Vienna Nocturne (23 page)

Da Ponte had written the libretto to a new solo cantata for Anna,
For the Recovery of Ophelia
, which she would sing to mark her return to health and the start of the new season at the Burgtheater. Salieri, Mozart, and Stephen had jointly composed the music. Da Ponte named the cantata not to reference
Hamlet
, but after her character in Salieri’s new comic opera
The Grotto of Trofonio
, which would be played at the Burgtheater in October. But the name of Ophelia could not help but also recall the tragedy, and there, even before she read the poem, Anna found in Da Ponte a kind of genius. For it did feel sometimes as though she had gone mad and drowned, and been brought back to life.

“Where’s Mozart?” Salieri demanded. “Is he coming? That man is always late. One thinks one has ahold of him and then he squirms away.”

“I told him to come,” Stephen said. “Perhaps he got the day wrong.”

“He’ll come,” said Anna. “It’s not struck two.”

She had not sung for anyone since she’d lost her voice. Stephen had heard her through the walls but the others would not know what to expect. She imagined herself failing. She imagined them all falling away like a crust. And she felt inside herself the steel of Rauzzini. She trusted her technique. She had done the exercises. The voice was there and it did her bidding. A voice did not depend on sorcery and miracles. As long as there was no permanent injury, the skill and the beauty came from training, just as for any dancer or rider. But she was afraid of standing on that stage again, where it had happened. She would have to see Benucci.

“Where is he?” Salieri demanded. “He knows I can’t stay past three. You’ll have to sing it without him. This is just a formality anyway. We all know it will be marvelous.”

But of course he did not know that, and wouldn’t until he’d heard her. A strange thing, this notion she’d once had, that if she could not sing, she could not live. That
this
was all she was: this formality, this standing at the piano before a few smiling gentlemen hoping to make them like her. But patently she could live. When she’d been an infant she had lived. When she’d woken last spring, and heaved back the drapery and watched through the thick windows the breaking day, and had put on her dress, and put up her hair, she had lived. She had looked at her strange face in the mirror and whispered, “You don’t have to,” and had felt an interesting affection for that dark-eyed girl, no longer a soprano, now a kind of nothing, who was somehow still alive.

Now it was autumn. “Have we decided who’s going to play the piano at the concert?” Salieri asked. “It can’t be me, I don’t play anymore. I’m all thumbs.”

“Of course Mozart must play,” said Stephen, at the same time that Anna said, “I thought Stephen would do it.”

“Well. It can’t be me,” said Salieri, “and Mozart isn’t here, so that leaves you, Storace. Unless you want to hire someone, but it’s a little late for that.”

“My sister prefers to sing with Mozart,” said Stephen, looking at her.

“Nonsense,” she said. “I prefer to sing with you.” She felt, as she spoke, a hot blush come to her face. The clock read twenty past. Da Ponte yawned and picked up a book.

Stephen laughed. “I can’t play Mozart’s music with Mozart in the audience. It would be like painting over a masterpiece.”

“It’s your music, too,” she said.

“And mine,” pointed out Salieri. “Aren’t you worried about playing
my
music with
me
in the audience, Storace?”

“Certainly, sir. But you said yourself you don’t like to play, and Mozart’s the best pianist around.”

“
You
play,” said Salieri. “You’re perfectly adequate. I know Mozart. He’ll add all sorts of notes and harmonies when no one can tell
him otherwise, and by the time he’s had his way with it I won’t know my own work. Moment he gets his paws on it he’ll change everything, just you watch. He’s got no self-regulation. I don’t like him smirking at me. Give that man an edge and he rides all over town.”

“Your statement has no sense,” Da Ponte observed sweetly.

“It’s half two,” Salieri retorted. “It’s been half an hour.”

“I concede,” said Stephen, and went to the piano.

“Oh, good,” exclaimed Anna, to hide her disappointment.

They started the cantata. Immediately Anna saw Salieri and Da Ponte brighten and relax. A few notes were all they required to be reassured she was well.

The first aria in the cantata was Stephen’s: light, charming, English. The last was Salieri’s, and quoted cleverly from
The Grotto of Trofonio
. The second stood alone. It was both happy and sad. The sadness contained joy and the happiness was veiled in suspense and unease. The text related a moment of darkness, yet it was mixed with light. The vocal line, through-composed and wrenchingly dissonant, languished and rallied and languished again, while the piano rolled and fretted beneath it, until finally the voice gave four soft cries—“
Ah!—Ah!—Ah!—Ah!—
” and stopped midway through the bar. Perhaps it was morbid, enacting the moment when Anna’s voice had failed her, but after all this was what drama was for: to render control by turning the chaos of living into an orderly story, something that had a beginning and an ending and that happened to someone else.

Anna tried to feel cheerful but she was irritable, full of a sudden ennui. It was all so tedious and small. None of these men were listening to her, not truly. She had expected something joyful in this moment. This was entirely too dull.

He hadn’t come. He would not hear her. She had taken out the memory too often.

So preoccupied was she with these dismal frustrations that when the door slipped open at the beginning of the second aria, Mozart’s
aria, she assumed it was Lidia or her mother or some other servant. She was distracted by Stephen, who kept playing the wrong accidentals. He dragged the tempo. She was angry that it was Stephen playing and not Mozart, and that Stephen would play in the concert. But still it was painfully beautiful music. She supposed this was a mark of a good composition, that it could remain beautiful even when performed inadequately, and in foul moods.

The intruder eased his head through the door—Mozart, of course—and engaged Anna with an expression of such tiptoeing repentant agony that she almost laughed aloud. The floorboard creaked and he ducked out of sight again, leaving the door ajar. But neither Da Ponte nor Salieri seemed to have noticed him. Da Ponte was smiling dreamily and winding his long fingers around his cane. Salieri was fixated on the clock. And Stephen did not know the music well enough to take his eyes from the score.

