Mozart’s Blood

by Louise Marley

  He grasped one of the branches to pull himself to his feet. When he pushed out of his shelter, a little drift of white flowers showered his bare shoulders.

  The rising sun had not yet burned away the morning mist. His feet brushed dew from the patchy grass. He looked about for some sort of habitation. The grove stretched into the fog, the ghostly shapes of the trees fading into the gray. Birds he couldn’t see twittered among the trees.

  His head ached ferociously, and the sour aftertaste of wine, bitter with opium, clung to his tongue. Not knowing what else to do, Ughetto turned toward the morning sun and crept forward.

  When he heard the footsteps crashing toward him, his shaking legs collapsed, and he huddled, whimpering, on the wet grass.

  It was Luigi’s hard hand that plucked him from the ground, yanking on his thin arm and shaking him as a dog shakes a rat. “Ecco!” he grunted. “Found you at last.”

  Ughetto squealed and struggled against Luigi’s grasp, but Luigi hauled him up and threw him over his shoulder as if he were no more than a sack of flour.

  “Paid good money for you, lad, and you’re going whether you like it or not,” Luigi said.

  Ughetto kicked his feet, once, but Luigi slapped the back of his thigh, a hard blow on his cold flesh. With a sob, Ughetto went limp.

  Fifteen minutes’ walk brought them back to the villa. Nonna had been waiting in the atrium, watching for them. She wore bandages on both her scrawny forearms, and she had a folded blanket in her hands. When Luigi set Ughetto on his feet, Nonna held the blanket out at arm’s length. The boy stood, swaying, as Luigi draped the rough wool around his shoulders. Nonna, keeping her distance, shooed Ughetto into an inner room of the villa.

  The room was small and bare, with a shutterless window that gave a view of the bay. One of the other boys was there, too, dressed and clean. His eyes seemed a little hollow, but his cheeks were pink and his short black hair neatly combed.

  When Nonna shut the door, he came close to Ughetto’s chair and bent to look into his face. “Che successa?” he asked softly. “Where did you go?”

  Ughetto shook his head. “I don’t know.” He sniffled. “I woke up in an orange grove.” He scrubbed at his tears with the heel of one hand and looked about him at the simple blackened wood furniture and whitewashed walls. A little fire burned in a grate. There were three cots, but only one had been slept in. “Where’s the other one? The other boy?”

  The boy straightened. “They won’t tell me. He didn’t come back, after.” He backed away and sat on one of the black chairs. “I thought you were gone, too. I thought you died.”

  Ughetto’s heart thudded suddenly as it all came back to him. He recalled the tub, the warm water, the surgeon’s knife. He remembered screams, but he was sure they weren’t his. His nose twitched at the memory of the scents of blood and poppies and fear.

  He shivered and pulled the blanket tighter around his shoulders. He didn’t want to look down at his body, to see what had been done to him. No one had told him whether he would look different, or simply be different. Forever.

  “Do you hurt?” the other boy asked. He was older, perhaps nine or ten.

  “N-no,” Ughetto said, a little shakily. “I’m cold, and—” His tears threatened again, and he swallowed a sob. “I wish my mamma were here.”

  There was a little pause, and then the older boy asked quietly, “Do you sing?”

  Ughetto stared at him, not understanding.

  “Sing,” the boy repeated. “Do you have a good voice? Is that why they chose you?”

  Ughetto said miserably, “I don’t know.”

  The other boy sighed and leaned back in his chair. “I don’t know, either.”

  The other boy’s name was Maurizio, but he said everyone called him Mauro. He and Ughetto stayed in the villa for three more days, sleeping on the cots in the small room. Mauro said Luigi and Nonna would keep them until they were certain they weren’t going to sicken and die. Ughetto asked how Mauro knew so much, and he answered that there had been a castrato in his town, one who had suffered the knife, but never developed a voice. Mauro said the other men laughed at him, and the women sniffed when he passed them, and made jokes behind his back. He spent his life doing tasks no one else wanted to do, cleaning privies and hauling garbage, simply for the privilege of being allowed to stay in the town.

  “That’s what will happen,” Mauro said glumly, “if we can’t sing. There’s nothing else for us to do.”

