Mozart’s Blood (28 page)

She rehearsed all of this in her mind as she hurried once more to Rauhensteingasse. She had forgotten her hat, and the cold sunlight, reflecting from ice-glazed streets and snow-buried gardens, dazzled her eyes. She knocked on Mozart's door. Someone opened it, but at first she couldn't make out who it was. Half blinded, she stumbled forward.

A hard small hand stopped her.

Teresa said, “Excuse me. Frau Mozart?”

It was a woman who answered, but it was not Constanze. “Weber,” she said sharply. “Frau Weber. You can't come in now. This is a death house.”

“No!” Teresa blinked, trying to see the woman who stood in her way. “No, I—listen to me, please!”

The woman's features began to come clear as her eyes adjusted to the dimness of the foyer. She was very like Constanze, though her hair was gray and her figure square and solid. “I'm sorry, fräulein. I wouldn't have opened the door, but I thought you were the doctor.” She stepped back into the shadows and began to close the door.

Teresa put out a hand to prevent her, saying swiftly, “Frau Weber. Are you Frau Mozart's mother? I'm a friend of the family. Please tell Frau Mozart—Constanze—please tell her I'm here.”

“She is at her husband's bedside,” Frau Weber said. Her voice dropped. “He's dying.”

Teresa searched for something to say, anything that would make Frau Weber allow her to enter. As the door began to close again, she saw the older woman's eyes well with tears. In a soft voice, Teresa said, “May I just pay my respects,
gnädige Frau?
”

Frau Weber began to speak, but her voice caught in a sob, and she began to weep openly. Teresa instantly stepped forward. She pulled a handkerchief from her bag and pressed it into Frau Weber's hands. Frau Weber buried her face in it, weeping, while Teresa closed the door on the brilliance outside.

Someone had drawn all the curtains in the house, as if a death had already occurred. A mirror Teresa could just see in one of the ground-floor rooms had been covered with a swathe of dark fabric. She stood waiting while Frau Weber collected herself. When she led the way up the stairs, Teresa followed at a respectful distance.

The door stood open to Mozart's darkened room. Constanze knelt at the bedside, her husband's swollen hand in hers. Several more people stood around the room in attitudes of sorrow, but Teresa barely saw them. She saw only Mozart.

His face was like the wax of an old candle, gray and oddly shiny. His eyes were closed, and his breath whistled in his throat. Teresa stopped in the doorway and stood gazing at him as a feeling of hopelessness rose in her breast, nearly choking her. Hardly knowing she did it, she breathed, “Oh, Wolfgang. Oh, no.”

She felt, rather than saw, the attention of everyone in the room come to rest on her. Constanze got to her feet and came forward. “Signorina Saporiti. He's given up!” she blurted in a rushed whisper. “He says he's poisoned, he insists he's dying. He won't drink anything, he won't see a priest…. Not even last rites! Can't you do something?”

Teresa stared over Constanze's head at Mozart. His head lolled on the pillow, and the resurgence of color she had seen two days before was gone. He looked—the thought made her shudder—he looked like one of her victims, spent, drained of all life. She said hoarsely, “Constanze. Can I talk to him alone?”

And Mozart's wife, pitifully eager for any shred of hope, bustled about the bedroom, shooing everyone out, stopping at the door for one more longing look at her husband. She went out, closing the door behind her and leaving Teresa alone with Mozart.

She approached the bed gingerly and sat beside him. As Constanze had done, she took his distended hand in hers. “Wolfgang,” she said, urgently. “Wolfgang, look at me.”

His eyes didn't open, but his upper lip lifted, showing her his teeth.

“Yes, yes,” she said softly. “If that's what you want. Anything you want! But look at me first, talk to me.”

His eyelids fluttered and opened. His eyes, which she had known to be a mild brown, with a steady sparkle, were dark and angry. His voice was no more than a croak. “Poisoned.”

“No,” she said. “No, changed. It's not the same. It doesn't have to be like this.”

“Damned,” he said.

She had begun to roll back her sleeve, to offer him her wrist once again, but she stopped with her cuff half undone. In a firmer voice, she said, “Perhaps, Wolfgang. Perhaps we are damned. But it wasn't my choice, nor was it yours.”

