Cry to Heaven (10 page)

But finally had come the moment when Andrea must unfold his own story.

“I know you have learned of your brother Carlo,” he said, divorcing himself from the greater scheme of things, the measured voice for the first time giving way to a slight quaver of emotion. “It seems that you but step out this door and the world hastens to disillusion you with that old scandal. Alessandro has told me of your brother’s friend, only one of his many confederates who yet oppose me in the Grand Council, on the floor of the Senate, wherever they wield influence. And your mother has told me of your discovery in the supper room portrait.

“No, don’t interrupt me, my son. I am not angry with you. You must be told now what others will twist and use for their own purposes. Listen and understand:

“What was left to me when I at last came home from sea, after so many defeats? Three sons dead, a wife lost after lingering and painful illness. Why did God so choose that it would be the youngest who would survive the lot, a son so rebellious and violent of temper that his greatest pleasure came from defying his father?

“You’ve seen his image, and you have seen the likeness to yourself; but there the resemblance ends, for you have the unmistakable stamp of character. But I tell you the worst of these times was embodied in your brother Carlo. Pleasure-loving, swept off his feet by prima donnas, an idler, a reader of poetry, and a lover of gambling and drink, he was that perennial child who, denied glory in the service of the state, has no taste for quiet courage.”

Andrea paused as if unsure how to proceed. Wearily, he continued: “You know as well as I do that to marry without the permission of the Grand Council is extinction for a patrician. Take a bride without family or fortune and the name Treschi is stricken from the Golden Book forever; your children are nothing but common citizens of the Serenissima.

“And yet he upon whose passion this line depended spent his life in the company of wastrels, spurning the alliances I attempted to forge for him!

“At last he chose a wife for himself as he might choose a mistress. A nameless and dowerless girl, child of a mainland noble, with nothing but her beauty to recommend her. ‘I love her,’ he said to me. ‘I will have no other!’ And when I refused his suit, seeking to direct him as was my duty, he left this
house blind with drink, and going to the convent where she was lodged, took her out of it by lies and trickery!”

Andrea grew too heated to continue.

Tonio wanted to put out his hand, to still his father. It gave him physical pain to see his father suffering, and the tale itself appalled him.

Andrea sighed. “Can you at your tender age understand this outrage? Greater men have been banished for such an action, hunted throughout the Veneto, imprisoned.”

Again Andrea stopped. He had no spirit, not even in anger, for the telling of the story. “A son of mine did this,” he said. “The devil in hell he was, I tell you. It was only our name and our position that held back the hand of the state, while I begged for time to use reason.

“But on the Broglio itself at high noon, your brother appeared before me. Drunk, wild-eyed, mumbling obscenities, he vowed his undying love for this ruined girl. ‘Buy her into the Golden Book!’ he demanded of me. ‘You have the wealth. You can accomplish it!’ And there as Councillors and Senators gazed on, he declared: ‘Give your consent or I shall marry her now without it.’

“Do you comprehend this, Tonio?” Andrea was now beside himself. “He was my sole heir. And for this scandalous alliance, he sought to
extort
my permission! Buy her into the Golden Book, make her a noble, and consent to this marriage I must, or see my seed scattered to the winds, see the end of a House that was as old as Venice!”

“Father.” Tonio was unable to keep quiet. But Andrea was not ready to be interrupted.

“All Venice turned its eyes to me,” Andrea went on, his voice tremulous. “Was I to be the dupe of my youngest son? My kinsmen, my fellow statesmen…all waited in shocked silence.

“And the girl…what of her? I in my rage took it upon myself to see this woman who had turned my son from his duty….”

For the first time in the span of an hour, Andrea’s gaze shifted to Tonio. For a moment is seemed he had lost the drift and was perceiving something for which he had been prepared. But then he continued:

“What did I find?” he sighed. “A Salome who worked her
evil spell upon my son’s degraded senses? No. No, she was an innocent child! A child no older than you are now, and boyish of limb, and sweet, and dark and wild with innocence as creatures of the wood are innocent, knowing nothing of this world except that which he had chosen to show her. Oh, I had not expected to feel for this fragile girl, to feel for her lost honor.

