Mozart's Sister: A Novel (19 page)

It was impossible to see anything. With assured movements, the girl lighted the candles of a candelabra, one by one, and Nannerl began to distinguish the outlines of old furniture, piles of unused dishes, stacks of paintings, even an old rocking horse. What was the archbishop doing with a rocking horse? And then headboards, a broken mirror, a box of doorknobs, everything covered by a thick coating of dust; and finally the harpsichord, protected by a white cloth that in that jumble seemed to glow with its own light. Victoria took off the cloth and folded it carefully, then she lifted the lid of the keyboard. Nannerl still seemed dubious.

“Calm down; no one can hear. I’ve come here millions of times and my father has never found out. And anyway, the archbishop has just sent him to Linz, on one of his missions.”

“All right,” Nannerl answered, and placed the score on the music stand. “It’s the great Bach, Johann Sebastian, of course—certainly not that clown who lives in London. Go on, and pay close attention to the different voices.”

Victoria looked at her in astonishment. “What? I’m to sight-read it?”

“Of course. You can do it, believe me. Have faith in your capacities. Don’t ever let yourself be conditioned by those who underestimate you. Never.”

“I understand. But why don’t you let me hear you, at least once?”

In response she received an exasperated outburst: “Because I don’t play anymore! I don’t play anymore, Victoria, won’t you understand that? Look. I’ve let my nails grow.”

And she showed Victoria her hands, which were not those of a pianist. On the palms there were calluses, the result of climbing trees, an activity no longer followed by warm-water soaks and softening creams; and her nails were long, but like those of a wild animal, not of a cared-for lady—uneven, broken, worn here and there, even a little dirty. Unthinkable for such hands to play.

Victoria seemed to grow sad, but she said nothing. She sat down, placed her hands on the keyboard and her eyes on the staff, and timidly performed the passage from Bach. Nannerl stood next to her and began instructing her.

“Very good. You have to move ahead with your eyes. Ahead of the notes you’re playing. What you read has to be different from what you’re doing. Learn to let your thoughts run on two parallel lines, and yet with control over both. Continue like that. Now you are the master of the piece.”

While the girls nourished their souls on music, on the upper floors of the palace preparations were under way for the more earthly nourishment of His Excellency. On the table in the middle of the kitchen lay five loaves of crusty white bread, just taken from the oven; one of the chickens that had offered shelter to the two intruders had had its neck wrung, and the cook Claudia had plucked its feathers skillfully. The cook Gunther, her husband, was preparing to make the archbishop’s favorite soup,
Gulaschsuppe,
with beef, lard, onions, and spices. The boxes of vegetables were piled on the floor next to one wall, and he, a robust man, picked them up all together to place on the work surface, but the action had an unexpected result. Just behind the pile was a hole in the wall—not very big, a couple of inches or so across—and as soon as he removed the box the distant sound of a harpsichord could be heard through the hole.

Gunther stopped, speechless, staring at the strange phenomenon. Claudia, however, throwing out a handful of feathers, said nonchalantly, “What are you surprised at? It’s Major d’Ippold’s daughter, isn’t it?”

“Ah, yes,” the man said, hitting the palm of his hand against his forehead, and prepared to weep over the onions.

Suddenly the sound stopped. In the cellar Nannerl had exclaimed, “What are you doing? That’s an F-sharp!”

“It wasn’t bad,” Victoria answered. “In fact, it’s much better than the F-natural, in my view. Besides you said it: I’m the master of the piece.”

“I didn’t tell you to change the notes. You can’t allow yourself to alter the choices of the author. You haven’t the least right!”

“Let’s go on. It’s not so serious.”

“No, it’s fundamental. You’re an interpreter, no more. The value of your art is in rendering as best you can the art of someone else. That’s it.” Then she added, in a lower voice, “You don’t have the slightest idea what it means to compose.”

Victoria stared at her. “Why, do you?”

Fräulein Mozart didn’t answer. She indicated a point on the score and said darkly, “Start again here.”

Victoria insisted: “So, do you compose or not?”

“I said start again from here.”

XVIII.

For the shopping, Anna Maria gave Tresel some coins and with those demanded that she acquire smoked meat, sausage, and high-quality game. Most of the time the maid was forced to choose old chickens, which she masked as pheasant using a flood of spices. As she was filling her basket with chives, cumin, and paprika, she realized that she was being followed. A little hat crowned with a tuft of daisies emerged from the potato stall; and as soon as she turned in that direction the hat disappeared. Tresel wasn’t alarmed. She calmly chose a big head of garlic, added it to her basket, paid, and moved to another stall; then she thought again, turned back, asked for a sprig of marjoram, and when she raised her head from her purse, she found Victoria’s childish face before her.

“Nannerl composes. I know she composes. And you know something, too, don’t you?” the girl demanded.

The servant made a half turn around her and continued choosing carrots and onions.

“Do you understand? So, you have nothing to tell me?”

Tresel sniffed an onion to see if it was fresh.

“And then, why did she stop playing? Every time I ask her to let me hear something, she invents an excuse. Once she said it made her ankle hurt!”

The servant decided that the onion wasn’t fresh and moved on to another stall.

“Do you have a tongue? Answer me!”

And so it went, through the whole market, the whole way home. Victoria followed her, entreating, wheedling, and Tresel went straight on with the energetic step of a woman from the mountains, her arms filled with baskets.

“In my opinion she wrote it all, the music she makes me study. It’s true, right? She talks a bunch of big names—Eckard, Schobert, Bach. But in my opinion it’s all hers. Can you understand what I’m saying, or do you speak only the dialect of Sankt Gilgen? Tell me something, please, Tresel! I just want to understand, I want to help her!”

