Of Love and Evil (8 page)

“Yes, that’s good,” said the father, and he rose and beckoned for the younger man to come out.

The younger man didn’t want to do it.

“Look, he’s scarce tasted the caviar last given to him,” said Lodovico. He pointed to a small silver plate on the bedside table. The caviar sat in a tiny glass dish inside it with a small delicate silver spoon. Lodovico filled the spoon and brought it to Niccolò’s lips.

“No, no more. I tell you, it burns my eyes.”

“Oh, come, you need it,” said the brother.

“No, no more, I can’t bear anything now,” said Niccolò. Then as if to quiet his brother, he took the spoon and swallowed the caviar and at once his eyes began to redden and tear.

Once again Vitale asked that all go out. He gestured for me to sit down in the corner, where a huge fantastically carved black chair glowered as if waiting to devour me.

“I want to remain here,” said Lodovico. “You should ask me to remain here, Vitale. If you are accused—.”

“Nonsense,” said the father, and taking the son’s hand he led him from the room.

I settled snugly into the huge chair, a veritable monster of exuberant black claws, with red cushions for the back and for the seat. I removed my gloves, slipping them behind my belt, and I began to tune the lute as softly as I could. And it was a beauty. But other thoughts were playing in my mind.

The patient hadn’t been poisoned until the dybbuk had appeared. Surely the poisoner was here, in this house, and I was fairly certain it was the brother, who was taking advantage of the appearance of the ghost. I doubted the poisoner was clever enough to produce a ghost. In fact, I was sure that the poisoner had not produced the ghost. But he was clever enough to begin his evil work because a ghost had appeared.

I began to play one of the very oldest melodies that I knew, a little dance based on a few basic chord variations, and I made the music as gentle as I could.

The thought struck me, as was inevitable, that I was actually playing a fine lute in the very period in which it had become wildly popular. I was in the very age in which it had attained perhaps its greatest music and strength. But there was no time for indulging myself in this, any more than there was time for making for St. Peter’s Basilica to see the construction for myself.

I was thinking about the poisoner and how fortunate we were that he had chosen to take his time.

As for the mystery of the dybbuk, it had to wait on the mystery of the poisoner because clearly the poisoner, though patient, did not need very much more time to accomplish what he’d set out to do.

I was strumming slowly when Vitale gently gestured for me to be quiet.

He was holding his patient’s hand, listening to his pulse, and now very gracefully he bent down and put his ear to Niccolò’s chest.

He placed both his hands on Niccolò’s head and looked into his eyes. I could see Niccolò shuddering. The man couldn’t control it.

“Vitale,” he whispered, thinking perhaps I couldn’t hear him. “I don’t want to die.”

“I won’t let you die, my friend,” said Vitale desperately. He laid back the bedclothes now and examined his patient’s ankles and feet. True, there was an old discolored patch on the ankle but it was no cause for alarm. The patient could move his limbs well enough but they shuddered. That could mean any number of poisons attacking the nervous system. But which one, and how would I prove who was doing it and how?

I heard a sound in the passage. It was the sound of a man crying. I knew by the very sound of it that it was Lodovico.

I got up. “I’ll talk to your brother, if I might,” I said softly to Niccolò.

“Console him,” said Niccolò. “Let him know that none of this is his doing. The caviar has helped me. He puts such store by it. Don’t let him feel that he’s at fault.”

I found him stranded in the antechamber, looking lost and confused.

“May I talk with you?” I asked gently. “While he’s resting, or being examined? May I be of some comfort to you?”

I felt the strong urge to do this, when in fact, in the usual course of things, it was something I wouldn’t have done at all.

However, he looked to me at that moment like one of the loneliest beings I’d ever beheld. He seemed to exist in a pure isolation as he wept, staring at the door of his brother’s room.

“He is the reason my father has accepted me,” he said under his breath. “Why do I tell you this? Because I must tell someone. I must tell someone how troubled I am.”

“Come, is there someplace where we might talk in quiet? It is so difficult when those we love are suffering.”

I followed him down the broad stairway of the palazzo and into the large courtyard, and into yet another gated courtyard which was wholly unlike the first, in that it was crowded with tropical blooms.

