Mozart's Last Aria (17 page)

Chapter 29

B
eneath the angular medieval frescoes at the entrance to St. Michael’s Church, Schikaneder recounted the story of Gieseke’s death for a handful of mourners. He fretted at the shoulder of his black frock coat, as though brushing away the blood that poured from the actor’s dangling corpse onto the Bird Man’s costume during the encores. With his eyes fixed on the altar, its sculptural angels tumbling to earth, his arm traced the dead man’s drop to the stage.

Constanze called to him. He advanced toward her. When he saw that it was I who was arm-in-arm with my brother’s widow, he hesitated, but it was too late for him to return to his audience.

“My dear Constanze,” he said. “We are to sing some sections of Wolfgang’s Requiem Mass today. For our friend Gieseke, who died during the performance of one of your husband’s most perfect works.”

“It’s as it should be, Emanuel.” Constanze’s eyes glistened in the candlelight.

The impresario gave a brief bow to me. “Madame de Mozart.”

I bent my knee. “Herr Schikaneder.”

His hands folded around Constanze’s bony wrist. “I’m sure Wolfgang’s music would’ve soothed our dear Gieseke.”

I believed it unlikely the murdered actor would’ve been calmed by any reminder of my brother, whose death haunted his final days. No doubt Wolfgang’s opera, sung in encores to the rapture of the audience, had been in Gieseke’s ears when he was killed at the theater.

With another bow, Schikaneder went to take up his place in the choir.

Constanze crossed herself and followed him up the aisle.

I would’ve gone with her, but I was distracted by the sound of a heavy cough from the corner of the church. A woman knelt before a wooden crucifix in the side chapel dedicated to St. Nicholas. Her back was thin under her shawl. She shivered in the unheated church.

I assumed she was a pauper off the streets. Or a girl of the lower classes who had been shamed by Gieseke and now lamented that he’d never restore her honor through marriage. Yet, as she rose, I noticed that the material of her dress was expensive.

Stumbling, she reached out and grasped at the altar cloth. She dropped to her knees and, with her hand still tight around the embroidered silk, dragged the crucifix that stood upon it to the floor. She lay beside the cross trembling, her legs drawn up and her arms jerking in a spasm.

I hurried to help her.

Before I reached the step of the chapel a tiny, squat maid lifted the fallen woman to her feet. She gave me a surly glance from under her thick eyebrows. I recognized her as the girl who worked for Mademoiselle von Paradies.

The haughty voice of the blind pianist came from behind me, too loud for the echoing church, too forceful for a funeral. “Do you like the chapel?”

I half turned, my attention still held by the shaking woman who rested against the altar. Paradies’s eyes rotated like buttons in the sockets of a girl’s doll. “The chapel?” I said. “It’s quite beautiful.”

“It was paid for by a royal chef over four hundred years ago.”

“A fine gesture.”

“It was to thank God for his acquittal.”

“He’d been on trial?”

“For poisoning.”

I would’ve sworn that the pianist’s eyeballs ceased for a moment their oscillations and held on me like the most penetrating of stares by eyes that could see. Her hand hooked through the air until it caught on my elbow. She pulled me toward the chapel.

I crossed myself and dipped my knees. The woman who had fallen shivered now on a stool by the altar. Paradies reached out her free hand. With sudden gentleness she lifted the black veil from the woman’s face.

Magdalena Hofdemel raised her chin. Her scars were raw against her pallid skin. Her eyelids fluttered, and she twitched her cheeks and brow.

“Why are you praying in this chapel, little one?” Paradies said to her. “Herr Gieseke’s service will be at the main altar.” In clipped Italian, the pianist commanded her maid to bring a thicker wrap for her friend.

“I’m awaiting my fate,” Magdalena said. She scratched hard at the back of her wrist, as though she itched deep beneath the skin. “My dreadful fate.” Her voice broke. It could no more hide her wounds than the weeping scars shining on her cheeks.

She raised her eyes to the flat spandrels above the chapel’s arch. A fresco of the Last Judgment blazed there in red and rich blue. I pitied the girl and worried she might have given up on the divine mercy that would see her redeemed on that Last Day. I knelt beside her and touched her cheek. She flinched, but her gaze remained on the fresco.

“What is it that afflicts you, my dear?” I said.

“Isn’t that obvious?” Paradies said. “I haven’t the capacity to
see
the scars on her face, but I
have
touched them.”

“I meant that she fell into a fit.”

Paradies hissed me silent.

