Mozart's Last Aria (14 page)
His voice was formal, as though on this floor he was the imperial librarian, rather than the man who had stammered about his feelings at the top of the stairs. But his eyes were gentle, and so only for a moment was I disconcerted.
“Yes,” I said.
“First I want you to come with me. There’s someone you ought to meet.”
T
he baron’s carriage turned into the entry of a well-appointed house on Bäcker Street. In a fresco above the gate, an unsuspecting cow rested beside a vicious wolf, a propaganda remnant of the wars between us Catholics and the Protestant heretics. As the carriage passed under the entrance, I seemed to hear the painted predator snarl.
Swieten stepped down to the courtyard and held out his hand for me. When I took it, I shed the fear that had come over me with the wolf. On the wall behind him, two carved angels placed a gilded crown on a stone Madonna. Her blank face was accusing as I stood beside a man who had all but declared his love for me.
The baron led me up the steps to the seigneurial apartment. An external gallery ran from the stairs to the door, decorated with curling black wrought iron. He tugged on the bellpull. A peephole in the door slid back, and a pale, rheumy eye frowned through.
Swieten jerked his chin in command. The bolt went back and an old manservant ushered us into a dingy kitchen. I coughed at the foul odor in the room.
The manservant shuffled toward the front of the apartment. As we followed, the sting of sulfur grew stronger in the air.
We came to a darkened room which, I assumed, would have overlooked the street had the shutters been open. My eyes were adjusting to the blackness, when there was a burst of green light.
I cried out, and the baron’s hand was on my arm once again. He removed it almost as quickly as the light faded. His touch shivered through me just as the brief flash had found every corner of the room.
The manservant opened a window to push the shutters back. The sulfurous scent cleared, replaced by the reek of animal feces and damp fodder. The salon was crowded with glass bottles and bubbling liquids.
A short man stepped into the shaft of light from the window. He wore an old-fashioned shoulder-length wig, its white curls framing a plump face that appeared younger than the headpiece. His stubby hands rubbed at a pair of spectacles with a cloth. His eyes bulged from their sockets, as though he were in the last moments of strangulation. He set the glasses on his nose, and his eyes disappeared into the thick lenses.
“Ah, my dear Baron van Swieten,” the man said. “I apologize for any shock I may have caused.”
“What was that eruption?” Swieten said.
“I’m trying to find a cure for toothache.”
“With explosives?” Swieten leaned over the dishes and bottles on the table.
“With light.”
The manservant shoved open the final shutter. Under the table, a dozen rabbits lounged in a cage on a layer of dirty straw.
“Everything is light and nothing more. Your tooth, too,” the short man said, pushing his spectacles higher on his nose. “ ‘Let there be light.’ Our Holy Bible tells us there was no existence before light, except for the spirit of God. This wall, this bench, you yourself—all just condensed light.”
“Hence this experiment?”
“Ah, well, but that flash just now was an extraordinary effect I hadn’t anticipated. It didn’t happen last time, not to that extent. Odd, most odd.” The man reached under his wig and scratched at his neck.
Swieten inclined his head toward me. The little man rushed to kiss my hand.
“Dr. Matthias Sallaba, at your service, madame,” he said. His cheeks were a lurid pink. Dry skin peeled in flakes the size of a thumbnail around his mouth. His face looked like the wall of a poor man’s basement, its plaster peeling away to reveal the brick beneath, mottled by neglect. He saw that I noticed these imperfections and he rubbed his neck again. “I’ve a little mercury poisoning, madame. Don’t worry. It’s not catching. The result of some experiments here in my laboratory.”
“You must halt your experiments, then,” I said.
He laughed and glanced at Swieten, who returned the smile.
“Then I’d never cure the toothache.” Sallaba opened his mouth wide and pointed to his teeth. They were blotched with silvery gray lumps. “Dental amalgams, madame. I preserve my own teeth in my head and, therefore, may eat the sweetest foods with impunity.”
Swieten dropped his hand onto the doctor’s narrow shoulder. “In a few years, my dear Sallaba, you’ll succumb to the poison. But we’ll bury you with all your own teeth.”
The doctor laughed hard, then shivered as though a spasm had gripped him. He clapped his hands. “You’ve come for your brother’s death mask, madame?”
I stared at him. He took my silence for surprise that he had recognized me.
“I didn’t get to know Maestro Mozart until his final days, when his face had puffed up a bit and he wasn’t at his best,” the doctor said, “but it’s clear enough who you are.”
He beckoned me to the corner of the room.
Beside a dangling skeleton, a gray plaster cast of Wolfgang’s face rested on the sideboard. It showed more weight beneath his chin than I remembered, but I noticed the depression between his brows that I shared. The long nose, a little too wide at the end, was like mine, too. He was quiet now, his eyes shut and at peace, but the cast couldn’t mask the suffering he had endured at the end. Suddenly I seemed to see the eyes open and the jaw spring wide to cry out in pain.
