Work Text:
Stumbling through the streets of late night Vienna, not even the beautiful architecture seemingly closing in on him can make Mozart focus on anything beyond his unsteady gait. He’s sure he looks comical, stumbling around in a garish costume that has long since come down from its place as the peak of all humour, hands too busy keeping balance to tear off the unwieldy mask limiting both his sight and breathing. His mind is muddied even more by an inability to feel the cold air on his face and in his lungs.
God, how he wishes his past self had had the gift of premonition, or at least ability to predict that a night spent drinking is a morning spent regretting, as it has always had been. Nevertheless, Mozart is surely in for a blistering headache at the first sign of daybreak if he doesn’t sober up now, and painful moments spent recounting this evening’s transgressions if he does. It’s remarkable, this understanding of the unpleasant situations that follow as the direct result of carousing too much. With pessimism only brought into his mind by a very specific amount of alcohol, he instead wonders at his inability to ever learn.
Heels click on cobblestone as Mozart walks ever forward, through a part of the city most unfamiliar to him. The buildings aren’t completely unknown – has he been through here before? And then he is at a carrefour, what is probably a frequented crossroads by day deserted in the wee hours of the night, it being far too late for anyone but the most sybaritic drunks to be up and about. Looking around only confirms what Mozart already knows. He is lost.
He finds himself drawn to a church overlooking one of the roads, and with nothing but his fickle sense of judgement to stop him, there is not any resistance to the draw. Like in a dream, he walks toward the imposing building, a serenity overpowering any conflict he may have usually felt walking into a holy place with a dangerous amount of alcohol in his bloodstream. Reality takes a backseat as Mozart’s propensity to believe in fate leads him nearer this familiar cathedral, baroque statues staring down at him with faces contorted in various degrees of religious ecstasy.
The sound of shoes on marble echoes as he first swings open a wing of the tall doors and then walks in, making his way to the altar. He almost overlooks it, but there, in one of the pews sits a figure, back hunched in prayer. There’s a hood covering the face, so Mozart hasn’t an idea of their reaction to his entrance. The mask sits on his face uncomfortably and he diverts from his path and sits right next to the hooded fellow. The whispered prayer in a language Mozart can’t bother to understand stops the moment he sits down, but the person doesn’t turn to him. Mozart decides to break the ice himself, feeling entirely unreal and too small in the moment.
“Good evening,” says the man next to him before Mozart manages to figure out what to say himself. He startles at this unexpected turn of events. How many hermits in darkened churches take to friendly conversation? Not any he knows. The man next to him shifts uncomfortably, a cue for Mozart to say something rather than just sit silently.
“Good evening. Come to pray, mein Herr?” he forces out, trying to speak in the airy lilt he uses when in good company, but finding all the usual humour gone the moment he finishes his sentence. His voice comes out muffled and serious and he tries not to fidget nervously, feeling the church’s ambience stifling his usual childish charm. You are not glamorous here. Not here, Mozart. Here you are but another mortal soul, with nothing but that which is given by the Lord. The man next to him startles him once again when he speaks, slowly, as if deliberating what to say. Maybe he, too, feels it.
“I’ve come to confess more than for prayer, but thank you for the optimism.”
The way he speaks is a slight bit different from a man born speaking German. It’s odd, but sparks recognition in Mozart’s mind, like he’s heard this voice before. He feels this may be what has called him here, knows that he needs to hear this person’s story.
“Then feel free to do so, mein Herr. Perhaps we were meant to meet here, you to speak and me to listen,” he says, desperately trying to sound serious and not just like he’s fishing for gossip. He’s not sure why, but he will feel incomplete without knowing.
Thankfully, the man sitting next to him only sighs out a laugh. Does he feel the same? Do they both sit stewing in confusion, one wanting to understand, the other to be understood? Mozart doesn’t even know this person.
“I fear what a distinguished gentleman such as you may say to the contents of my confession. Am I wrong in assuming you sybaritic?”
A sense of familiarity nags at Mozart, makes him wonder what is the connection escaping him. The hermit, nevertheless, sounds all too happy to point out Mozart’s ruffled state. There are not many people audacious enough to insult strangers that offer a helping hand, at least not in Mozart’s world. It’s almost as refreshing as Alpine air and feels twice as biting.
“You’d be more correct in calling me a new-age bacchant. Am I to assume you ascetic?”
The man laughs, a gravelly sound that cuts through the heavy air and makes Mozart feel at home. When was the last time he’d gotten more than a polite giggle, all the while acting more serious than he had in weeks?
“You can, but I wouldn’t have anything to confess had I been an ascetic. I am here for a reason most undignified and unfitting of a man as austere as I tend to be.”
