Mozart's Sister: A Novel (42 page)

All this time Baptist had remained seated at the desk, in silence, playing with the stopper of the inkwell. He screwed it tight, wiped his fingers with a cloth, and stared at his wife. No emotion was visible in his gaze.

“Why do you want to do this, Nannerl?”

“What? Do you mean to oppose it?” she asked, surprised and annoyed.

“Not at all. I only wish to know why you’ve decided to do this.”

“Because otherwise the music will be lost. It’s so obvious. Why do you ask?”

“And if it should be lost, what would be so bad about that?”

For a moment she was silent, widening her eyes. “Baptist, what’s gotten into you?” she murmured.

“Will you please explain what would happen if that music should be lost?”

“But don’t you see? These compositions are astonishing. They open up a whole new path. In recent years, Wolfgang had reached heights never touched before, by him or by others. It’s unacceptable that this legacy should disappear.”

“It’s unacceptable for whom?”

“For me, but not just me. It should be also for you. You should be happy that I’m trying to preserve it.”

“So you’re doing it to please me? As you tried to please the esteemed Colonel d’Ippold with the warm hands?”

“Why do you bring up Armand now?” she asked in dismay. She went over to him, resolutely. “Please, let’s set things straight: that man has nothing to do with my decision. And if you think about it, you, Baptist, don’t play a big role, either. It’s a matter that has to do with me and my only brother, who, by the way, was a great composer. He has died, and I want his music to survive.”

“Now, then, Wolfgang is your only brother? And was he not when you could barely pronounce his name? And was he not in the years when you were forced to give lessons to pay for his studies, and you hated him with all your heart?”

“Now it’s different.”

“Tell me why!”

“Because now I am choosing to be occupied with him, just as I chose to reject him.”

They placed their fists on the desk and confronted each other, breathing hard, their faces tense and close. For a moment they were silent, then Nannerl said quietly, “I want to do it because—because I miss music, Baptist. Because to give concerts, or compose, is no longer so important for me; but to be involved in music is, and always will be. I want to do it because the idea of analyzing those works, of dating them, of going to publishers, of checking the proofs, of authenticating Wolfgang’s compositions with respect to the thousand false ones that will surely emerge from all over—because the idea of doing all this, Baptist, is thrilling to me.”

She left him and went to the window. Before her eyes unfolded the landscape that she had looked at a thousand times at night, wondering where Vienna was. “The same emotions can be felt in such a different way. It’s true, for a long time I cut my brother out of my life—not to mention my father. And perhaps I didn’t want to touch an instrument because inevitably, if I had, I would have thought of the two of them. But now I understand that to both I owe something. I understand that both are part of my story, and it doesn’t make sense to deny it, because to reject the memory of them would mean to reject myself.”

Baptist listened without interrupting. Under his thick mustache was the hint of a smile.

“In these years,” Nannerl continued, “I haven’t lived in pure silence, but as if within a ‘rest.’ In music, rests are as significant as a torrent of sound. A rest makes possible what precedes it and what follows, and lacking such a passage, I wouldn’t be able, now, to occupy myself with composition in a way so different from the way I always thought and dreamed and imagined—but with the same intensity.”

Then she turned to him and confronted him with gentle firmness. “I can’t be a wife, a mother, and no more, all my life, Baptist. I need to do other things, too, and it’s no longer possible for me not to do them. I don’t know if I’ll be able to be involved with our family in the same way I’ve been until now, but I also know, on the other hand, that if I didn’t undertake this activity I still wouldn’t be able to: because I am not what I was yesterday. Today, Baptist, I am again Maria Anna Walburga Ignatia Mozart.”

XI.

“Children, get rid of all the guns, bows, arrows, and even the slingshots, if you have any: I do not want anyone shooting a feathered dart into my rear.”

