Authors: Anne Rice
Cry to Heaven (44 page)
It seemed the world was fragrant and full of unspoiled loveliness everywhere he looked. It held no hideous mystery for him. There was no draining tension day in and day out.
And he felt quieted with love, love for Guido, love for Paolo, love for all those who were his fast friends under the same roof, those boys who shared work and play and study and rehearsal and performance, those who were the only brothers he’d ever known.
And yet the darkness was there.
The darkness was always there. It waited only for Catrina’s letter, for the insult of that rash and inept Tuscan boy. But it had been so easy for so long to shut it out!
It seemed a wonder to him that he had ever counted upon hatred, bitterness, to sustain him until the children of Carlo numbered so many that he could go back and settle the old score.
Was he so flawed that he had forgotten the wrong done him, the world denied him, that he could have fallen so easily into this strange life in Naples which now seemed more real to him than any life in Venice he’d ever known? Was it weakness that he had not wanted to kill the Tuscan? Or could it have been something wiser and finer that he felt in those moments?
He had the appalling fear suddenly that the world would never let him know.
Yet it seemed unreal to him that he had ever lived in Venice. That he had ever seen the mist steal over those motionless canals the color of lead, or the walls rise up on either side so close they threatened to swallow the very stars.
Silvery domes, rounded arches, mosaics shimmering even through the rain,
what was this place?
Shutting his eyes he tried to recall his mother. He tried to hear her voice, to see her whirling in the dance on that dusty floor. Had there ever been a day when seeing her at the window, he had crept up crying behind her? She was singing some common street song. Was she thinking of Istanbul? His hand went out for her. She turned to strike him. He felt himself falling….
Had any of this happened at all?
He was standing suddenly in the grass. The green land was laid open all around. Far off, he saw Guido’s dark form stranded amid a great drift of tiny flowers that streaked this vast and beautiful place like white traces of the clouds. And the figure seemed too motionless, the head cocked to one side as if Guido were listening to the sound of the distant birds or simply to the emptiness itself.
“Carlo,” he whispered. “Carlo!” as if he could not leave this spot until he had made his father real. And then he closed his eyes on the gentle sun, on these endless fields, and in that distant city he knew so well, he found himself stalking, feline, deadly until in some shadowy and unexpected place he’d come upon him, and in his face he saw the horror, the shock.
But dear God, what would I give if I could live but one day, just one day, with this cup passed from me?
A
NOTHER SEVEN MONTHS PASSED
before Tonio was to hear from Marianna herself, telling of the birth of her second son.
He was so shaken when he saw the letter that he carried it with him all day, opening it only when he was alone on the edge of the sea.
It seemed with the roar of the waves in his ears he would not hear her voice, which had for him some menace like the Sirens’ song.
Not an hour goes by that I do not think of you, that I do not feel pain for you, that I do not blame myself for your rash and terrible action. You are not lost to me, no matter how you protest, no matter how reckless and spiteful the course you took.
Your little brother, Marcello Antonio Treschi, was born a week ago in this house. But no child takes your place in my heart.
Only a few days separated Tonio from his first lead role in an opera entirely written by Guido for the conservatorio stage. And he knew if he could not forget this letter, he could not perform.
He drove himself almost foolishly as the production drew near, and his will stood by him. On that night he thought of nothing but music; he was Tonio Treschi of the conservatorio,
and Guido’s lover, afterwards, when only a frenzied lovemaking could silence the echo of the applause in his ears.
But in the days that followed this little triumph, he was obsessed with his mother, though little of his love for her, his sense of her beauty and her sometime tenderness, remained.
She was Carlo’s wife now; she belonged to him, and how could she have ever believed him! Yet believed him she had, without doubt.
Beneath this almost blinding anger, Tonio knew the answer, of course. She had believed Carlo because she
had
to, she had believed him to go on living, she had believed him to escape her empty room and her empty bed. What would there have been for her in that house save Carlo?
And at times, when these thoughts revolved in his head almost incessantly, he could not escape the memory of her old unhappiness, her loneliness, those flashes of cruelty that could even now in recollection bring the chills to the surface of his skin.
Shut up in a convent she would have died, he was certain of it, and his brother, his powerful and cunning brother, his wronged and righteous and willful brother, would have taken another wife in her place.
No, she had faced an impossible choice, and to live with the man without his love would have been as unendurable as the convent cell. She must have the man’s love as well as his protection and his name. What had name and protection ever done for her in the past, after all?
“And I shall send her back to her loneliness,” he mused. “I shall send her back to her cloister….” And he saw her once more in a widow’s black veil.
It was real to him, more real than the pictures these letters conjured of babies christened, and of a life in that house such as he had never known.
She turned on him, she railed at him. With fists clenched, she cursed him. He heard her cries over the years and the miles, and over the dim vista of the imagined future, “I am helpless,” and his anger moved inexorably past her so that she became a shadow unable to affect what lay before him any more than she had ever affected the past.
She was lost from him, truly lost from him, and yet his eyes misted over again and again to think of her, and he turned
sharply, his heart racing, from the everyday spectacle of those dark-clad women in the churches everywhere, widows ancient and young lighting their candles, on their knees before the altars, walking in black clusters with their old servants, through the streets.
Invitations poured in now for him to sing at private suppers and concerts. He ventured out once to the house of the old Marchesa he’d met his first night at the Contessa Lamberti’s house.
But as time passed, he sent only regrets no matter when he was asked.
Guido was furious naturally.
“You must be heard!” he insisted. “You must be seen and heard in the great houses. Tonio, the foreign visitors must see you, don’t you understand?”
“Well, they can hear of me and come to see me here,” Tonio said, quickly blaming it upon the rigors of his schedule. “You expect too much of me!” he said with conviction. “And besides the Maestro’s always complaining about how the boys get into trouble when they go out, too much drinking…”
“Oh, stop it,” Guido said contemptuously.
