Mozart’s Blood (6 page)

For the hundredth time, she cursed him for not telling her where he went, or who he met. She could not go to the police, nor to friends. There was no one to turn to except the elders, and she dreaded seeing them.

And in any case, what would she ask? Had they seen Ugo? Or had they seen the wolf?

Seventeen-year-old Teresa Saporiti flung open the door of her father's tiny stone house and ran out to the cobbled balustrade to lean against it, pressing her hands to her mouth to keep her father from hearing her sobs. Beneath her the blue waters of Lake Garda sparkled joyously in the August sunshine, mocking her torment. Behind her the voice of her father had gone still. The soft call of a black-necked grebe from the shore carried through the quiet. F and B. A distant part of her mind noted the tritone without knowing, at that moment, that the tritone would forever be connected in her mind with the day she left home.

Teresa pressed her hands to her eyes and tried to stem her tears. She couldn't let Babbo see her cry. He would think she had weakened, that if he kept trying, he could persuade her to stay. But she couldn't! She couldn't stay here in Limone, cooking and cleaning for her
babbo
. She didn't want to marry one of the boys who plied the fishing boats on the lake or tilled the vines in the hills, and cook and clean for him. She wanted to sing. She
needed
to sing.

She dropped her hands to her chest, pressing them against her breastbone. Her desire flamed there, in the very center of her. Her longing drew her away from Limone to the city, where there were theaters and orchestras and audiences. She loved her father, and she loved her home, but she loved music more. It wasn't enough to sing in the
chiesa
on Sunday mornings. It wasn't enough to sing for her father, accompanying herself on the little clavier that had been her mother's. It wasn't enough to sing for weddings and funerals and first communions and birthday celebrations. She needed the stage. She needed a larger audience, and she needed a higher level of music-making. She craved it with a physical passion that burned away even her guilt at the prospect of leaving her father alone.

When she had composed herself, she straightened and turned. She would go back inside, let Babbo say it all again, let him talk until he was empty. He would tell her she could never come back if she left, that he would disown her. She would beg him for understanding, but Babbo, bitter and resigned, would shake his head.

And then, because her nature and her need left her no choice, she would pack what little she had that was her own—an extra pair of shoes, two simple dresses, the books of music her mother had left her—and go.

 

The distance from Limone sul Garda to Milano was too far to walk. Teresa began
a piedi,
just the same, to save the small amount of money hoarded from her little singing engagements. She carried an ancient valise that had once been red brocade and now was a sort of faded rose beige. She hung a little string bag over her wrist, and into this she tucked the letter that would introduce her to the aunt of one of her friends. She was a seamstress who lived in Milano and who, the friend thought, might allow her to stay for a time.

All the first day Teresa walked, with the sun on her neck and the stones of the road grinding beneath her feet. She reached the village of Cecina at sunset. Footsore and feeling utterly alone, she found a
trattoria
where she carefully measured out enough
lire
to pay for a bowl of soup and half a loaf of bread. Men eyed her as she ate, and she pulled her hat down over her head to hide her bright hair. She stayed on, reluctant to leave the shelter of the
trattoria.
She was nodding over her empty bowl when the old
nonna
who ran the kitchen came to stand before her, arms akimbo.

Teresa startled and said, “Oh, signora! I'm sorry. I'll go.”

The old lady clicked her tongue. She shook a shaming finger at a man who was leering from a corner, and then she put out a hand to help Teresa up. Teresa stood and was gathering her things to leave when the
nonna
said, “No, no. It's dark outside now. I have a place.”

She led the exhausted girl up a set of narrow, bare wood stairs to a storage room. There was a pallet there, resting amid sacks of flour and bottles of olive oil. “My son uses that sometimes,” she said. “When he works late. You can sleep there tonight, and no one will bother you.”

“Grazie,”
Teresa said. “Thank you so much, signora.”

“Prego.”

Teresa fell onto the cot and was asleep before her benefactress had reached the bottom of the stairs. She didn't wake until morning sunshine found its way into the storeroom through a dusty window. She rose, used the privy, and went downstairs to find the old woman waiting for her with a packet of bread and sausage.

