Mozart’s Blood

by Louise Marley

  “That’s it. That’s good.”

  He opened his eyes, and looked into hers. “Why couldn’t he do that?”

  “Who?”

  “Mozart.”

  “Oh, Massimo.” Her eyes stung again at the picture of Mozart on his deathbed. “I did everything I could, but he wouldn’t—”

  “I know,” he said impatiently. “I know all of that. What I don’t know is why.”

  She lifted her shoulders in a despairing shrug. Her eyes brimmed and overflowed. Tears dripped down her cheeks, and she made no attempt to hide them. “I have never known. I think it takes a certain—a certain hardness. To do what you have to do, and to control the memories. Mozart was so highly strung, and so sensitive. But Zdenka Milosch was as hard as iron.” She swallowed and swiped the wetness from her face with the heels of her hands. “She never cared,” she said. “Not about either of us. She only cared about the music. It was all that was left to her, and to the elders.”

  “Are they going to try to kill me?” he asked.

  The question startled her. “She’s dead! Countess Milosch is dead.”

  “Is she? What happened?”

  “Nick killed her. At the elders’ compound.”

  “But the elders still live.”

  “They do. And Tomas and Kirska and the others.”

  “Someone will take her place. There’s too much at stake.”

  His voice had softened a bit, and a little flame of hope flickered in her breast. She put out her hand to him. “Massimo, come with me. Follow us, Ugo and me. He’ll protect you.”

  He drew back from her hand. He shook his head, and his lips curled slightly, a shadow of the sweet smile she remembered. “I have my own career to think of,” he said. “Just as you do.”

  She dropped her hand, and the feeble spark of hope guttered and died. She said bleakly, “You must hate me. I hated Zdenka Milosch, once I knew.”

  “I thought,” he said with a grimace, “that I was in love with you.”

  “And now that you know what I am, you’re revolted,” she said.

  “I don’t know yet what I feel,” he said.

  “No. I suppose you don’t. It takes time.” She straightened her scarf and looked away from him, up to the street where the passing headlights gleamed on the windows of the office building opposite the piazza. “There are compensations, you know.”

  “Singing.”

  “Yes. That above all.”

  He took a step toward her, his shadow swaying above her in the gloom. He bent his head a little to look into her face. “I can handle the memories,” he said. His voice had gone hard again, with a deep steely note. “But I don’t know if I can do what you do, Octavia. I don’t know if I can do what you did to me.”

  She released a long breath, feeling as weary as if she were one of the ancients. She turned her face up to his, letting him see the naked sorrow in her eyes. “You will, Massimo. My dear. When you’re thirsty enough, you will.”

  38

  Più non sperate di ritrovarlo, più non cercate: lontano andó.

  You’ll never see him again; don’t bother to look: he’s far away.

  —Leporello, Act Two, Scene Five, Don Giovanni

  Ughetto left the elders’ compound in the autumn, when the harvest of aconitum lycoctonum was in and drying in bundles in the pantry behind the kitchen. He took enough of the herb with him to last for a long time. He didn’t tell anyone he was going, nor did he ask permission. From a small stash of money the elders kept in the kitchen, he lifted money for coach and boat fare. He slipped over the garden wall one moonless night and struck out on foot. He was, at last, going home.

  The journey was long, and it was nearly a month before he reached Napoli. There he haunted the docks until he found a boat headed for Trapani. He stood on the deck all day as the boat bobbed its way across the peaceful Tyrrhenian Sea, and he peered ahead for his first glimpse of the harbor. He was the first off the boat when it tied up to the dock. Carrying a small cloth bag with his few possessions in it, with his herb in a pouch around his neck, he strode quickly up the road that led to his mother’s tavern.

  Eight years had not changed Trapani nearly so much as it had changed Ughetto. He saw faces he recognized, but no one recognized him. The same fishmongers plied the wharves who had once given him fish heads for his mamma’s soup pot. The same fruit sellers who used to hand out slices of lemon to thirsty children playing in the square still hawked their wares from beneath striped awnings or broad umbrellas. He passed them all with the most cursory glance. He was impatient now. He hardly looked at the vista of blue sea beyond the white beach. He didn’t slow his steps to savor the salt tang in the air. The sun he had longed for shone generously on his head, but he barely noticed it.

