Mozart's Last Aria (18 page)
A
ll Vienna seemed as lifeless as the crypt beneath St. Michael’s Church, as I went through the covered way before the Spanish Riding School. The Lipizzaners craned out of their stalls, their long heads gray and ghostly in the twilight. Market women stumbled home, catatonic with fatigue at the day’s end. The air was still and freezing.
The fire blazed in the tall hearth at the porters’ station of the Imperial Library. I hurried to the head of the stairs and crossed the hall to Baron van Swieten’s chambers.
The baron rose from his dining table. He pulled a napkin from his neck and tightened the belt of his green silk chamber robe over his breeches. He took both my hands and brushed my knuckles with his lips. Only then did I realize that he might misinterpret my returning alone to him, the day after he had hinted at love.
He gestured toward the table. “Will you join me? I’m so happy you came. I lost you in the crowd after the funeral Mass. I’m having
uccellini
. It was one of—”
He hesitated, staring at the platter beside his candlestick. A sage leaf protruded from a roll of veal. Twisted within it, a spiral of prosciutto was like a wound in the pale meat.
“One of Wolfgang’s favorites,” I said.
He touched his thumb to his lip.
I glanced at the door. A page stood beside it with his eyes averted.
“That’ll be all,” the baron said.
The page clicked his heels and left the room.
“My dear baron,” I said, “fear has brought me to you.”
Not love?
I saw the question run across his eyes as though it had been inscribed there. I couldn’t be sure if my answer was written as clearly, but I read in his face the response he found. The light that had illuminated him when I entered his chambers faded.
No, not love.
I told him what I had learned of the Prussian connection to Wolfgang’s Grotto, and that the king in Berlin tried to use my brother to infiltrate Viennese society.
“I fear someone may’ve taken Wolfgang for a spy,” I said.
“It’s possible.”
“But if such activities
were
discovered, who would’ve—who would’ve punished him? Count Pergen, whose job is to eliminate foreign agents? Or the king of Prussia, covering his tracks?”
He led me to his couch. When he sat beside me, he brought the scent of jasmine. I remembered the perfume on his handkerchief when I had dried my tears of joy at the conclusion of
The Magic Flute
. A log dropped in the fire, and I started.
“This information is very important, madame,” he said.
“Your Grace, it seems to me that it’s also very dangerous.”
He grinned. “Nothing at the imperial court is important unless it’s dangerous, too. That’s the nature of palaces.”
“Then I ought to change my negative opinion of the obscurity in which I’ve lived these last years at St. Gilgen. At least there’s no danger there.”
“One risks avalanches in your mountain village, and an unnoticed death. But, in a palace, when one takes a chance, it’s like a daring throw at dice for the richest pot in the casino.”
He stood and paced the floor, slow ruminative footsteps, each making two clear connections on the floorboards, toe following heel. “And the pot, madame, is Austria. The future of its freedoms. If we cast a winning throw, we may save the emperor’s subjects from the oppression of Count Pergen. We may grant them the liberty to think and speak as they wish. To inquire into the deep truths of new sciences.”
I sensed it might be I who would rattle in the baron’s hands and tumble across the gaming table at the mercy of chance. “How?”
“Our Emperor Leopold trusts Pergen only so far.”
Swieten tapped his forefinger on the medal adorning his jacket, the red and gold Knight Commander’s Cross of the Order of St. Stephen. “In my capacity as imperial librarian and head of censorship, I allow limited freedoms to publishers of books and pamphlets. I adjust those limits all the time.”
“On what basis?”
“My latest discussions with the emperor. I carry out his politics as much as my own beliefs will permit. The same is true of Pergen. He’s allowed to run his network of spies, to arrest dissenters and to punish them. But he mustn’t overstep the bounds of what Emperor Leopold considers civilized.”
“Has he ever done so?”
The baron sat on the arm of the couch. “The emperor reprimanded Pergen earlier this year. A publisher had distributed some pamphlets critical of the government. Pergen engineered the absolute ruin of the poor man’s business. But he had gone too far. The emperor forced him to rehabilitate the bankrupt fellow. What if he was proven to have done something that couldn’t be withdrawn?”
The dice were in the baron’s hands. The throw was coming. “Murder,” I murmured.
“Exactly. If the emperor could be presented with proof that Pergen’s agents murdered a prominent figure like Wolfgang, it’d force the emperor to dispose of his police minister.”
Make your throw
, I thought.
I’m ready.
“Your Grace, I’m at your disposal. Whatever you wish me to do, I shall carry it out immediately and willingly. If you’d have me write a letter to the emperor detailing what I’ve learned—”
“A letter?” Swieten waved his hand and shook his head. “Put nothing in writing. Speak to no one of this.”
I curtsied. “I’ll await your advice at my inn.”
He reached for my wrist. “No, you’re right that this is dangerous. I can’t allow you to sit alone in a public inn. You’d be too exposed.”
“But I must—”
“You’ll stay here. I assure you, I’ll devise a way to reach the emperor with this information. To prove what Pergen has done. You shan’t be detained here for long.”