I clutched at my chest.
The doctor bent close to the death mask. Swieten laid his hand on my elbow in reassurance.
“I’m quite sure I could’ve helped you, my poor fellow.” Sallaba stroked the mask with a gentle, discolored finger. “They didn’t call me in until the end. By then, it was too late for you.”
“You could’ve helped me?” I said.
“What?” the doctor replied.
“Him, I mean. You could’ve helped
him
.”
“It wouldn’t have been easy, but his regular doctor, Closset, wasn’t up to the job. He’s more or less a medieval physician, like most doctors in Vienna. No idea about new treatments, no real science. All he knew to do was bleeding and cupping. Opened the poor fellow’s veins, weakening him critically, just when he needed all his strength. Tortured him by placing the rims of hot cups on his flesh—drawing forth the bad vapors, he would’ve claimed.”
The death mask called out its pain to me again.
“Dr. Closset attested that my brother expired of ‘acute heated miliary fever,’ ” I said.
Sallaba grinned. “He also told me Herr Mozart had an excess of black bile building up. Our bodies, according to the ancient doctrine of Hippocrates, are balanced between blood, phlegm, and yellow and black bile. Too much of any one of these and we fall sick. Closset decided Maestro Mozart’s black bile was building up in a deposit on his brain. That’s why he bled him and gave him powders that would cause him to throw up—so that the black bile would stop moving to his brain.”
“He made Wolfgang vomit?” I stammered.
“A big jet of it.”
I whimpered. Swieten clicked his tongue and glared at Sallaba.
The doctor scuffed his shoe against the floor, embarrassed. “He died right afterward. You might say Dr. Closset killed him. But there was probably nothing Closset could do. Because of his limited experience with poisons.”
The doctor dribbled a few drops from a stone jar into a pan of liquid that had just come to the boil. The sulfurous smell returned.
“So Wolfgang was— He died by poison?” I said.
“Oh yes, most certainly,” he said. “It’s my specialty, you see. I’ve made a study of poisons, in my capacity as chair of forensic medicine at the university.”
“How was he poisoned?”
“Well, not by mercury. Even Closset could’ve spotted that. Foul breath, cloudy urine, sweats. The same symptoms you find in the average syphilitic who’s had too many doses of quicksilver in his member to counter the pox.”
“Doctor, there’s a lady present,” Swieten said.
Sallaba looked up from the boiling pan, as though he had forgotten I was there. “Quite, quite,” he said. “Poor Mozart was hallucinating at the end. He thought he was at a performance of
The Magic Flute
. He said, ‘Quiet, the Queen of the Night is taking the high F. Listen, she’s singing her second aria. How powerfully she hits the B-flat and holds it.’ All the time staring off beyond the bed as though he were in a theater rather than a death room. Poor fellow.”
“Doctor, how was he poisoned?”
“
Acqua toffana
. Arsenic, lead, and belladonna,” Sallaba said. “Tasteless, colorless. Deadly.”
“How can you be sure?” I asked.
“Well, there was no autopsy, but the observable pathology points to poisoning.”
“And the miliary fever?”
“My manservant has had one of those for some days now. He seems to be all right.” The doctor called down the hallway. “Ignaz, have you been hallucinating? Burning pain in your mouth or throat?”
The rumbling voice of the servant came from the kitchen. “No, sir.”
“Abdominal pain? Muscle spasms?” The doctor turned to me. “I can vouch that he has had no spasms. The old fellow barely moves a muscle. However, if you look at his skin, you’ll see the rash like millet seeds that Dr. Closset entered in the Black List for your brother.”
“The Black List?”
“The death register.” Swieten coughed. “Doctor, something in here irritates my breathing.”
Sallaba sniffed at the boiling liquid in his pan. “Really, that’s interesting.”
“What is it?”
“Just something I’m investigating. It bothers your lungs, does it?”
“Yes. Very much.”
“Good, good. You know it’s quite poisonous over a long period. But I’m intrigued that it had such an immediate effect on you—”
I rushed out of the room, past the doctor’s disheveled bed, toward the kitchen and the door.
“Wait,” the doctor called. “Don’t you want the death mask?”
I leaned over the gallery outside and clutched at my stomach. An eddy of cold wind spiraled down through the courtyard, but the diabolical scent of Sallaba’s poisons clung to my cloak. Swieten’s coachman slouched against the flanks of his lead horse with a pipe in his mouth.
The baron came onto the gallery. “Madame, I apologize for the distress,” he said. “I merely wanted to—”
“I’d like to pray for Wolfgang.” I felt as though the gas circulating in the doctor’s laboratory had filled me with the vapors of Hell itself. What scent enveloped the soul of my poor dead brother? “Take me to the cathedral.”