He coughed several times, with a hard, tearing sound. “Doesn't matter,” he said, when he had caught his breath. “Choose now.”

Teresa's own breath caught. “Choose now? What do you mean?”

But Mozart's eyes had closed again. Teresa squeezed his fingers and called his name, but he wouldn't open his eyes, though the lids jerked and trembled. She called his name again, and this time, with what must have been a terrible effort, he pulled his hand away from hers.

She sat on for long minutes, trying to think what to say, what to do. She felt as if he had struck her. “Choose now.” What were they to choose? What could he mean? It had great import, that was clear. Because Mozart was prepared to die for it.

 

Teresa wandered the streets of Vienna that afternoon, hatless, her ermine stole wrapped tightly around her shoulders, the hem of her wool broadcloth dress bedraggled with melting snow. She stood opposite the Cathedral of St. Stephen, watching worshippers come and go. Its lacy Gothic façade and the richly colored glazed tiles of its steep roof soared above the city. Its massive south tower pointed to heaven, a heaven now denied to her. Would Mozart win his way there, with his sacrifice? Was that what he meant when he said to “choose now”?

She turned away from the church she dared not enter and made her way slowly back to her lodging. Tomorrow, she told herself, tomorrow she would go back to the house in Rauhensteingasse, and she would ask him.

She slept badly that night. She dreamed of the night they had shared the tooth, she and Mozart, reliving the heat and the exhilaration and confusion. She dreamed of Mozart drinking from her wrist like a babe at its mother's breast. And she dreamed something else, something awful that brought her bolt upright in the darkness.

With her heart thudding in her chest, she staggered out of bed and went to the window. The night was nearly as bright as day, with moonlight reflecting off the banked snow in the empty streets and on the slanting rooftops. The floor beneath her feet was as icy as the street outside must be, and when she touched the ewer beside her bed, her fingers slid on a film of ice. The fireplace was dark, all embers dead.

She pulled the quilt from the bed and bundled it around herself, but still she shivered from the aftermath of her dream.

There had been a procession of people dressed in black. A mourning procession, it seemed to be, with veiled women and men in formal dress. Teresa had followed them, begging to know whose funeral it was, but no one would speak to her. When they went into St. Stephen's Cathedral, she tried to follow them up the steps, but someone—a woman in a long veil like a shroud—turned and pointed a finger directly at her face. Teresa put her hand to her mouth and found that her teeth had grown so long her lips could no longer cover them. When the procession had gone inside, she took her hand down and found that her teeth had pierced the skin of her palm, and blood ran down her wrist in dark, glistening rivulets. A strange music sounded from the cathedral, a melody built on the tritone. F–B, F–B, the calling of the seabirds above Lake Garda, the motif of her departure from home. Someone was singing—was that Vincenzo? It was the high, sweet tone of a
castrato,
and it pierced her heart with sadness.

Now, awake beside the window, she put her fingers up to touch her teeth and found that they were no longer than they had been the night before. She leaned into the window, her face burning with relief, though her body was so cold. Just as she pressed her forehead against the icy glass, the bells of St. Stephen's struck one o'clock.

Teresa shot bolt upright. One o'clock, December fifth. It meant something, something evil. She didn't know the reason, but the tolling of the bell made her heart quiver with dread.

She stayed by the window a long time, shaken by premonition.

 

Massimo's chest, Octavia found, was smooth, his belly flat and ridged with muscle. She knew already that his hands were strong, but his long fingers were as deft as a violinist's, precise on her zippers and buttons. He kissed her as if the night were endless and explored her body with those sensitive fingers, a feathery touch of her breast, a stroke of her buttock, a long sweep from her ankle to her thigh.

She had turned the lights off in her suite and left the curtains open. The only illumination came from the window. The night lights of Milan, white and red and amber, flickered over Massimo's long, lean body, glimmering on the hard muscles of his thighs, the silken flex of his biceps as he lifted himself above her.

It had been a long, long time for Octavia, and the craving in her body, the yearning ache in her loins and her belly, had an intensity that approached that of her thirst. She put everything aside—her worry for Ugo, her sorrow over the street girl, her loathing for Zdenka Milosch. She pulled the pins from her hair, and it swept across her face and her breast. Massimo pushed the strands aside so he could kiss her again, her lips, her cheek. She lifted her chin so he could kiss her neck, and she felt his lips at that pulsing fountain, that source of life she knew so well.

