“I hate them, too,” she said. “If they knew what I feel—they are the torturers, they the murderers!” She hugged herself, staring before her. It was almost impossible to believe that half an hour before she had been glittering on a stage, a girl of sixteen, incomparably charming, commanding, poised. Anna Storace could light a hall with the way she held her hands. But of course it had been a mask. Benucci knew that better than anyone.
“Anna,” he said. “Is it true?”
She looked at him blindly. “Oh, no,” she said. “Oh, Francesco.”
“I’m sorry,” he said, but there was a challenge in his voice. His voice was too loud for some rooms; it carried a challenge, sometimes, where none was meant.
She looked as if she did not know where to go. “No,” she whispered. “It’s not true, Francesco.”
He put his hand on the door. There was a long silence. She did not move, nor look away. She was a remarkable picture of stillness. He might have been leveling an arrow at her heart. “It was mine,” he said, “wasn’t it?”
She faltered and closed her eyes. The arrow struck, quivering, at the base of her throat. Her voice was not loud but perfectly placed, melodious, clear: “Yes,” she said.
He grasped the door and saw her marrying the Irishman, in her silk frock, saw her mother like a queen refusing to speak to him. He heard himself say, “And we’re still friends. That’s the main thing,” and saw her again and again turning her head and saying, “Yes.” He saw her more than a year ago in this same room, a plumper, sweeter, ardent young girl who clung to him and kissed him and wept from her love and he saw himself taking her in a vindictive passion, hurting her and not caring, caring only to silence and give her what she thought she’d wanted, caring only, too, for his pleasure, hating himself yet feeling the pleasure still. He saw her in her frock marrying the Irishman, again and again saw her turn from him and say, “Yes.” Saw her singing with him all year long, smiling, slipping away, collapsed with her big belly behind the stage with her idiot brother squawking above her. He saw the Irishman hurting her, the rest of them pretending he was not.
“Oh, God,” he breathed. “How could you do it? How could you look me in the eye?” She went white and said nothing. He cast his eyes around the room desperately. “What kind of man do you think I am?”
“You didn’t love me,” she said. She swallowed. “You loved Aloysia.”
He stared at her. Then he said in a sharp voice, “Aloysia? Aloysia Lange? When did I give a fig for Aloysia Lange?”
“She said you did. She said you wrote her love letters.”
“When have I ever sent any woman love letters? When would Francesco Benucci have time for love letters?”
She listed forward as if he had struck her. “Oh,” she whispered. “Of course you didn’t.”
“Would you have let me dandle the child on my knee?” he said. “Would you have lied and lied? All that time, Anna, and you said nothing—”
“Don’t I know that?” she cried out wildly. “Haven’t I known it every minute?” She put her hands to her cheeks as if she was afraid she would break apart. “Oh, God! It was horrible! Oh, God!”
He stared at her and took a few steps back. “I never knew you,” he said. “I don’t know you now. We’re worse than strangers. You never told me. You never did. You married him and never told me.”
She let down her hands and stared vacantly before her, tears hesitating on her cheeks, as though waiting patiently for him to strike her down.
He gave a helpless groan and passed a hand over his forehead. “I’ve done you wrong,” he said suddenly. “Forgive me … please forgive me.” Then he turned and left the room.
Upstairs, in a mirrored hall with a checkered floor, the reception was still going on. “My gentle friends!” called someone in heavily accented English. It was Mozart, red-faced, wigged, on the arm of his wife. “A most good evening to you.”
“Hello, Mozart,” said Stephen. “Practicing your English, are you?”
“If I do not practice,” said Mozart, delicately articulating each syllable, “I shall not advance.”
“Very good,” said Stephen, laughing. “And if you don’t advance you’ll never come to London. Good evening,” he said to Constanze in German.
She nodded to them both and said to Anna, “I’m so happy to see you well.”