“And can you measure then the rage I endured against the man who’d so rashly corrupted her?”

A wordless panic seized Tonio. He could not keep still any longer. “Please believe me, Father,” he whispered, “when I tell you that in me you have an obedient son.”

Andrea nodded. Again his eyes rested on Tonio. “All these years I have watched over you more closely than you know, my son, and you have been the answer to my prayers more fully than you can realize.”

But it was clear nothing could soothe him now; he pressed on as if that were the wiser course and there were little alternative.

“Your brother was not arrested. He was not banished. It was I who had him apprehended and placed on the ship for Istanbul. It was I who obtained his appointment there, giving him to know that as long as I lived he would never see his native city.

“It was I who impounded his wealth, withholding all support until he had bowed his head and accepted the post offered him.

“And it was I—it was I who then took a wife in my old age who gave me that child upon whom the life of this family is now dependent.”

He stopped. He was weary, but he had not finished.

“Much harsher punishment might have befallen him!” he declared, looking again directly at Tonio. “Perhaps it was the love of his mother that restrained me. He’d been her joy since the day he was born, everyone knew it.” And Andrea’s eyes misted suddenly as if for the first time his thoughts were not clear to him. “He’d been so loved by his brothers. His frivolity was no irritant to them. No, they loved his jests, the poems he wrote, his idle chatter. Oh, how they all doted upon him. ‘Carlo, Carlo.’ And by the grace of God, none of them lived to see that irrepressible charm turned to the seduction of an innocent girl, that impetuosity sharpened to defiance.

“Dear God, what was I to do? I chose the only honorable course before me.”

His brows came together. His voice was thinned with weariness, and for a moment he was communing with himself. Then he regained his power.

“I dealt with him lightly!” he insisted. “Yes, lightly. Soon he accepted his duties. He has done well with the allowance granted him. And laboring obediently in the services of the Republic in the East, he has petitioned again and again to be allowed to return. He has begged my forgiveness.

“But I will never allow him to return home!

“Yet this state of affairs will not endure forever. He has his young friends in the Grand Council, the Senate, boys who shared his youth with him. And when I die, he will return to this house from which he has never been disinherited. But you, Tonio, will be master here, you in the years to come will take the wife I have already chosen for you. Your children shall inherit the fortune and the name of Treschi.”

The morning sun exploded on the golden lion of San Marco. It drenched in sparkling white light the long graceful arms of the arcades which disappeared into the motley shifting crowds, the great spear of the Campanile rising abruptly to heaven.

He stood before the glittering mosaics above the doors of the church. He gazed at the four great bronze horses on their pedestals.

He let himself be jostled by the crowd; he moved in an unconscious rhythm now and then, but his eyes remained fixed on the immense scheme of porticoes and domes that rose around him.

Never had he felt such love for Venice, such purified and painful devotion. And he knew in some way he was much too young really to grasp the tragedy that had befallen her. She seemed too solid; too substantial, too full of the magnificent.

Turning to the open water, the gleaming motionless sea, he felt himself for the first time in full possession of life itself as he stood in possession of history.

But a drawn and exhausted figure had left him only an hour before with an air of resignation in the face of old age that only filled him with dread. And there came back to him now
his father’s concluding words: “He will come home when I die. He will make this house a battleground again.

“Not six months passes that I do not receive some letter from his hand pledging he will marry the wife I choose for him, if only I will allow him to see his beloved Venice again.

“But he shall never marry!

“Would that I could, with my own eyes, see you at the altar with your bride, see your sons, see you put on your patrician robes for the first time and take your rightful place in the Council.

“But there isn’t time for this, and God has given me clear signs that I must prepare you for what awaits you.

“Now, do you know why I send you out into the world, why I take your childhood from you with this fairy tale that you must be the escort of your mother? I send you out because you must be ready when the hour comes, you must know the world, its temptations, its vulgarity.