As she began the next phrase she saw one white hand, wreathed with lace, appear with a flourish from behind the tall dark door. For a moment it hesitated in the air, like a bird in flight. Then it gave a sort of sigh and began, pompously, to conduct her. But Stephen did not see the hand and kept getting out of time with it, which infuriated the hand and made it writhe and shake.

Somehow she managed to continue singing. But it was hard going—she almost split apart with laughter. A large, capable, expressive hand it was, rather thickly made, as though padded with unusual degrees of muscle and fat. She tried not to look at it but she could not look away. So expressive it was, so bright and dancing, it compelled her, indeed, to follow.

The second aria ended. The hand retired behind the door. But Salieri was impatient and there was no time for delay, so they ran immediately into the recitative that preceded the third aria.

For the whole of the first two sections of this last aria, which was a rondo, with verses and refrain, there was not a stirring. She thought perhaps he had gone away. She began letting down her guard. The last was a light aria anyway—it didn’t matter if her eyes
sparkled, if her voice took on a joyful quality. She thought she was safe; she truly thought she was in the clear. But then, perfectly in time with the last four bars, there appeared in sequence from behind the door four largely written and elegantly lettered cream-colored cards, which read:

ICH-

BIN-

EIN-

ARSCH-

It meant:
I am an ass. Forgive me. I am a fool
. She burst out laughing and immediately converted it to a violent cough. The
arsch
card vanished in a fright.

“Are you all right?” Salieri shouted, rising.

But there was no Mozart in the hall. Nor anywhere in the house. Stephen asked what Anna was looking for, what was so funny, and she said she’d thought she’d heard something and was just giddy to be singing again, and then she twirled him around the room in a dance.

For Francesco Benucci, seeing Anna for the first time after the months of her indisposition was a shock of the greatest kind. She was lovely. He had never seen her so lovely. She was not the little girl, round of cheek and light of step, who had danced with him and pushed his hand down her bodice in the dark. She was not, either, the girl he had watched marry John Fisher, a girl in a kind of trance. She had always been someone who slipped away, as if covered in scales, vanished in weeds and glassy water. But now when she looked at him she stayed where she was. She did not fidget. The angles of her face had grown sharper. There was almost a hardness, now, in a certain look she had. Her pretty, full lips had firmed like her mother’s. The slight sharpness of her cheek, the slight thinness, made her eyes appear larger, darker, and when she set them upon him somehow she did not slip away. It was almost an uneasy feeling; it gave him an ache almost of apprehension. Though she laughed and was merry, and acted like her old self, this strange, penetrating gaze she would sometimes turn on him,
this sudden almost hardness, changed her into something she had not been.

But her voice was Milan. She sounded sixteen again. Sweet incomparable Anna. They had all worried. John Fisher had roughened her, shaken her breathing, flattened her tone. Perhaps the public had not noticed, because Anna Storace could act her way out of anything, but for trained singers like Benucci and the rest there had been a marked difference after her marriage. They’d felt it in their own throats. They’d cast each other secret looks of dismay. The night she’d damaged her voice had rocked them as if the damage was their own, their own the grief and shock. They all feared that the instrument might never repair. This sweet girl whom none of them had helped. It was as though they’d watched her put out her eyes.

But she sounded sixteen now. There was no wound. The voice was responsive and fresh, holding all her old sweetness, all the truth and warmth and openness that made it hers and no one else’s. Hot tears sprang to his eyes when he heard it. He was in Milan again, marveling at her honesty and ease. The true, warm sound, a voice he would have known anywhere, a voice to match his own.

But then she turned those eyes on him, the hardness, the sharp hollow, and he did not know her anymore.

Anna tried very hard to deceive herself. It was just another concert. A hall like every other. But when she stepped out with Stephen onto the stage and saw the familiar boards, the rows of chairs, the tall windows, everything elegant, white, spare, Viennese to the core; when she smelled that smell like nowhere else, a smell of wood chips and roses, and stood in the place where she had been in love, once, where she had triumphed, where she had been frightened and humiliated, she wished she had someone to take away the responsibility. After they bowed, Stephen sat at the piano and she turned to him and whispered, “I don’t think I can do it.”

Stephen looked handsome tonight and relaxed. He had walked in the market with Lidia. He had remarked earlier that he had decided not to try so hard; he did not like to remember how he had behaved over the failure of his opera. He had an easy quality now, as if he were going around feeling slightly amused at himself. He raised an eyebrow at his sister and whispered, “We’ll find out.” Then he began the introduction.

She tried to think of nothing but the words. It was as though she were on a tightrope and if she looked down she would fall. She must set herself inside each word, believe in it wholly, think of nothing but the word. She was not herself now. She was some girl singing
“Felice,” “Tradito,” “Piange.”
When she pretended to lose her voice at the end of the second aria she felt the horrible feelings, and yet they were feelings felt by another, and inside her remained the impassive coolness of Rauzzini.

“It doesn’t matter,” she told herself. “Nothing can be worse than what has already happened.” But that was no comfort. There was always something worse. When she’d married Fisher, that had seemed the worst, and then worse events had followed. But she supposed the point of it was that she had prevailed. It had marked her, surely, it had left her something different than she had been before. But she still had her spirit. She had. She could laugh and play and sit in the sunshine and have that be true, not acting, but just as she was. And the joys were finer, then. She noted them more, felt them more deeply, and yet also more gingerly, knowing they might pass at a moment’s warning, or with no warning at all. In her essence she rested unchanged. She hoped she would never forget how it felt now to sing, how precious. That this should be her life’s work—that she should have been given another chance—