It was ecstasy to open herself, to expose herself to him. His skin was warm and firm, and hers came alive wherever he caressed her, yearning for more, craving a deeper touch. He kissed her breasts and her belly as her breath came faster. He touched her throat with his tongue. He kissed her deeply, sweetly, until she could hardly breathe at all.

She pressed hungrily against him, eager now, impatient. He pulled back so he could put one hand beneath the small of her back to lift her, move her into position below him. And at last, when she thought she could wait no more, the welcome thrust, the piercing that was like pain but was all bliss.

His movements were confident and strong, and she answered him with her own. His throat was at her cheek, near her lips, but she was not thirsty. He was in no danger. She gave herself to him, took him in return, moved with him, shuddered with him.

Afterward she cradled his head against her shoulder. His hair tickled her chin. She pushed it back and stroked his cheek with her fingertips, trying not to think of anything.

It was so good not to be alone. Even if it was just for a little while.

Teresa stood outside the house in Rauhensteingasse, staring in horror at the black bunting draped over the front door and covering every window. Her ermine cape slipped from her shoulders to trail in the dirty snow of the street as she stood, frozen, staring at the undeniable signs of mourning. She knew what it meant, but somehow it seemed that if she didn't knock, if she didn't ask, it might not be true.

It was what her dream meant. It had been too much for him. The weight of memory had crushed his sensitive spirit. The thirst and its attendant violence had broken his tender heart. He was gone.

She trembled in the cold sunlight, her knees so weak she could barely stand. “Oh, no,” she murmured to herself, again and again. “Oh, no, oh, no.” She didn't realize tears were on her cheeks until the cold air began to chill them. Her face crumpled and her vision blurred as she wept painful, tearing sobs. The pain in her heart was so sharp she thought it must choke her.

Mozart gone. It didn't seem possible. The world would be intolerably empty without this brilliant man, with his fine small hands and his merry eyes…and his music! There would be no more operas, no quartets, no symphonies…no
Requiem.
The loss was too great to comprehend.

Teresa could not bear to hear confirmation. With a cry of anguish, she turned and fled from the sight of Mozart's death house.

 

The whole world soon knew that Mozart had died. For days Teresa huddled in her lodgings, refusing to go out, only eating or drinking if her maid brought things to her door. She couldn't face Constanze, and she didn't try. She didn't attend the funeral, nor was she invited. She was nothing to the Mozarts. She was less than nothing. She was just a singer who had been lucky enough to work with him once, and now, never again.

She tortured herself with thoughts of what she should have done to save him, arguments she should have made, words that might have changed his mind. In the daylight hours she tried to convince herself it was not her fault, but in the long, lonely hours of darkness she berated herself, fought herself, grieved and raged and suffered.

Then, a week after that darkest of days, the thirst came upon her.

For a whole day she wrestled with it. She drank water until she thought she would burst, then drank glass after glass of wine, trying to cool the fire in her throat, to damp the blazing need of her body. She kept seeing Mozart's swollen face, hearing his voice when he said, “Damned…”

Damned, of course, because people died. Killing was a sin, condemned by the church, by the law, by Christ Himself.

It was then she began to wonder, for the first time, if she could take what she needed but leave her victim alive. It could be as it was with Mozart! She had given him enough to get stronger, to begin his recovery, but she was not really harmed.

In the pale gray hours of dawn, Teresa ventured out into the streets of Vienna. She knew she looked haggard, her eyes reddened and her cheeks colorless. She staggered slightly, drunkenly, on the cobblestones, and a solitary man passing by gave her a wary look.

“Sto bene,”
she said.

He shook his head at her, not understanding. She pulled herself upright. “I'm all right,” she said in German. “Tired.”

“Ah.” He came closer to her. He had a slight frame, with a heavy paunch that protruded beneath his waistcoat. As he approached, her nostrils flared at the scents of old wine and recent sex that preceded him. He looked her over and gave a small nod at the quality of her clothes. He put out his arm, the elbow crooked. “May I walk you home, fräulein?”

Teresa hesitated. He looked like a respectable burgher, though he had evidently been out for a disreputable evening. It was a risk. Such a man was just the sort to attend theater and the opera, and he might recognize her in the daylight.