“But remember when your brother is under this roof again, I will not be here, but the Grand Council and the law will be on your side. My will shall fortify you. And your brother will lose the battle as he lost it before: you are my immortality.”

A
FLAWLESS BLUE SKY
arched over the rooftops, with only a score of perfectly white clouds sailing inland. The servants hurried through the house announcing the sea was calm and surely the
Bucintoro
could safely carry the Doge to San Nicolo del Lido. All the windows over the canal stood open to the balmy breeze, and brilliantly colored carpets streamed from
the sills under flapping banners. It was a spectacle repeated everywhere along the banks, as grand as Tonio had ever seen it.

And when he and Marianna and Alessandro, all of them gaily dressed, descended to the little dock, he caught himself whispering aloud, “I am here, this is happening!” It seemed impossible he’d passed into the panorama he’d so often witnessed from a distance.

His father waved from the balcony above the main door. The gondola was lined with blue velvet and garlanded with flowers. The great single oar had been gilded, and Bruno, in his bright blue uniform, guided the boat out into the flow as all around them came the other great families. Tossed in the wake of a hundred before them, they poured downstream to the mouth of the canal and the piazzetta.

“There it is,” Alessandro whispered, and as the gondolas pitched forward and rocked back, seeking to hold their place in waiting, he pointed to the glare and flash of the
Bucintoro
itself at anchor. A giant galley resplendent in gilt and crimson, it carried the Doge’s throne and a throng of golden statues. Tonio lifted his mother by her small waist so she might see, and glancing up, he smiled to see Alessandro’s muted wonder.

He himself could hardly endure the excitement. All his life he would remember it, he thought, this moment when the trumpets and fifes let loose shrill and magnificent in the air to announce that the Doge was being carried from the Palazzo Ducale.

The sea was littered with flowers; petals everywhere rode the faceted waves so it seemed the water became solid. The golden boats of the chief magistrates were moving out, then came the ambassadors, and the papal nuncio behind them. The great warships and merchant vessels that spanned the lagoon gave off their salutes with flags unfurling.

And finally all the fleet of patricians advanced towards the lighthouse of the Lido.

Cries, waving, chattering, laughter, it was a great lovely roar in his ears.

But nothing surpassed the cry that went up when the Doge had cast his ring into the water. All the bells of the island rang, the trumpets blasted; thousands upon thousands cheered at the top of their voices.

It seemed the whole city was afloat, roaring in one great communal cry, and then it broke up, boats turning back to the island by whichever way they chose, great trains of silk and satin spread out behind them to float on the water. It was chaotic, it was mad, it was dazzling. The sun blinded Tonio; he raised his hand to shield his eyes as Alessandro steadied him. The Lisani came alongside, their gondoliers in rose-colored garments, their servants pitching white blossoms into their wake, as Catrina threw kisses with both hands, her dress of silver damask ballooning out behind her.

It was enough in itself. He was spent and almost dizzy and felt he wanted to retreat to some little shady corner of the world just to savor it.

What more could happen? And when Alessandro told them they were now going to the Doge’s feast at the Palazzo Ducale he was almost laughing.

Hundreds were seated at the long white-draped tables; a fortune in wax blazed over the heavy silver carving of the candelabra while servants streamed through the doors carrying elaborate dishes on giant trays—fruits, ices, steaming platters of meat—and along the walls the common people poured in to observe the never-ending spectacle.

Tonio could scarce taste anything; Marianna was whispering every moment of what she saw, who was this, who was that, Alessandro’s low voice giving her all the news of the world that was splendid and full of friendly marvels. The wine went at once to Tonio’s head. He saw Catrina across a great pale and smoky gulf, beaming at him, her blond hair a mass of thick and perfectly formed little curls, her heavy bosom adorned with diamonds.

She had a painterly blush to her cheeks which made the ideal beauties of paintings seem real to him suddenly; she was overblown, glorious.

Alessandro meantime was so at ease; he cut the meat on Marianna’s plate, moved the candles when they blinded her, never turning completely away from her. Perfect cavalier servente, Tonio was thinking.