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The court of Emperor Joseph II was full of birds. Peacock daemons casually trailed their tail feathers over floors of rare wood and imported carpets; brightly colored songbirds cheeped sweet accompaniment to social chatter or perched in some of the more architectural hairstyles sported by court ladies; and every room of Schönbrunn Palace where the emperor might go sported an ersatz branch, sometimes ceramic but generally gilded, for Joseph II’s golden eagle.
Among these, Benedetta did not fit in. In a palace of birds, a cat is notably grounded, predatory, domesticated; and amongst the colors of that court, a black and white cat was like a milkmaid at a ball. Still, this was probably for the best. She and Salieri knew that they were only hirelings in this glittering world; it wouldn’t do to wear ambition openly, as a gaudy bird of paradise on one’s shoulder. The Emperor was fond of telling Salieri, when he made any sly or critical remark, that he was being cattivo—naughty, wicked—and every time he would look at Benedetta in apparent hope that everyone would appreciate the pun. Salieri always smiled and bowed his head as was appropriate to his station.
He was surprised, then, to learn that Mozart’s daemon also took the form of a cat. Mozart had toured the courts of Europe as a boy, and while he played duets with his sister and flirted childishly with princesses and poked wicked musical fun at those he considered untalented, his daemon slithered and scuttled and flew, taking the shape of anything quick and beautiful and rare.
Perhaps that was just for show. At the party where Salieri first encountered him—Salieri concealed by a high-backed chair and Benedetta relaxed on his lap, purring with vicarious pleasure as he enjoyed a crema alla mascarpone—it was undeniably a cat that followed on the heels of the young man and woman tumbling into the library, the woman with something like a ferret or a stoat on her shoulder. The man chased, teased, poked, and got her prone on the ground, while the daemons played at hunting, flirting with danger. The cat was a big orange female, with thick fur that protruded between the pads of her toes and made a luxurious plume of her tail. It was not certain that she, or any of the amorous little party, noticed there was another person in the room. When Benedetta snuck a peek, the orange cat didn’t look up from her pursuit of the little mustelid, but she flicked her ears back in Salieri and Benedetta’s direction, quick cat language for I heard something happening over there.
“Una gatta arancione,” Benedetta pointed out to Salieri later, as they were walking home. “She probably thinks she’s special, but orange females aren’t as rare as people think.”
“Living on farms and in back city streets all over Europe, I suppose,” Salieri said. “But it doesn’t matter. If she had settled as a black swan, or a white tiger, it would still be no miracle.”
They knew they only were distracting each other. Thinks she’s special, no miracle, as if the appearance of Mozart’s daemon were what mattered. But they had heard his music from the other room before they left the party—the swelling Adagio with the pulsing winds, the aching sweetness of the oboe, the release when it passed the melody to the clarinet, all of it so vivid as to be almost indecent, a gorgeous realization of a sorrow so great it could only belong to God.
At their first official meeting, when Mozart came to the palace for the first time, Salieri composed and played a little “Welcome March” on the fortepiano for his arrival, with Benedetta sitting upright by the bench, her tail wrapped neatly around her feet and the tip of it bouncing just a bit, tastefully, unobtrusively, in time with the music. Her back and Salieri’s shoes were equally spotless and glossy-black.
Mozart bounded in with his arms full of his fluffy, shockingly orange daemon, and Salieri did not pause in his playing, but he could tell that the hairs along Benedetta’s spine had gone up. Introductions were made; the orange cat was set on the floor, where she yawned and reached out her front paws in a stretch, careless of the priceless carpet she was clawing, and displayed her asshole to half the members of the Austrian court.
“Well,” said Emperor Joseph, eyebrows up. “There it is.”
Benedetta looked away, primly declining to respond like a real cat, as if reminding the assembled courtiers that she would not comport herself like a base animal; she was a human soul, thank you very much. Nobody noticed. Mozart greeted Salieri with a flood of Italian, professed delight to the emperor in a flood of French, and then the emperor left them alone, as if there were some musical business they needed to discuss.
“That’s a charming little march you wrote for me,” Mozart said, and he tossed aside the sheet music Salieri had gifted him and played the whole thing from memory; and then, audaciously, fixed it, improved it, not only reining in the part of the melody that Salieri had not been happy with but playing on from there, expanding and extending the simple little march into something gorgeous and lively.