“Thank you,” Anna answered, and felt a kind of panic rise inside her. Not the panic of stage fright—decidedly not that. She had returned to the party ten minutes after Benucci had gone. No one there mentioned her absence, nor her reddened eyes. They were all kindness. They avoided speaking of the madman, and the rumors.
Stephen had had a few drinks and was relaxed and amused. He had played well tonight. “I say, Mozart,” he continued, still in German, “awfully good of you to join us. Awfully bold. We missed you at our rehearsal for Anna’s cantata.”
“I was sick that day,” Mozart protested. “Feverish indigestion. Wasn’t I, my dear? I wrote Mademoiselle Storace and she absolved me.”
Saying this he pulled Anna toward him and whispered quickly in her ear, as if a caricature in a play, “I am an ass. Say nothing. You sang beautifully, beautifully—” but his grip on her arm was firm and his lips grazed her earlobe.
“Stop it, my love,” laughed Constanze, pulling him back. “You’ll muss her hair.” She looked around them composedly. “My husband has had too much wine.”
“I have not,” cried Mozart.
“He really was sick that day,” Constanze continued. “He hasn’t been that sick in ages. But he wouldn’t let me write you because he insisted he’d be well enough. He kept saying, ‘I must be there, I must hear her,’ until I thought he’d have a fit, so finally he went, but by then it was too late and he came right home again. I thought it was a lot of fuss for nothing when he was so unwell.”
“It’s not true,” Mozart said. “I was not sick, I was fatigued. My wife is trying to defend me. Wasn’t sick at all.”
“You were sick,” said Constanze, frowning. “I was most anxious. I didn’t want you to go out. But you insisted.”
“You didn’t come all the way to our house, did you?” said Stephen. “Why the devil didn’t you say hello?”
Mozart looked at Anna and shrugged a little. “I was too late. I hadn’t realized, in my state, how late it was.”
“Well,” said Stephen. “I’m rather glad you weren’t there; I played your stuff abominably that day. I fared much better tonight.”
“You were so charming,” said Constanze. She smiled and patted Anna’s arm. “Both of you were so charming. Everyone is so happy.”
Mozart Riding
Mozart rode out on his horse lightly and easily, humming to himself, occasionally talking to the animal or patting its neck. There was a special grace in being a small man upon a fine horse. One could observe the world from height. One guided the animal and was carried by it. The ears swiveled, the hooves clopped, there was a bellows of breathing and low, conversational snorts. The balance was elegant and lively, always at the edge of thought, like when one hit a special place of concentration where the notes seemed to run of their own accord and one was afraid to eat or sleep or take a piss lest one topple down again into the slog of tedious labor and confusion like the poor fellows who walked.
It was good to have a horse. He hoped he wouldn’t have to sell it. Sell the horse and move to the outer city beyond the Prater, where the cheap rents were. With a horse one could see everything and get places quickly and independently, and look a certain way, tall, refined, powerful. He was not really any of those things, without his pretty horse, without his piano or some other instrument. On his own he was small and bashful. Always saying some nonsense. He could never say quite what he meant. His own face made him laugh in the mirror, the jutting nose, the pitted skin, the eyes like a frog. When Aloysia Lange had broken his heart he had stared at his face for a long time. He did not do so anymore, he only laughed. His father, though, was st
ringently handsome. But Wolfgang resembled his mother. She had died with him in Paris, the worst days of his life. His father had blamed him. He would never go back to Paris. Not for all the horses in the world.
He would stop at his best friend Gottfried’s house for lunch, teach a lesson, meet with Da Ponte, pick up his new coat, the one with the white and gold, drop off a few easy piano pieces for a princess, and have an English lesson with Georg Kronauer, his brother Mason. Stephen Storace was rubbish for English lessons, and Anna—well, he couldn’t speak English with Anna, she made him tongue-tied in English—she pattered on in her lilting way and he gaped and stuttered and made a fool of his own foolishness until they were both constricted with laughter.
