Mozart's Last Aria Part 22

At Magdalena's side, Paradies moved her lips with the Latin of the choir. Her hand ran over the pew in front of her, as if improvising on a keyboard.

I thought of Wolfgang's riddle, scribbled at the end of his sonata. Did it refer to Paradies? He had written of sightlessness and of Paradise. But he also wrote that "She repents her blindness as she is always penitent." I had yet to see Paradies repent of anything.

If he had intended admittance to his new Masonic lodge to be based on talent, Maria Theresia von Paradies was a musician second only perhaps to Wolfgang himself. No doubt he also sought a woman of determination. If the Princess in The Magic Flute had doubted herself, she'd never have made it. She won her place among the priests at the end of the opera because of her absolute firmness. That was a quality Paradies possessed to a degree no less prodigious than her talent at the keyboard.

When her sister sang of the eternal light shining on the saints, Constanze sobbed. I laid my arm across her meager back. The choir brought the Requiem to a close.

Four porters in rough coats hoisted Gieseke's coffin onto their shoulders. The body's bony parts, perhaps the head, the elbows, the ankles, rattled against the unpolished wood. Like all peasants, the porters still suffered the old terror of being buried alive. They hesitated, wanting to be sure that Gieseke hadn't revived. Even if he were living I was sure he'd have been quiet in his casket until the earth closed over him. Fear had seeped like sweat through his pores. Death would've seemed the only safety and rest for him.

I helped Constanze to the door of the church. Swieten took her other arm. The hea.r.s.e rolled past the entrance, south toward St. Marx Cemetery a few leagues outside the city. Gieseke would rest near Wolfgang.

Constanze wept against Schikaneder's chest. Singers from the theater surrounded my sister-in-law. Though the service had been for Gieseke, Wolfgang's music had drawn Constanze's grief once more to their attention. Now that the body was on its way to the grave, everyone came to the little woman in black with a consoling hug, as though she were the widow of all the corpses in Vienna.

The music had finished, but I continued to hear it. I turned back into the church to catch its last echoes.

The pews were empty. Most of the candles had been snuffed. I pa.s.sed once more over the Pergen family tomb. The slab moved with a gentle tilt beneath my foot. I hurried onto the firmer flagstones around it.

The chatter of the opera singers receded in the square outside. They'd take Constanze home, or perhaps to an inn. I had no wish to go with them. Within the silence of the church, I detected the beautiful strains of Wolfgang's Requiem. It was as if the angels behind the altar chanted it in a register audible only to me.

A voice came through the church. I listened until it separated from the angels. It was a woman singing. I tracked it toward the north transept. She sang a melody from Wolfgang's Requiem.

I came to a worn stone staircase. From below, the woman sang the Domine Jesu Christe: "Lord Jesus Christ, King of Glory, deliver the souls of all the faithful departed from the pains of h.e.l.l and the deep pit."

From a niche beside the stairs I took a candle and lit it on the flame of an oil lamp. I followed the voice down into the dark.

Chapter 30.

Let them not fall into darkness."

The voice wasn't quite a soprano and the singer made no attempt at polish. She was all expression, as though her emotion and faith gave birth to the music that had, in fact, come from the pen of my dying brother.

"The holy standard-bearer, Michael, brings them back into the holy light," she sang.

My candle flickered in a draft at the bottom of the stairs. I cupped my hand about it and stepped into a long, vaulted crypt.

The air was chilly and dusty dry. Low, narrow containers crowded the floor. I thought to call a greeting, but I didn't wish to interrupt the music.

"We offer sacrifice and prayers of praise to thee, O Lord."

I touched the nearest of the containers. Dust and metal, a hinge.

I put down my candle to lift the lid of the box. Reaching inside, my palm rested on something dry and stiff. I took the candle in my other hand and held it close.

A face. Empty eyes and a lipless grin.

I stumbled backward, my palm upright before me as though to fend off the corpse should it rise from its casket.

But the body lay still. The remnants of a woman's wig encased the head, stiff and russet like autumn leaves. Her hands were crossed on her chest in lace gloves.

I tripped over an uneven flagstone and reached out to steady myself. The wall spread its cold along my arm. Beside my hand in the shape of a cross were two long thigh bones.

I spun away. My shin struck the nearest coffin. It rocked on the timber blocks that elevated it from the floor in case of a flood. Then it tipped against the next one. The caskets tumbled along the row. As they fell, the bones within snapped with a sound like running feet in summer undergrowth.

The singing sounded farther from me now. "Let them pa.s.s, O Master, from death to the life you promised to Abraham and his offspring."

I hurried down the row of coffins, trying to halt their fall. My head struck a low span in the stone vault and I dropped back into a niche in the wall. Pain ringed my brain and bore down on it.

I opened my eyes. The niche was stacked high with pelvic bones. The first dead of the crypt, moved aside to make room for new corpses. I screamed with all my terror of death.

My shriek subsided into short breaths.

Silence beneath the church.

The coffins had come to rest. Only the dust that choked the air showed they had been disturbed.

The singing, too, had ended.

I held my candle before me, my arm locked as if I might extend it far into the darkness to light up the whole crypt. I turned to my right and left, staring and blind.

A footstep sounded, not close by. I spun toward it, but heard nothing more.

"Who's there?" I called.

Another step echoed through the vault. In my panic, I thought that a corpse, liberated from its coffin, had risen. I imagined it stumbling through the dark with limbs unaccustomed to walking, like a tottering baby.

The steps came closer.

I put the corpses out of my mind. I had been attacked only two days before. I had living, murderous men to fear, before I faced the spirits of the vengeful dead.

