Fiasco!...Fiasco!...The sordidness of it! The sheer sweating sordidness!...Worse than
if I'd actually done it!...To be that much in sin and feel so ridiculous as well!
Nobile, nobile Salieri!...What had he done to me, this Mozart? Before he came, did
I behave like this? Toy with adultery? Blackmail women? It was all going---slipping---growing
rotten...because of him! She had said that these were his original
scores. First and only drafts of the music. Yet they looked like fair copies. They showed
no corrections of any kind. It was puzzling---than suddenly alarming. What was evident was that
Mozart was simply transcribing music completely finished in his head. And finished as most
music is never finished. Displace one note and there would be diminishment. Displace
one phrase and the structure would fall. Here again---only now in abundance---were the same
sounds I'd heard in the library. The same crushed harmonies---glancing collisions---agonizing
delights. The truth was clear. That Serenade had been no accident. I was staring through
the cage of those meticulous ink strokes at---an Absolute Beauty!
Capisco! I know my fate. Now for the first time I feel my emptiness as Adam felt his
nakedness. Tonight at an inn somewhere in this city stands a giggling child who can
put on paper, without actually setting down his billiard cue, casual notes which turn
my most considered ones into lifeless scratches. Grazie Signore! You gave me the desire to
praise You—which most men do not have—then saw to it the service was shameful in the
ears of the server. Grazie! You gave me the desire to praise You—which most men do not
feel—then made me mute. Grazie tanti! You put into me perception of the Incomparable—which
most men never know!—then ensured that I would know myself forever mediocre.
Why?...What is my fault?...Until this day I have pursued virtue with rigor. I have labored
long hours to relieve my fellow men. I have worked and worked the talent You always allowed
me. You know how I’ve worked! Solely that in the end, in the practice of the art which
alone makes the world comprehensible to me, I might hear Your Voice! And now I do hear
it—and it says only one name: MOZART!...Spiteful, sniggering, conceited, infantine Mozart—who
has never worked one minute to help another man! Mozart, with his botty-smacking
wife! Him You have chosen to be Your sole conduct! And my only reward—my sublime privilege—is
to be the sole man alive in this time who shall clearly recognize Your Incarnation!
Grazie e grazie ancora! So be it! From this time we are enemies, You and I! I’ll not
accept it from You—do you hear? …They say God is not mocked. I tell You, Man is
not mocked!...I am not mocked! They say the spirit bloweth where it listeth: I tell You
NO! It must list to virtue or not blow at all! Dio inguiusto—You are the Enemy! I
name Thee now—Nemico Eterno! And this I swear: To my last breath I shall block You
on earth, as far as I am able! What use, after all, is man, if not to teach God His lessons?
Before I tell you what happened next—God’s answer to me—and indeed Constanze’s—and
all the horrors that followed—let me stop. The bladder, being a human appendage, is not
something you need concern yourself with yet. I, being alive, though barely, am at its constant
call. It is now one hour before dawn—when I must dismiss us both. When I return, I’ll
tell you about the war I fought with God through His preferred Creature—Mozart, named Amadeus.
In the waging of which, of course, the Creature had to be destroyed.