There was never enough money and never enough time. He thought of his death every day, not from morbidity or fear but to remind himself that it would come. He wasted so much time. Just this morning he had overslept and then had had to write a couple of letters and suddenly he was late for lunch at Gottfried’s and had not a line of music to show for himself. If he died today he would leave his family poor and his best work—he felt it there, dormant in his heart—unwritten. So it would be better not to die today, please God. Since becoming a Freemason he thought he had made his peace with death, which had used to frighten and anger him so much, but yet there were all these things waiting urgently in his heart to be written, waiting for money and time and peace and concentration. He could have written them today if he had not overslept. These piano pieces he was selling for the princess were drivel, rubbish, worse than any mincing, timid, derivative opus of his peers. But they had to be mincing or she could never play them and he would never get his fee and would never pay the rent. Not that the fee would cover the rent. But he had to have the white-and-gold coat for performing in. He had to look richer than he was. A fine set of garments was as important as a fine horse—more so. When he wore a coat like that, then he was handsome. Striking, if not handsome. When everything fit just so and the fabric was heavy and rich and the buttons were like pearls and the collar was high and everything sharp and straight and fine and smooth. He was a peacock but he did love it. Then he could be easy with himself, then stand tall and play beautifully and banter with the duchesses and not be so nervous and shy. Most of the time one would not know he was nervous and shy. He had learned early and well to disguise his feelings with revelry.
Lovely, graceful, funny Anna. He felt he had always known her; he’d felt that from the first. And yet he’d never met anyone like her. This little English Italian soprano. Her waist fit neatly in his hands. Her hair was dark and soft; softer still were her lips and her cheek. How many hours he’d spent dreaming of her cheek, of it resting against his naked chest while he stroked her downy temple.
He loved his wife. She made him laugh. She took care of him. When he was stuck in his work he would go out and chat with her or play with their son and that would revive him. He loved her breasts and her rump, loved taking her to bed. When she looked at other men or behaved with immodesty he became jealous and enraged. But she was so ordinary and uncomplicated. She was like a lamb. Lower-class, simply taught. He was sometimes afraid she would say something ill-bred and then he was ashamed of himself. That was his father in him, his father who could be proud and stubborn. And Constanze—it could be that he had been rushed into marrying her. He had been boarding in her home, still in love with her sister. All he’d wanted was some nice companion, someone to kiss and squeeze and do all manner of delicious things with. After all, he’d been just a boy. It was true that after he and Constanze were engaged, her mother had made him sign a contract, with witnesses, stating that if he did not marry Constanze he would pay her mother as settlement a large annual stipend for the rest of her life. He hadn’t minded; he’d been sure he would marry Constanze. He would have signed anything. And when she had found out about the contract, Constanze in a fine fury had made them rip it up. But still. It had been there. He had perhaps been rushed. And he had not known, then, how much he would change.
That night he’d stolen Anna’s slippers he’d been angry with the world and restless. He had worked himself nearly to death that week. He’d longed for playfulness and release. And when he saw the new Italian company perform Salieri’s opera it was as if his soul caught fire. A hundred ideas crowded into his brain at once. And at the center was the pretty soprano who knew everything to do and yet made her every word and action seem spontaneous and new. Her voice captivated him. The sound held simplicity and beauty and a quality of being direct, crystalline, unadorned. She could create all manner of colors and moods, as if she were one of those acrobats whose strong and flexible bodies defied the rest of human experience, yet the voice at its core was clear, truthful, only hers. She achieved such acoustic resonance and subtlety of tone, and had access to such ranges of dynamic and emotion, that Mozart felt it almost physically. She was perfectly in tune. Her voice in all its clarity and honesty, in its precise, direct skill, cut him to the quick. Listening to her he remembered everything he aspired for in his music. The human voice at its best had no companion nor rival. All other arts fell abject before it. A baby’s cry, a lover’s vows, a sob of grief, touched the heart more readily than any crafted instrument. While Anna was singing he could not move, nor think of anything else. He almost shouted out, like an animal. He had wanted to possess her. He, with his wife beside him, wanted to do such things!