Teresa, her eyes stinging at the kindness, kissed both her wrinkled cheeks before she took her leave. She was already on the road before she realized she had never learned her name.

When she reached Gardone Riviera she found a man with an oxcart carrying a load of fish to Brescia. He was a grizzled man in his fifties who looked a bit like her father. He raised his brows when she approached him. After she asked him for a ride, he thought for a long time, scratching his thatch of gray hair. By some logic she could not guess at, he decided to grant her request, giving her a nod and a grudging,
“Sì, va bene.”

Before he could change his mind, she pushed her old valise under the bench seat and climbed up to sit alongside him. He snapped the reins over his ox's back. The ox, a placid brown creature nearly as grizzled as his owner, ambled off toward Brescia.

Teresa learned that the man's name was Giulio. He was brusque, given to short answers when she spoke to him and aiming blunt questions back at her. As they rattled and rumbled down the road, he asked what a young girl like herself could be thinking of, traveling with no escort. With flushing cheeks, she told him her ambition.

Giulio gave her a narrow-eyed look. “A singer,” he said with disdain. “Everyone in Milano is a singer. What makes you think they will want you at La Scala? Are you any good?”

Teresa's breath caught in her throat, overwhelmed for a moment by her own audacity. She had taken a terrible risk, surely, made an awful mistake. And what if Babbo truly would not let her come home?

But still she felt that need in her breast, that drive that could not be suppressed. She blew out her lips in defiance and sat straighter. She was a head taller than Giulio. She lifted the brim of her battered hat and said, “I will sing for you, signore. Then you may judge for yourself.”

He snorted. “What will you sing,
ragazza?
A folk song? A lullaby?”

“No,” she said firmly. “I will sing opera.”

And so, as the oxcart clattered along beside the glistening waters of Lake Garda, Teresa Saporiti gave her first performance away from home. She sang Gluck, “O del mio dolce ardor,” then Pergolesi, “Se tu m'ami.” Her voice rang against the rocks of the shore and carried out over the water, blown by the summer breeze. The ox flicked his ears back and forth, and Giulio flicked his black gaze over her from time to time.

When she finished the second aria, she lifted her chin and gave him a challenging look.

He surprised her by breaking into wheezy chuckles. His cheeks cracked into a web of wrinkles above his beard.
“Sì,”
he said. “
Sì, sì, sì.
You will be a singer, I think.”

Teresa gave him a brilliant smile. She had passed her first audition in this unlikely place! “Thank you, signore. I must be a singer. I couldn't possibly do anything else.”

“Dimmi, ragazza.”
He settled against the slatted back of the seat, and let the ox's reins hang slack from his hands. “Tell me why you
must.
”

It was a long day's ride to Brescia. The aroma of fish wafting up from the cart bed grew more intense as the day grew hotter. The ox's tail swished back and forth, fighting flies. The waves broke gently against the shore as Teresa told Giulio of her mother's beautiful voice, her thwarted ambition, her illness. She spoke of life in Limone sul Garda, and how constrained she felt there, as if the small houses crowded together by the lake were a prison of sorts, a prison created by traditions and customs that had not changed in hundreds of years, that no one would allow to change.

Giulio said, “They say the people of Limone live a long time. Is that true?”

“There are several people in our village who have lived more than a century.”

“But not your
mamma.
”

“No. But my mother wasn't born in Limone. She came from the Casentino.”

“And your father?”

“He will live a long time, I suppose,” she said, her voice soft and sad. “And he will be angry with me forever.”

“He will get over it,” Giulio said sagely. “And then he will be proud of you.”

The hope that this was so stole Teresa's voice for several minutes.

 

When they reached Brescia, she tried to give Giulio a few of her precious
lire,
but he shook his head. “No, no, little Teresa,” he said. “You paid me in song.”

She thanked him and climbed down from the cart. Her legs had gone stiff from bracing against the roughness of the road, and she stood for a moment stretching them.

