Cry to Heaven (76 page)

“And your friends, your powerful friends, would I never stop hearing of them, the Lamberti, the Cardinal Calvino, di Stefano from Florence. And then on the stage you dared to use my name, as if throwing the glove in my face! You lived your life to torment me. You lived your life as if it were a blade thrust forward drawing ever closer to my throat!”

He sat back. His chest was a mass of pain, but oh, it felt good, so good to voice it at last, to feel the words pouring out of him, an uncontrollable stream of poison and heat.

“What did you think? That I’d deny it?” He glared at the silent figure across from him, those long white hands, those claws, playing with the handle of that long, bone-handled knife.

“I gave you your life once, expecting you to stick it between your legs and run with it. But you made a fool of me. God, has one day passed that I have not heard of you, been forced to speak of you, to deny this and deny that and swear innocence
and feign tears, and declare platitudes and resignation, and lies without end to it. You made a
fool
of me. The sentimental one, afraid to shed your blood!”

“Oh, Father, curb your tongue,” came Tonio’s astonished whisper. “You are unwise!”

Carlo laughed, a mirthless dry laughter that made the pain in his head throb.

He gulped the wine without realizing it and as his hand strained for the bottle, he saw it slide forward, and then the liquid splashing into the cup.

“Unwise, am I?” He laughed and laughed. “If you want denials from me, if you want begging, then you will be very disappointed! Take that sword of yours, that famous sword of yours, for surely you’ve got it hidden somewhere, and use it! Shed your father’s blood! Show me none of the mercy I showed you!”

And the deep drafts of Burgundy cooled him for a moment, washing over the pain and over the dryness of that laughter that seemed to carry his words along.

He wanted to wipe his mouth with his hand. It was maddening that he could not touch his mouth.

He let the wine lap against his lip as again he felt a shudder and that panic, that urge to struggle again to no avail.

“I didn’t want to send those men to Rome!” he said. “I had no choice! If it had worked differently, if they’d come and told me you’d grown meek and diffident, afraid of your own shadow! I’ve known eunuchs like that, that despicable old Beppo, who hanged himself in his cell after you left, that slinking Alessandro, for all his insolence, absolutely spiritless. There’s nothing to fear from a gelding like that. But you, oh, it had not done its work with you! You were too strong for it, too fine for it, too much of my father’s mettle, too old for it, perhaps! And there was no end to hearing of you, I tell you it was as if you lay on the very pillow beside me, as if you lived and breathed under my roof! What was I to do! You tell me! I had no choice!”

Through the haze of the smoking candles he saw the distant face still shocked with amazement, but it had become more remote, and almost sad.

“Ah, you had no choice!” Tonio whispered almost bitterly. “And what if you had come to Rome? What if we two had
met as we are met now, and discoursed as we are discoursing now?”

“Met? Discoursed?” Carlo demanded disgustedly. “To what end? So that I might have begged your forgiveness for having you gelded?” He almost sneered. “Well, I begged you once over and over again to yield to me, my bastard son! And you refused. You made your fate! It was your decision, not mine!”

“Oh, you cannot believe that!” Tonio whispered.

“I had no choice!” Carlo roared. He bent forward. “Again, I say to you I had no choice! And damn the men I sent after you in Rome, that was nothing. If they prodded you on your errand, so much the better, for you would have come and you know it, and I say to you I had no choice!”

His vision clouded, but oh, that face was so beautiful even now, demon thing, the irony of it, and youth, youth, the thing he lamented most of all.

But he was seeing the bottom of the cup again. He felt the wine running down his chin. He reached for the bottle.

“Met with you, discoursed with you.” He sighed, his chest heaving, his eyes half mast.

But what was he doing, what was he saying?

His eyes moved over the distant ceiling, the great shadowy vault that shivered slightly with the flames of the candles, where spiders lived, and the rain, seeping in, shimmered in droplets through hairline cracks.

It was time he needed, time for it to get dark, and what had he been saying, what had he let pour out of him, all the poison from these old sores.