He giggled and pressed closer to her. She realized he was even more drunk than she was. “Come on, little fräulein. You can trust me.”

“Little?” she said, laughing. “I'm taller than you are.”

He giggled again. “
Ja, ja.
Then you can escort me.” He slid his arm around her waist and leaned against her, his hot breath blowing against her cheek.

Teresa sobered instantly. “Yes. Thank you,
mein Herr.
” She pointed toward the wall that encircled the old city. Her upper lip had begun to throb in anticipation, and saliva filled her mouth. In a throaty voice, she said, “This way, sir.”

He was more than cooperative, she found. He was also younger, and lustier, than she had first thought. By the time she could pull aside his collar to expose his throat, her own clothes were half off and the damp stones of the ramparts were scraping her bare thighs.

It didn't matter. She drank, quickly and deeply, but she stopped just when her thirst was slaked, and when the good burgher was still breathing, even still grasping at her with his soft, plump hands. She wriggled away from him and stood rearranging her skirt, pulling the ermine cape around her shoulders.

At her feet, the burgher sighed, and his eyelids twitched for a few seconds before he lay still. Asleep. Not dead, but sleeping. She suspected he would think, in the morning, that he had found a second sexual partner.

Satisfied, she spun about and marched back toward her lodgings.

By midday she and her maid were on a coach, beginning their long journey back to Milan. She wrapped herself in her traveling cloak and hid behind the shield of a long silken veil wound around her neck. Through all the days of travel, she mourned for Mozart and wept her regret for what she had learned too late.

 

Vincenzo dal Prato encountered Teresa upon her return, backstage at La Scala. He embraced her and drew her to one side, stepping around the dozens of water buckets always laid ready in case of fire. “Where have you been?” he asked her in his high voice. “The
direttore
has sent to your rooms a dozen times!”

Teresa leaned on Vincenzo's ample shoulder. “It's so good to see you,” she said, her voice catching in her throat. “You've heard the news, haven't you?”

“You mean Mozart,” he said. “Yes, we've all heard. The
direttore
wants to stage a memorial concert. You'd better go see him straight away.”

Teresa straightened, and took a deep breath. “Yes. What are we doing?”

“He heard there's a
Requiem.
”

Teresa's eyes widened. “Vincenzo, it's not finished. He was working on it when he—when he—” Her throat closed, and she couldn't go on.

The
castrato
took her hand. “Teresa,” he said. “I'm sorry. I know how much you admired him.”

She closed her eyes and clung to her friend's hand with all her strength.

“He would want you to go on singing,” Vincenzo murmured.

Teresa swallowed and opened her eyes. She didn't think that was true, but she couldn't tell Vincenzo that. She wished she could blurt it all out, how she had tried to save Mozart, how he had repudiated her, how utterly bereft she felt. She wished there were someone she could talk to, someone who could understand. But there was not. She didn't dare confide in Vincenzo. She couldn't have borne the horror in his eyes, the shock and distaste at what she had become. There was, in fact, no one she could confide in.

The only person she could have talked with had died hating her.

The bite had isolated Teresa Saporiti, surely and irrevocably. She had nothing to alleviate the desolate landscape of her life but her music.

She straightened, leaving the comfort of Vincenzo's shoulder, standing upon her own feet, her head high. “Of course,” she said. She hardened her heart and composed her features. “Of course I will sing, Vincenzo.”

She went out into the house to look for the director. The oil lamps were dark, and the house echoed with emptiness. Teresa stepped into the aisle, walking gingerly, waiting for her eyes to adjust to the darkness.

Someone spoke from the dimness. “Teresa.”

It was Zdenka Milosch, standing in a row of seats. Teresa turned slowly to face her. The Countess's erect figure was swathed in her usual black bombazine. Jet beads on the bodice caught what little light there was, gleaming through the murk.

“Welcome home,” the Countess said in her uninflected tone.

“Countess,” Teresa answered. She heard that same cool, emotionless quality in her own voice. She wondered if, in times long gone, Zdenka Milosch had suffered the same loneliness she felt now.

“Mozart is dead,” the Countess said.

“I was there.”

“I know that, of course.” The Countess sidled between the rows of seats and came into the aisle beside Teresa.