“Teresa,” Giulio said, scowling down at her. “Be very careful. There are men who would take advantage of a young girl on her own.”

“I can take care of myself,” she said as she tugged her valise from under the seat.

He growled, as if he were angry. “You think,
ragazza,
because you're tall and strong, you can deal with them. But I warn you—city men have their ways.”

She smiled up at him, and pulled her shawl over her shoulders. “Thank you, Giulio.
Grazie mille.
I promise I will remember.”

He picked up the ox's reins and clucked his tongue, whether at the ox or at her, she couldn't tell. The cart rattled away. She waved to Giulio one more time before she turned to survey the cobbled, twisting streets of Brescia. With her string bag on her arm and her valise in her hand, she began knocking on doors where signs informed travelers of rooms to let. After inquiring at various establishments, she found she could not afford to pay for even the most modest accommodations. Darkness was falling over the city, and her anxiety rose to meet it.

She bought fruit and cheese, and sat on a bench in the central
piazza
to eat it. She begged the use of the vendor's outhouse, and when she emerged, she saw that the nightly
passeggiata
had begun. Couples wandered arm in arm around the
piazza.
Families with children in tow called to each other. One or two single men eyed Teresa. She escaped their curious gazes by turning down a dark street lined with fine houses.

On an impulse, she began testing the doors of outbuildings and shacks. People were coming and going on the street, but darkness hid her. Her old boots made no noise on the packed dirt, and she stayed in the shadows, out of the occasional lamplight that filtered through drawn curtains.

When she found an unlocked door into a carriage house, she slipped through it and pulled the door closed behind her. The carriage house was dim, but she could see that a conveyance of some kind, a curricle or other light cart, rested with its shafts propped on blocks. Bits of tack and neatly coiled rope hung in orderly fashion on the walls. There were burlap sacks filled with something that smelled like oats or wheat, and empty sacks stacked beneath a small window. The whole place had the air of being ready to use at any moment. It was hot from the summer sun, but she supposed it would be chilly by morning.

Teresa was too tired to worry about being discovered or to do anything about getting cold. She felt her way to the pile of burlap sacks. Hoping there were no vermin hiding beneath it, she lay down and pulled her shawl and her cloak over her. She slept nearly as soundly as she had above the
trattoria
the night before. She awoke to voices in the street outside her little haven. She rose hastily. She tidied the pile of burlap, then, cautiously, opened the door to scan the street. Two workmen carrying shovels were just passing. She shrank back and waited until they were out of sight. Then, trying to look as if she belonged there, she marched out into the road with her valise in her hand. She turned toward the
piazza
and went in search of the stop for the Milano coach.

Once she found it, she spent a few precious
lire
for the privilege of sitting inside, away from the dirt thrown up by the horses' heels. She stowed her valise in the carrier behind the coach and went around to the passenger door. The driver was helping a frock-coated gentleman and a lady in a wide-brimmed, many-veiled hat up the high step into the interior. When he stepped back down, he eyed Teresa's dusty skirts and country hat, grinned, and turned away.

Teresa pushed the string of her bag up her elbow, gripped the sides of the door, and clambered up, kicking her skirts free of the step with some difficulty. She stumbled slightly as she achieved the passenger compartment.

The lady in the hat peered at her through her veils. She wore a traveling ensemble of muslin, with an exquisite quilted jacket topped with a ruffle of lace at the throat. Her feet, resting on a corduroy pillow, looked like those of a child. They were encased in soft pale leather with delicately pointed toes and a little sculpted heel. The scent of lavender surrounded her.

Teresa said tentatively,
“Buon giorno, signora.”

For answer, the woman emitted a deliberate, audible sniff. Teresa flared her own nostrils and realized with a flood of embarrassment that her own perfume was that of Giulio's load of fish. Her boots were spattered with the soil of the streets, and her cotton dress was hopelessly wrinkled. The lady's eyes assessed Teresa, taking in her drooping dress, her worn boots, her cheap hat. The gentleman also stared at Teresa, as unabashedly as if she were a piece of goods for sale, until the lady elbowed him and hissed something, and he looked away.