Vienna Nocturne (21 page)

He shook his head. “Do you think I’m such an ass as that? Do you think my ears are so inviolate they’ll forget what you were?”

Were. What you were
.

“One can’t,” he continued. “One mustn’t succumb to the lure of the past. One must always keep moving forward, and never stop being terribly brave and good. To go the other way is incomprehensible.
It doesn’t suit you. You aren’t a coward. You don’t wallow and despair.”

“Oh,” she said in a forced whisper, with a false, haughty laugh. “Oh, signor, but I do. That is my métier. You’ve mistaken me for someone else. For one of my roles.”

He straightened. The gesture had a youthful flair, as of a boy, neglected at school for his slightness, attempting to play the hero. “I’ve not mistaken you. I want you back.”

She stared at him, her throat as taught and painful as a bound whip. “Signor Mozart,” she whispered. “I think you’d better find room in your heart for another soprano. You’re wasting your time with this one. Better for you to be composing now, than asking a snapped string to knit itself together again. Not even God can ask a thing like that, of a poor little string.”

This speech, the longest she had delivered to anyone in some time, was uttered in tones so low that Mozart had to lean closer to hear it. She smiled sadly and plucked at the long fringes of her robe.

“I think of you as many things,” he said. “But not a poor little string.”

“Well,” she said, “that is your privilege.”

He looked down at the piano with a frustrated expression and played a few bars of a slow movement. It had the yearning sweet-sad quality of a winter’s dawn, rising in a series of suspensions as if to break the long-held dark.

“This piano is very fine,” he said. “Mine is also fine, but in a different way. How lucky I am to be able to move between my instruments.”

“Yes,” she said. She smiled at his acknowledgment; she would never have another voice, just as she would never have another life. His eyes were kind, the brows pale in the light. His skin had the luminous pallor of the inner coil of a seashell. His neck was straight and so was his spine. He had taken off his overcoat and sat in his plain waistcoat and loose shirtsleeves, and though his shoulders
were narrowly built they were strong, and strong, too, his arms and wrists, from the many hours mastering his instruments.

She had noticed, often, a certain smile of his, an inward-looking smile, that barely touched his lips, a smile of confidence and calm that was probably unconscious, unbidden, a reflection of some secret feeling. This smile was there now as he looked at her so kindly and sadly. “Would you like me to go?” he asked.

She shook her head.

He rose, glancing at her, and paced the room. He examined the ceramic shepherdesses, the flowers. He shook his arms and wrists to relieve them of the exertion of playing. His feet were narrow and turned slightly inward. The sleeves of his shirt touched his knuckles. He worked his fingers, stretched wide his arms. “To live like this! How can you stand it? How can you do this to yourself when you’re so young and pretty and there’s so much to be lived and done and sung? I should’ve gone to you when you married that pig. I was an ass not to do it.”

“You tried,” she said. “You were the only one who tried.”

He shook his head as if in great agitation and said quickly, “I don’t believe you can’t sing. Not for one minute. If you can speak, you can sing.”

She shouldn’t have come down. She shouldn’t have let him draw her.

“I know what it is,” he said, “to lose an infant. I know what a woman goes through to bear a child.” He knelt at her side. His eyes were clear. “Sing for me, Anna,” he murmured, “and I will kiss your hands a
hundred thousand times
.”

She shook her head and whispered, “No.” Mozart took up her hand and kissed her palm.

She gasped. The room was bright with sun. He leaned at the edge of the chaise, brushing her side. He reached across her lap and took her other hand and kissed that, too. Then he drew down her face and kissed her lips. Her unbound hair fell around them.

“See,” he said quietly, studying her with wide, anxious eyes.
“That’s three already. Now you must do it, mademoiselle. I’ve given you a head start.”

But she refused. She could not. She could not even speak. After a moment he got to his feet, and she thought he would leave, and prepared herself to be alone again. But instead he went to the piano and played without pause for half an hour longer, until Stephen came home. He played as though she had given him all he desired. As well as she had ever heard—so well it was impossible to think of anything else. His fingers bestowed the kisses on the keys. Her hands lay in her lap, where he’d restored them, as though they had perished there.

Mesmer set up treatment for Anna in the music room. She was a private patient. The emperor had paid for everything. Mesmer brought with him a small replica of his
baquet
, a magnetized oaken tub with which he treated groups. The small one was about the size of a side table, circular, covered with a warmly finished lid and inlaid with Masonic symbols. The lid was rimmed with a number of hook-shaped cast-iron rods, like the legs of a spider. Mesmer explained to Anna that these rods were held in place, inside the tub, by glass bottles that stood upon a bed of crushed glass, sulfur, and iron filings. The tub was filled to the brim with magnetized water. It took two men to carry it. To one side of the
baquet
stood the doctor’s glass harmonica, a musical instrument made from circular glass tubes. These tubes, when turned upon a spit with a crank by his assistant and touched with dampened fingers or cloth, produced high, hollow, spinning tones. To this music Franz Mesmer conducted his cures.

He had requested that Anna wear a loose cotton smock and nothing
beneath it, to ensure the efficient transference of magnetic energy. He arranged a series of Turkish screens in such a way that she might feel secure in her near-nakedness while he was treating her. Lidia and Anna’s mother sat outside the circle of screens.

Mesmer retired to put on his robes, and Anna stood barefoot in her airy smock waiting for the doctor to reappear. She was almost sure he was a fraud, and would not have agreed to see him but for the fact that Mozart knew Mesmer. Mesmer had put on Mozart’s first opera,
Bastien and Bastienne
, in his private theater, and he was friends with Mozart’s father, and a Freemason. Mozart had written to Anna to assure her that the doctor could work miracles. It was a week since he had played for her. Every night when she went to sleep she held the memory in her heart. But everything else, it seemed, remained the same.

