Cry to Heaven (3 page)

Tonio bent his head. He gave the tender stretch of his neck to his mother’s warm hand, and felt a wordless and terrifying dread that pushed him close to her.

Late that night, covered to the chin in bed, he did not sleep. His mother lay back, lips slack, her angular face softened as if against her will, her close-set eyes, so unlike his own, drawn to the center of her face in a frown that seemed the very opposite of sleep, more accurately preoccupation.

And shoving back the covers (his father never slept with them; he was always in his own apartments), Tonio slipped to the cold floor, barefoot.

There were street singers out in the night, he was certain of it. And wrenching open the wooden shutters, he listened, head cocked, until he picked up the faint strains of the distant tenor. There came a basso underneath, the raw dissonance of strings, and round and round the melody rising higher, wider.

The night was misted, without forms or shapes save for the aureole of a single resin torch below that lent its heavy smell to the salt from the sea. And as he listened, his head against the damp wall, knees drawn up in a loose clasp, he was still in the choir loft of San Marco. Alessandro’s voice eluded him now, but he felt the sensation, the dreamy sweep of the music.

He parted his lips, sang a few high notes in time with those distant singers in the street, and felt again Alessandro’s hand on his shoulder.

What was nagging at him suddenly? What came like a gnat to the eye? His mind, ever so sharp and unclouded as yet by written language, felt again the palm of that hand resting so gently at his neck, saw the billowing sleeve rising and rising to the shoulder above it. All the other tall men he had ever known had to bend to caress a boy as little as Tonio. And he remembered that even in the choir loft, in the midst of that
singing, he had been startled to feel that hand rest so easily on him.

It seemed monstrous, magical, the arm that scooped him up, the hand that had caught the bones of his chest as if he were a toy and brought him higher into the music.

But the song was tugging at him, pulling him out of these thoughts as melody always pulled him, making him feel desperate for the harpsichord that his mother played, or her tambourine, or only the mingled sound of their voices. Anything to make it go on. And suddenly, shivering on the sill, he was sleeping.

He was seven years old before he learned that Alessandro and all the tall singers of San Marco were eunuchs.

A
ND BY THE TIME
he was nine years old he knew just what had been cut away from these spidery beings and what had been left them, and that it was an accident of the knife, their height and their long limbs, for after that terrible cutting their bones didn’t harden like those of men who could father children.

But it was a commonplace mystery. They sang in all the churches of Venice. They taught music when they were old. Tonio’s tutor, Beppo, was a eunuch.

And in the opera, which Tonio was much too young to see, they were celestial wonders. Nicolino, Carestini, Senesino, the servants sighed as they said the names the next day, and even once Tonio’s mother had been lured out of her solitary life to see the young one from Naples, whom they called The Boy, Farinelli. Tonio cried because he couldn’t go. And waking
hours after, saw she’d come home, and sat at the harpsichord in the dark, her veil sparkling with rain, her face as white as a porcelain doll’s as in a faint uncertain voice she echoed the threads of Farinelli’s arias.

Ah, the poor do what they must for food and drink. We will always have these miraculous high voices. Yet every time Tonio saw Alessandro outside the church door, he could not help but wonder: Did he cry? Did he try to run away? Why didn’t his mother try to hide him? But there was nothing in Alessandro’s long face but that sleepy good humor, his chestnut hair a lustrous frame for skin that was as pretty as a girl’s, and that voice slumbering deep inside, waiting for its moment in the choir loft, waiting for the backdrop of hammered gold that seemed to make him one—for Tonio—with the angels.

But by this time, too, Tonio knew he was Marc Antonio Treschi, the son of Andrea Treschi who had once commanded the galleys of the Serenissima on foreign seas, and after years of service in the Most Serene Senate, had just been elected to the Council of Three, that awesome triumvirate of inquisitors whose power it was to arrest, to try, to pronounce sentence, and to carry out that sentence—even if it were death—upon anyone.

In other words, Tonio’s father was among those more powerful than the Doge himself.

