Cry to Heaven (72 page)

Four bravos would guard Marc Antonio from now on, said the Cardinal. Tactfully, considerately, anger still agitating him, he did not ask Raffaele why Raffaele’s men had been there. The Cardinal’s bravos had spoken to these men as if they knew them, as if their presence came as no surprise.

And what if none of them had been there? Tonio narrowed his eyes and looked away as Raffaele bent to kiss the Cardinal’s ring.

Across the room, Guido appeared defeated behind his mask
of innocence. It was as if he’d seen Tonio’s body lying slain in the street.

Tonio felt the cut on his throat again. Raffaele was going out. The bravos would stand guard in the very corridors of the house, even as Tonio had seen those bravos of Carlo making shadows of themselves in the passages of the Palazzo Treschi.

“Go, Guido,” Tonio whispered.

Finally he and the Cardinal Calvino were alone.

“My lord,” Tonio asked. “Would you grant me another kindness after so many? Could we go alone to your chapel? Would you hear my confession?”

T
HEY WALKED
in silence down the hall. And opening the doors found the air warm inside, candles aglimmer before the marble saints, and the golden doors of the tabernacle giving off a faint light above the smooth whiteness of the linen-draped altar.

The Cardinal moved to the first row of carved chairs set before the communion rail and settled himself there, offering the seat next to him to Tonio. There was no need for the men to use the wooden confessional box itself. The Cardinal’s bowed head and haggard profile told him he might begin when he wanted:

“My lord,” he said, “what I tell you must be under the seal of the confessional and never repeated to anyone.”

The Cardinal’s brows knit. “Marc Antonio, why do you remind me of this?” he asked.

He raised his right hand and made an efficient little blessing.

“Because I don’t ask absolution, my lord, I seek some justice
perhaps, some righteousness before heaven. I don’t know what I seek, but I must tell you the one who sent men to kill me is my own father, known to everyone as my brother.”

The tale came out of him swiftly, cleanly, as if the years had washed the trivia away, leaving only the bones. And the Cardinal’s face constricted with pain and concentration. His lowered lids were smoothly rounded over his eyes and he shook his head ever so slightly in eloquent silence.

“What was done to me would have moved others to vengeance long before now,” Tonio whispered. “But I know now it was my
happiness
that caused me to eschew my purpose. I did not abhor my life; I loved it. My voice was not only God’s gift to me, it was my joy, and all of those around me became my joy, though granted there was lust and there was passion. I can’t deny it. But live I do, and sometimes I’ve felt I was like a glass of water struck by the sun, the light veritably exploded in it until it became a light itself.

“So how could I strike him down? How could I make a widow of my mother once again, and orphans of her children? How could I bring darkness and death to that house? And how could I raise my hand to him when he was my father, and in love for my mother he had given me life? How could I do this when, save for the hatred of him, I lived in the happiness and contentment I had never known as a child?

“So I put off the doing of it. That he must have not one child, but two, I waited. That my mother should finally be released to heaven, I waited. And even then, when nothing remained to prevent me, when I had discharged my duties to those I loved, and nothing stood in my path, it was my
happiness
and the leaving of it that caused me to waver. But more to the point, my lord, it was my happiness that caused me guilt that I should strike him down! Why must he die if I had the world, and love, and all a man could hunger for? These are the questions I asked myself.

“And even on this very day, I wavered, struggling with my conscience and my purpose, the arguments I gave others but arguments with myself.

“But you see, he has been his own undoing! He has sent his men to kill me. He can do it now. My mother is dead and buried, and four years stand between him and the obvious motives that would have proved his death sentence had he done
it before when he counted so upon my allegiance to my house, and my name, and yes, even to him, the last of my family.

“And sending these assassins to cut me down, he has sought to snuff out the very life that was luring me away from him, that was saying to me, forget him, let him live!

“But I cannot forget him. Now he has left me no choice. I must go there and strike him down, and there is no reason under God I cannot do this and come back to those I love who are waiting for me. Tell me there is no reason I must destroy myself to destroy this man who has this very day attempted to kill me!”