The Italian maid draped a cloak of thick wool over Magdalena’s shoulders. She rubbed the hairs on her dark upper lip.

Paradies snapped her fingers, and the maid was at her side. “Come and listen to Wolfgang’s music, Magdalena.” She spoke with a softness I hadn’t heard from her before. Then her voice was hard again: “That man could even entertain the dead.”

Magdalena covered her eyes with her hand. She made to draw down her veil, but I held her wrist and came close to her.

“Listen to me,” I whispered. “Since I visited you at your home, I’ve learned some of the circumstances surrounding Wolfgang’s death.”

Tears ran through her fingers. She refused to look at me.

My hand was wet with her crying. “Wolfgang’s death was something to do with—with things of which I can’t tell,” I said. “Secret, dangerous things. But your husband didn’t kill him.”

Her head shook. Tiny uncomprehending movements. Her eyes were reddened and brown and fearful.

“He died as the result of a bigger conspiracy,” I said. “It wasn’t your husband.”

“My Franz,” she murmured.

“You came to my inn. You told my maid you wished to repent. You have nothing to repent of, do you understand?” I kissed her cold hands and tasted her tears on my mouth. I made out the words “thank you” on her lips, though they were too soft for me to hear.

I left Magdalena in the pew beside Paradies and went toward the front of the church. In the aisle I stepped across a speckled flagstone. A bronze crest marked it as the entrance to the Pergen family crypt below the floor of the church.
No doubt the police minister even has spies inside the graves of the Viennese
, I thought.

Slipping into the front row, I looked about for Baron van Swieten. I couldn’t find him. I sat at Constanze’s side.

Her sister Josefa hurried up the aisle. She kissed Constanze, bowed to me, and entered the choir, where she was to sing the soprano part in the Requiem. The chorus of Schikaneder’s theater formed up on the altar, jostling the rough wooden box where Gieseke’s body lay. The soloists stepped into line with Josefa.

As the woodwinds opened the Introitus, Baron van Swieten took the seat beside me. He was flushed and his mouth was tense. “Forgive my late arrival,” he said.

I inclined my head.

“There are developments at the palace. I was engaged until the last moment.”

“I thought it impossible you’d fail to attend the funeral Mass for an actor you applauded with such enthusiasm. You’re not that kind of man.” I laid my fingers on the back of his wrist in reassurance.

He blinked in surprise. He was restrained by the mood of the funeral, but his joy was so intense that I felt it smolder through my gloves where I touched him.

Only one thing could’ve made us break the gaze between us. We turned to the choir, to Wolfgang’s music.

God was in every note of my brother’s Requiem. He carved through the pretense with which we guard our souls. He revealed us in all our sin. I imagined poor Wolfgang laboring over this last great commission, a Mass for the departed, even as he felt himself crossing into the realms of the dead.

I trembled at the baleful Confutatis Maledictis, when the choir sang of the souls of sinners consigned to hellfire and begged to be among the blessed. I closed my eyes and prayed—for Wolfgang’s spirit, for my little lost daughter, for my mother and father, and for myself. But there was torment rather than salvation in the music. The singers sounded more like the desperate damned than those who were to be saved. My prayers were overpowered.

I glanced toward Magdalena. She bent forward, her hands clasped before her veil. I hoped I had convinced her that her husband might not be condemned after all. He was innocent of Wolfgang’s murder. Then I understood why she had wept for him beneath the fresco of the Last Judgment. Even if he was no murderer, he had been a suicide, an unpardonable sinner. I crossed myself.

At Magdalena’s side, Paradies moved her lips with the Latin of the choir. Her hand ran over the pew in front of her, as if improvising on a keyboard.

I thought of Wolfgang’s riddle, scribbled at the end of his sonata. Did it refer to Paradies? He had written of sightlessness and of Paradise. But he also wrote that “She repents her blindness as she is always penitent.” I had yet to see Paradies repent of anything.

If he had intended admittance to his new Masonic lodge to be based on talent, Maria Theresia von Paradies was a musician second only perhaps to Wolfgang himself. No doubt he also sought a woman of determination. If the Princess in
The Magic Flute
had doubted herself, she’d never have made it. She won her place among the priests at the end of the opera because of her absolute firmness. That was a quality Paradies possessed to a degree no less prodigious than her talent at the keyboard.

When her sister sang of the eternal light shining on the saints, Constanze sobbed. I laid my arm across her meager back. The choir brought the Requiem to a close.

