Cry to Heaven (19 page)

Then suddenly he stopped. His hand was on the marble railing. He didn’t move. He looked precisely like someone who has suddenly suffered a sharp pain in the side and cannot move without making it sharper.

And then very slowly he turned his head, gazing back at the old castrato.

The disgusted Angelo was already reading a book between his elbows. And the old eunuch was shaking his head.

Carlo took several steps to the door of the room.

“Tell me this again?” he said softly.

T
HE SKY WAS
mother-of-pearl. For a long while there were no lights across the water and suddenly it seemed there were many, scattered among Moorish arches and barred windows, flickering from the torches hung to light gates, doorways. Tonio sat at the dining table looking through the forty some odd panes of glass that composed the nearest window, its sky-blue drapery tied back, its surface running with rain that sometimes glinted with the gold of a passing lantern. When that happened all beyond it went dark. But then the lantern would pass away, and the dim hulks of the other side of the water would reveal themselves again, the sky as luminous and pearlescent as ever.

He was making a little poem aloud with just a little music
to it, something that said, darkness come early, darkness open up the doors and open up the streets so that I can go out of here. He was tired and full of shame, and if Ernestino and the others wouldn’t brave this rain, he would go it alone, he would find some place to sing, some place where, anonymous and numbed by drink, he could sing until he had forgotten everything.

This afternoon he had left San Marco with a feeling of despair. All the many processions of his childhood had come back to him in that place, his father walking behind the Doge’s canopy, the smell of incense, those endless, translucent waves of ethereal singing.

Then afterwards he had gone with his cousin Catrina to visit her daughter, Francesca, in the convent where she would live until she was his bride. And then home again, in the incessant rain, to be alone with Catrina.

They had not meant to make love, surely, this woman who was older than his mother, and he. But they had done it. The room was warm, full of firelight and perfume. And she had marveled at his skill, and the vigor with which he drove between her legs, her body lush and full as he had always imagined it. Afterwards, he felt appalling shame, all the scaffolding of his life giving way under him.

“But why are you behaving so?” she had demanded. He must give up these nights out, was there ever a time when it was so important to be exemplary? A strange lecture, he remarked softly, from this bower of fragrant pillows. “How can his malice eat at you like this?” she insisted.

He had no answer. What could he say? Why didn’t you warn me she was the girl! Why didn’t anyone warn me?

But he could not speak, for there was a fear gathering in him, growing stronger with every passing day that was too terrible for him to articulate even to himself, let alone to another. He turned away from Catrina.

“All right, my troubador,” she had whispered. “Sing while you can; young men have done a lot worse; we can put up with it for a little while; it’s harmless for all its absurdity.” And then teasing him gently between the legs, she said: “God knows you haven’t very long to enjoy that lovely soprano.”

A voice in the empty church turned round by the golden walls came back to mock him.

And he had come home. Why? To hear it from Lena that his brother had sent Alessandro out of the house saying his services as tutor to Tonio were extraneous? Alessandro was gone. His mother was somewhere lost to him behind closed doors.

And now as he sat alone at the supper table where he had not dined in months, he did not even stir when he heard steps in this great hollow shadowy house, steps entering this room, when he heard those massive doors creak shut, first one pair of them and then another.

The light changed, did it not?

I cannot avoid him forever.

The sky was darkening. From where he sat he could see yet the farthest edge of the water. And he kept his eyes fixed there, even though two figures, it seemed, had approached him. Almost desperately he emptied the wine in his silver cup. And she is come, too, he thought. This is pure agony.

A hand came out to refill the wine.

“Leave us alone now,” said his brother.

He was speaking to the servant who set the bottle down and was gone with just a dry shuffle on the stones. Something like the sound of a rat in a dusty passageway.

Tonio turned slowly to look at these two. Ah, yes, it is she, with him. The candles dazzled him. He raised the back of his hand to shield his eyes, and then he saw what he thought he had seen, her face reddish, swollen.