  “Why did your family sell you, then, Mauro?” Ughetto asked in a small voice.

  “Same reason as yours. Money.”

  Ughetto wanted to protest this, to say that his mamma would never have sold him, but even as he opened his mouth to say the words, he understood that it wasn’t true. The tavern brought in very little money, especially since his babbo had died. His mamma might have known no other way to support her family but to sell her little son. And for months now, his mother and his grandmother had behaved differently toward him. It seemed to him it had begun the night they had waited on the docks for the squid fishermen, but maybe it began when they knew they were going to send him away.

  How could they do that, he wondered? Surely his nonna, at least, loved him. It had seemed so, before. But perhaps she had stopped. And if a grandmother’s love could stop, Ughetto thought bleakly, then anything could happen.

  The thought pierced his heart like the twist of a knife beneath his breastbone, a pain much worse than that between his legs. That hurt had already dulled to a distant aching. Mauro seemed to suffer much more from it. He winced when he sat down, and he moved carefully when he was on his feet.

  Luigi and Nonna left them alone for the most part. They never examined them, never checked to see if their wounds were healing. They fed them well, bringing trays to the room, giving them clean clothes and warm bedding. On their last day at the villa, Luigi carried their dinner into the room and set it down, then went back to stand in the doorway. “Pack your things,” he said. “We’re leaving in the morning.” He was gone, the door closed and locked, before they could ask him where they were going.

  Mauro took his plate from the tray. “They’re afraid of you,” he said to Ughetto.

  “What? Who’s afraid?”

  “Luigi and Nonna. They watch you as if they expect something strange to happen. As if they don’t know what you might do.”

  Ughetto stared, dry-mouthed, at Mauro.

  Mauro persisted. “Why do they do that? What happened?”

  “I don’t know,” Ughetto said.

  “You did something, didn’t you? Before you ran out into the orange grove?”

  Ughetto’s voice rose and thinned, a child’s plaintive tone. “I don’t know,” he said again.

  “You must know!” Mauro said. “What do you remember?”

  Ughetto gave a sigh from deep in his own small soul. “I remember the knife, and the water…and then nothing.” He didn’t want to talk about slashing at Luigi, and at Nonna. He didn’t want to tell Mauro how the surgeon had fled, in case Mauro, too, would be afraid of him. He turned his head to hide his omissions. Mauro, though he barely knew him, was all he had.

  Ughetto was glad, when morning came, to leave the villa behind. He and Mauro settled on a pile of straw in the back of an oxcart. Luigi and Nonna saw them off with smiles and waves, but Ughetto caught the weighted looks that passed between them as the cart driver whipped up his oxen.

  As the cart pulled away, heading north on the road that wound from Napoli to Roma, Nonna picked at her bandages with her fingers and blew out her lips. She turned back to the villa before the cart had rounded the first bend in the road.

  Ughetto, at eight, was the youngest of the twelve boys at the scuola. The oldest was seventeen, tall and slender, smooth of cheek and sweet of voice. He was called Leonino, the young lion, and he would soon be off to San Marco to sing in its choir. He strode proudly about the music rooms and the salotto with his nose tilted up to remind everyone of his impor
tance.

  The scuola sat on a pine-topped hill east of the city. It was an airy structure of stucco and stone, with a lavish view of the immense dome of St. Peter’s below its sun-washed courtyard. For months Ughetto felt reasonably happy there. His longing for his home and his family subsided to a dull if persistent ache, felt mostly in the lonely hours of darkness. He slept on a cot next to Mauro’s in the dormitory. There was plenty of fish and bread and olives to eat at long tables beneath the arbor of grapevines in the courtyard. He had no chores except his music lessons, which surprised him.

  He was the smallest of all the students. There were boys already coming into their height, of course, the older ones, but even the younger ones were bigger, stouter, taller than Ughetto. He fell into the habit of hiding himself when the rest of the boys bathed. They all washed their hair and scrubbed their bodies in an enormous sink of marble, laughing, teasing, splashing each other. Ughetto waited so that he could bathe alone, even though the water was not so clean when everyone else was done. He didn’t even bathe with Mauro.

  Once Leonino, leaving the bath, caught Ughetto just coming for his turn. “What’s this, little one?” he cried. “Afraid to take off your clothes with the rest of us?”