Four porters in rough coats hoisted Gieseke’s coffin onto their shoulders. The body’s bony parts, perhaps the head, the elbows, the ankles, rattled against the unpolished wood. Like all peasants, the porters still suffered the old terror of being buried alive. They hesitated, wanting to be sure that Gieseke hadn’t revived. Even if he were living I was sure he’d have been quiet in his casket until the earth closed over him. Fear had seeped like sweat through his pores. Death would’ve seemed the only safety and rest for him.

I helped Constanze to the door of the church. Swieten took her other arm. The hearse rolled past the entrance, south toward St. Marx Cemetery a few leagues outside the city. Gieseke would rest near Wolfgang.

Constanze wept against Schikaneder’s chest. Singers from the theater surrounded my sister-in-law. Though the service had been for Gieseke, Wolfgang’s music had drawn Constanze’s grief once more to their attention. Now that the body was on its way to the grave, everyone came to the little woman in black with a consoling hug, as though she were the widow of all the corpses in Vienna.

The music had finished, but I continued to hear it. I turned back into the church to catch its last echoes.

The pews were empty. Most of the candles had been snuffed. I passed once more over the Pergen family tomb. The slab moved with a gentle tilt beneath my foot. I hurried onto the firmer flagstones around it.

The chatter of the opera singers receded in the square outside. They’d take Constanze home, or perhaps to an inn. I had no wish to go with them. Within the silence of the church, I detected the beautiful strains of Wolfgang’s Requiem. It was as if the angels behind the altar chanted it in a register audible only to me.

A voice came through the church. I listened until it separated from the angels. It was a woman singing. I tracked it toward the north transept. She sang a melody from Wolfgang’s Requiem.

I came to a worn stone staircase. From below, the woman sang the Domine Jesu Christe: “Lord Jesus Christ, King of Glory, deliver the souls of all the faithful departed from the pains of hell and the deep pit.”

From a niche beside the stairs I took a candle and lit it on the flame of an oil lamp. I followed the voice down into the dark.

Chapter 30

L
et them not fall into darkness.”

The voice wasn’t quite a soprano and the singer made no attempt at polish. She was all expression, as though her emotion and faith gave birth to the music that had, in fact, come from the pen of my dying brother.

“The holy standard-bearer, Michael, brings them back into the holy light,” she sang.

My candle flickered in a draft at the bottom of the stairs. I cupped my hand about it and stepped into a long, vaulted crypt.

The air was chilly and dusty dry. Low, narrow containers crowded the floor. I thought to call a greeting, but I didn’t wish to interrupt the music.

“We offer sacrifice and prayers of praise to thee, O Lord.”

I touched the nearest of the containers. Dust and metal, a hinge.

I put down my candle to lift the lid of the box. Reaching inside, my palm rested on something dry and stiff. I took the candle in my other hand and held it close.

A face. Empty eyes and a lipless grin.

I stumbled backward, my palm upright before me as though to fend off the corpse should it rise from its casket.

But the body lay still. The remnants of a woman’s wig encased the head, stiff and russet like autumn leaves. Her hands were crossed on her chest in lace gloves.

I tripped over an uneven flagstone and reached out to steady myself. The wall spread its cold along my arm. Beside my hand in the shape of a cross were two long thigh bones.

I spun away. My shin struck the nearest coffin. It rocked on the timber blocks that elevated it from the floor in case of a flood. Then it tipped against the next one. The caskets tumbled along the row. As they fell, the bones within snapped with a sound like running feet in summer undergrowth.

The singing sounded farther from me now. “Let them pass, O Master, from death to the life you promised to Abraham and his offspring.”

I hurried down the row of coffins, trying to halt their fall. My head struck a low span in the stone vault and I dropped back into a niche in the wall. Pain ringed my brain and bore down on it.

I opened my eyes. The niche was stacked high with pelvic bones. The first dead of the crypt, moved aside to make room for new corpses. I screamed with all my terror of death.

My shriek subsided into short breaths.

Silence beneath the church.

The coffins had come to rest. Only the dust that choked the air showed they had been disturbed.

The singing, too, had ended.

I held my candle before me, my arm locked as if I might extend it far into the darkness to light up the whole crypt. I turned to my right and left, staring and blind.

A footstep sounded, not close by. I spun toward it, but heard nothing more.

“Who’s there?” I called.

Another step echoed through the vault. In my panic, I thought that a corpse, liberated from its coffin, had risen. I imagined it stumbling through the dark with limbs unaccustomed to walking, like a tottering baby.

The steps came closer.

I put the corpses out of my mind. I had been attacked only two days before. I had living, murderous men to fear, before I faced the spirits of the vengeful dead.