My arm weakened. I lowered the candle.

Measured and slow, the steps seemed still some way off.

Then she was before me.

"You'd do better without that pathetic little light," she said.

I started, and lifted the candle once more. Paradies licked her thick lips and let her mouth hang open.

I glanced at the candle and frowned.

"I can smell the burning tallow," she said, "if that's what you're wondering."

I stammered, "I heard you singing. I couldn't see-"

"Down here you're as blind as I am." She swept past me and extinguished the flame of my candle with her thumb and forefinger.

I cried out. She grabbed my wrist and twisted it so that the useless stub of the candle dropped to the floor. She wrenched at my arm.

"Come with me, d.a.m.n it," she said.

I blundered along behind her. My knees struck the sharp corners of the coffins. I tripped over unseen tools, left against the wall by workmen. She hauled me deeper into the crypt.

"Before they built the graveyards outside the walls of the city, the wealthy were buried right beneath the churches," she said. "That's who you see around you. Hundreds of n.o.bles and leading citizens, dried out and preserved by the air down here."

"It was as if the woman inside the coffin was screaming at me."

Paradies clicked her tongue. "The burial workers tie up the jaws of the dead before they put them in the coffins. If you thought you saw one screaming, it was only that the string around her head had slipped and her mouth had dropped open."

She thrust my hand downward. She ran it along a leathery surface. Even in the dark I knew it was the skin of one of the corpses. I struggled, but she was stronger. "Feel that? There?" she said. She rubbed my palm over the long bone of the thigh.

"It curves. It isn't straight," I said.

"Broken, but badly set. This one must've been thin and malnourished, even though she surely would've been rich to be buried down here."

My fingers explored the brittle leg, until I realized that Paradies no longer held me there. I pulled away.

"Now everyone but the emperor's family goes to a common grave. The new burial laws. You can have as many Ma.s.ses said for you as you're prepared to pay for, but you'll still be interred next to a poor man."

My breath shivered through my teeth.

"Don't be squeamish. Poor old Gieseke would be pleased to be buried in a cemetery where no distinction is made by rank. Wolfgang, too," she said. "That's what the Masons want, isn't it? Equality. A pity they have to die to get it."

She took me by the shoulder and led me in a new direction. "They stopped putting bodies down here a decade ago, but I still come. I know them all from the inscriptions on the metal plates of their coffins. From the touch of their fingers, the bones of their cheeks and foreheads."

We moved fast. The wall was on our right. I thought I was beginning to see things, dark against darker. I wondered if that was how the world appeared to the blind woman who rushed me through the crypt.

She halted. I stubbed my foot against a step.

"You'll find a lantern down to your left," she said.

I lifted a small glowing oil lamp and flipped back the guard. It cast a long shaft of yellow light. The room, which had become somehow clear to me in the dark, receded. I saw only the single coffin before us.

"Metastasio," Paradies said.

I directed the lamp toward her. Perspiration stood out on her upper lip. She must have detected something of the lamp's glow, because she gestured impatiently for me to turn it back on the coffin.

It was a tall pine casket painted with lutes and skulls garlanded with olive branches. At its side, there stood a copper urn. "The Imperial Poet?" I thought of the expensive edition of the Italian's poetry presented to Wolfgang by the Milanese count.

"Fifty years as court poet. Wrote the texts of a few dozen operas, which were set to music by countless composers, including your brother. And now there he is-a gutted corpse."

"Gutted?"

"In the urn beside his casket, you'd find the heart that was the source of his poetry and the tongue that declaimed it. A few other organs, too."

"A great genius," I said.

"Now his guts are in a fancy bucket."

I gave her a sharp look. She flicked her wrist in dismissal, as though she had seen me.

"What've you been doing since you came to Vienna?" she said.

"I've had some business to conduct."

She sneered. "Ridiculous woman."

"I want to know who killed my brother," I said.

My words came back at me off the vaulted ceilings. I had spoken louder than I expected.

Paradies sucked in her cheeks. "Do you want your innards in a pot, too?"

"Are you threatening me?"

"Dear, I became blind when I was three. For a while I was bitter about it. Then I understood. In that time I'd seen enough of this dreadful world for it to live before my eyes forever. Without the distraction of sight, I see things as they truly are." She spoke through tight, emphatic lips. "I cared too much about your brother to let you go the way of the corpses down here. You know what you should do? Live with Wolfgang. Don't die with him."

Her stare was ferocious. I wondered how close Paradies had been to Wolfgang.

"Why am I in danger?" I said. "Is it the Grotto?"

"The what?"

"The Grotto. The Masonic lodge he was founding. It was you he intended to make its first woman member. I'm sure of it. But perhaps you don't want anyone to find out about it. Because of the emperor's restrictions on the order."

Paradies laughed. "If that was Wolfgang's intention, I'd have turned him down."

"I don't understand."

"I've made my own way in the world. In spite of my blindness. In spite of being a woman. I've supported myself by working as a musician. I've toured London and Paris, earned big commissions. If I seem scornful of you, it's because you had a talent at least equal to mine but you never broke free."

"I had to look after my father."

"True, I was never enc.u.mbered by anyone as domineering as that old b.a.s.t.a.r.d."

"Madame." I stamped my foot.

"I'm not genteel enough for you? You'd prefer me to say it in French, perhaps? Your father tried to limit even Wolfgang's career, because he wanted to be taken care of in his old age. Your brother barely made his escape. You didn't stand a chance."

I leaned against the wall. It was cold on my neck.