Excerpt
CHAPTER 1 The life of every man is a diary... -J. M. BARRIE At the ticket window in the central station, there was a huge line of anxious, impatient travelers, mostly Italian. When I finally reached the counter, the agent informed me, "Trains heading south are running several hours late." Standing behind me in line, a traveler accustomed to the caprices of the Italian railways added that he had heard a group of disgruntled workers had blockaded the tracks at Salerno with their own bodies. "Nothing serious," the agent at the window concluded. "Just the usual Christmas strike." But to me it suggested serious delays, and I envisioned spending hours in an immobile train packed to capacity with restless holiday travelers. "The best thing to do?" I asked. "Wait a day and see what happens," the ticket agent replied, and the veteran traveler concurred. After checking into a small hotel, I crossed the street to Via Mecenate, where the windows of a large auction house caught my eye. A preview was taking place and although I suspected I would be gone by the time the items were auctioned, the quality and number of antiques were imposing enough to capture my imagination, and so I entered. Spread out over many rooms was an infinite number of impressive pieces: inlaid period furniture, marble busts, and eighteenth-century engravings, all competing for the eye. In a room dedicated entirely to leather-bound volumes and illuminated manuscripts, I noticed a dusty archival folder marked "di scarsa importanza" (of little importance). Untying it, I found a thick stack of tawny ochre pages covered with columns of script and numbers penned meticulously in Italian. The random words olio, vino, and legno-oil, wine, and firewood-caught my eye, indicating that the pages were a balance sheet for household expenditures. As I proceeded through the stack, the color of the pages shifted gradually to ashen gray and I began to detect a musky stench, the smell of damp paper. In peeling the layers apart, my hands were continuing to search long after my mind had decided that I had better things to do on my vacation. But my fingers persisted in their silent hunt, since I realized that the folder, after making it through so many centuries, could easily end up in a Dumpster if no one bought it. The ink, a rich sepia, glistened with a syrupy viscosity, and the enigmatic quality of the leaves and layers intrigued me. Dampness had weakened the folios, but the paper was from virile stock-much like the rich, sturdy pages used today for artistic writing paper and fine private editions from exclusive bookmakers-and seemed to have stood up to the ravages of time. After prying apart a new layer, I was surprised to find myself staring at a set of pages completely different from the anonymous ledgerlike household accounts that preceded them; these were not in Italian, but in German. As I peeled back another page, a name caught my eye: Nannerl. The name was so special-the nickname of Mozart's sister. In fact, I realized I had never heard of anyone else using the name Nannerl. But my thoughts were interrupted when I spied numerous tiny burrows and tunnels traversing the pages, apparently made by worms eating their way through the layers. An involuntary shudder swept through my body as I searched for a date, aware that I might at any moment unpeel a page and find one or a dozen of the voracious creatures squirming and wriggling before my eyes. The mere glimpse of the name Nannerl triggered a flood of impressions. In some ways her life had been unfortunate; she had been a child prodigy on the harpsichord, but the extraordinary abilities of her younger brother gradually eclipsed her own talent and usefulness. Although she had appeared before the sovereigns of the greatest courts in Europe, she was eventually relegated to staying home in Salzburg with her mother while her father, Leopold, traveled with Mozart to Italy in search of fame. Attractive, well mannered, and educated, she was prevented by her father from marrying the man she loved in favor of a nobleman who was almost twenty years older. And she died alone, almost blind and in poverty. The birth of a genius in her family had proven both a blessing and a curse. Despite the damage, the pages were almost pristine: no smudged edges, no signs of reading and rereading. In fact, I had the distinct impression they had never been touched. When I found the scrawled date, "January 24, 1770," my mind shut down momentarily and my heart began to pound. Looking around surreptitiously, I tried to see if anyone had noticed my reaction, but customers were too busy discussing how items would look in their apartments, and the sales and security personnel were too interested in guarding small silver objects on display. To avoid attracting attention, I resisted the temptation of reading through the folios and debated canceling the rest of my trip, which had been undertaken at great financial risk. Not having received any word about several job prospects, I had decided to toss caution to the wind and buy an airline ticket on my last credit card. And I was now paying my travel expenses with the remaining trickle of available credit. All because I had come to realize that Europe-that rich, elusive sanctuary of Western art and culture-was necessary to my existence. For years, my precarious financial situation kept me from traveling outside America. But I had begun to wonder what the purpose of all my hard work was. Unwisely, and regardless of the consequences, I had put up my last dollar to travel, and now I was considering giving it up in midstream. Somehow the innocuous little stack of papers made sense of it all. The prospect of a serendipitous discovery sent a wave of optimism racing through me: for once, fate was smiling on this impoverished, unemployed scholar. Briefly, I even imagined a few lines in the Associated Press, an event that could give me an edge over hundreds of other candidates for a permanent teaching position. Maybe it was all just by instinct but I decided to cancel the rest of my trip. After all, even established, well-paid university professors would do the same thing. And if the diary were authentic, nearly any one of them would kill for what I had in my hands. On the evening of my fourth day in Milan, I arrived early at the imposing, frescoed auction room, where seventy or eighty buyers were seated. A huge lot of inlaid Italian furniture from the time of Louis XVI immediately drew intense activity, followed by keen interest in a splendid oil painting of the Madonna by Murillo. The language in the room was unknown to me: a pen or an index finger raised aloft almost imperceptibly, a brief raising of the chin or a subtle nod. After an hour and a half, the grimy folder that had caught my attention came up for bid, and I waited in the uncomfortable silence while the auctioneer opened the bidding at dieci...ten euros. About ten dollars. The moment he was ready to move on, I said, "Dieci," using my best poker voice. After a painfully silent pause, no one was interested in making a higher bid. "Once, twice..." the auctioneer announced. "Venti." Glancing over my shoulder, I saw an extraordinarily well dressed man with a thick black mustache who raised an eyebrow when my eye caught his. Was he a professional, hired to push up the bidding? Or was his curiosity suddenly stimulated by a foreigner bidding on a worthless stack of papers? My heart suddenly pounding, I hesitated to respond too quickly. "Trenta," I finally said. It was only about thirty dollars, but I realized I could soon find myself outside my possibilities for bidding. After a pause, I heard, "Cinquanta." Raising his bid to fifty dollars, it seemed as if the only other bidder was playing a game with me. Although I tried to be inconspicuous as I examined the contents of my wallet, I sensed every eye in the room was