Mesmer emerged wearing yellow slippers and a long purple robe. His wide-set eyes had deep frown lines between them, as though he had spent much energy imagining the pains and travails of others. It was a face wholly compassionate and open; a face to inspire faith, confession, and trust. He reminded Lidia and Mrs. Storace that they must be silent and respectful, lest they risk disturbing the transference of energy. If Anna needed assistance she was to ring a bell.

“Begin the music,” he said, and his assistant spun the glass tubes on the crank, drawing forth the clear, ethereal sound of the glass harmonica, a sound like a choir of miniature castrati singing in an overlapping cascade.

“Now,” Mesmer said gravely. He rested his hands on Anna’s shoulders. They felt like tender weights—so heavy and so filled with understanding, and she gasped in shock and nearly collapsed. He looked into her eyes. “I see,” he said. “My poor girl, what a state you are in.” And to her surprise—to her relief—he folded her in his arms. His thumbs rubbed into her back. Her face was in his shoulder, and he smelled of incense. “There,” he murmured, embracing her ever more tightly. “Do you feel that? That is our magnetic energy,
mine and yours. That is the force that runs through everything, every animal and human. Yours is weak and thick, it does not flow, but mine is a torrent, I give it to you freely. Don’t you feel it?”

“I don’t know,” whispered Anna. One of her knees buckled. She would have stumbled to the floor had the doctor not held her fast.

“There,” he said softly, hoisting her up. “That’s one of your blockages gone. We must dislodge them all. You must help me channel the astral tides and release your ether in a clear beautiful stream.” He drew back and took her hands, rubbing the tops of them rhythmically with his thumbs. “You’ve gotten yourself all dammed shut. The pools of your life force are stagnant. How can one sing when inside one is a festering pool? One cannot! One grows weak and mute with putrid inner sores!”

The keening waterfall of the glass harmonica spread around them. “Where is your anguish?” Mesmer whispered.

Anna closed her eyes. She had not expected to be moved by this. At worst she had thought the treatment would leave her the same, and at best, that it would give her an hour’s diversion. But this doctor made her legs shake and her head feel light and empty, as though her mind were spreading thin as beaten gold. With an unsteady hand she touched her throat.

Mesmer nodded. His eyes half lidded in concentration, he felt along the sides of Anna’s neck with his open palms, and again the sensation was of a great and tender weight, hot and tingling, as the magnetic energy roused and churned between them.

“I feel the heat,” said Mesmer. “I feel the deadness—the void—yes, there, there.” His fingers massaged firmly and gently along her neck, turning her head with the movement as though sculpting clay. Then his hands fell down her collarbones to her arms and he guided her to a kneeling position in front of the
baquet
, crouching behind her with his robe flung around them. He said, in a fervent voice, “When I tell you, you will grasp a rod in either hand. You will feel a shock. But you must not let go. You must keep holding
the rods. The shock will travel through your body and make you convulse. It is the only way you will be healed. Do not be afraid.”

She felt dizzy with his voice and the smell of incense. “I don’t want to,” she said in a faint voice.

His hands went under her arms, under her breasts. “You must,” he said.

As if in a dream she saw her hands reach toward the black iron, saw them grip the rods and convulse. In the next instant she was rocked by a surge of magnetic force that came through her neck and blossomed at the top of her head and shot down her spine to her belly, and even to the soles of her feet, and she cried out and shook from the feeling and sank back against Mesmer, who grasped her to him.

“Is she all right?” called Lidia anxiously.

“Perfectly, madam!” shouted Mesmer in a voice hoarse with effort and emotion. He held Anna close, warming her with his body, speaking softly into her ears, clearing away all the blockages and deadnesses and voids, massaging her, while she sobbed and shuddered. They put her to bed and she slept like death.

Softly, as she did every morning, Lidia went into Anna’s room to draw the curtains and see if she needed anything. Lidia no longer stayed with Anna at night. Her mistress was not anymore that fluttering, needful sweetheart who had burned for Francesco Benucci’s secret kisses. Her cheek had grown hollow, her gaze turned thoughtful and inward. She had a waxen complexion, she who had been always flushing pinker and pinker. The doctors, Lidia feared, had bled her of every drop. She was grown so thin, she who had been so strong and plump. Lidia admonished her that there would be no more riding or dancing if she was not nourished, but Anna only sighed in her languid way and said it did not matter. She refused to see her mother.

Lidia had watched Anna go in to Mozart that afternoon; she had heard the music and the murmuring through the walls and seen Anna creep up to her room again afterward. That had all gone according to plan—a scheme of Stephen’s to draw his sister out. But Mozart, who had seemed shaken from the experience, said he did
not know if it had done any good. He had not come again. And yesterday had been the famous cure of Dr. Mesmer, but no one knew whether or not that had done any good, either. Everyone was always urging Lidia to use her influence, to get Anna to move and eat and laugh, but Lidia was at her wit’s end. Mrs. Storace, for her part, since her daughter would not see her and she had no wish, she said, to force herself upon her, had taken to spending long hours in study and prayer, like a nun or a penitent. She was not as harsh, Lidia noted, as she had been. But Lidia thought a little harshness might have been helpful now. If they could only douse Anna in ice water—if they could only force her to eat. That was what she needed, Lidia thought. Anything but the closed bedroom and the black ruminations with which she lay there, day after day.