Nannerl, absorbed in checking the manuscript of a fantasia for piano, looked up and saw the monumental grand piano entering, carried by four workmen on the orders of her husband, and meanwhile Vincent and Hermann were lifting up the big table and putting it in a corner, and Jeanette, incredibly, was picking all her dolls up off the floor and putting them in a basket.

“What? You’ve had it brought here?”

“Yes, as you see, and from what they tell me, time has helped it rather than damaged it. The action is in excellent condition, and before the move I called a tuner. In a couple of months it will need a light touch-up, but just so that it settles. Gently, men, it’s a precious object. Nannerl, where do you want it?”

“Oh…by the window, I would say.”

“Hear that? Do what my wife says. Where’s the stool? Ah, here it is. Nannerl, this is new. I allowed myself to choose it, but if for some reason it doesn’t go, you can change it even for a chair for a queen. Good, I’d say we’re good. Vincent, if you don’t mind, see the gentlemen to the door and take care of the last details. Thank you all.”

As the room emptied, Nannerl opened the lid and propped it up, then clapped her hands and listened to the resonance of that beat fade in a thousand ripples. Then she stroked the strings in all their length, feeling them scratch her fingertips pleasantly, and suddenly she rushed to sit on the stool beside Baptist.

“I didn’t remember that it was so marvelous,” she murmured.

“I’ve always known it, Nannerl.”

“What?”

“That sooner or later we’d come to this. And I’ve always waited for you—and the wait was so long that I had almost forgotten whom I married.”

She was silent while he gently slipped a hand under her dress to feel her skin, and yet he looked only at the ivory of the keys.

“I knew I didn’t have with me a woman like others, but a Mozart who had decided not to devote herself, for a while, to music. I knew that you would go back to it, and marrying you, I also married that certainty, and knowing you over the years, I understood that the depths I now see in you cannot be reached through joy alone. When I asked you to play this piano, and your only response was to shoot me in the buttocks, I was much more thoughtless and talkative than I am today, and also much more restless. Now, instead, I’m happy, so happy that you will stop punishing yourself, but at the same time I’m frightened: because you are about to set sail, and the truth is I don’t know where you’ll land. Yet I have to do my part, I have to stay beside you, of course, because to be with you is my greatest pleasure, but without weighing on you.”

He took her hand, brought it to his lips, and gallantly said,
“Madame, jouez ce piano pour moi…je vous en prie.”

Carefully she placed the fantasia on the stand. Wolfgang had designed a passage simple to execute but revolutionary. It began with a broad arpeggio in D minor, establishing a melancholy nocturnal atmosphere, which seemed to clearly presage a dramatic outcome. Instead, after an interminable pause, a little melody arose, rich in half tones, light, tortuous, transporting the thoughts of both player and listener into some watery realm, to be suddenly undermined by those heavy, terrible chords, like sudden stabs of pain. Then a frenetic fragment, accelerating, preparing for a conflict—you wait for it, you know you have to reach it, and instead the music returns to that light melody. How could Wolfgang have had such intuition? How many disparate musical cells does this piece contain? How many intangible, superior visions? Suddenly a violent cascade of sound invades the entire space, and the hands speed along the keyboard, from one end to the other, crossing, and then two spaced-out chords, and an unlikely finale, which overturns every premise. It’s a game, barefoot children chasing a ball who stick out their tongue at you, or a carillon that enjoys its own insolence and hammers you with those sharp sounds: and you think, before the piece ends, we’ll have to go back to the beginning. We’ll have to return to sorrow and, so, close the circle. But no, instead that game repeats with childish insolence, and the children end it with a light laugh that is a gay mockery. This piece is the confounding of expectations. Perhaps Wolfgang felt that and wanted to communicate it: each of us lives in expectation of something, but reality is always different from every conjecture and even every aim; in reality, an accident always happens that the most imaginative mind wouldn’t have conceived of, and it’s pointless to torture oneself about what hasn’t happened, which can obscure what actually has. And while she played and thought all this, Nannerl seemed to see her brother beside her, in a gold jacket carefully buttoned, and he was happy that his sister had understood. And behind him she seemed to feel Frau Mozart tightening her corset, and she felt the contact with her soft, welcoming body, and her instinctive and boundless love, and opposite her was Herr Mozart, with his violin, and he—he was playing with her! He touched the strings lightly with the bow, supported only by the sounds his daughter produced, and like those who make music in ensemble, he exchanged with her rapid glances, and that silent contact canceled out every trace of the difficult past and let only affection emerge, and Music. She imagined that Victoria, too, was sitting in a corner, her attentive listener, in a flowered skirt, and on her face the pleasure of one who is gaining personal success; even Armand was present, in a brilliant general’s uniform, mute and distant, and then there was Tresel, and Martin, and between one note and the next she seemed to hear Ebony’s angry neighing…