Salieri listened with a stiff spine and a frozen expression, in embarrassment and a creeping sense of offense. He did not at first realize how Benedetta yearned toward the music, first closing her eyes to listen and then opening them again in astonishment, taking a few steps forward and stretching her neck to get a look at what Mozart was doing on the keyboard. He had rapid, assured fingers, and he giggled a little when he played something especially inventive or pretty. He finished off the improvisation with a proper finale, a cadence and a flourish, and only then did any of them realize that Benedetta was watching him with her front paws up on the piano bench.
Salieri coughed; Benedetta dropped to the floor, mortified, and trotted back to his side. Mozart could have let the moment go, like someone well brought up, like a professional; but instead he laughed and said, “No need to be shy! Mechtilde does the same thing. If I realize she’s gone a little far it’s always because of something she wants to hear better. She’s my ears.”
Mechtilde was grooming herself next to the piano, but at the mention of her name she flicked her ears toward Salieri. There was no escaping the implication that she had heard him on that previous encounter, but Salieri was wound too tight in his embarrassment to address it. He bowed a little instead and said, “It’s an excellent ear you have. Excuse me, I must be going.”
Mozart stood back and gestured to the keyboard as if in invitation. “So soon? Won't you try a variation?”
Benedetta seemed tempted, but the piano-playing fingers belonged to Salieri, who was already backing away. “Another time, perhaps. I trust you will find yourself very welcome in Vienna.” He left in such haste that his daemon had to run a little to keep up with him.
How was it to be borne? Since he struck his childhood bargain with God, Salieri had taken certain truths for granted: that his piety would be rewarded, that his music would improve with practice, that if the Lord was pleased with the works Salieri composed in His name then he would receive the blessings of prosperity and respect.
And none of it was untrue! Salieri was respected, prosperous, improving with time; and it was ash in his mouth next to the sublimity of a single melody from Mozart’s pen. Salieri could not lie to himself about this genius, he could not pretend that Mozart was simply a peer, when his own soul responded to Mozart’s music in a way she never had to Salieri’s.
She did not, could not, lie to him about it, and the truth lay between them uncomfortable and unspoken while they tried to puff each other up. At home, when he was meant to be writing, Salieri puttered about and stroked Benedetta’s back for reassurance and told her, “I cannot in good conscience recommend Mozart to teach the princess music when he is really a pianist, not a vocal coach.”
“A just excuse,” Benedetta replied, too honest to call it a good reason, and neither of them mentioned how she had closed her eyes and purred when Mozart played a few lines of his new opera and asked for Salieri’s opinion. He went back to his work, and she encouraged him as always—kept time when he played things through, reminded him of revisions he had intended to make—but none of the music he wrote that day provoked the same reaction.
Salieri was not proud, afterward or indeed at the time, of his attempted seduction of Frau Mozart. She was genuinely loyal to her husband, but that wasn't necessary to make the whole business a farce, because she so transparently did not like Salieri. It would have been one thing if he had tempted her, charmed her, seduced her in the true meaning of the word. He tried, but all he managed was to coerce her. She responded to his proposition first with shock, her daemon staring right into Salieri's eyes—yes, it was definitely a stoat, tiny yet predatory—and then with cold compliance. She shamed him. Salieri sent her home untouched. Benedetta sat down at his feet and began to wash her face, attempting to calm her agitation, and said without looking up at him, “She’s not the one you want.”
“Quite right,” he said. He applied his attempted seduction to Katherina Cavalieri, with more felicitous results, and studiously ignored any notion that this was not what his daemon had meant.
There are limits to how far one can ignore or disbelieve one’s own soul.
At The Magic Flute, Salieri sat with Mozart in the audience and tried to hold himself at a distance, to focus on the nonsense of the story, the faulty technique of the singers, the cheap scenery meant to evoke ancient palaces and sacred temples, the general tawdriness of the vaudeville hall and lowbrow crowd. Mozart's librettist had been pressed into service to play one of the characters, a bird-man, even though his own daemon wasn't a bird—it was something shuffling about at his feet under a sheet, as if nobody would notice it—and the evil wizard had a butterfly daemon that made him look rather less threatening than he ought.
But none of that could hide the shocking, transcendent beauty of what Mozart had created. Salieri was not thinking about the Emperor, or the Masons, or revenge, when the romantic hero and heroine of the piece passed through fire and water unharmed, protected by the music of the flute. He was not even thinking about music—no, he was inhabited by the music. The silly story couldn’t conceal how gorgeous the composition was, how true. The opera concluded with a wedding, overseen by a figure who was at once priest, father, and Lord, extending a benediction to the world entire—
Strength has triumphed, rewarding
beauty and wisdom with an everlasting crown!