T
he painted faces of the saints shone with sacred clarity from the niches of the Franciscan Monastery. In the gloomy twilight on Bäcker Street, I wondered if the luminous portraits were an illusion, some symptom of Dr. Sallaba’s poisonous gas.
Swieten made to speak, but he turned his face to the window of his carriage, instead. I struggled against the urge to touch his hand, pulling back my arm as though restraining an excitable pet.
“I don’t like to leave you by yourself,” Swieten said. “It isn’t safe. The men who attacked you in the street last night—”
“No one knows I’m here. I need to be alone for this.”
At the cathedral, the footman gave me his arm. I stepped down into the square. He swung onto the step at the rear of the carriage.
From the window, the baron peered into the half darkness. “I’ll collect you at your inn, madame, at seven,” he said. “We’ll proceed to the Freihaus Theater. They’re giving
The Magic Flute
tonight.”
I inclined my head in assent. “Your Grace is most generous.”
The silver knob of his cane glimmered in the diffuse light from the lantern dangling beside the driver’s seat. He pointed with the stick and his voice became curt. “Through the main door and to the left, by the tomb of Prince Eugene.”
The coach clattered away past the cathedral’s North Tower.
I kept to the shadows as I passed through the high doorway of Vienna’s mother church. I slipped away from the nave to the place where Wolfgang’s funeral Mass had been held.
The sandy brown stone of the Chapel of the Cross was blackened by generations of candles. Behind the altar, a tormented Christ arched away from His cross, struggling against the nails in His hands and feet. He was almost the size of a real man, His head rimmed with thorns made of the same cherrywood as His body. Hair cut from a human beard had been glued to Our Lord’s chin, but its dryness made it more lifeless than the wood.
A draft swept the chapel. It set the lanterns swinging. They lit Our Savior’s face, illuminating His agony, then dropped away to leave Him in shadow, over and over. Like a fairground trick, the light animated the carving. I crossed myself twice.
The stone floor was cold when I lowered my knees to it. I couldn’t hold Christ’s tortured gaze. Where had Wolfgang’s coffin lain when Swieten and Constanze brought my poor brother here for the funeral service? Years of guilt pulsed through every part of me. I shivered with a quiet sob.
For my greed and for the sin of jealousy, I begged forgiveness. Begged the Christ on the cross. Begged Wolfgang.
After our father’s death, I had inherited all the money saved from the tours of Europe Wolfgang and I made as children. Our father had invested well, and it was a substantial sum. He also left expensive furnishings, musical instruments, and a hoard of gold watches and jeweled snuffboxes that were gifts from the nobility of all Europe.
Wolfgang had been the main attraction during those early tours. He ought to have had his share. Though our father disinherited him, even so I could’ve sent half the money to Wolfgang. Yet I begrudged my brother his freedom. I convinced myself he should pay for it with his inheritance. He had left Salzburg for a life of accomplishment and fulfillment in the imperial capital. He had abandoned me, my talents ignored and my prospects for a good marriage dimming as I entered my late twenties. We had been close as children, but I had cut myself off from him.
I looked up at the crucifix. I betrayed Wolfgang for money, as Judas had sold one greater than him who had loved him.
I twisted the rosary of dried seeds from the Holy Land. Did I deprive Wolfgang of money that could’ve made him secure? I thought of the debts Constanze mentioned. Wolfgang had been living beyond his means, but I knew it wasn’t our financial dispute that had hurt my brother. I had done something much worse than to cheat him out of a few thousand forints. I had denied him the last remnant of the family that had nurtured his talent and taught him about love.
Another sob caught at my chest.
Intercede for me, Virgin, with your son, my Savior
, I thought.
The lamplight rocked across the face of Christ. I saw His pain, as He called to His Father whom He thought had forsaken Him. His passion was alive and it was my sacred duty to bear it, like the agony on the gray death mask Dr. Sallaba displayed in his room of poisons.
I told Holy Mary my vow: to face any suffering, any hazard, so that I might make amends to my brother. I crossed myself as I rose to leave the chapel.
Outside in the square, someone exclaimed at the new degree of chill in the air. Another man laughed at his companion’s discomfort.
It was night now. But I had no thought of the danger that had seemed to hang in the darkness after I was attacked with Gieseke. I was calm and decided.
A shepherd drove a small herd of sheep past the cathedral. He called to a shaggy, lumbering wolf dog, which nudged the bleating animals toward Schuler Street. Then I was alone in the drifting lantern light.
I pulled my cloak around me and set out for my inn. My thoughts were clear now. I had spoken to Wolfgang in prayer. That night at the opera I felt sure he would reply.