My arm weakened. I lowered the candle.

Measured and slow, the steps seemed still some way off.

Then she was before me.

“You’d do better without that pathetic little light,” she said.

I started, and lifted the candle once more. Paradies licked her thick lips and let her mouth hang open.

I glanced at the candle and frowned.

“I can smell the burning tallow,” she said, “if that’s what you’re wondering.”

I stammered, “I heard you singing. I couldn’t see—”

“Down here you’re as blind as I am.” She swept past me and extinguished the flame of my candle with her thumb and forefinger.

I cried out. She grabbed my wrist and twisted it so that the useless stub of the candle dropped to the floor. She wrenched at my arm.

“Come with me, damn it,” she said.

I blundered along behind her. My knees struck the sharp corners of the coffins. I tripped over unseen tools, left against the wall by workmen. She hauled me deeper into the crypt.

“Before they built the graveyards outside the walls of the city, the wealthy were buried right beneath the churches,” she said. “That’s who you see around you. Hundreds of nobles and leading citizens, dried out and preserved by the air down here.”

“It was as if the woman inside the coffin was screaming at me.”

Paradies clicked her tongue. “The burial workers tie up the jaws of the dead before they put them in the coffins. If you thought you saw one screaming, it was only that the string around her head had slipped and her mouth had dropped open.”

She thrust my hand downward. She ran it along a leathery surface. Even in the dark I knew it was the skin of one of the corpses. I struggled, but she was stronger. “Feel that? There?” she said. She rubbed my palm over the long bone of the thigh.

“It curves. It isn’t straight,” I said.

“Broken, but badly set. This one must’ve been thin and malnourished, even though she surely would’ve been rich to be buried down here.”

My fingers explored the brittle leg, until I realized that Paradies no longer held me there. I pulled away.

“Now everyone but the emperor’s family goes to a common grave. The new burial laws. You can have as many Masses said for you as you’re prepared to pay for, but you’ll still be interred next to a poor man.”

My breath shivered through my teeth.

“Don’t be squeamish. Poor old Gieseke would be pleased to be buried in a cemetery where no distinction is made by rank. Wolfgang, too,” she said. “That’s what the Masons want, isn’t it? Equality. A pity they have to die to get it.”

She took me by the shoulder and led me in a new direction. “They stopped putting bodies down here a decade ago, but I still come. I know them all from the inscriptions on the metal plates of their coffins. From the touch of their fingers, the bones of their cheeks and foreheads.”

We moved fast. The wall was on our right. I thought I was beginning to see things, dark against darker. I wondered if that was how the world appeared to the blind woman who rushed me through the crypt.

She halted. I stubbed my foot against a step.

“You’ll find a lantern down to your left,” she said.

I lifted a small glowing oil lamp and flipped back the guard. It cast a long shaft of yellow light. The room, which had become somehow clear to me in the dark, receded. I saw only the single coffin before us.

“Metastasio,” Paradies said.

I directed the lamp toward her. Perspiration stood out on her upper lip. She must have detected something of the lamp’s glow, because she gestured impatiently for me to turn it back on the coffin.

It was a tall pine casket painted with lutes and skulls garlanded with olive branches. At its side, there stood a copper urn. “The Imperial Poet?” I thought of the expensive edition of the Italian’s poetry presented to Wolfgang by the Milanese count.

“Fifty years as court poet. Wrote the texts of a few dozen operas, which were set to music by countless composers, including your brother. And now there he is—a gutted corpse.”

“Gutted?”

“In the urn beside his casket, you’d find the heart that was the source of his poetry and the tongue that declaimed it. A few other organs, too.”

“A great genius,” I said.

“Now his guts are in a fancy bucket.”

I gave her a sharp look. She flicked her wrist in dismissal, as though she had seen me.

“What’ve you been doing since you came to Vienna?” she said.

“I’ve had some business to conduct.”

She sneered. “Ridiculous woman.”

“I want to know who killed my brother,” I said.

My words came back at me off the vaulted ceilings. I had spoken louder than I expected.

Paradies sucked in her cheeks. “Do you want
your
innards in a pot, too?”

“Are you threatening me?”

“Dear, I became blind when I was three. For a while I was bitter about it. Then I understood. In that time I’d seen enough of this dreadful world for it to live before my eyes forever. Without the distraction of sight, I see things as they truly are.” She spoke through tight, emphatic lips. “I cared too much about your brother to let you go the way of the corpses down here. You know what you should do? Live with Wolfgang. Don’t die with him.”