But the conservatorio became the only place where Tonio would perform.
More and more he kept to it when he was not in the fencing salon, and he never accepted the invitations of the other young men there to join them in drinking or the hunt.
Again and again he was startled to see his blond-haired friend. She was in the Franciscan church when he went with the other boys for the regular performance. He saw her in the Teatro San Carlos, perched like a queen in the Contessa’s box. She faced the stage as English people did, and seemed forever engrossed in the music.
And she was at the school every time that he sang.
From time to time, he returned to the Contessa’s with one purpose, though he never admitted to himself what it was. He would go to the chapel and look at those delicate and darkly colored murals, the oval-faced Virgin and her angels with their stiff wings, the muscular saints. It was always late when he did so; he had always just a little too much wine. And sometimes
seeing her afterwards in the ballroom, he would stare at her so boldly and so long that surely her family was bound to take offense.
They never did.
But it was his life at the conservatorio that more fully engrossed him, and nothing really disturbed his regimen, his day-to-day happiness, except the long letters of his cousin Catrina, who in spite of the fact that he seldom if ever answered her, grew more and more bold.
Always delivered to him by the same young Venetian from the embassy, the letters were clearly meant for Tonio’s eyes alone.
She, too, reported the birth of Marianna’s second baby, saying simply it was healthy as the first:
But your brother’s bastards far outnumber his legitimate heirs, or so I am told, as it seems not even his brilliant successes in the Senate and in the councils prevent him from an almost continuous delight in the fair sex.
Your mother he worships however, have no fear on her account.
Yet all marvel at his vigor, his robustness, his capacity for work and play from the crack of dawn to the chiming of midnight. And to those who express their admiration, he is quick to counter that exile and misfortune have both combined to make him savor the life he lives.
Of course at the mere mention of his brother, Tonio, he is at once driven to tears. Oh, how grateful he is to hear that you are doing so well in the south, and yet for all that gratitude, he is nevertheless concerned to hear so much about your singing and your prowess with the sword.
“The stage,” he says to me, “you don’t really think he would ever go on the stage?” And he confesses that he had fancied you somewhat of the temperament of your old teacher, Alessandro.
And I observe that you are more inclined to be another Caffarelli, and at that you should see the look on his face.
He would have everyone feel sorry for him! Can you imagine it! Don’t I know what it means to him to be reminded so often, he says, of all this disgrace?
“And the dueling!” he says to me. “What of all this dueling? I only want for him to be at peace.”
“Yes, and there is nothing so peaceful as the grave, is there?” I observe. Only to have him give way to great emotion again and leave my house in a flood of tears.
But he returns, soon enough, much fortified with wine, and pleasantly exhausted from the casinos. And bleary-eyed, he condemns me for my persecution, and yes, if I must know it, he has often thought it would have been better for his unfortunate brother, Tonio, if the surgeon had unwittingly caused some greater injury so that the boy were at rest.
“Why so?” I laugh. “What a dreadful thing to say. Why, he prospers remarkably by all accounts!”
“But what if he’s slain in some foolish sword fight?” he demands. “I am never without worry over him night or day.” He should never have sent you the swords you requested.
“Swords he can purchase anywhere,” I remark.
“My little brother, my little brother,” he says with such emotion it would wring tears from an audience. “Does anyone know what I have endured!” But then he turns from me as if he cannot confide in one so simpleminded and unsympathetic as myself
the full extent of his various regrets!
But truly Tonio, I beg you to be careful and wise. If he hears more of your swordsmanship, he may well feel compelled to dispatch a pair of bravos to Naples for your protection. And I think you would find the company of such men confining, if not positively smothering. Tonio, be watchful and wise.
As for the stage, your voice, how can anyone begrudge you the gift God gave you? I hear your singing when I lie awake at night on my pillow. Would I could really hear it once again, and take you in my arms to show you how much I love you now as I have always. Your brother is a fool if he does not look to you to do great things.
This letter Tonio kept with him for a long time before he eventually committed it, as he had so many others, to the fire.
He was much amused by it, and strangely fascinated by it,
and his hatred for Carlo was stoked by it to a new and hotter flame.
How well he saw his brother drinking of the cup of life that was Venice! How well he imagined that figure moving from the ballroom to the floor of the Senate, to the Ridotto, to a courtesan’s arms.
But all Catrina’s gentle warnings were lost on Tonio. He changed nothing in his own life.
He was as dedicated as ever in the fencing salon. And he perfected his aim with the pistol at targets when he had time for it. And alone in his room, increased his skill with the stiletto as much as anyone can without the luxury of sinking it regularly into other people’s flesh.
But he knew it was not belligerence or courage that had prompted him to take such a commanding manner with Giacomo Lisani, or pushed him to such obvious skill with weapons just now.
It was simply that he could not conceal from anyone what he was in any way.
More and more the glances of those he met told him they knew he was a eunuch. And the glances of the young Neapolitans told him that he had won their unqualified respect.
As for the stage—his being another Caffarelli, as Catrina had so generously put it—he wished for it and dreaded it so much that sometimes he was baffled by his own mind.
He was intoxicated by the applause, the paint, the glitter of the beautiful sets, and the moment when he heard his own voice ring clear over the others, weaving its elusive and powerful magic for all who wished to hear.
Yet to think of the great theaters filled him with an isolating and strangely exciting fear.
“Two children in two years!”
Sometimes it hit him with such clarity and force that he stopped in his tracks. Two children, both of them healthy sons!
Many a Venetian family had only that claim upon immortality.
And he wished, oh, how he wished with all his heart, that his mother and his father had given him just a little time!