I trusted him to take my part in this risky affair. But I also wondered if he didn’t have another reason for keeping me at the palace. I knew him for a gentleman, but thoughts that are not absolutely guilty may not necessarily be without fault. The longer I spent with him, the more I feared that my own pleasure in his company might develop beyond the power of my shame to restrain me.
He led me through a high gilt door to his salon. The room was lit only by the fire and the evening moonlight. He left me in the shadows by the window and walked through the orange beam of the hearth.
Shoving aside a pile of papers on his desk, he slid open a small drawer. Then for a long time he was motionless.
When he turned, the fire flared and caught his eyes. He approached me soundlessly. The blaze was behind him then, and his stare was filled with the moon.
He lifted a cross on a delicate chain. “When my father brought her to Vienna from the Netherlands,” he said, “he gave this to my mother, rest her soul.”
The baron dangled the cross above my hand, so that it tickled at my palm. It was half the length of my smallest finger, gold inset with squares of amber. He let go of the chain. I caught it between my knuckles before it slid to the floor.
“I want you to have it,” he said.
I followed the moonlight into his eyes. I unclasped the chain and fastened it at my neck. The cross lay over my collarbone. I knew I had its protection.
The crackling of the fire died down. I heard the baron’s breath, then mine, short and urgent.
A song sounded in my head. The aria of love my brother wrote in
Così fan tutte
for Ferrando.
A loving breath from our treasured one brings the heart sweet solace.
My respirations joined the slow saraband rhythm of the aria.
The heart that’s nourished by hope and love needs no better enticement.
The cross glinted in the glow of the fire, quivering with each of my inhalations to the song’s triple meter. The baron watched his gift, enraptured, as though he, too, heard the music.
He lifted his hand toward the cross. I took his fingers in mine. I thought to hold them back, but instead I placed them over the jewel he had given me. I went onto my toes. His other hand circled my waist.
When I kissed him the tiny hairs of his beard seemed so rough and sharp that I felt they might draw blood. I pushed my cheek harder against him.
I
reclined on the divan in the baron’s chamber. The fire warmed my legs. My head lay on his chest, lifting with the soft motion of his breathing. His fingers moved through the heaviness of my hair and found my scalp. I let him massage me there.
With his toes, he stroked at my foot until I laughed. I rolled onto him for a slow kiss. His shirt was loose and I moved my hand inside it. “Are you cold?” I rubbed his firm shoulder.
“You’re getting all the warmth of the fire.” He smiled. “Move over.”
“Is my body not sufficient to warm you?”
He pushed his face against my neck and breathed in. Then his head dropped back against the divan and he frowned at the dark ceiling.
I tickled at his chin with my nose. “What is it?”
“To see us together would’ve made Wolfgang very happy,” he said.
Since the moment he had placed the cross around my neck, I had felt no guilt. I had sensed that I might’ve rushed to the palace not out of fear, after all, but out of lust, yet I hadn’t reproved myself. When he touched me, I had thought of no one but the baron. I had experienced the same absolute absorption that came over me when I sat at the keyboard. With the mention of my brother’s name I was overwhelmed by all the complications from which music—and now love—had been my refuge.
It was as if my father, my husband, and my confessor from the Church of Mariaplain jostled through the door, shocked and enraged by the position in which they found me. I pulled the thin muslin of my shift around my neck to cover myself from their disapproving glares. I watched the logs consumed by the fire.
“Forgive me.” The baron touched my cheek. His hand left a trace of cologne in the air before my face like a screen. “I shouldn’t have mentioned his name.”
My sight blurred with tears, but not because of the baron’s indelicacy. I had recalled where I had smelled the scent Swieten wore. It was the delicate blossom fragrance Constanze had savored when she unstoppered the bottle on Wolfgang’s desk.
I had grown so far from my brother that I hadn’t known his perfume. I wondered with what accuracy I remembered anything about him, his voice or his laughter. Would he be erased from my memory entirely in a decade, or even a year?
“He was the only one who wanted me to be fulfilled,” I said. “When he came to Vienna, he wrote to tell me I should follow him. He was sure I could make a living here as a performer and a teacher.”
“You were still unmarried?” The baron’s face was stilled by what might have been, had we met then.
“My father was alone. I couldn’t leave him in Salzburg.”
Swieten’s voice was impatient, as though I were denying him, rather than denied to him. “For heaven’s sake, that’s what servants are for.”
I whispered, “And daughters, it seems.”
He took a long breath. “So it seems.”
“Wolfgang always understood me. He wasn’t encumbered by my duties, so he saw what was best for me more clearly than I did.”
The baron grasped my hip as though he feared I might slip away from him and leave the room.
“I didn’t realize how much I missed him, until I came to Vienna,” I said. “In the mountains, without any letters for three years, I consoled myself for his absence by playing his music. It was all I could know of him, and so it seemed to be enough. But in this city he wasn’t just a name on a composition. He was a performer, a man who ate dinner and played billiards and loved his wife, and died. Everyone was his friend—or his enemy.”