  Ughetto shrank away from him, gripping the bath sheet around his middle. “I just—I don’t like—” he stammered.

  Mauro appeared as if from nowhere, stepping between Leonino and Ughetto. He wore a bath sheet as well. His chest was dark and smooth, and his arms already showed curves of muscle. “Leave him alone,” he said to Leonino. “He’s shy.”

  The older boy laughed. “Better get over that, little baby. None of us has much left to be shy about!” He stripped off his own towel and danced naked in a circle around Ughetto, cupping what was left of his genitalia in one hand and waving the towel in the other like a flag.

  Ughetto averted his eyes from the sight of Leonino’s mutilated testicles.

  Each of the boys looked different. Some had little empty sacks hanging between their legs. Others had irregular flaps of flaccid skin that stopped at the very top of their thighs. Some, like Mauro, had nothing left at all, their surgery as smooth and effective as if the entire apparatus had been snipped off. Ughetto’s fingers had told him that his own testicles were small and flat. He found them shameful.

  Mauro said, “Go away, Leonino. Ughetto can bathe when he wants to.”

  Leonino danced away, wearing his bath sheet like a cape, snorting with laughter. Mauro folded his arms. His hair was still wet, dripping down his neck. “Ughetto. Do you want me to stay with you?”

  Ughetto shook his head. “No, thank you, Mauro.”

  Mauro gave him a curious look.

  “I’m sorry,” Ughetto mumbled. “We just never—even in the sea, we were never naked.”

  Mauro grinned at him. “That’s it, then,” he said cheerfully. “It’s because you were raised by women. We were all boys, and we swam naked in the river all the time. It was the only bath I ever had at home.”

  “But would you do it now, Mauro?” Ughetto asked, staring at his bare toes. “Now that—I mean, now that they—”

  The smile left Mauro’s voice. “Maybe not,” he said sadly. “It was different when we all looked the same.”

  “I don’t want people looking at me,” Ughetto said.

  “I know.” Mauro turned to the door, saying over his shoulder, “I’ll bet you get used to it, in time. I’ll watch the door for you till then.”

  Grateful and relieved, Ughetto waited until the door shut behind his friend before he laid the towel aside and went down the steps into the water.

  An old castrato called Brescha taught the boys scales and intervals. He would often point to the dome of the Basilica and say, “There! See that, ragazzi? Work hard, and one day perhaps you can sing in the Cappella Sistina, as I did. You can follow in the footsteps of the great Brescha.” He stroked his enormous belly, and his eyes grew distant. “They say they still speak of me at St. Peter’s. They talk of my voice and my art.”

  When they were alone in the dormitory, some of the boys jeered at Brescha. They laughed at his spidery legs, the swell of his stomach, his quavering soprano.

  Mauro never joined in the jesting. His eyes were shadowed when he listened to the old man, and his lips paled with anxiety. One day when they were alone, Ughetto touched his arm, and said, “Mauro. Are you so sure you won’t be able to sing?”

  Mauro gave him a bleak look. “I can’t hear the scales,” he said.

  “Yes, you can,” Ughetto asked, tightening his fingers. “I’ll help you. They’re easy.”

  “Easy for you,” the older boy said. He shook off Ughetto’s hand. “I hear you sing them, and your voice is true.”

  He was right. Ughetto’s voice, a sweet, clear soprano, surprised everyone with its reach and its flexibility. The masters were pleased with him, and he was already beginning to learn turns and roulades, to study the patterns of recitatives and the simplest of arias. The more he learned, the more confident he felt. But Mauro…

  “It might be all right for you,” Mauro said then. “But for me—” He turned to stare down the hill at the city of Rome sprawling at their feet. “I can’t hear the scales, and my voice is sour. No one will hire me. They will put me to work in the brothels,” he said bitterly. “A eunuch.”

  “No!” Ughetto said. “No! You don’t have to do that! I will take you with me, wherever that is. You can be my serv—I mean, you will be my assistant!”

  Mauro turned his back. “I will be no one’s slave,” he said, and he stalked away, his shoulders stiff. Ughetto wanted to run after him, but Brescha called his name, and he had to go and take his lesson. The next time he saw his friend, they spoke only of casual things. Mauro never mentioned the brothels again.

