Damiano's Lute (3 page)

But all he could bring himself to say was: “Please, Gaspare. I get so tired.”

His lack of response brought the flush stronger into Gaspare's face. “We will starve, and it will be
all your fault!”
he shouted, in an effort to be as unfair as possible.

Damiano did not look at him.

Gaspare's color went from red to white with sheer rage. That he should have to follow this lifeless stick from place to place like a dog, dependent upon him for music (which was both Gaspare's living and his life), for companionship, and even for language (for Gaspare spoke nothing but Italian)… it was crushing, insupportable. Tears leaked out of Gaspare's eyes.

But tears were not Gaspare's most natural mode of expression. Convulsively he grabbed Damiano's arm and drew it to him. With a canine growl he sank his teeth into it.

Damiano stood up in the seat howling. Gaspare tasted blood but he did not let go, no more than any furious terrier, not until the wooden handle of the horsewhip came crashing down on his head and shoulders.

Damiano then threw himself down from the seat of the moving wagon, clutching his bleeding arm and dancing over the shoulder of the road. The gelding pattered to a halt and turned its elegant, snake-like head.

Above, on the high wooden seat, young Gaspare sat, red as a boiled crab, and puffing like a bellows.

Damiano stared, slack-jawed, at him. “You
bit
me!” He repeated it twice, wonderingly. “Why?”

Suddenly Gaspare was all composure, and he knew the answer to that question as he spoke it. “I wanted to see if you were still alive at all. You don't act like it, you know, except when you play the lute. I thought maybe you died last winter, during the battle of San Gabriele, and had not yet noticed.

“A man gets tired,” Gaspare concluded, “of talking with the dead.”

Still gaping, Damiano pulled his woolen sleeve up. “Mother of God,” he whispered, staring at the neat oval of broken skin, where stripes of crimson were welling over the bronze. “You have bitten me like you were a dog! Worse, for no dog has ever bitten me.” His head went from side to side in shocked, old-womanish gestures, and his eyes on the wound were very large.

Gaspare sat very tall on the wagon seat. The yellow and green of his dagged jerkin outlined the ribs over his emotion-puffed chest. “Best work I've done in weeks,” he stated. “Should have seen yourself hop.”

Then he settled in the seat, like a bird shifting its weight from wings to perch. “You've been unbearable, lutenist. Absolutely unbearable for weeks. No man with a spirit could endure your company.”

Receiving this additional shock, Damiano let his wounded arm drop. “Unbearable? Gaspare! I haven't even raised my voice to you.
You're
the one who has been howling and complaining since we hit the French side of the pass….”

“Exactly!” The boy thrust out one knobbed finger. “Even though it is to meet
my
sister we are traveling across France and Provence in cold, dry Lent. It is me who complains, because I am a man. And you bear with me with a saintly, condescending patience which undermines my manhood.” Now Gaspare stood, declaiming from the footboard (which wobbled) of the high seat.

“To err is human. Yes! I am a human man and proud of it! To forgive… and forgive, and forgive… that is diabolic.”

Suddenly the older fellow's dark face darkened, and he kicked a wheel as he muttered, “Did you have to say that—exactly that, Gaspare? Diabolic? A man can also get tired of being called a devil.”

Gaspare snorted and wiped his nose on his long, tight sleeve. “No fear. You possess no such dignity. You are the unwitting—and I do mean
unwitting
—tool of wickedness, designed to lead me to damned temptation! By Saint Gabriele, Damiano, I believe you lost your head with that cursed Roman General Pardo in the town hall cellar, for you've been nothing but a ghost of a man since.”

Damiano stared at Gaspare, and then stared through him. Five seconds later, for no perceivable reason, he flinched. His uninjured arm gestured about his head, dispersing unseen flies. Without a word he stepped to the side of the wagon and climbed into it through one of its large holes. A moment later he was out again, carrying a bundle with a strap and another bundle wrapped in flannel. The first he slid over his back (it made a tinkling noise) and the second he cradled with motherly care. Then he strode off and disappeared to Gaspare's eyes, hidden by the bulk of the wagon.

Gaspare heard the receding footsteps. He stood and hopped from one foot to the other. Failing to see Damiano appear around
the wagon, he sprang gracefully to the dirt.