Mozart thinks he would rather like to see this man, who so freely describes himself as strict and severe. The moonlight streaming in through coloured window panes, though poetic, reveals nothing to his searching gaze, even as he turns his head to see better. It may be fair, what with the disguise on his face, but he doesn’t like it.
“Does that mean you will?” he asks eagerly. “Will confess, that is,” he adds, after a few seconds without a response.
His companion sighs.
“If I must, then–”
“You must,” Mozart interrupts, impatience getting the best of him. He cannot see the stranger’s face, but somehow still feels how unimpressed he is.
“If I must, then I will speak uninterrupted, signor,” the voice really is familiar, especially addressing him with annoyance. How does he know this man?
“I,” he sighs, perhaps trying to figure out how to start unravelling the situation, “I have not yet committed fully to sin, but I can almost feel myself getting closer. Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image. Make no idols, understand the Lord is the only one, understand him as Him.”
Mozart feels incredibly confused and also a little bit like laughing. What kind of person even considers this? How does one almost make an idol? The man is odd, maybe even odder than Mozart himself. Still, he hangs on to every word, waiting for the one that puts everything into perspective, that brings the confession together into something sensical.
“There is a man. I find myself hating him and venerating him both. He leads me off the right path. For I am a man of God, but hearing his music makes me see the Lord even where he isn’t, particularly in his hands, in his mind. It horrifies me, for it is nothing earthly, not admiration. He is my foil, and the only person to bring me peace. Angels speak through his music, and he doesn’t care for me, and I hate him. That is why I’m here, signor. That is what I bear with me, what I hope to leave behind in these pews.”
The man sounds tormented yet calm, and as he ends his monologue, suddenly the walls around him, the curving pillars, everything around Mozart crumbles. Standing knee deep in rubble, the pieces finally fall into place, and it takes strength inhumane to keep calm and keep Antonio Salieri, almost ascetic and sitting next to him, in the dark.
“Perhaps,” the rest of the sentence escapes before he can wrangle it and speak it aloud. He, who has no right to Salieri’s pain, who stole it, swindled the other for it, can only in the moment keep silent.
“Perhaps there is nothing to say, except that the sunrise makes its appearance and reminds us both of our duties.”
Salieri’s right, but it is only as he mentions it that Mozart sees the sun’s rays fall through the church’s windows. The man next to him looks disappointed with his lacklustre reaction. Mozart is about as useful as the wood of an empty confession booth. Seeing Salieri’s dismay show on his face, bathed in colourful light lent to him by the sunrise mixing with stained glass is what snaps Mozart into a reverie, makes him speak.
“Perhaps you misunderstand yourself,” he says, getting up from the pew, and wrapping his cloak tightly around himself. “Perhaps you’re misunderstanding him. Likely, in fact.”
He tilts his head in invitation and Salieri gets up. They slowly walk back to the doors of the cathedral.
“No matter how much of a poet you are about it, we are all only human. Me, you, and he, too. I have never met a saint without their own vices. What do you want, mein Herr? Do you want him to see you? To disappear?” he turns fully toward Salieri, peering at him through the eye holes in his porcelain mask. “Do you want to take his place?”
Salieri looks to be in a trance of his own. He looks confused, taken aback. Mozart feels life pour into his veins upon realising he’s made someone think, pushed one through the first step in a journey of one’s change. The doors get closer. It’s almost the end, almost the time for the conductor to collect his flowers and go.
“I don’t know.”
Mozart stays silent.
The crossroads that had been deserted only a few hours ago is bustling with life. They stand on steps leading to their church and overlook it.
“Figure it out, maestro,” says Mozart, barely hiding the mirthful note in his voice. The atmosphere of the church is gone. He only feels stifled by the mask now. “Tell him when you do.”
He turns toward a group of people walking to work, as if ready to leave. And he must, before Salieri realises. There’s no fun in his anger if Mozart’s there to take the brunt of it.
“I’m sure he’s dying to figure you out.”
He walks briskly away from the cathedral. It may be time to avoid the court and its composers, at least for the moment.
Looking back only for a moment, he catches a glimpse of Salieri, hood down, looking marginally more lost than he had before Mozart put his two cents in. Though the other hadn’t truly seen him, Mozart cannot help but feel seen through, taken apart and aback. Though their meeting had been minute in the march of their lives, something shifts inside him, changes, if slightly.
The world doesn’t stop and stare for even a minute, unimpressed by one man’s epiphany, so neither does Amadeus. He just turns his head forward and goes on walking, tearing that god awful mask off his face. He can consider the night’s events at home.
They both can.