Mozart's Sister: A Novel (21 page)

“That way, Fräulein Mozart,” he said calmly. “The last door on the left, then down the stairs.”

Bewildered but certainly relieved, she followed his directions and found herself at the top of the steep flight that led to the door of the cellar. Already the sound of the harpsichord reached her in a confusion of echoes, the notes bouncing off the walls of the stairwell. Suddenly Nannerl recognized a certain passage and was horrified. Victoria was playing, and singing—something for which she had no talent—an aria for soprano that carried Nannerl back a hundred years: to a time when she was little more than a child, at the end of the European tour, and was composing vocal music with the complicity and secret support of Wolfgang; a time before the departure of her brother, which had marked a turning point in her existence, before she had learned to confront loss, solitude, bitterness. But it wasn’t possible that Victoria knew it!

She took the final steps on tiptoe and held her breath as she opened the door, praying that it wouldn’t squeak. It didn’t, and at the far end of the basement room was the harpsichord, illuminated by candlelight, and Victoria seated, her back to her, intently singing in her chirping voice. Nannerl approached stealthily, while a sense of intrusion into her innermost self increased. She came very close, so close that she could touch Victoria, or even strangle her. And on the music stand she recognized her old score: the edges were scorched, and it was blackened.

Violently she pushed the girl aside, and Victoria fell to the floor with a cry of fear; then Nannerl seized the sheet of paper and looked at it, stunned. It was her “Vain are your words, vain your tears.” Her manuscript, the real one, beautifully copied in her hand, with that small erasure on the last beat because she had not felt like transcribing the whole thing from the beginning.

She spoke in a half-whisper, bewildered. “What are you doing, Victoria? Playing with my life, behind my back?”

Victoria was still in a heap on the dirty floor, breathing hard, and for a moment she didn’t have the strength to speak. Then she said weakly, “Forgive me, Nannerl. I wanted…I wanted to surprise you.”

“Who gave it to you?” she asked, still stupefied.

“I stole it from Tresel. I’m sorry, believe me, Nannerl. I didn’t want to upset you. Your music is beautiful.”

“My music is dead!” she cried, and ran away, up the stairs.

XXII.

The armor around her heart was molded, cast, and ready. And that day, rather than throw it aside and leave herself open to hope, Nannerl put it on, bolted it, and barred for a long time the door to her dreams. She hugged the score to her, creasing it carelessly. She walked with determination, yet without a goal. From the Residenzplatz through the narrow streets, from the city’s center to the outskirts, and then again to the center, her eyes red but dry and a lump in her throat that would not dissolve. She bumped into more than one passerby and didn’t bother to apologize. Someone shouted a mild insult at her, but she couldn’t hear. In her mind a raucous symphony sounded, a collection of orchestras superimposed, each going its own way, at high volume—an intolerable cacophony even for an untrained ear.

She found herself on the road that led to the hill outside of town, and her legs went up the slope like an athlete’s. Nannerl ran, she ran for hours and felt no fatigue; she didn’t take the path but went deep into the undergrowth. Her dress caught on brambles and tore, branches slapped her face, her neck, her arms, scratching her, yet she pushed on, heedless.

It had already been dark for a while when she got home. Frau Mozart, who had been waiting for her anxiously, opened the door and, seeing her so upset, couldn’t repress a cry of fear.

“Good Lord! What happened to you, child?”

She didn’t answer. She didn’t have the strength. Slowly, she scraped the dirt from her shoes and plucked the leaves from her hair.

“Where have you been? Are you all right? Do you have a headache?” Her mother assaulted her with questions, while she, mute, turned her back and went to her room.

“Nannerl! What’s wrong? Dinner’s right here, it’s still warm…”

Finally she said wearily, “I’m not hungry,” and continued walking.