  When he reached the tavern, he stopped in the street and gazed at it for long moments. It was smaller and darker than he remembered. It had no real door, only a piece of canvas pulled across the entryway. He had forgotten that the main room gave directly onto the street. The canvas was pulled aside now, tied with a length of rope. He could see the same scarred tables inside, where sailors sat drinking and gambling, the same oil lamps that had always hung from the walls, the same bits of discarded fishing equipment propped here and there. The familiar smells of fish and beer and smoke wafted out through the open door and wrapped him in a fog of nostalgia. He felt as if he were eight years old again, as if his sisters might come tumbling out to drag him down to the beach, or to tease and torment him until he cried.

  He took a step closer. Someone was moving between the empty tables, a thick-figured woman in a dark dress and an apron. A scarf covered her hair, and she carried a wooden tray on her hip. He didn’t know if it was his nonna or his mamma. And he didn’t know what he would say to either of them.

  Ughetto drew a breath that puffed out his chest and lifted his chin. He put his shoulders back, hefted his bag, and went inside.

  The woman in the scarf turned when he entered. At first she thought he was a customer, and an automatic smile began to cross her face. Then, as he stopped just inside the doorway, her smile vanished. She stared at him, her eyes wide, her mouth a little open.

  Not his mother, but one of his sisters. Ughetto said, “Nuncia. Don’t you know your brother?”

  His sister gasped. She dropped her tray on the dirt floor, whirled, and ran back toward the kitchen, calling, “Mamma! Mamma!”

  Ughetto dropped his bag near the door and waited, listening to the sudden tumult from the kitchen. There was a clatter, as if something had fallen. Voices raised, calling names, shouting orders. A few moments later, Nuncia came back into the tavern, with three of her sisters in tow. When they saw Ughetto, they stared as wordlessly as Nuncia had.

  He gazed back at them. They had grown older, of course, but he still knew which of them was which. Nuncia was the plumpest. One had grown tall, another had retained something of her childish prettiness. One limped, as if she had suffered an injury.

  And behind them came Ughetto’s mamma. Like Nuncia, she wore a scarf on her head. She had grown stout and gray-haired. She stood in the passageway between the kitchen and the main room of the tavern, her plump jowls trembling. She looked as if she had seen a ghost.

  She said, in a hoarse tone, “They wanted their money back. I didn’t have it.”

  He shrugged.

  “Ughetto,” Nuncia said. “Are you a…a musico?” All the girls watched him, awaiting his answer.

  His mamma took a step forward. “They said you ran away.”

  “They sent me away, Mamma.”

  “Because you can’t sing?”

  “I can sing. That is, I could sing.” Ughetto stepped forward, where the light from the small window could fall on his face.

  “What happened?” Nuncia asked. “Mamma said you were going to be a famous singer.”

  Ughetto ignored the question. “Tell me, Mamma. What did you do with the money? The money you took when you sold your son?”

  His
mamma dropped her eyes and stared at the floor. “We paid for Maria’s wedding, and for Caterina’s.”

  “For two weddings,” Ughetto said, slowly and thoughtfully, “you sold my future.”

  Mamma said, “I have six daughters. What was I supposed to do?”

  Nuncia crossed the floor to Ughetto and searched his face with her eyes. “You’ve gotten so handsome, Ughetto.”

  He smiled at her. “It’s good to see you,” he said softly.

  She put her hands on his shoulders and kissed his cheeks, one and then the other. A moment later, his other sisters did the same. The youngest put her arms around him and hugged him tightly. “Mi dispiace,” she whispered.

  “Not your fault, Anna,” he said. “I know that.” He looked around at his sisters, at the empty tavern. “Where’s Nonna?”

  Nuncia said, “She died the same year you left.”

  And Anna whispered, “Of a broken heart.”

  Mamma looked at him, above the heads of her daughters, and he read the fear in her eyes. She had not sold him to pay for weddings. She—and no doubt his nonna, too—had known what he was. That night on the docks, when the moon glimmered on the moving waters of the bay, hung between them.