“How?”

Zdenka Milosch shrugged, a nearly invisible movement of her shoulder. With an air of infinite boredom, she said, “My dear, we have been building La Società since before your great-great-grandparents were born.”

Teresa looked into the Countess's eyes. This woman alone, in all the world, could understand what she felt. But there was no possibility of sympathy in that hard, patrician face.

“I want to show you something,” the Countess said. She turned on her heel and swept up the aisle without waiting to see if Teresa would follow.

Teresa, curious, not knowing what else to do, went with her. In the foyer, Zdenka Milosch stopped and faced her. She opened a small string bag of black velvet that hung at her waist. With her thin white fingers, she pulled out a small leatherbound book and held it out.

Teresa took it and let it fall open on her palm. The Countess exclaimed, “Careful! It's very old.”

Teresa frowned at the urgency in her voice and put her other hand under the open book. The leather felt odd to her, thicker than the split calfskin she had expected, with a texture that sent a shiver through her fingers. She lifted it higher, into the light from the lamps of the foyer.

The pages were filled with lines in an old-fashioned hand, with elaborate capitals and little punctuation. Teresa peered at it more closely, then looked up at the Countess. “I don't read Latin,” she said.

“You don't need to.” Zdenka, with careful fingers, took the little book back and gently turned the pages. “I will read it to you.”

“Why?” Teresa asked in a peremptory tone. “I'm busy. The
direttore—
”

Zdenka went on as if she had not spoken. “Here it is,” she said. “Twenty-ninth October, seventeen eighty-seven. Prague.”

Teresa caught her breath and put a hand to her lips. “Prague…”

Again the Countess ignored her interruption. “Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, composer, and Teresa Saporiti, singer.” She stopped reading and gave Teresa a look that made her heart skip a beat. She said, “And now Mozart is gone. There is only you.”

“What do you mean, only me? That whole book is full of—”

“Oh, yes,” Zdenka said, with a dismissive wave of her hand. “Full of names, none of them of importance. Even yours is of no importance.”

Teresa pursed her lips at the irony. “Then why are you showing it to me?”

The Countess's eyelids lowered and closed, slowly, like a snake's. “Mozart,” she pronounced, slowly, as if she relished the taste of the syllables. For the first time her voice betrayed some feeling, a small unevenness of tone that spoke of emotion. “You shared the tooth with Mozart. His blood runs in your veins.”

“There must be others!” Teresa cried. Her voice echoed in the empty foyer, her words coming back to mock her. “He fed…. He must have!”

Again the negligent shrug. “Like Mozart, they did not survive.”

Teresa stared at her for a long moment, trying to understand. “You mean that I—only I—carry Mozart's memories?”

“His genius.”

“No. Not his genius. I have his recollections, and his thoughts, and his feelings.”

“What do you think genius is?
Cretina!
” The Countess spoke the insult as casually as if she were saying hello. “You, Teresa Saporiti, are very special to us. To La Società.”

“What does La Società care about Mozart's blood?”

At this, Zdenka Milosch lifted her head and gazed over Teresa's at the sculptures of composers that dotted the foyer of La Scala. She drew a long, whistling breath through her nostrils and breathed it out, her eyelids drooping like a woman in ecstasy. “It's the music, Teresa. The music. There are so few pleasures left to us—food, wine, even sex pales after so long—but music endures. And Mozart's music…” Her voice trailed off, and the faint glimmer of emotion in her eyes faded.

Teresa stared at her. “But some of my…some of the people I've…” She couldn't bring the word to her lips. She said at last, lamely, “It can't be true. I can't be the only one.”

The Countess brought her eyes, hooded and blank now, back to Teresa's face. She didn't answer. She opened her string bag without looking at it, slid the diary into it, and pulled the strings tight. She said, “I look forward to the memorial concert.” She turned and walked away, out through the doors of the theater, neither speaking a word of farewell nor glancing back.

Teresa stood where she was, alone. She would never, she decided, tell Zdenka Milosch how she had tried to save Mozart. She would never tell her anything again.

She turned and went in search of the
direttore,
to find out what she was to sing for the concert. Like La Società, what she had left to her was music. And she would not let Zdenka Milosch, or anyone, take it from her.