They had now reached the house. “Come,” Tresel said, finally. Then she went in and disappeared up the stairs.

Victoria looked around: there was no one nearby, apart from a young woman walking on the other side of the street with a newborn sleeping in her arms. Her father wouldn’t find out. So she hurried up the stairs.

From the ground floor the labored sound of the piano could be heard. Tresel gestured to her to be quiet, and she opened the door without making any noise; she put down the shopping baskets and went along the hall on tiptoe, making sure every so often that Victoria was following with the same caution. The door of the music room was closed; Nannerl was giving a lesson to some aristocratic young lady, and on a sofa outside, a lady and a little girl were waiting their turn. The child looked at Victoria and smiled.

The journey ended in a room so small that it barely contained a bed shorter than normal and a night table, nothing else. Tresel opened the drawer and from a false bottom took out a sheet of music paper inscribed with handwritten notes. The paper was smoke-stained and the edges were scorched.

“It’s true, Nannerl wrote music,” she admitted. “But then she burned all her music. Only this was left.” And she showed it to Victoria, who held it breathlessly: it was an aria for a soprano. The title said:
“Vane son tue parole, vano il pianto”—
“Vain are your words, vain your tears.”

Tresel immediately, jealously, took it back. “You didn’t see it,” she said sharply. “You know nothing. And if you really want to help her, don’t torture her anymore!”

She put the score back in the drawer and, with her head, invited Victoria to get out of the way.

XIX.

The target was large, and it showed a rather risqué scene, painted in bright colors. In the middle of a lovely grove of trees, a man had been caught by the painter in the act of preparing to take care of his needs: his pants were half down and his pink buttocks were in evidence; his face, turned back toward the observer, was immobilized in a slightly embarrassed yet jolly expression. The players passed the guns back and forth and took shots, and the feathered darts stuck in the canvas; those who hit the buttocks got the highest score.

Fräulein Mozart made one bull’s-eye after another, and the assembly of aristocrats was delighted, whereas she, without a word to anyone, continued to shoot, aiming at the target with great concentration. The other guests were gossiping, as usual. What else could one do? Three boys between four and six were romping about in a game of war, totally ignored by the company, while a fourth fair-haired child, barely a year old, slept in his nurse’s arms. The buffet was abundant, worthy of the villa of a baron: cooks, waiters, designers had worked for weeks on the preparations for this little party, whose purpose was for the baron to see Nannerl again.

“You have no idea what I had to do to get her here,” Anna Maria whispered to Katharina, with a beleaguered air. “I dragged her by force.”

“My dear, the important thing is that she came. You’ll see, our friend will succeed in making some progress, sooner or later…It just takes a little patience.”

A small round of applause broke out in Nannerl’s direction as she hit the pink buttocks yet again. She acknowledged the applause with a small bow and loaded the gun again, while the baron moved to her side, assumed a pose, and began his jesterlike recitation:

“The huntress Diana took aim!

And like her target my heart

Is pierced, and for her longs, aflame!

Alas, cruel maid…”

Here the font of inspiration dried up, perhaps because of a sudden self-critical impulse, and he stopped. The guests took it as a pause for effect and stood with bated breath; Nannerl, however, appeared completely uninterested in the poetic act and continued to hit one bull’s-eye after another. Anna Maria poked her with an elbow, then with great affectation pleaded: “Herr Baron, continue, please! Your poetry is so delightful.”

Immediately Katharina echoed her, smiling at the guests: “These marvelous verses—you know he improvises them? He pulls them as if by magic from his wonderful mind. Isn’t it astonishing?”

“Oh yes, everything here is astonishing,” Frau Mozart said, hinting as she eyed the rich furnishings of the salon. Then she poked her daughter again with her elbow and growled, “Will you stop it?”

The silent challenge caused Baptist to return to his Muse. He came so close to Nannerl that she could smell the odor of his body and, in a low voice, uttered in her ear:

“This dark scowl, alas, escapes me

But the lion’s heart that roars so fiercely

has gentle depths, I know…

And there we will go…”

The baron took a deep breath, readying himself for the coup de théâtre he had arranged, and offered:

“A sole desire from my heart flows:

That in counterpoint to my verses may

Celestial music be made, and so…

And so…”

“The rhyme’s not coming—too bad,” he mumbled, smiling under his mustache at the situation and at himself. He went to the other end of the salon, which was bigger than the Mozarts’ entire apartment, and under the fascinated gaze of his guests grabbed the corner of a cloth draped over a large object and pulled it, uncovering a pianoforte. For an instant he was silent, wondering how Nannerl would take this provocation, and then, like a gallant courtier, he called upon her:
“Mademoiselle Mozart, jouez ce petit piano pour moi! Je vous en prie.”

Among the guests rose a murmur of surprise, a rush of fans and oblique smiles. Katharina exclaimed, “Oh yes, dear Nannerl, play for the baron, do be good.” Then she turned to the others haughtily: “She is my daughter’s teacher, did you know? An exceptional teacher. Under her guidance, Barbara has made great progress.”

Anna Maria addressed Nannerl with less benevolence. She kicked her in the shins and hissed: “Put down that dreadful gun and go and play!”

Finally Fräulein Mozart stopped aiming at the painted buttocks and turned to face the room; but she kept the gun balanced on her shoulder, so that through its sight passed an array of the nobility of Salzburg, who amid little laughs and murmurs of fear tried to get out of the way. Then, rapidly and silently, like a goddess of the hunt, she crossed the room, reaching the baron, who was raising the lid of the piano; in a flash, she shot and hit him right in the buttocks. The feathered dart remained fixed in his redingote, to the silent dismay of all present and above all Anna Maria, who thought she would die.