I felt the hair rise on the back of my neck.

A good deal of light spilled down into the area though the palazzo must have been four stories high, and the area was naturally sheltered due to its smaller size. It was extremely warm.

I could see orange trees and lemon trees, and purple flowers and waxen white blooms. Some of these I knew and some I didn’t. But if there were no poisonous plants in this room, then my mother had raised a fool.

In the center of the courtyard, where the shafts of sunlight made a sweet and beautiful light, stood a makeshift cross-legged writing table and two simple chairs beside it. There was a decanter of wine and two goblets.

And the dejected man, moving almost as if in a dream, took the decanter, filled a goblet and drank the contents down.

Only then did he think to offer me a drink, and I declined.

He seemed exhausted and emptied from his weeping. That he was genuinely miserable was beyond doubt. Indeed he was grieving, and I wondered if he was grieving because in his mind and heart his brother was already dead.

“Sit down there, please,” he said to me, and then he collapsed at his writing table, allowing a whole sheaf of papers to fall to the floor.

Behind him, from a large pot, grew a rangy and waxen-leafed tree, and one that was not at all unfamiliar to me. Again the hair rose on the back of my neck and my arms. I knew the purple flowers that covered this tree. And I knew the tiny black seeds that were left when the flowers dropped, as some of them had already done into the moist earth of the pot.

I picked up the mess of papers and put them back on the desk. I set my lute beside the chair.

The man appeared dazed as he watched this, and then he leant on his elbows and he wept very genuine tears.

“I have no great gift for poetry, and yet I am a poet for want of being anything else,” he said to me. “I’ve traveled the world, and have had the joy of it—no, maybe all the joy of it was writing to Niccolò and meeting him if and when he’d come to me. And now I have to think of the vast wide world, the world I traveled, without him. And when I think of this, there is no world.”

I stared past him at the earth in the pot. It was covered with black seeds. Any one of these would have been deadly to a
child. Several, carefully chopped, would be deadly to a man. A small portion given regularly in caviar, of all perfect things, would have sickened the man slowly and pushed him closer with every dose towards death.

The taste of the seeds was ghastly, as is the case with many a poison. But if anything would hide it, it would be caviar.

“I don’t know why I tell you these things,” said Lodovico, “except that you look kind, you look like a man who peers inside another man’s soul.” He sighed. “You grasp how a man might love his brother unbearably. How a man might think himself a coward when faced with his brother’s weakness and death.”

“I want to understand,” I said. “How many sons does your father have?”

“We are his only sons, and don’t you know how much he will despise me if Niccolò is gone? Oh, he loves me now, but how he will despise me if I am the survivor. It was only on account of Niccolò that he brought me from my mother’s house. We don’t have to talk of my mother. I never talk of her. You can well understand. My father need have acknowledged no claim against him. But Niccolò loved me, loved me from the first moment we played as children, and one day, I, and all I possessed, were bundled up and taken from the brothel in which we lived, and brought here, to this very house. My mother took a fistful of gems and gold for me. She cried. I will say that much for her. She wept. ‘But this is for you,’ she said. ‘You, my little prince, are now to be taken to the castle of your dreams.’ ”

“Surely she meant it. And the old man. He seems to love you so, as much as your brother.”

“Oh, yes, and there were times when he loved me more. Niccolò and Vitale, what rascals they can be when they get together. I tell you, there’s not much difference between a Jew
and a Gentile when it comes to wenching and drinking, at least not all of the time.”

“You are the good boy, aren’t you?” I asked.

“I’ve tried to be. With my father, I went on our travels. He couldn’t pry loose Niccolò from the university. Oh, I could tell you stories of the wilds of America, the wilds of Portuguese ports and savages such as you can only imagine.”

“But you came back to Padua.”

“Oh, he would have me educated. And in time that meant the university for me as well as my brother, but I could never catch up with them in their studies, Vitale, Niccolò, any of them. They helped me. They always took me under their wing.”

“So you had your father to yourself those years,” I said.

“Yes,” he said. The tears were frozen now, no longer slipping down his face. “Yes, and you should have seen how quickly he embraced my beloved brother. Why, you would think he had left me in the jungles of Brazil.”