After she played the last chord, Nannerl rose without even thinking and made a deep bow. There was a burst of applause, she closed her eyes, and tears flowed down her face slowly. Ever since she had rediscovered tears, she gave in to them easily; her eyes were a generous fountain whose waters streamed at the snap of a finger. Could tears, like the piano, be a matter of practice? Nannerl laughed and cried, happy in her tears, and when she opened her eyes she saw only Baptist near her, her only spectator, who observed her in silence with his beautiful eyes, in loving acceptance.

Finale: Scherzo

I.

Tightening the knot of the foulard that the wind was threatening to steal, the old woman approached a man muffled in a cape and tapped his shoulder with one hand. “Hello, sir. I’m here. Tell me what the problem is, please.”

“Here,” said the engineer. “As you see, we’ve dug a hole five feet deep exactly, because a part of the pedestal had to be sunk in the ground. The statue, as you know, is very heavy. And the deeper we went, the clearer it became that the soil is very loose and probably full of holes. Would you like to look from close up?”

“I trust you, I trust you. But tell me, what are those workers doing?”

“Surveys, Baroness. If the ground really is unstable, I’m sorry, but…the statue of Mozart can’t be put up. Too risky.”

“Oh, good Lord! And what will I do with it?”

The statue, suspended high up on a pulley, grimaced, but didn’t seem offended.

“I imagine you’ll have to find another square. But in Salzburg there are many beautiful squares.”

“Yes, but imagine! We would have to start the whole process over again. To get the permission has taken me a lifetime. And I don’t have much time left. I’m sixty years old, did you know?”

“Actually, I did, but believe me, you look ten years younger. Even fifteen, easily.”

“May I remind you,” she said, raising an eyebrow, “that I’m not the one paying you for this work.”

He laughed. “I know, I know. It was a free compliment!”

“I’m grateful. So, how long will it take to finish the surveys?”

“Not long. If you like, you can stay here and wait. In fact, I would be delighted to offer you a hot drink in that café beyond the square. I looked in this morning, quickly, and they have some very inviting pastries.”

“Thank you, but I can’t. I have so many things to do. Would you be so kind, instead, as to come and tell me at home? It’s not far.”

“It will be an honor, Baroness.”

“Then I’ll wait for you,” she said, and went off.

Nannerl’s pace was not that of a sixty-year-old. She cleaved the air with the decision of a prow and passed the French soldiers who guarded the streets without bowing her head; in fact, they greeted her with respect. She went as far as the café beyond the square, entered, shook hands, smiled kindly at the citizens for whom Mozart, and his sister, had for years been glory and pride. She had the counterman bring her a bag of the pastries that had tempted the engineer, then, at the flower seller, she bought a bunch of violets and one of daisies, and took the road to the cemetery.

She loved the holy quiet of that place, and the slow steps of the grieving mourners, and it seemed to her that she heard the voices of those who observed human events from a distant land. She reached a graceful tomb, and around the name of the dead man scattered the violets as if on a meadow, then she sat on the bench opposite the stone and spoke in a low voice.