It was true. The lutenist was leaving, plodding back up the road toward Lyons, Chamonix and the Alps. Without another word, he was leaving. By conscious effort, the boy turned his sensation of cold desolation into his more accustomed red anger. He caught up with Damiano in ten athletic bounds.

“Hah!” he spat. “So you think to stick me with that unmanageable swine of a horse? Well, it won't work. The crows can pick his ribs for all I care!” And he executed a perfect, single-point swivel, flung up his right arm in a graceful, dynamic and very obscene gesture, and marched back down the road west and south. His small, peaked face was flaming.

Damiano, in his outrage, had forgotten Festilligambe, and he now felt a bit foolish. His less acrobatic steps slowed to a shuffling halt, while he heard Gaspare rummaging through the wagon. At last, when the noise had faded, Damiano came back.

The horse, while still standing between the traces, stared curiously over his shoulder at Damiano. He had a marvelous flexibility in that neck, did Festilligambe. Damiano tossed his gear back into the wagon and carefully deposited the lute into the niche in one corner which he had built for it. (This corner had no holes.)

Slowly and spiritlessly Damiano walked over to the horse. He examined the knotted, makeshift harness and the places where it had worn at the beast's coat. Festilligambe lipped his master's hair hopefully, tearing out those strands which became caught between his big box teeth. Damiano didn't appear to notice.

“I shouldn't be doing this to you, fellow,” he whispered, stroking the black back free from dust. “You are no cart horse. It's clean straw and grain for which you were born. And fast running, with victory wine from silver cups.” Thick horse lips smacked against the young man's face, telling him what the gelding thought about silver cups. His near hind foot suggested they start moving again.

Having no ideas of his own, Damiano was open to such suggestion. He boosted himself up to the driver's seat and reached for the whip he had dropped after drubbing Gaspare. Carefully he pulled up his sleeve, bunching it above the elbow to allow the sun free access to the neatly punched bite on his forearm.

The horse did not wait for a signal to start.

What a misery that boy was. Squatting passively on the plank of wood, Damiano let Gaspare's offenses parade by, one by one.

There had been that housewife in Porto. She had had no business to call the boy such names, certainly, but you cannot drive through a town cracking strange women on the head and expect to get away with it. Not even when they are bigger than you. Especially not then. She had almost broken the lute over Damiano's shoulders (though he was by rights not involved in the exchange of insults, only easier to catch than Gaspare).

And in Aosta they had come near to fame, or at least a comfortable living, playing before the Marchioness d'Orvil, until Gaspare ruined things and nearly got them sent to prison with that sarabande he insisted on dancing. In front of the marquese, besides. Damiano blushed even now, wondering how he could have missed seeing all winter that the dance was obscene. Gaspare had no delicacy.

But he was touchy as a
condottiere,
where slights to his small self were concerned. And jealous. Though he never let Damiano forget the young man's inexperience with women, Gaspare's attitude was as possessive as it was mocking, and his green eyes watched Damiano's every move. Let the lute player offer one gallant word to a female of any description, whether it be a girl with the figure of a poker or a mother with a dozen children, and Gaspare purely trembled with agitation.

You'd think he was a girl himself.

And hey! Gaspare was even jealous of the horse. That was what lay behind his silly resentment of the animal. He was jealous.

Heat laid a dry hand against Damiano's face. The clouds had dissolved in the sky. The black gelding trotted now easily, ears a-prick, long head bowing left and right to an invisible audience. It was as though this trip to Provence were Festilligambe's idea, not Damiano's. Or rather not Gaspare's, Damiano corrected himself. Damiano had no pressing desire to meet Evienne and her thieving clerk of a lover in Avignon on Palm Sunday. It was Gaspare who had arranged the rendezvous and set the time. (And what a time! How they had gotten through the snows of the pass at that season was a story in itself, and not a pleasant one. It had almost done for the lute, not to mention the three living members of the party.)

Gaspare babbled endlessly about his sister, calling her harlot, slut and whore with every breath and always in tones of great pride. He had badgered Damiano into crossing the Alps two months too early,

just to keep faith with this sister with whom he was sure to squabble again in the first hour.