“Do you regret coming?”
I heard a plea in the baron’s question. I smiled to reassure him. “All my memories of Wolfgang have been reawakened by Vienna. The magic kingdom we invented to pass the time on our first coach journeys when I was twelve. The room we shared in our house on Getreide Lane—my bed had a curtain for privacy, which he little respected. The time I became sick with typhoid in Holland and was so ill I received the last rites. Wolfgang joked that I might’ve remained a prodigy forever if only I hadn’t recovered.”
“God forbid.”
I laid Swieten’s hand in my lap. “I recall, too, how he looked at me when Papa left with him for a tour of Italy, his excitement edged with just a little guilt that I was to be left behind. I hated him desperately and went to bed in tears for a week.”
“Yet he wanted you to come to Vienna.”
“It was our father who created this antagonism between us.” I had to pause, to hold back a sob and to understand what I had at last said, though I had known it for so long. “Wolfgang only wished to compose and perform. But when he broke away from Papa, he wanted me with him. He wanted me to fulfill my musical potential, too. To be at his side when he wore his fine red suit and sat at the piano before an audience.”
“Our loss when Wolfgang died would’ve been much harder to bear had we not discovered you.”
An image came to me—I was beside Wolfgang on the piano stool, playing his Sonata in D for four hands. He wrote it for us to perform together at a single keyboard. His red sleeve crossed my left hand to play a higher note.
“I’m a poor replacement, Gottfried,” I murmured, distracted.
Swieten dropped his eyes when I spoke his first name.
The four-hands sonata came to a close in my head. Wolfgang and I played the final chord and lifted our arms in unison.
As sharply as the chord brought the piece to an end, I snapped upright on the divan. “But I’m not,” I cried out. “Not inferior at all. In fact, exactly alike.”
I grabbed Swieten’s face and kissed it. In spite of his usual formality, he laughed. “What’s this?” he said.
I threw my arms wide. “Tomorrow Mozart shall perform for the emperor.”
“Indeed?”
“You shall arrange it.”
“As you wish, maestro. What’ll you play?”
“I don’t know yet. But I do know exactly what I’ll wear.”
F
rom the window of the baron’s carriage, I peered out at the maidservants walking to their work in gray shawls and white bonnets. Their faces were luminous and beautiful in the dawn. The clouds that had obscured the sky since my arrival in Vienna lifted. The morning sun lit the façades of the palaces, picking out all their elaborate detail.
The carriage crossed the Staff-in-Iron Square, rounding the stump at the center of the plaza where the apprentice had once chained an impregnable padlock. Satan claimed the young craftsman’s soul in payment for this secret art. I reclined on the padded bench, shuddering across the cobbles, and smiled.
I knew then what I would play for the emperor.
Lenerl was on her knees preparing the fire in my room. She raised an eyebrow at my late arrival. I laughed with a freedom that, I believe, surprised her even more than the hour of my return.
Throwing my cloak on the bed, I dropped against the bolster. “Leave the fire for now, girl. Go to Baron van Swieten’s chambers. He’ll have a package for you to bring to me.”
Lenerl dusted off the knees of her skirt.
“Hurry, girl, hurry,” I said, with a laugh.
She smiled at my good humor, took her shawl, and left the room. I listened to her clogs clipping over the cobbles in the square.
The scent of jasmine lay on my clothes from Swieten’s embrace. Wolfgang’s perfume. I went to the mirror on the dressing table.
I untied my hair and combed it down over my shoulder. It dropped almost to my waist. I twisted it into a single braid and gripped it in one hand. I picked up a pair of scissors.
Long and blond, always tied with colorful ribbons, this hair had been my pride. It had consumed so much of my attention that perhaps I had sometimes failed to consider what went on inside the head from which it hung. I lifted the scissors and cut with slow strokes.
As I laid the braid on the dressing table, my head felt light.
I pulled my remaining hair back to my neck and tied it with a single black ribbon. I was
him
again, as I had been when I stood before the mirror in St. Gilgen with the letter in my hand informing me of his passing. This wasn’t the death mask reflecting his final sufferings back at me. In the glass, I saw all the creativity and joy I shared with Wolfgang. One stroke of the scissors freed me of the weight of womanhood. No one would’ve commanded this face to renounce such talent as I had, to tend an aging father and marry a bureaucrat in a tiny village. This face might enter the palace. This face might walk beside Baron van Swieten and greet the emperor.
I smiled at the mirror. “Maestro,” I said.
Lenerl returned with the package, opened it, and laid out the contents on the bed. She gasped when she noticed the length of hair on the dressing table.
I ran my hand across Wolfgang’s red frock coat. One of his hairs adhered to the shoulder. I left it there. I turned over his hat and saw the traces of his sweat where it had stained the band. The inseam of his scarlet pants was worn from the motion of his legs. The suit was alive with my brother.
“Undress me, Lenerl.”