Her stare was ferocious. I wondered how close Paradies had been to Wolfgang.

“Why am I in danger?” I said. “Is it the Grotto?”

“The what?”

“The Grotto. The Masonic lodge he was founding. It was you he intended to make its first woman member. I’m sure of it. But perhaps you don’t want anyone to find out about it. Because of the emperor’s restrictions on the order.”

Paradies laughed. “If that was Wolfgang’s intention, I’d have turned him down.”

“I don’t understand.”

“I’ve made my own way in the world. In spite of my blindness. In spite of being a woman. I’ve supported myself by working as a musician. I’ve toured London and Paris, earned big commissions. If I seem scornful of you, it’s because you had a talent at least equal to mine but you never broke free.”

“I had to look after my father.”

“True, I was never encumbered by anyone as domineering as that old bastard.”

“Madame.” I stamped my foot.

“I’m not genteel enough for you? You’d prefer me to say it in French, perhaps? Your father tried to limit even Wolfgang’s career, because he wanted to be taken care of in his old age. Your brother barely made his escape. You didn’t stand a chance.”

I leaned against the wall. It was cold on my neck.

“Men destroy women. They refuse to acknowledge our talents. They ruin our bodies and our health with their midnight attentions and the constant pregnancies they bring. I avoided such misery. That’s why I’ve been able to have a successful career. I never sought the aid of any man in my success, because such support comes at the price almost of one’s life,” Paradies said. “No man ever held me back, either. Masonry? I need no Brotherhood.”

“What of friendship?”

She waved her hand. “I’m blind. I’m accustomed to being alone, even when I’m surrounded by a crowd. That’s why I come to this crypt. In the church up there, death is a show. A Requiem by Maestro Mozart, a fine send-off. Down here I see better than anyone else.
This
is the reality of our lives—each shut up in our coffins, brittle and powerless. Music fills me with beauty, and I don’t care if people recoil from my spinning eyeballs. The dead don’t judge me the way living people do.”

She dropped her chin. I sensed the isolation that led her to prefer such terrifying company.

“I have to go. I’m leaving for Berlin.” Paradies seemed to debate whether to say something more.

I held my breath and waited.

“The Prussian ambassador hired me to perform some pieces by Wolfgang. One of them, he says, is previously unknown. He has acquired it from the widow Mozart,” she said.

Her powdered face twitched with indecision. Then she seemed to relax. “I was at the ambassador’s residence today. He gave me the commission and ordered me to depart for Berlin as soon as possible.”

“I know the new piece. I played it myself this lunchtime.”

“While I was there, someone else came into the room. He blurted out the words, ‘Pergen knows.’ ”

I would’ve spoken, but Paradies raised her hand for silence.

“The ambassador and the newcomer became still, as though perhaps by a gesture or a look the Prussian had signaled that he wasn’t alone. There was something nervous and secretive in their quiet. I knew it was my presence that halted them. Then they remembered that I couldn’t see them, and I sensed their tension release. The ambassador rose and went to the door. The visitor whispered a few words to him. He said, ‘I can’t go on.’ The ambassador told him to wait in another room. He didn’t ask him; he ordered him rather forcefully. Then he dismissed me, with payment in advance for my journey.”

I frowned. “ ‘Pergen knows’? ‘Can’t go on’? What does it mean?”

“People behave as if I’m deaf as well as blind,” she said. “They think that if they whisper I won’t know who they are. But I recognized the voice quite clearly. I teach piano to his wife and I’ve played at his mother-in-law’s salon many times.”

“Who was it?”

“Prince Lichnowsky.”

At the home of the man who had told me the prince was a scoundrel? What was Lichnowsky’s connection to the Prussian ambassador? And what did he believe Pergen knew?

Paradies reached out her hand. I caught it in my own. “You have to be careful, Nannerl. Wolfgang cherished you to the very end. For his sake, take care.”

Paradies touched my cheek. My tears fell on her hand. She led me to the steps of the crypt and pushed me up ahead of her.

In the transept of the church, the gray evening light struggled through the windows.

“Wolfgang wrote a riddle,” I said. “If it wasn’t about you—?”

“I’m no good with riddles. I’m blind. I detest anything that makes it harder to see the truth.”

In the first pew of the church, the Italian maid stood up. She faced the altar, crossed herself, and came to take the blind woman’s arm.

When the door creaked shut behind them, I felt a draft against my back. It seemed to rise from the entrance to the crypt. I hurried down the aisle and out into the growing darkness.