There was nothing wrong with Evienne, really. She had a warm, ripe body dusted with freckles, a wealth of copper hair and a strong desire to please.

But when Damiano compared her to another woman of his acquaintance—a lady whose tint was not so rare or figure quite so generous—all Evienne's color and charm faded into insignificance.

Next to Saara of the Saami, all of female humanity came out second best, Damiano reflected ruefully.

And when Gaspare met Evienne again, along with her lover and pimp, Jan Karl, the boy was sure to learn more pickpocket's tricks. He was certain to wind up hanged as a thief, if he didn't die brawling.

Damiano shut off this silent arraignment of his musical partner, without even touching on Gaspare's salient vices of gluttony and greed. It was an arraignment too easy to draw up, and rather more pathetic than damning. The upset of spirits it was causing in the lutenist was making his arm throb harder.

So what if Gaspare was nothing but trash, and daily becoming worse. Who had ever said otherwise—Gaspare himself?

No. Especially not Gaspare.

And there was the truth that disarmed Damiano's argument, Gaspare expected nothing but failure from himself—failure, acrimony, wounded pride. He
knew
he was difficult to get along with, and he accepted that Damiano was not. Therefore he considered it Damiano's responsibility to get along with him, as it is the responsibility of a hale man to support a lame companion, or a sighted man to see for a blind.

And this last tirade, in which the boy had accused Damiano of exactly nothing, had been built on a bizarre foundation of humility. For by letting the lutenist know how disappointed in him Gaspare was, he also let him know how much he had expected of him.

Damiano's head drooped. Grass-broken road swept by below the cracked footboard. His fine anger dissolved with the shreds of clouds, leaving a puddle of shame.

The truth was he didn't really like Gaspare. Not wholeheartedly, except when the music gave them a half-hour's unity, or during the rare moments when they were both rested and fed. Gaspare was simply not very likable.

But the problem was Damiano didn't like anyone else wholeheartedly either, except of course one glorious angel of God. And that took no effort.

Gaspare had been right, Damiano admitted to himself. He had failed the boy. He had given him very little, on a human level, since the beginning of winter. Aside from his music, Damiano had felt he had nothing to give.

And wasn't the lute enough? Damiano rubbed his face with both hands. God knew it was work to study and play as hard as he had done for the past year. It required concentration, which was the hardest of works, as well as the best.

But no. Damiano might be a madman about his instrument, but he was not so deluded as all that. One could not pass off a
bourrée
as an act of friendship, any more than one could disguise as human warmth what was mere good manners and a dislike of conflict.

And what had he taken from Gaspare in exchange for that counterfeit friendship? Rough loyalty, praise, energy, enthusiasm….

Once Damiano had had his own enthusiasm. Enthusiasm and a dog. The dog died, and then the enthusiasm, and he had had only Gaspare.

Eyes gone blind to the spirit, ears gone deaf to the natural world: it seemed to Damiano he had given as much as a man ought to be asked to give, for the sake of right. He ought to be allowed some peace now, for as long as he had left.

But how could he say that to Gaspare, who had never possessed what Damiano had now lost?

Suddenly it occurred to him to wonder which way the boy had gone. Surely he would continue to Avignon, to Evienne. Damiano raised his eyes.

A minute later and Gaspare would have been out of sight, or at least out of the lutenist's poor sight. But he was visible in the far distance ahead, a bobbing splotch of motley, jogging along faster than the horse's amble. Frowning, Damiano tossed his hair from his face. Gaspare's physical endurance inspired awe. Doubtless he would make it to the city alone, and probably he would go quicker and plumper than he would have in the lutenist's company.

Then truth stung Damiano's black eyes. Beloved or no, Gaspare was necessary to him. In a manner totally removed from the question of like or dislike, Damiano Delstrego needed Gaspare because the boy believed in him—as a lutenist, as a composer.

As a man of possibilities.

Damiano did not believe he was the best lutenist in the Italies, any more than he had believed himself to have been the most powerful witch in the Italies—when he had been a witch. After all, he had only been playing (obsessively) for a handful of years. But Gaspare did believe that, and more. Gaspare was the first and only person in Damiano's life who was convinced of Damiano's greatness.