“But
can
you destroy him, Marc Antonio,” the Cardinal asked, “without forfeiting your own life?”

“Yes, my lord,” Tonio answered with quiet conviction. “I can do it. For a long time I have known a way to get him in my power with little danger to myself.”

The Cardinal weighed this silently. His eyes narrowed as he looked at the distant tabernacle.

“Ah, how little I knew of you, how little I knew of what you suffered….” he said.

“An image has come to my mind,” Tonio went on. “All evening it has plagued me. It is that old tale told to children and grown men alike of how the great conqueror Alexander, presented with the Gordian knot, cut through it with his sword. For that was what was inside of me, a veritable Gordian knot of wishing to live and yet believing I could not live until I’d destroyed him and thereby proved my own ruin! Well, he has cut the Gordian knot with the knives of his assassins. And often enough tonight when others thought I smiled or talked or even sang on the stage, I was thinking to myself I understand now how fully that old tale has always disappointed me. What wisdom was there slicing through a puzzle which had defeated finer minds? What a brutal and tragic misunderstanding! Yet these are the ways of men, my lord, the slicing through, the cutting away; and it is only those of us, perhaps, who are not men who can see the wisdom of good and evil in a fuller light and be paralyzed by our vision of it.

“Oh, I would spend my time with eunuchs, with women, with children and saints, who shun the vulgarity of swords if I were but free to do so. But I am not. He comes for me. He reminds me that manhood is not so easily dispatched after all,
but can be yet summoned from my bowels to stand against him. It is as I always believed it was: I am not a man and yet I am a man and cannot live as one or the other as long as he lives unpunished!”

“Then there is but one certain way out of this difficulty.” The Cardinal turned to him at last. “You cannot raise your hand against your father without suffering for it. You have told me so yourself. I need not quote the Scriptures to you. And yet your father has sought to kill you because he is afraid of you. Hearing of your triumph on the stage, your fame, your fortune, your swordsmanship, the powerful men who have befriended you, he cannot but believe you mean to move against him.

“So you must go to Venice. You must get him in your power. I can send men with you, or those of Count di Stefano, however you choose. And then confront him if you will. Satisfy yourself that he has suffered these four years for the wrong he committed against you.
Then let him go
. And he will have the certainty he needs that you will never do him wrong; and you will have your satisfaction. The Gordian knot will be unraveled and there will be no swords.

“These things I don’t say to you as a priest, as your confessor. I say them as one who is in awe of all you have suffered and lost and gained in spite of everything. I have never been tested by God as you have. And when I failed my God, you were gentle with me in my sins and showed me no contempt nor monstrous advantage in my weakness.

“Do as I tell you. The man who let you live for so long does not truly wish to kill you. What he wants above all is your forgiveness. And only when you have him on his knees can you convince him that you have the strength to give it.”

“But do I have that strength?” Tonio demanded.

“When you realize it is the
greatest
of all strengths, you will possess it. You will be the man you want to be. And your father will bear eternal witness to it.”

Guido was not asleep when Tonio came in. He was at his desk in the dark and there came from him the soft sounds of the cup being lifted, of the liquid in it being drunk, and the cup being set down on the wood again almost silently.

Paolo lay curled in the middle of Guido’s bed, the moon laying bare his tear-stained face and loose hair, and the fact
that he had never undressed and was cold, with his arms close around him.

Tonio lifted the folded cover and laid it over him. He brought it up to his chin and bent to kiss him.

“Are you weeping for me as well?” He turned to Guido.

“Perhaps,” Guido answered. “Perhaps for you, and for me, and for Paolo. And for Christina, also.”

Tonio approached the desk. He stood before it watching Guido’s face slowly reveal itself.

“Can you have an opera ready for Easter?” he asked.

Hesitantly, Guido nodded.

“And the impresario from Florence, is he still here?”

Again, with hesitation, Guido nodded.

“Then go to the impresario and make the arrangements. Hire a carriage large enough for all of you—Christina, Paolo, Signora Bianchi—and go to Florence and take a house for us there.

