the clawing of his fingers on the coverlet as they searched for the Requiem.
“You can finish it,” she said, straightening. “If you will only let me help you. Let me feed you. You can finish your Requiem.”
He moaned, without opening his eyes, “Süss—”
“No! Mozart, look at me!” When he didn’t respond, Teresa pulled back the long, lace-trimmed sleeve of her bodice. She turned her left wrist upward, exposing the delicate blue rivers of life running beneath her skin. She looked over her shoulder to be certain the door was still closed, and then, with a sharp breath to steel herself, she lifted her upper lip and drove her teeth into her own arm.
She bit deeply, fiercely, tearing skin and flesh in one gesture, opening the barrier to the radial artery where the blood flowed from heart to fingers. It hurt, but pain didn’t matter. Nothing mattered at that moment but Mozart.
She felt her own blood hot on her lips as she lifted her head, but she wasted no time wiping it away. She pressed her bloodied wrist against Mozart’s mouth, forcing his lips apart. She caught a brief glimpse of his teeth before her arm hid them. They were not so long as hers, nor so sharp. He had not used them enough, she thought.
“Drink!” she hissed. “Mozart, drink!”
At first it seemed he would not accept her offering. Her blood seeped down his chin and fell in vivid scarlet droplets onto the muslin of his nightshirt. A moment passed in which she hardly breathed. She pressed her wrist more tightly against his mouth, like a mother suckling a babe. She forced the sweet, hot taste of her blood onto his tongue.
Slowly at first, then eagerly, she felt the suction of his lips, the papery scrape of his tongue against her skin. A sensation akin to pleasure flowed over her, a sort of ecstatic shudder. Her knees weakened, and she sagged against the bed, struggling not to dislodge her wrist from his mouth.
As she fed him, she remembered her dream of years before, the peach that was no peach, but a fruit full of blood. She was that fruit for Mozart now, an offering, a sacrifice. She knelt beside him, her wrist at his lips, and willed him to take what he needed.
Only when she began to feel light-headed did she pull away. Gently, she broke the seal of his lips against her wrist. Tenderly, she wiped his mouth with a handkerchief from his bedside table. She bound her wrist with the same handkerchief, knotting it, pulling it tight with her teeth. Trembling now with weakness, she rearranged her clothes, pulling down her sleeve, pressing the flap of her torn bodice over her shoulder. She retrieved her stole from the floor and twisted it around her neck to hide her ruined dress.
Mozart’s eyes were closed again, but his lips and hands were still. A faint color showed in his cheeks.
Surely, she thought, he would recover now. He would finish his Requiem. He would write more operas.
And he would remember that she had saved him.
Octavia turned from the window, rubbing her left wrist. The scars there had faded long ago, indeed almost immediately, as all her scars did. But the memory of Mozart’s lips on her skin, the burr of his tongue as he suckled, was as fresh as if she had left his bedside only yesterday. She set it aside, gently, sorrowfully, to be considered another time.
As she did this, her thirst returned with a rage. Need drove all other thoughts, even memories, from her mind.
Hardly aware of what she was doing, she threw off her nightgown and pulled on a pair of jeans, a black sweater, a pair of soft-soled boots. When she left the suite, shrugging into a three-quarter-length wool coat, she turned away from the staircase that led to the lobby. She took the back stairs, slipping past the dark kitchens and out through a service exit, taking care not to be seen by the night guard in his lighted cubicle.
In moments she was striding through the public gardens across from the hotel. Her upper lip felt hot and swollen, and her teeth throbbed. Her body felt utterly alive, supremely focused on her goal, all long-denied, exquisitely familiar sensations. She was a huntress again, a predator, a creature of the night. She belonged to the darkness, grim and fierce beyond the civilizing lights of the city.
The moon had gone down, and the sculptures in the park made dim, amorphous shapes in the washed-out starlight. She encountered no one on the gravel paths as she cut across the park to Via Venezia.
She found her prey in an alley behind a travel agency, digging through a Dumpster. Her legs, in ragged jeans, wriggled out over the top of the big green container. As her grimy hightop sneakers settled onto the pavement, Octavia said in a throaty voice, “Che successa, ragazza?”
The girl
gasped and whirled to face her. Octavia struck without further nicety.
It was not subtle, and it was not pleasurable. It was necessary, a bad meal for a hard hunger. She took only what she needed to slake her thirst, and then she broke away, leaving a panting, bleeding girl on the cobblestones. The girl cried after her as she strode away, “What did you do? What was that?”
Octavia didn’t answer.
25
No, no, padrone! Vo’ andar, vi dico.
No, no, master. I’m off, I tell you.
—Leporello, Act Two, Scene One, Don Giovanni
The moon rose early, silvering the snowy mountain slopes, shining through the window of Ugo’s prison. Its delicate light fell upon his face, enticing him with the cool invitation of the music of the spheres. He sat up, facing the window, and began to unbutton his borrowed shirt.
Occasionally, the wolf retained bits of his clothing when it raced away. It was sometimes a useful trick. Once in a great while, Ugo was spared the inconvenience of scenes like the one at the house of the formidable Laurette. More often the clothes he found himself with were unwearable, inadequate scraps—a sock, or a shirt with no pants, or once, oddly, a handkerchief. Ugo cared no more about nakedness than the wolf did. Society was another matter.
He stood to remove the too-large trousers Laurette had given him. He took off the socks and underwear, too. He folded everything and piled it neatly on the bed before he went to stand in the shaft of moonlight. He gazed up at the white disc where it floated, full and brilliant, above the glowing silhouette of the mountain.
He tipped his head back and opened his eyes wide to let the moonlight flood his corneas, fill his expanded pupils, pour into his retina, flow through the optic nerve into his brain. His neural pathways widened and twisted, processing moonlight. The moon fed the lupo mannaro the way sunlight fed the pines on the mountain slopes above Aspin-en-Lavedan. It was idiosyncratic, a strange kind of photosynthesis no scientist would ever study.
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