  “If you’re not a singer, Ughetto,” his mamma said in a shaky voice, “what do you do?”

  “I have work,” he said. “For a countess.”

  Nuncia said, “A countess! Is she very rich?”

  He dug into his pocket. “Rich enough. I’ve brought you a bit of money.”

  Anna took the little purse he handed her and carried it to her mother. Mamma opened it, counting the coins with her eyes before she looked up at Ughetto again. She said only, with infinite sadness, “Grazie.”

  “Prego.”

  She looked as if she might say something else, but then caught her lip between her teeth and was silent.

  Ughetto shook his head. He would not tell her, even if she pressed him. He had wanted to know if she understood, and it was clear to him she did. Perhaps she had hoped castration would cancel out the circumstances of his birth. He would not ask. He didn’t want to know if it wasn’t true.

  Ughetto stayed in Trapani for three days. Nuncia cooked him enormous meals. Anna walked with him along the beach, asking him questions about the scuola, about Roma, about his life. He swam in the warm waters of the bay and slept long hours in the two rooms the family occupied above the tavern. His mother hardly spoke to him, and she looked wary whenever he came near her.

  Ughetto found his nonna’s grave in the cemetery on its hill above the village. Her gravestone was a rudimentary monument, with only her name, the date of her death, and a rather crude crucifix carved into it. Ughetto sat down beside it in the untended grass. He stayed there a long time, talking to her as if she could hear him, telling her he wished he could have seen her one more time. He told her everything else, too, about the scuola, about his dashed hopes, and about the elders of La Società. “I don’t know what will happen now, Nonna,” he said. He stroked the soft grass growing on the mound of earth that covered her resting place. “But I’m sure you wouldn’t like it.”

  He found a ship sailing to Rome from the Trapani harbor, and bought passage. He walked slowly back to the tavern, wanting to remember everything just the way it was at that moment.

  His sisters gathered to bid him farewell. Maria came, with a fat baby on her hip. Caterina already had two toddlers clinging to her skirts. Nuncia and Anna and the rest hugged him, and Anna cried.

  He wiped away her tears. “Just be happy, little Anna, will you?”

  She buried her face against his chest. “I miss you, Ughetto! I want you to stay!”

  Gently, he loosened her hold on him, and held her at arm’s length. “It’s Ugo now, Anna. And I can’t stay, I really can’t.”

  “But why not?” She lifted her tear-streaked face and gazed at him. Her eyes swam with real tears, shed just for him. He had to set his jaw to keep from giving in to his own loneliness and sorrow. Who would ever weep for him again? Certainly not Zdenka Milosch, or the ancients who haunted her mansion. His was going to be a lonely life. A long, lonely life.

  When he could control his voice, he said, “I have work to do in Roma, and in Firenze and Milano, even Parigi.”

  Nuncia said, “You should be proud of your brother, Anna. He must be very important in the world.”

  Anna wiped her eyes with the hem of her apron and sniffled. The other sisters stepped back as their mother came forward.

  “Ughetto,” she began.

  “Ugo now, Mamma,” Nuncia said.

  Her mother nodded. She looked older than she had just three days before, with dark circles under her eyes. Her lips were pale.

  He said, “Arrivederci, Mamma.”

  She shook her head. “Addio, mio figlio.” And in a low tone, meant only for his ears, she said, “Don’t come back, Ugo.”

  He met her eyes with his own, and the last tender spot in his soul seemed to harden, to scab over, to begin to scar. “No,” he said. “I won’t.”

  She stepped back as he bent and picked up his bag. Anna came forward with a packet in her hands. “Bread,” she said. “Some olives and a bit of dried fish.”

  “Grazie,” he said. He kissed her cheek. He looked into his sisters’ faces, each in turn.

  Anna turned away, throwing her apron over her face, sobbing behind the folds of cotton. One of the toddlers began to wail along with her.

  Nuncia and Caterina and the others followed him out into the road and stood waving as he descended to the docks. He looked back, imprinting the memory of his home, the dark, dank little tavern perched above the town, his six older sisters arrayed before it. Six of them, and he the seventh child, the only son. Their existence had doomed him to the life of the lupo mannaro, though they would never know it.