“But you can’t go to bed on an empty stomach,” Anna Maria insisted, running after her. “You won’t sleep well, you know.” On the dresser halfway along the corridor stood a vase of roses with stems so long they practically grazed the ceiling. “Look how beautiful they are!” she fluttered, in an attempt to cheer her. “They arrived just this afternoon, with a note so sweet, in rhyme; and guess who sent them to you? Baron von Berchtold zu Sonnenburg. You see, he is still interested in you, in spite of your rude behavior.”

In answer, she received a slammed door and a key turning in the lock.

Finally, she would have at least a few moments of peace. Nannerl pulled the aria from her corset and undressed, tugging at her torn dress, piling the petticoats haphazardly, kicking off her shoes at the foot of the bed, ripping out her hairpins and throwing them on the floor along with a few strands of hair.

At that moment Wolfgang, too, was in a bedroom: that of a modest but comfortable inn. He was playing the violin for Leopold, who was lying in a chair, in pain, with his leg bound and resting on a stool. Frau Mozart knew almost nothing of the accident; her husband had not told her that the wound was infected, the leg swollen, and that at night his forehead was burning and he kept breaking out in a sweat that was not caused by the hot Italian summer. He was haunted by a fear of its getting worse, and only Wolfgang, who could make the violin sing like no one else, managed to give him some solace.

“That theme is really original,” he said weakly. “When did you compose it? I can’t remember.”

The boy stopped playing and looked affectionately at his father. Then he said vaguely, “A few years ago…but actually I don’t recall exactly when, either.” Then he put the bow back on the strings and took up the melody of “Vain are your words, vain your tears.” To make it his own, he changed a note every so often.

Nannerl was huddled under the sheets unable to sleep. She lay on one side, her arms squeezing the pillow, her jagged, yellowed nails scratching it. Her toes contracted spasmodically, and her eyelids kept opening and closing as if she had a tic, and then opened into darkness. Suddenly she rose and in a single rapid movement seized the score and ripped it to pieces.

At the same instant the sound of the violin broke off in a harsh sound. “What happened?” asked Leopold.

“A string broke…how strange.”

XXIII.

Tresel didn’t say a word, but that was normal for her; it was much less so for Victoria. She entered the Mozart house as if the floor were burning and stood there, head bent, playing with the wristbands of her dress; Tresel’s stern silence made her feel even guiltier. Tresel would have loved to slap Victoria’s shameless little face until it turned purple, but a servant can’t do such things, so she turned her back and went to the music room.

Nannerl was busy choosing some easy pieces for her students. She looked thinner, or perhaps it was only the eyes sunk in their sockets that made her face look wasted, made her seem much older; pale, jaws clenched, she looked almost like the Leopold of earlier days. She looked up as Tresel entered and understood who had come to see her. She said only, “Let her come in. Thank you.”

“Shall I bring something to drink?” Tresel asked, somewhat sharply.

Nannerl shook her head. “She won’t stay long.”

Tresel went out, leaving the door open, and indicated it to Victoria with a gesture that was almost rude; then she returned to the kitchen to prepare the liver dumplings, happy to be out of the presence of that little hussy.

With an effort, Victoria peeked in and then slowly entered. She stood with her hands clasped at her waist, mortified, under her teacher’s angry gaze; she had composed a litany of apologies, but at that moment she forgot them all.

In any case the silence didn’t last. “It’s ridiculous for you to come here!” Fräulein Mozart said to her harshly.

The sentence struck Victoria like a whip; in a second her eyes filled with tears, while her lips trembled. She turned and was about to go and never return, but Nannerl spoke again: “We can’t risk having your father discover us!”

She froze. What was that plural? And then, what would her father discover?

“I’ve prepared a program of study for you,” Nannerl continued, in the same inflexible tone. “It’s a concert program. We’ll meet in the cellar, a week from today.”

And she pointed to a bundle of scores on the piano.

The tears welled in Victoria’s eyes even more abundantly as she stammered, incredulous, “What? What did you say? A concert?”

