Vienna Nocturne (26 page)

There was a short pause. Mozart cleared his throat and said, “Is he really?”

“Oh, yes, quite desperately. And she loves him. They do make a beautiful pair, don’t they? They’re both so handsome, are they not? I daresay Benucci is the tallest gentleman in the room. He was asking me what he should do, poor man. He really wants to marry her, but of course she’s already wed. And she, poor lady, begs him to disregard her honor and live with her in sin. She says she’s had too much unhappiness. All she wants is peace and love. She cares nothing for honor.”

Anna and Benucci were talking to the emperor now, laughing and bantering. Mozart watched them. A high color was in his face. “What did you tell him?” he asked Aloysia.

She gave a sad, compassionate sigh. “I said to do it. I said she was free in the eyes of everyone but the law—even in the eyes of God. I said that a great love must be cherished—that this life of ours goes all too fast.”

He turned to face her. It was curious to think he’d once been in love with Aloysia Lange. She could not act to save her life. “I don’t believe a word of it,” he said. He looked back at Anna. “Mademoiselle Storace has too much dignity.”

“I assure you it’s true,” Aloysia exclaimed.

He shook his head. “Benucci might love her,” he said, “but she, my beloved sister, does not love Benucci.”

As they were departing the orangery, Anna and Aloysia arrived at the exit at the same time. Their skirts bobbed together and they held their fans on opposite sides in the air. Mozart and Salieri were coming up just behind them.

“After you, my dear,” said Aloysia, smiling and bowing formally.

“Oh no,” Anna said, with her own sweet curtsy. “After you.”

“You are the victor,” quoted Aloysia through her teeth, and graciously inclined her head.

Anna laughed and gestured kindly to the door with her fan. “But you are my senior.”

Aloysia’s mouth fell open. “Ah!” she exclaimed. She gathered her skirts. “There, my dear, you have trumped me.” With a fixed look of lightness she glided through the doorway. Anna followed behind.

“I’m using that,” said Mozart into Salieri’s ear, roughly linking arms with him. “You are not allowed to use that, you bastard.”

Salieri laughed, delighted. “Oh, please,” he declared, “be my guest. I wouldn’t touch those girls for all the money in the world. I leave the difficult ones to you, Mozart. I like my women like I like my music, obedient and mild.”

Mozart shoved him away. “That’s not what I meant. The
scene
. Their tone—their smiles.”

“I know what you meant,” said Salieri, smiling easily. “You can have it, my man, with pleasure. I wouldn’t know what to do with it anyway.”

Mozart gave him a blank stare and then laughed. “That’s right. You wouldn’t. Forgive me, Salieri. Sometimes I forget you’re not as clever as I am.”

“Do you really?” asked Salieri dryly. “That’s the most flattering thing I’ve heard all day, Mozart, my boy. I’m sure I never forget it for a moment.”

Their first day back in rehearsal, two months after her concert, Anna and Benucci could at first say nothing serious, not with everyone there, but they smiled, tentatively at first, and there was relief in those smiles. He had had time, perhaps, to recover from his shock. At last she found a chance to take him aside and say how sorry she was, and he grasped her shoulders and said, “No, no, it’s my fault, it’s I who ask pardon of you,” and he hugged her tightly, and the humanity of that embrace washed over them both. Though nothing could be as before, yet they could go on. For the first time in weeks she had no nightmares.

But John Fisher sent her letters. She balked to read them, felt the old shadows slamming around her. He was in France. He said she was still his wife. And she was. He claimed he had no wish to see her again. He only wanted money. Even the penmanship made her ill. She gave the letters to Lidia to file away. Then she decided she must witness the execution of Franz Zahlheim.

Franz Zahlheim had murdered his young wife with such brutality
that he had been sentenced to the kind of torturous public death not seen in Vienna in forty years. His wife had been so beautiful and the murder so gruesome, so entirely without cause, that the public clamored for suffering. His execution was scheduled for March 10, 1786, Lorenzo Da Ponte’s thirty-seventh birthday.

Da Ponte, disgusted, declined to celebrate.

Michael Kelly did not want to go, but Anna insisted. She had loaned Michael money for a gambling debt; he was in no position to deny her anything, however perilous to his ease of heart and stomach. Michael was a gentle, pleasure-loving fellow; he had no affinity for blood sport and screaming, for being squeezed and pummeled by the rapt and heaving crowd. But Anna said that she had an interest in men who murdered their wives.

“Have you ever seen a man executed?” Michael asked, exasperated. “Stuck with hot coals and broken on the wheel?”

Anna gave him a soft look. “Now and then I thought that John was going to kill me. I’d set him off, somehow, and I’d be absolutely certain it was going to happen. Wouldn’t that have been a scandal? If he’d killed me?”

“Not a scandal,” Michael said. He rubbed his forehead. “A goddamned tragedy.”

“Of course I didn’t
want
to die. Lidia will tell you, I still have nightmares. It was as though I was only made of fear—I couldn’t think—I was suffocating in it. But, you see, sometimes I wanted him to do it. I did, Michael. I wanted it so that he could never take it back. I wanted him tormented. I wanted it to be in the newspapers. Everyone would have been so shocked and sad.… But then he didn’t kill me, and no one knew a thing, and it wasn’t in any newspapers, and we all went along.”

“Some of us knew.”

“Not really,” she said.

Michael said, feelingly, “You should resist pain, Anna. You shouldn’t invite it in. You know that story already.”

“I want to see if he looks like John.”

“Of course he won’t.”

“In the eyes.”

“You won’t be able to see his eyes!”