But as he felt his body flooded with the warmth of the wine, and a great soft exhaustion, he did not care!

What he cared about was all the injustice of it, the brutal and relentless injustice of it that had gone on and on for years. Lies and accusations that were never ending, and all that he had paid and paid and paid! That was the mystery of it, that each dung he had sought had cost him so dearly it was not worth it in the end. Oh, what had he ever enjoyed that had not cost him youth, blood, and endless wrangling, and when had there ever been any understanding, any moment when he could lay down the whole of it before any judge?

“What do you know of it?” he demanded. “Of all those years in Istanbul when you were spoilt and pampered and she
taken from me, and then to come home and have her accuse me, accuse
me!
She never believed me, you know! It was always Tonio, and Tonio! I begged her a thousand times to put the wine away, I’d bring physicians, nurses. What didn’t I give her? Jewels, Paris fashions, servants to wait on her hand and foot, the gentlest nurses to care for our boys, I gave her everything! But what did she want when it was all said and done: ‘Tonio,’ and the wine, and it was the wine that brought her to her deathbed, and on her deathbed she asked for you!”

He studied Tonio. What was it now? A look of incredulity? Of unwilling pain? He could not tell. He did not care.

“That must give you solace, surely,” he said bitterly, again leaning forward, his head too heavy for him now, the wine cool and fresh in his mouth. “And she in those last days! Do you know what she said to me, that I had ruined her, destroyed her, driven her to madness and drink and taken from her her only comfort, our son! She said this to me!”

“And of course you did not believe it, did you?” Tonio whispered.

“Believe it! After what I had suffered for her!” Carlo felt the leather strap against him with a sharp pain, and settling backwards, held the bottle tight in his hand. “After what I had done for her! Exiled for the love of her, and who after all those years in Istanbul, and she in my father’s house, would have bothered with her again!

“But I loved her, and it was a passion that endured fifteen years only to be destroyed by what? Not time, mind you, not my father, mind you, but you! ‘Tonio’ and she died. She would not even look at our children in the end….”

His voice broke. He was startled at the sound of it, and would have rested his head in his hands if he could.

This bondage was endurable, but it would be worse were he to struggle and feel its limits, and desperately he told himself that, as he sat still, his hands straining to reach his face, his head moving just a little from side to side.

“You ask if I believed her. What right have you to ask me anything! What right have you to sit in judgment on me!”

He reached for the brandy flask, and quickly emptied it into the cup. He drank it down, feeling the sharper, stronger heat of it, delicious, and the whole room seemed to move under him, some convulsion in him rolling upwards until even his eyes
rolled up in his head. Some image was before him, tormenting him, of his young and beautiful Marianna when he had first taken her from the convent, when they had come into his lodgings, and when she realized he was not to marry her, and she commenced to scream.

He was shuddering, remembering only the rush of his words as he had tried to comfort her, assuring her it was only time he needed, time to win over his father. “I am his only son, don’t you see, he must yield to me!”

But this was not what he wanted now. He was on the verge of delirium; and without words he had some sense of the years before that, when his mother was alive, and all of his brothers, and all the world had been easy and full of hope and full of love. There stood between him and his father a great buffer, and there had been nothing he could not mend, could not make right. But that had been taken away from him, cruelly, just as she had been taken away, and his youth had been taken away, and it seemed now that all he could truly remember was struggle and bitterness that obliterated everything else.

He moaned. He was gazing at the supper table. Dimly, he knew where he was and that it was Tonio who held him here. He felt the strap cutting him, and drifting, he struggled to see clearly, to remember again that what he needed now was time.

The candles were burning low, and the fire on the hearth was a heap of glowing cinders. When he had gone drunk to the Broglio that morning, swearing he would marry her with or without permission, his father had stood over him, turning him back, that horrid countenance: “You dare to defy me!” And she, sobbing across the bed in those filthy lodgings, “O God in Heaven, what have you done to me?”

He must have made some sound again, some moan.

With a start he realized the room had darkened and grown enormous, and Tonio, opposite, stared at him still without expression save for the hardest line to that long mouth.