His brother seemed uncommonly raw as if some quarrel had brought him to the brink. And as he leaned over with his hands firmly placed on the table before Tonio, Tonio thought for the first time: I despise you! Yes, it is true now I despise you!

But there was no smile now. There was no pretense. The face was sharpened as if by some new perception.

Tonio lifted the silver goblet, felt the bit of stone that adorned it. He let his eyes shift slowly to the water again. To the sky’s last gleam of silver.

“Tell him,” said his brother.

Tonio looked up slowly.

His mother was staring at Carlo as if with deliberate outrage.

“Tell him!” said Carlo again. And she turned to go out of the room, but Carlo, moving faster than she, had caught her by the wrist. “Tell him.”

She shook her head. She was staring at Carlo as if she could not believe he was doing this to her.

Tonio rose slowly from the table, out of the glare of the candlelight to look more closely at her, at the way that her face was being slowly infused with anger.

“Tell him now before me!” Carlo roared.

But as if infected by that very rage, she cried out:

“I will do no such thing, not now, not ever.” She commenced to tremble. Her face was crumpling like that of a small child. And suddenly grabbing her in both hands Carlo started to shake her.

Tonio didn’t move. He knew that if he moved he could not control what would happen. And that his mother belonged to this man was now beyond doubt.

But Carlo had stopped.

Marianna stood with her hands over her ears. And then she looked up at Carlo again and said No with her lips, her face so twisted that she was almost unrecognizable.

It seemed that roar was rising out of Carlo again, that awful roar like that of a man bewailing a death he could never accept, and with the full force of his right hand he struck her.

She fell several steps backwards.

“Carlo, if you strike her again,” Tonio said, “it will be resolved between us, forever.”

It was the first time that Tonio had ever called him by name, but it was impossible to tell if Carlo realized it.

He was staring straight forward. He did not seem to hear Marianna crying. Her tremors were becoming more and more violent and suddenly she began to scream:

“I will not, I will not choose between you!”

“Tell him the truth before God and me now!” Carlo roared.

“Enough!” Tonio said. “Do not torture her. She is helpless as I am. What can she tell me that will make any difference? That you are her lover?”

Tonio looked at her. He could not bear to see her in this pain. It seemed infinitely greater than all those years and years of appalling loneliness.

He wished somehow he could let her know, silently, with his
eyes, with the color of his voice, that he loved her. And that now he expected nothing more from her.

He looked away, and then again, he looked up at the man who had turned to him.

“It is no use,” Tonio said. “Not for both of you can I go against my father.”

“Your father?” Carlo whispered. “Your father!” He spat the words, and then he seemed on the verge of some hysteria.

“Look at me, Marc Antonio.” He bore down on Tonio. “Look at me. I am your father!”

Tonio shut his eyes.

But the voice went on louder, thinner, on the edge of breaking:

“She was carrying you in her body when she came into this house, you are the child of my love for her! I am your father, and I stand here with my bastard son placed before me! Do you hear me? Does God hear me? You are my son and you have been placed before me. That is what she can and must tell you!”

He stopped, the voice strangled in his throat.

And as Tonio opened his eyes, he saw through the glimmer of his tears that Carlo’s face was a mask of pain, and that Marianna stood beside him, putting up her frantic hands to cover his mouth. With a great shove, Carlo sent her backwards.

“He stole my wife from me,” Carlo cried. “He stole my son from me, this house he stole from me, Venice he took, and my youth, and I tell you he shall not prevail any longer! Look at me, Tonio, look at me! Yield to me! Or so help me God, I declare I cannot be held to account for what happens to you!”

Tonio shuddered.

It was as if these words were striking him physically, and yet they receded so fast, he could scarce remember them, their sound, their literal meaning. There was only a relentless, muted hammering.