  It was only a few weeks later that Mauro disappeared from the scuola. Ughetto rose one morning as usual and found his friend’s cot empty, its blankets stripped. Mauro’s small possessions had vanished from the dressing table they shared.

  Ughetto went to breakfast, hoping to find Mauro at the table, but he wasn’t there. He asked Brescha what had become of him, but Brescha wouldn’t tell him. He begged the other masters to tell him where Mauro had gone, but no one would speak of it. Their faces closed, and they turned their backs. They reminded him of Nonna at the villa, turning her back before the oxcart was even out of her sight.

  When he was free from his lessons, Ughetto wandered to the courtyard to stare down the road toward the city. He had lost his home, his mamma, and his sisters. Now his only friend had left without a word. Or had been sent away.

  He imagined Mauro would have said he had his music, that he should be content. But Ughetto felt freshly bereft. He wondered what else there could be for life to take from him.

  8

  Ma il giusto cielo volle ch’io ti trovassi…

  But a just heaven willed that I should find you…

  —Donna Elvira, Act One, Scene Two, Don Giovanni

  Octavia showered, and vocalized, and ate the breakfast brought up for her, though it might have been straw for all that she could taste it. She dressed casually because today would be the first staging rehearsal. She wore a black cashmere sweater with a scarlet silk scarf around her neck. She pulled on a pair of lined wool slacks that gave her room to move, and she chose her most comfortable shoes. The rain still pattered against the windows. As she reached into her closet for her Burberry, she caught sight of herself in the mirrored door. She heard Ugo’s voice in her mind. “Oh, bella, not that scarf!” She grimaced and went to the bureau to take out one in a neutral silver-gray.

  Ugo had become the arbiter of her taste a very long time ago. She supposed she had come to rely on him more than was good for either of them. But after such a long time alone, she had welcomed someone who cared about what she did and what she wore.

  As she ran her scales, he often would say, “Not so high this early!” She wished he were here to remonstrate with her now. She moderated her v
ocalize as he would have wanted, saving the top notes for when they mattered.

  She would mark the rehearsal, of course. It was silly—amateurish—to use full voice for staging rehearsals. When someone boasted that Callas never marked rehearsals, Octavia had to restrain herself from snapping, “Oh, yes? And how long did her voice last?” The sophistry irritated her. And it was a terrible example to extol to young singers.

  She felt a faint stirring of thirst as she went down the stairs to the lobby, and a thrill of unease made goose bumps rise on her arms. She thrust the feeling aside, telling herself it was only anxiety over Ugo. She should be all right for days yet. Surely, sometime today, he would show up at the theater, grinning ruefully, telling some tale of getting lost, or meeting someone, or having forgotten to warn her he might be away.

  Octavia leaned back in the limousine seat and watched the rain-drenched buildings of Milan spin by. Ugo had every right to disappear if he wanted to. Theirs was a relationship forged by unique bonds, and it was utterly voluntary.

  But she had come to depend on him. She had abandoned the old ways and settled, with grateful relief, into the way of life Ugo made possible. She had begun to feel protected, in a way she had not done since her father’s death, which was a very long time ago indeed.

  Teresa had had no choice in the way she led her life. Zdenka Milosch, Countess of Bohemia, had seen to that.

  Octavia closed her eyes, remembering the sharp features of her seductress. She had seen Zdenka Milosch only a few times since those early days in Prague. Except for Ugo, the Countess was the only person who knew Octavia’s secret. Teresa’s secret.

  After that evening with Mozart, the night of the premiere, Teresa Saporiti had avoided Countess Milosch when she could, but it wasn’t easy. At Signor Bondini’s invitation, the Countess attended rehearsals and performances whenever she wished. The theater company depended upon her seemingly limitless funds and endless lists of highborn acquaintances. And Countess Zdenka Milosch liked keeping a close eye on her investment.

  The Countess had an armchair set for her in the wings, from which she watched the entire second performance of Giovanni. As Teresa made her exit after the first scene, she rose from her seat and seized the young singer’s arm. “Lovely, my dear,” she murmured into her ear. “Passionate.”