“If we get close enough I will.”

“We will not get close enough. I won’t have you swooning on me with blood spattered upon us. I’d lose my breakfast.”

“I deserve it,” Anna said, feeling a kind of stillness fall across her.

“What? His pain?” She shrugged and would not answer. Michael took her by the shoulders, his eyes wide, his face red with emotion. “You
don’t
deserve that. You
don’t
.”

“It’s not my pain, Michael—it’s my pleasure.”

“Do you hear yourself?” he cried, looking around him as if to seek more sympathetic ears.

“Are you sure you don’t want to go back to Ireland and become a seminarian?”

“Don’t mock me,” he said.

“Please,” she said. “As my friend—my dearest friend.”

He gave an indignant snort. “Fine. But only because I owe you money. And we’re not getting close.”

“Close enough to see his eyes,” she said, and kissed him.

She wore her black veil, in the hopes that no one would recognize her, and leaned on Michael’s elbow. He was wordless, thin-lipped.

Lidia and a big manservant pushed a way through the rolling crowd. The smell was bad. One could not help bumping against men—most of them were men—of every rank. On the streets and lanes, from shop fronts and carriages, all eyes turned toward the square, where stood the scaffolding and all its flags and barbaric accoutrements, soldiers ranging before it. Anna was surprised at the number of children. Sometime later the soldiers brought out Franz Zahlheim—a thin man in soiled clothing, with a shaved head—and bound him to the wheel while he wept and struggled hoarsely and feebly. He was twenty or thirty yards away. The noise of the crowd
seemed to blot out all thought, all freshness, all peace. But there was a great hush when the bludgeon was raised to break Zahlheim’s first flailing foot. The hammer swept through the sky and there was a crack and thump and then the rending scream, and the cheers and shouts of the crowd. Anna, in all her career, had never heard a crowd like this, so huge, so rapt. In spite of her veil she was flayed by her senses.

She had wanted to place John Fisher’s face over Zahlheim’s. To see him hurt—to see him, in agony, die—this would release her, she had thought; would bring a feeling of vengeance, an end. But there was no end. She did not wish to see this man suffer. She did not wish to see him tortured and killed. She had been tortured herself once. The wife of Zahlheim remained murdered. And these crowds were wild with excitement, they were laughing, vivid, exultant, to see the murderer wracked and killed. She suffocated among them. It was they, as much as the spectacle, that stunned her, and made her wonder who she was. It was as if they had never known pain themselves, even though this, what they were doing, was nothing else. She plugged her ears but the sound only seemed greater. Stumbling against Michael, who pressed a handkerchief over his mouth and against his tearing eyes, she begged him to take her home, but their progress was so slow, and the executioner’s so swift, that Zahlheim’s body had been broken and branded long before they could struggle free.

Her mother was at home doing some needlework. The dogs lay sleeping around her.

“How was the execution?” Mrs. Storace asked. Anna put her face down to Bonbon and didn’t answer. “I saw a few hangings when I was a girl. Thieves and such. Poor creatures.”

They were quiet for a while. Then Anna asked, “Mama? Were you afraid of my husband? Of John?” Her throat was dry. She petted the soft, dreaming dog.

Mrs. Storace continued stitching so steadily that for a moment it seemed that she had not heard. But at length she sniffed and said, “I curse myself every day for letting that man into my house.”

Then Anna, her heart full of sadness which was also a terrible warmth, rested her cheek on the arm of her mother’s chair and watched the needle pinch and thread as if for all eternity. While she watched she did not have to think of the broken man and the wrongs. She had only to think of the needle, pinching and threading forever in her mother’s elegant hands.

Mozart was home, waiting for Anna. She’d said she would sing Susanna only if her last aria, “
Deh, vieni, non tardar,
” was a showpiece rondo. He was good at writing rondos. He liked to put them in his piano concertos. They were long and vivacious, in the form of verse and refrain, and demanded a skilled technique. Anna’s aria would have decorations and roulades, low notes and high, show off everything she could do. It would stall the action, but leave no doubt which soprano was the prima buffa of the Burgtheater.

She was coming over now to try it out. His rondo. He had cleared his afternoon appointments. What time Anna did not need he would reserve for
Figaro. Figaro
must be everything now, as nearly everything as he could make it.

At lunch Constanze had remarked that he was fidgeting. That was what he did when he was nervous. He had not been alone with Anna since that time when she was ill.

He tried to play but it was shit, his hands were shaking all over.
She was late. Perhaps she would not come. Perhaps that would be better.

Then there she was, cheerful and smiling, with her bright, dark eyes, and it seemed that both of them were nervous, remembering the last time they had been together alone. So long ago that was now. He had tired himself out, finishing his opera. It consumed his thoughts. He wanted little to eat and little sleep—only to finish it, to see it whole and perfect as he had it in his head. He forgot to wash, forgot household matters and social engagements and his appearance. Nothing like that could hold in his mind. Only
Figaro—
only Susanna.

His wife was out for the afternoon with Karl, visiting her mother. They went every Wednesday. Mozart disliked his mother-in-law. She was always wanting money and smacking her lips. She was superstitious. But she was good to Karl and devoted to her daughter.

It was now late March. Soon it would be full spring. Since last he’d seen Anna, Mozart had come to believe that Aloysia must have been right about Anna and Benucci. After all, their characters in his opera possessed an ideal love. And it was better that way. Benucci was tall and free. Mozart was small, and bound to Constanze. He had no time for infatuation. It would be much better if Anna loved Benucci. He would encourage it. He desired nothing but her happiness and she could not find happiness with him.