And the name Treschi had been in the Golden Book for a millennium. This was a family of admirals, ambassadors, procurators of San Marco, and senators too numerous to mention. Three brothers of Tonio, all long dead—the children of a first wife gone to the grave, too—had served in high places.

And on reaching his twenty-third birthday, Tonio would certainly take his place among those young statesmen promenading that long strip of the piazzetta before the Offices of State known as the Broglio.

It would be the University of Padua before that, two years at sea, a tour of the world perhaps. And for now, hours spent in the library of the palazzo under the gentle but relentless eyes of his tutors.

Portraits hung on these walls. Black-haired Treschi with fair skin, men cut from the same mold, delicate-boned but tall,
with broad foreheads that rose straight to the full hair that grew up and back from them. Even as a little one Tonio perceived his resemblance to some more than others: dead uncles, cousins, those brothers: Leonardo who had died of consumption in an upper room, Giambattista drowned at sea off the coast of Greece, Philippo of malaria in some distant outpost of the empire.

And here and there appeared a face that was more perfectly Tonio’s own, a young man with Tonio’s wide-set black eyes and the same full but long mouth always on the verge of smiling; he peeked only from great clusters of richly clad men in which Andrea might be yet young with his brothers and nephews around him. But it was hard to fix a name for each face, to distinguish one from another among so many. A communal history absorbed them all in wonderfully wrought tales of courage and self-sacrifice.

All three sons with their father and his somber first wife peered from the grandest of gilt frames in the long supper room.

“They’re watching you,” Lena, Tonio’s nurse, teased as she ladled the soup. She was old but full of good humor and more a nurse to Tonio’s mother, Marianna, than she was to him, and she only meant to amuse him.

She couldn’t guess how it hurt him to look at this spectacle of ruddy and perfectly painted faces. He wanted his brothers alive, he wanted them here now, and he wanted to open doors on rooms filled with gentle laughter and commotion. Sometimes he imagined how it would be, the long supper table crowded with his brothers: Leonardo lifting his glass, Philippo describing battles at sea; his mother, her narrow eyes, so small when sad, grown wide with excitement.

But there was an absurdity to this little game that made itself known to him over the years. It frightened him enormously. Long before he knew the full import, he’d been told that only one son of a great Venetian family marries. It was custom so old it might have been law, and in those days it had been Philippo, whose childless wife had gone home after his death to her own people. But if any of those shades had lived long enough to produce a son of the Treschi name, Tonio would not be here! His father would never have taken a second
wife. Tonio would not even exist. And so the very price of life for him was that they were swept away without issue.

He couldn’t grasp it at first; but after a while, it was an old truth; he and those brothers, they had never been meant to know each other.

Yet he played his fantasy out; he saw these yawning rooms brilliantly lit, heard music, pictured soft-spoken men and women who were his own kin, a swarm of nameless cousins.

And always his father was about, at supper, on the ballroom floor, turning to catch his youngest son in his arms with a wealth of spontaneous kisses.

As it was, Tonio seldom saw his father.

But on those occasions when Lena came for him, whispering anxiously that Andrea had sent for his son, it was absolutely marvelous. She would outfit him in his best, a coat of rustcolored velvet he loved, or maybe the darker blue that was his mother’s favorite. And brushing his hair to a lively luster, she let it fall softly without a ribbon. He looked like a baby, he would protest. Then out would come the jeweled rings, the furlined cloak, and his own little sword, studded with rubies. He was ready now. His heels made that delicious click on the marble.

The Grand Salon of the main floor was always the setting. It was an immense room, the largest in a house of large rooms, furnished only with a long heavily carved table. Three men could have lain end to end on that table. The floor was a pattern of tinted marble that made up a map of the world, while the ceiling was an endless vista of blue where angels hung suspended, unfurling a great winding ribbon of Latin lettering. The light was uneven, coming as it did through open doors from other chambers. But it was often full of morning warmth as it fell on the slight, almost wraithlike figure of Andrea Treschi.

Tonio would make his bow. And as he looked up, never once had he failed to see the awesome vitality of his father’s gaze, eyes so young they appeared disconnected from the skeletal face, and brimming with irrepressible pride and affection.