  At the last moment his mother came outside to stand behind her daughters. She shaded her eyes with her hand, watching her only son leave home for the last time.

  At the bottom of the hill, Ugo lifted his arm in a last salute. The girls waved, but his mother kept her arms folded over her long apron.

  Ugo turned away and set off to catch his boat.

  39

  Forse un giorno il cielo ancora sentirà pietà di me.

  Perhaps one day heaven will yet take pity on me.

  —Donna Anna, Act Two, Scene Four, Don Giovanni

  Teresa Saporiti traveled to Munich in 1805, to sing with Vincenzo dal Prato in his farewell performance. The production was a Mozart opera, Idomeneo. She had learned the rôle of Ilia for the first time. Vincenzo had created the rôle of Idamante.

  He met her coach and walked with her to her hotel. He carried her valise in one hand and kept the other draped around her shoulders, chatting cheerfully. “Gran Dio, Teresa,” he said in his fluting voice. “You don’t look a day older than the day I found you at the bottom of the stairs in San Satiro.”

  She gave him the close-lipped smile she had cultivated, and let her cheek brush his arm. “Flatterer,” she said.

  “It’s true, my dear,” he said in avuncular fashion. He squeezed her shoulders with his long arm. “You’re still the piatto saporito! Everyone marvels at it.”

  “It’s because I come from Limone,” she said. “Everyone lives so long there.”

  “Lucky,” he said. He gave a great sigh. “And here I am, at the end of my career already. It seems I made my début only yesterday.”

  “Yesterday!” she laughed. “You were sixteen years old, Vincenzo.”

  “Yes. Sixteen. And now I’m nearly fifty.”

  “But that’s wonderful, Vincenzo. You’re still singing.” They reached the hotel, and a doorman in livery held the door for them to pass inside.

  As they crossed the lobby to the desk, Vincenzo said, with a deep sadness that made his voice tremble, “My voice is going, Teresa. I’m not the singer I was.”

  She cast him a worried glance, but there was no time to press him. The clerk was handing her a
key, asking for a signature, ringing for a bellman. Vincenzo kissed her cheek and told her he would return to take her to dinner.

  As he left, people watched his gangly figure curiously and murmured to each other. Teresa watched him, too, making the bellman wait for her. Vincenzo stood out among ordinary people. His great height, his odd proportions, his lined, beardless face gave evidence to what he was, a castrato, a musico. He had no wife, no children. Music was all his life. What would be left to him, when he could no longer sing?

  As they began the Idomeneo rehearsals, she realized Vincenzo was right. His voice had grown thin at the top, and his coloratura was forced. His sustained tones had a tendency to waver, and his cadenzas were less elaborate than they had been. She stood in the wings, listening to him go through Idamante’s first aria, and her heart ached.

  Vincenzo’s day was reaching its end, and she, too, would have to retire soon. It would be necessary. Soon even Vincenzo, her dear friend, her mentor, would not be allowed to see her. She would be in hiding until all those who remembered her were gone.

  She watched him strike a pose as he brought his aria to its close. He stepped stiffly to the lip of the stage to listen to some word from the conductor. His hair was graying, and his belly drooped. Vincenzo was getting old.

  A thought struck her like a bolt of lightning, a thought that made her cheeks burn and her heart pound. She had to turn away from the stage, to go to her dressing room where she could be alone to consider it.

  She sat before the dressing table with its jars of powder and rouge, and stared at herself in the cloudy glass. What would he say, if she offered? What would he think?

  She rested her head in her hands, trying to think. Sorrow and affection for Vincenzo battled with her instinct to protect her secret. What if he was revolted and denounced her to the world? What if he said yes, but then couldn’t handle the memories? She couldn’t bear to see someone else she loved crumble under the burden, as Mozart had done.

  Outside her dressing room, cast and crew came and went. The noise of set pieces being dragged about came down the narrow hallway. Still Teresa sat, agonizing over her choice. If only, she thought, she could pray. But she had lost her right to that grace.