His black hair was softened now and fallen down more naturally about his face, and what did he look like? Even after the knife there was still the old resemblance, yes, like a dozen portraits painted years and years ago when they were all together, his brothers and he, and his mother, but this was Tonio!

He felt the sickness rising in him again.

“You…” He seethed, his body shuddering. “You hold me
prisoner here, you sit in judgment on me! Is that what you’ve come for, judgment on me! You, the pampered one”—he smiled, that laughter commencing again, low, rustling dry laughter that seemed to carry his words along—“the chosen one of my father, and the singer, yes, the great singer, the celebrity in Rome with women pelting his carriage with flowers, and royalty receiving him, Tonio with gold overflowing his purse, and the great Cardinal Calvino doting on his every wish.”

There was just a flicker of feeling in Tonio’s face.

“Yes, yes.” He laughed, his laughter low and dry. “Do you think I don’t know the odious fate to which I so rashly and impulsively condemned you, do you think I haven’t heard tell of your lovers, your worshipers, your friends? What door is there that has not opened to you? What is there you would have that has been denied you? Eunuch. What in God’s name did they hack away from you that you have laid a siege to the beds of Rome as great as that of the barbarian hordes?

“And you come here, rich, young, blessed by the gods even in your monstrousness, so that you seduce your own father, and you sit in judgment on me! Ask me why I did this and why I did that!”

He rested, his fingers trying vainly to wipe at his lips. There was a taste of brandy yet in the cup and it burned him.

“Tell me”—he bent forward again, head cocked to one side—“would you give up all of that if you could have it back, Tonio! Would you give up all of that for the life I’ve had since!” He leered into Tonio’s face. “Think before you answer. Shall I tell you just what it has been! And never mind my wife wailing ever for her lost son, and your cousin, your dear cousin, Catrina, a harpy at me night and day, claws ever and ever deeper, waiting for my slightest slip of the tongue! And those old senators and councillors, his partisans, vultures, that’s what they are, ever watching me out of the corner of their eye!

“No, I am talking of Venice now, the life of duty and obligation of which I so cruelly robbed you, Tonio, the singer, Tonio, the celebrity, the castrato. Well, hearken to me.”

He softened his tone as if confiding a secret, his words almost feverish: “A great moldering palazzo to begin with, that drains your fortune for its countless rooms, its crumbling walls, its rotting foundations, like a giant sea sponge sucking
up all that you give to it and ever wanting more, an emblem finally of the Republic itself, that great government which every day of your life summons you to the Offices of State, there to bow, to smile, to haggle, to lie, to plead and preside over the incessant and never-ending cacophonous babble that is the day-to-day workings of this proud and powerless city without empire, without destiny, without hope! Spies and inquisitors and rubrics and tradition and pomp on the verge of madness, your pocket picked for every new spectacle, feast day, anniversary, celebration, and extravagant display.

“And after that, when finally you are quit of those elephantine robes, and mumbling inanities, your feet blistered, the very muscles of your face aching from dissimulation, what then, but that you are free at last for the one hundredth time to lose your money at the Ridotto, or sleep with the same courtesan or the same tavern girl, or the same adulteress with whom you quarreled seven times the week before, the spies of the state ever at your elbow, your enemies ever judging you, your conduct ever under scrutiny, and when you are weary of it, sick of it, suffocated with it, only to turn round and look about you, from one end of this narrow island to the other, and realize that on the morrow it will all begin over again!

“And you have come home to judge me!

“You want it back! You want to take it in place of the opera, you want it instead of your English beauty in the Piazza di Spagna, you want to give up that voice of yours that has made you a god among the people and a nonpareil, so that you can return here but one of a thousand grasping noblemen all struggling for the same few expensive and dreary offices within this Republic all but shrunk to the very walls you saw around in the piazza when you played your little dance of cunning for me!”

Low laughter. It had its own momentum, good like the words, an outpouring that could not be checked.

“You take the damned stinking house. You take the damned stinking government. You take it all and…”