Andrea bent to kiss his son. His lips were powdery soft and soundless, and they lingered on Tonio’s cheek, and once in a
while, even as Tonio grew taller and heavier with every year, Andrea would sweep him up in his arms and crush him for a moment to his chest whispering his name as if the word, Tonio, were a little blessing.

His attendants stood about. They smiled, they winked. There seemed in the room a ripple of soft excitement. Then it was over. Rushing to his mother’s window upstairs, Tonio watched his father’s gondola move down the canal towards the piazzetta.

No one had to tell Tonio he was the last of them. Death had worked such a devastation on all branches of this great house that not even a cousin remained who bore the name. Tonio “would marry young,” he must be prepared for a life of duty. And on those few nights when he was ill, he shuddered to see his father’s face at the door; the Treschi lay with him on the pillow.

It thrilled him; it frightened him. And he would never remember the precise moment he perceived the full dimensions of his universe. All the world, it seemed, rode the broad green waters of the Grand Canal at his doorstep. Regattas all year long with hundreds of sleek black gondolas gliding by, lavish Saturday evening parades in summer when the great families decked their
peotti
with garlands and gilded gods and goddesses; the day-to-day procession of patricians on their way to affairs of state, their boats lined with richly colored carpets. If Tonio stood on the small wooden balcony over the front door, he might see the lagoon itself, with the distant ships at anchor. He could hear the soft thunder of their salutes, the blare of trumpets outside the Palazzo Ducale.

There were the endless songs of the gondoliers, lilting tenors echoing up the olive-green and rose-colored walls, the rich sweet strum of floating orchestras. At night lovers cruised under the stars. Serenades carried on the breeze. And even in the early hours, when he was bored or sad, he might gaze down on the endless throng of vegetable boats heading noisily for the markets of the Rialto.

But by the time Tonio was thirteen, he was sick of watching the world through the windows.

If only just a little of this life would spill through the front door, or better yet, if he could only get out into it!

But the Palazzo Treschi wasn’t merely his home; it was his prison. His tutors never left him alone if they could help it. Beppo, the old castrato who’d long ago lost his voice, taught him French, poetry, counterpoint, while Angelo, the young and serious priest, dark of hair and slight of build, taught him his Latin, Italian, and English.

Twice a week the fencing master came. He must learn the proper handling of the sword, more for fun it seemed than for ever seriously using it.

And then there was the
ballerino
, a charming Frenchman who put him through the mincing steps of the minuet and the quadrille, while Beppo pounded out the appropriate festive rhythms at the keyboard. Tonio must know how to kiss a lady’s hand, when and how to bow, all the fine points of a gentleman’s manner.

It was fun enough. Sometimes when he was alone he tore up the air with his blade, or danced with imaginary girls beautifully constructed from those he saw from time to time in the narrow
calli
.

But save for the endless spectacles of the church, Holy Week, Easter, the routine splendor and music of mass on Sunday, Tonio’s only escape on his own was into the bowels of the house, when he fled to the neglected rooms of the lowest floor where no one could find him.

There, with taper in hand, he sometimes probed the heavy volumes of the old archive, marveling at these moldering records of his family’s congested story. Even the raw facts and dates, pages crackling dangerously to the touch, fired his imagination: he would go to sea when he grew up, he would wear a senator’s scarlet robes; even the chair of the Doge was not beyond a Treschi.

A dull excitement coursed through his veins. He went to further prowling. He tried latches that hadn’t been turned in years, lifting ancient pictures from their damp corners to peer into alien faces. Here old storage rooms still smelled of spice, once brought from trade with the Orient when in olden times boats came to the very doors of the palazzo itself, unloading a fortune in rugs, jewels, cinnamon, silks. And there was the hemp
rope still, in damp coils, bits of straw and those mingled fragrances pungent, enticing.

He stopped from time to time. His eerie little flame danced uneasily in the draft. He could hear the water beneath the house, the dull creak of the pilings. And far above, if he shut his eyes, he could hear his mother calling.