“That plant there, that tree,” I said. “It’s from the jungles of Brazil.”

He stared fixedly at me, and then turned and appeared to stare at the plant as though he’d never seen it before. “Perhaps it is,” he said. “I don’t remember. We brought back many a sapling and many a cutting with us. Flowers, you see, he loves them in profusion. He loves the fruit trees that you see blooming here. He calls this his orangery. It’s his garden, really. I only come here now and then to write my poems as you can see.”

The tears were entirely gone.

“How would you know such a plant on seeing it?” he asked.

“Hmmm, I’ve seen it in other places,” I ventured. “I’ve even seen it in Brazil.”

His face had changed and now he seemed calculatedly to soften as he looked at me.

“I understand your worry for your brother,” I said, “but perhaps he will recover. There’s a great deal of strength in him yet.”

“Yes, and then perhaps my father’s plans for him may begin in earnest. Except there is a demon standing between him and those very plans.”

“I don’t follow you. Surely you don’t think your brother …”

“Oh, no,” he said coolly, his tears having dried. “Nothing of the sort.” Then he looked dazed again and preoccupied, and he raised one eyebrow and smiled as if he were lost in his innermost thoughts.

“The demon stands in my father’s way,” he said, “in a manner you can’t have known. Let me tell you a little story of my father.”

“By all means do.”

“Kindly he is, and all those years kept me at his side like his trained monkey, from ship to ship, his beloved little pet.”

“Those were happy times?”

“Oh, very.”

“But boys become men,” I interjected.

“Yes, precisely, and men have desires, and men can feel a love so keen it’s as if a dagger has pierced the heart.”

“You have felt such a love?”

“Oh, yes, and for a perfect woman, a woman with no cause to look down on me, born as she was, the secret daughter of a rich priest. I needn’t tell you his name for you to grasp the threads here. Only that when I set eyes on her, there was no world but the world in which she existed, there was no place where I would ever want to roam unless she were at my side.” He looked at me again fixedly, and then that dazed expression overtook him. “Was it such a fantastic dream?”

“You love her, and you want her,” I coaxed.

“Yes, and wealth I have from my father’s ever-increasing
generosity and affection, abundantly in private, and in the presence of others.”

“So it seems.”

“Yet when I proposed to him her very name, what do you think the course of action suddenly became? Oh, I wonder that I hadn’t seen it. I wonder that I hadn’t understood. Daughter of a priest, yes, but such a priest, such a high-placed cardinal with so many rich daughters. How could I have been a fool not to see he saw her as a crowning jewel for his elder son.”

He stopped. He looked at me intently.

“I don’t know who you are,” he said musing. “Why do I tell you of the ugliest defeat of my life?”

“Because I grasp it,” I said. “He told you the woman was for Niccolò, not for you.”

His face became hard and almost vicious. Every line in it that a moment ago had seemed pregnant with sorrow and concern now hardened into a mask of coldness that was frightening, and would have been to anyone who saw him as he was.

He raised his eyebrows and gazed past me coldly.

“Yes, for Niccolò, my beloved Leticia was intended. Why hadn’t I known that the talks had already begun? Why had I not come to him sooner, before mortgaging my very soul? Oh, he was kind to me.” He smiled an iron smile. “He took me in his arms. He cradled my face in his hands. His baby son still. His little one. ‘My little Lodovico. There are many beautiful women in the world.’ That’s what he said.”

“This cut you to the quick,” I said softly.

“Cut me? Cut me? It tore my heart as if it were food for a vulture. That’s what it did to me. And what house do you think of all his many villas and houses in Rome did he plan to give to the happy bride and groom when the marriage would be accomplished?” He laughed icily and then irresistibly as if it were too funny. “The very house which he has let to Vitale to
prepare for them, to air out, to furnish, and which is now the home of a noisy and evil Jewish dybbuk!”

He had changed so completely that I wouldn’t have known him for the man who had been weeping in the corridor. But he fell into that daze again, hard as the lineaments of his face remained. He stared past me into the mingled trees and flowers of the courtyard. He even lifted his eyes as if he were marveling at the errant rays of the sun.