Nannerl didn’t answer and didn’t change her expression. Victoria frantically dried her face, laughing and crying at once, then suddenly darkened: “But—where? No one knows me. No one would give me a stage.”

“You take care of studying. I’ll take care of the rest.”

The girl approached her, trembling, and in a whisper asked, “Have you forgiven me?”

“Go!”

So Victoria took the scores and skated lightly along the corridor, her heart hammering madly.

The moment she was alone, Nannerl melted in a tender smile. Tresel, on the other hand, grinding liver in the kitchen, groaned in annoyance when she heard the door close.

XXIV.

The cellar looked different. Most of the dirt was gone and the jumble of furniture had been piled against one wall. The harpsichord had been placed in the center and there was an open space around it, which allowed Nannerl to walk in a circle, listening to Victoria, instructing her, and sometimes interrupting her with the brutality of a slave driver.

“No! Stop. They’re triplets! Concentrate!”

Victoria repeated the passage once, and another time, and then yet again.

“There, that’s better. Go on like that. Forget you have two hands. You have ten fingers, and they are all independent. Let them run. Faster! Even faster! You have to work hard, Victoria, or you’ll remain a talented unknown.”

The girl’s forehead was pearled with sweat. She went on playing ardently, eyes closed, as if in a trance.

In the kitchen the hole in the wall was free of impediments and the sound of the instrument cheered the cooks, who were busy preparing the archbishop’s afternoon coffee with his favorite sweet,
Zwetschgenknödel.
Gunther was making the pastry and Claudia was patiently pitting plums and stuffing them with lumps of sugar; their gestures kept time to the music, and they were very quiet. But suddenly the music stopped and there was no sign of its starting up again. Puzzled, they went to the hole, his hands white with flour, hers black with plums. What in the world had happened?

Nannerl was devoting some minutes to style markings. She was sitting beside her student, who was shaking her hands and trying to relax her aching wrists, showing her the music for a new piece.

“As you see, this is a minuet,” she said. “So when you play it try to imagine the dancers bowing. You have to picture their light, graceful movements, so as to be refined and delicate yourself.”

She rose and turned her back to the harpsichord so that, unable to see Victoria, she could concentrate on the sound. From the first notes, however, the girl launched into a mellifluous interpretation, with languors and endless rallentandos that would have left the dancers with their feet in the air for an impossible length of time. Nannerl listened to her, suffering silently, and just then feared she had made a mistake. Maybe Victoria wasn’t ready for this venture. Maybe her decision had been hasty and incautious.

“I said to be gentle, not mawkish. You’re worse than a society doll. You should take that damn rose not just off your hat but out of your head! Do you understand what I’m saying?”

Victoria nodded, discouraged.

“Now start again. Respect the notes, respect the style, and behave like a real musician. Because that’s what you are now!”

Victoria began, and after a few moments Nannerl calmed down; she had exaggerated her tone, but perhaps it had been useful in some way.

In the kitchen, Gunther and Claudia had abandoned the
Zwetschgenknödel
and were happily dancing a minuet. As they took each other by the hand, flour mingled with the pulp of plums, and though their aprons were hardly fit for a ball, their red faces expanded into wide smiles that an elegant ballroom would never have known.

XXV.

“Papa says that his leg isn’t giving him any more problems,” Anna Maria said, scanning a letter from her husband. “He says that it was really nothing and that now, in effect, it’s healed.”

“Good for him,” Nannerl commented calmly, while Tresel poured boiling soup into her cup. Mother and daughter were sitting at the table, and Frau Mozart had several times exchanged her spoon for the magnifying glass that helped her read; she resigned herself to giving up her soup and devoting herself exclusively to reading.

“Yes, but he’s not telling me everything. I mean—if it were serious, do you think he would tell us?”

“I don’t have the slightest idea,” Nannerl replied. Then she thought about it for a moment. “Probably not. He wouldn’t want to worry us.”