But that, too, his insensible lust, testified to Anna’s voice and ability, and he laughed at himself as if he had been a character in a bawdy story. He vowed to write for this remarkable soprano. To fit his music to her voice so perfectly that when she sang it, she became her best self.
What he had felt that night when he’d first heard her had been the product of a fevered imagination. He’d known nothing about her. If anything the desire and frustration had arisen from the fact that this new company was here and Salieri got to write for them, and any other man got to write for them as long as he was Italian, as long as he was not Mozart—the German, the small fellow, the one whom everyone still thought of as a seven-year-old boy. Mozart could not write for them. Mozart must sit stewing in the audience, lusting after the exquisite, incomparable new soprano … but he loved his wife …
At the reception he’d had to talk to that windbag Herr Gosta and a hundred other windbags who knew nothing of what he did, who had no life in them and no souls, who cared only for what mattered least. He’d escaped to the courtyard, where there was nothing and no one, no fear, no lust, no wife, only himself and his frustration and the trees and the darkness. Then he’d turned and seen her, on the bench, the very girl he’d been longing for all evening. She’d followed him out. She had not seen him. He’d watched her take off the slippers. He’d said to himself that if he lost this chance he did not deserve to live.
He had not expected her to accept his kiss. It was as if they were in a romance, exchanging the requisite motions and words. She could not speak German then but her Italian had been beautiful, and her speaking voice more melodious than he had even imagined. She had hesitated in his arms and then leaned against him.
After they’d gone inside that night and he’d seen his honest wife—he loved his wife—he had wanted to feel ashamed for what he had done but he had not. It had felt nothing but a game then, a game he had won. Salieri would never have done anything so bold. Salieri was too stodgy. He had not the necessary recklessness.
Mozart should have been a Kapellmeister by now, rich as Gluck. All of them knew it. He was almost thirty and had nothing. He should have had more time for composing if he hadn’t had to do everything else. What? Did they think he’d stay forever? He’d go to London and they’d never see him again, no matter how they begged and implored.
Anna’s voice came to him in dreams. Sometimes he imagined another life, in which they lived together in London and he could hear her in the next room, and anytime he wished he could talk with her, tell her something that had happened or interested him, laugh with
her, press his face into her shoulder. When he was with her he was happy and lively, and the time sped along without his noticing, as it did when he was in the middle of a good composition.
Until that day when he’d played for Anna in her illness, he’d thought he was safe. He had cared for her, had worried for her, but had not allowed himself to love.
That day, he sat at Anna’s fine instrument and imagined her upstairs, in the bed he had never seen. He could almost pretend he was alone with her in the house, as he’d imagined them being alone in London. He did not like to think of her upstairs lying there as if waiting to die. The piano was perpendicular to the door. Along the wall were the chaise-longue and various side tables and chairs. Books lay about and flowers drooped in vases on the mantel. The sun flooded in and made everything hot. Mozart had to remove his jacket.
Exploring a fine piano with no aim or ending point was one of his greatest pleasures. Every worry abandoned him. His concentration was so steady, and yet so abstracted, that he could have no thought of the past or the future. He became loose and calm. He had a sensation of watching himself from afar, of admiring his hands and fingers and wondering how they managed it, and what might come next. Musical convention made some turns more likely, even required, but even so there was always an element of randomness and play. He would watch himself running toward a certain corner and at the last minute turn the opposite direction. Or he would send himself deliberately somewhere hazardous and strange just to see if he could get out.
He could always get out. This was a point of pride, even when there was no one there to hear him. He never felt so full of power as when he was at the piano. So potent, so calm, expert and whole. If he had only time in a day to practice, to compose, then he was happy, then he found his life’s meaning and equilibrium. So he was almost always happy, and his life almost always had meaning. He thought of this now when he played for Anna, because her meaning had left her.
Vienna Nocturne Page 17