Salieri was moved beyond understanding. He reached out to Benedetta, to bury his fingers in her fur and attempt to recover some composure.
He reached out; his hand made contact with fur; a feline spine arched in response to his touch; he did not realize his mistake until he noticed Mozart suddenly sitting straight up like a puppet whose strings had been pulled.
Salieri went cold and snatched back his hand, mortified, from the orange cat to his left. Benedetta was at his right hand—the natural place for her to be; how could he have made such a gross error? He noticed, belatedly, a sensation in his hand like a limb rewarming after extreme cold, or regaining circulation after the removal of a tourniquet. And there was a resonance, a sense of lift—
But that was the opera, of course. The answer was always the man’s damned, exalted music. Salieri was so enthralled, so possessed already, so full of Mozart’s music that the additional intimacy of touching his daemon had not even been apparent.
While Salieri was in his agony of embarrassment, the final notes of the opera rang out, and the ovation was instantaneous. The fun-loving crowd of the vaudeville hall cheered Mozart into getting up to take a bow, and he stood on the bench and acquiesced, looking happy as he usually did when accepting applause but also flushed, discomfited. Salieri stared at him against his will and Mozart, having taken one or two elaborate bows, stared back, breathing a little hard. What was that expression on his face? Salieri searched desperately for signs of anger or hatred; he thought he saw shock, but Mozart had yet a smile on his lips—and then he had turned his attention away from Salieri and back to the stage, was blowing kisses and shouting bravos to the company and the orchestra.
Then Baron Van Swieten came barreling out of the crowd to upbraid Mozart for having put the secret symbols of the Masons on display, and Salieri’s victory was complete, and Mozart was ruined, never again to receive a commission for an opera, never again to get charitable alms from his brother Masons—
Katherina left in embarrassment, the company went off to remove their costumes as if nothing were amiss, and the crowd paid little attention either way, but Mozart stood stock still, and Salieri could not leave him.
“Wolfgang,” he said weakly. “I—I don’t know how to apologize. My intentions—”
It was not clear to either of them whether he was speaking of his transgression during the opera, or of having advised Mozart to put in the Masonic symbols that had so enraged Van Swieten.
Mozart rubbed a hand across his face. “What are your intentions, Antonio?” He made a face, as if hearing how much that sounded like a father interrogating his daughter's suitor. “No, that’s not what I mean. Forgive me, I don't think I’m very well.”
Down on the floor, Mechtilde was twining herself between Mozart’s legs, and he bent to pick her up, burying his face briefly in her fur. She closed her eyes and flexed her paws as if trying to knead the air. Salieri watched, immobile, not knowing what he even wanted to attempt until Benedetta, his soul, his fatally honest co-conspirator, trotted forward without hesitation and leaned herself against Mozart’s calf.
It was not as intimate as touch with a bare hand, but it was nevertheless a shock. Now that Salieri was not overwhelmed by the opera he could feel it, and he drew his breath in sharply. Mozart looked up at the sound, blinking at Salieri with some evidence of tears in his eyes, and rather than respond directly to what was happening he said, a bit childishly, “You’re my best friend.”
“Don’t be absurd.”
“It’s true.”
“I haven’t been a useful friend to you. I've been wicked, terrible.” He couldn’t confess his scheming, not when it would damage both of them so badly, but he also couldn’t bring himself to lie to someone his daemon was attempting to comfort so intimately. “And you are—adored.” A brief, terrible silence. “By everyone,” he added, attempting to retreat from the baldness of what he had just said.
Mozart reached out and grabbed Salieri’s hand. “Nevertheless,” he said, and brought his hand close so it was pressed against Mechtilde’s side.
Salieri gasped, or perhaps it was a sob. The rushing, numbing sensation returned, stronger this time, like a church organ playing a harmony across all of its octaves. Benedetta rubbed her face against Mozart’s calf. Salieri stepped closer, as if falling, and leaned his forehead against Mozart’s to create a closed loop, each of them in contact, the whole contained.
He could not reveal his lies here, his betrayals, his smallness. This little circle would not admit of that much truth. He confined himself to the measure of truth that had just become achingly clear. "You are adored," he repeated.
He let the words hang in the air like the end of an opera, or of a confession. He waited to be absolved, or applauded, or condemned.