And all around him in this room there seemed a sadness building and building. It was like a great cloud collecting its deadly momentum. It shrouded him. It shut them away, concealing them. And it left him alone here in this shadowy place, staring mutely at the blurred lights that made their slow passage on the invisible stream beyond those windows that was the water.

He had
known
it. He had known it when this man first took him in his arms, he had heard it pressing through his dreams, he had known it when his mother ran about that darkened room whispering, “Shut the doors, shut the doors,” yes, he had known it.

Yet always,
always
, there had been the chance that it was not true, that it was but some groundless nightmare, some foul connection made more of imagination than real happening.

But it was true. And if it was, then
Andrea had known it also
.

It did not matter what happened now in this place. It did not matter if he turned to go, or what he said. It seemed he had no will, no purpose. It did not matter that somewhere someone had given a voice to this sadness. It was his mother weeping.

“You mark my words,” Carlo whispered.

Dimly Carlo materialized again before him.

“Oh, what is this, your words?” Tonio sighed. My father, this man. This man! “Is this your threat of death?” Tonio whispered. He righted himself peering steadily forward. “Your first council to me and we two so briefly reconciled as father and son!”

“You mark my council!” Carlo cried. “Say you cannot marry. Say you will take Holy Orders. Say the doctors have found you ill formed, I do not care! But say it, and yield to me!”

“Those are lies,” Tonio answered. “I cannot speak them.” He was so weary. My father. The thought obliterated all reason, and somewhere far, far beyond his reach stood Andrea, receding into chaos. And he knew the most bitter, the most terrible, terrible disappointment that he was not Andrea’s son. And this man, frenzied, desperate, standing before him, imploring him.

“I was not born your bastard.” Tonio struggled. It was such an agony to speak these words. “I was born Andrea’s son under this roof and under the law. And I can do nothing to change that, though you spread your abominations from one end of the Veneto to the other. I am Marc Antonio Treschi, and Andrea has given me my charge, and I will not bear his curse from heaven, nor the curse of those around us who do not know the half of it!”

“You go against your father!” Carlo roared. “You bear my curse!”

“So be it, then!” Tonio’s voice rose. It was the greatest struggle of his life to remain here, to continue it, to answer once and for all. “I cannot go against this house, this family, and the man who knew all of this and chose to plot the course for both of us!”

“Ah, such loyalty.” Carlo seemed to sigh and to tremble, his lips drawn back in a smile. “No matter what your hatred for me, your will to destroy me, you would never go against this house!”

“I do not hate you!” Tonio declared.

And it seemed that Carlo, caught off guard by the edge of this cry, looked up in one desperate moment of feeling.

“And I have never hated
you
,” he gasped as if just realizing it for the first time. “Marc Antonio,” he said, and before Tonio could stop him, Carlo had taken him by both arms, and they were so close they might have embraced, they might have kissed.

The look on Carlo’s face was astonishment and almost one of horror. “Marc Antonio,” he said, his voice breaking, “I never hated you….”

I
T WAS RAINING
. One of the last rains of the spring perhaps. Because it was so warm nobody much minded. The piazza was silver, and then a silvery blue in the rain, and from time to time the great stone floor seemed a solid sheet of shimmering water. Draped figures darted here and there across the five
arches of San Marco. And the lights in the open coffeehouses were smoky.

Guido was not quite as drunk as he wanted to be. He disliked the din and glare of this place and at the same time he felt safe in it. He had just received another installment of his allowance from Naples, and was wondering if he should leave for Verona and Padua. This city was magnificent, the only place he had encountered in his roamings that was all that men said it was. And yet it was too dense, too dark, too confining. Night after night he homed to the piazza merely to see that vast stretch of ground and sky and feel that he could breathe freely.

He watched the rain slant down under the arches of the arcade. A dark shape crowded the door, but then it passed into the room. And again there was the rain swept in by the wind so that he could almost feel it on his warm face and on the backs of his hands which were folded before him. He drained the glass. He shut his eyes.

Then he opened them abruptly, because someone was seated beside him.