“Because I promise you, if I do not come back to you sooner, I will be with you on Easter Sunday before the doors of the theater open.”

E
VEN IN THIS VEIL
of gently driven rain, it was too beautiful to be a real city. Rather it was the dream of a city, defying reason, its ancient palaces sliding up from the battered surface of the leaden water to form, all of a piece, one grand and glorious and continuous mirage. The sun suffused itself through the broken clouds, burnt silver at the edges, the masts of the ships rising sharply beneath the soaring gulls, banners snapped and flapping, explosions of color against the gleaming sky.

The wind whipped the sheet of water that was the piazzetta, and beyond came the bell of the Campanile, caught up in the cold howling so that the sound seemed the dream of itself, like the screaming of the gulls.

Out of the porticoes of the Offices of State there came that ancient and sacrosanct spectacle of the Most Serene Senate, scarlet robes trailing in the damp, white wigs torn by the wind, as the promenade took it to the water’s edge, and one by one these men drifted off into those sleek funereal barges of jet black, up the avenue of unbroken splendor that was the Grand Canal.

Oh, would it never cease to astonish, to lay waste the heart and the mind? Or was it only that for fifteen years of bitter exile in Istanbul he had so hungered for it that it would never be enough? Ever tantalizing, ever mysterious, and ever merciless, his city, Venice, the dream made material over and over again.

Carlo lifted the brandy to his lips. He felt it burn his throat, the vision faltering, and then it held firm again, gulls caught in a great upward motion as the wind stung his eyes.

He turned round, almost lost his balance. And saw his trusted men, his bravos, shadows on the edge of the piazza, drawing just a little closer, uncertain whether they should help him, ready to step forward should he fall.

Carlo smiled. He held the flask by the neck. He drank a deep swallow and the crowd became a sluggish mass of color, mirrored in the water, as insubstantial finally as the rain itself which had dissolved into a silent mist.

“For you,” he whispered to the air around him, the sky, this miracle of the solid and the evanescent, “for you, any and every sacrifice, my blood, my sweat, my conscience.” And closing his eyes, he listed against the wind. He let it ice his skin in this delicious drunkenness, beyond pain, beyond grief. “For you, I murder,” he whispered. “For you, I kill.”

He opened his eyes. All those red-robed noblemen were gone. And in an instant, he imagined pleasantly, they had drowned one by one in the sea.

“Excellency, let us take you home.”

He turned. It was Federico, the bold one, the one who fancied he was servant as well as bravo, and again the brandy to his lips, he felt it in his mouth before he made the decision to drink.

“Soon, soon…” He wanted to say the words, but a film of tears had risen to soften his vision, empty rooms, her empty bed, her dresses yet on hooks, and some perfume faintly lingering. “And time blunts nothing,” he said aloud. “Not her death, not the loss of her, not the fact that on her deathbed she spoke
his
name!”

“Signore!” And with his eyes Federico exposed a shadowy figure, ludicrous in the manner in which it shrank from sight suddenly, one of those loathsome and inevitable spies of the state.

Carlo laughed. “Report me, then, will you? ‘He is drunk in the piazza because underground his wife is hostess to the worms!’” With the flat of his hand he pushed Federico away.

The crowd swelled, a living thing, and broken open here and there only to close again. The rain, twisted by the wind, fell on his eyelids, and on his lips, drawn back in a smile he could feel with his whole face. He stepped to the side, caught himself, and with the next swallow, he said, “Time,” aloud again with that recklessness that only drunkenness could give you, he
thought, when time gives nothing, “and drunkenness,” he whispered, “gives nothing except now and then the strength to see this vision, this beauty, this
meaning
of the whole.”

The rain clouds etched with silver, the gold mosaics shimmering, moving. Had she ever had this vision in all that clandestine drinking, when she pulled the wine right out of his hands as he begged her not to, “
Marianna, stay with me, don’t drink it, stay with me!
” Unconscious on her bed, did she even dream?

“Excellency,” whispered the bravo, Federico.