by Anne Rice
His nurses said no. But there was no stopping his mother. A gaiety pervaded the room, candles dipping and trembling as the servants followed them about, his mother's fingers deftly buttoning his satin breeches, his brocade waistcoat. She took the comb to his softer curls with the old chant, they were black silk, and kissed him twice abruptly.
And all the way down the corridor, he heard her singing softly behind him as he skipped ahead, thrilled with the click of his fancy slippers on the marble.
She was radiant in her black velvet gown, a blush suffusing her olive skin, and in the light of the lantern as she sank back into the dark felze of the gondola, her face with its slanted eyes resembled perfectly those Madonnas in the old Byzantine paintings. She held him on her lap. The curtain closed. "Do you love me?" she asked. He teased her. She pressed her cheek against his, mingling her eyelashes with his own, until he gave way to uncontrolled laughter. "Do you love me!" she clasped his shoulder.
And when he said yes, he felt her melting embrace, and for a moment became motionless, as if paralyzed, against her.
Across the piazza he danced on the leash of her arm. Everyone was here! He made bow after bow, hands reaching to tousle his hair, to press him to perfumed skirts. The young secretary to his father, Signore Lemmo, tossed him high in the air seven times before his mother said stop it. And his beautiful cousin Catrina Lisani, with two of her sons in tow, threw back her veil and, picking him up, smothered him against her fragrant white bosom.
But as soon as they set foot into the immense church Tonio was silent.
Never had he witnessed such a spectacle. Candles everywhere wreathed the marble columns and in the gusts from the open doors, the torches roared in their sconces. The great domes blazed with angels and saints, and all around arches, walls, vaults pulsed with gold in millions upon millions of tiny twinkling facets.
Without a word, Tonio scrambled into his mother's arms. He climbed her like a tree. She rocked backwards under his weight, laughing.
And then it seemed a shock passed through the crowd like the rustle of burning kindling. Trumpets blared. Tonio turned back and forth frantically, unable to find them.
"See!" his mother whispered, squeezing his hand. And above the heads of the crowd the Doge appeared in his great chair under a swaying canopy. The sharp heavy scent of incense filled the air. And the trumpets rose in pitch, shrill and brilliant and chilling.
Then came the Grand Council in their brilliant robes. "Your father!" said Tonio's mother with a spasm of girlish excitement.
The tall bone-thin figure of Andrea Treschi came into view, sleeves down to the floor, his white hair the shape of a lion's mane, his deep-set pale eyes fixed like those of a statue before him.
"Papa!" Tonio's whisper carried sharply. Heads turned, there was muffled laughter. And when the Councillor's gaze wavered and fixed his son in the crowd, the ancient face was transformed, its smile almost rapturous, those eyes brilliantly enlivened.
Tonio's mother was blushing.
But suddenly from out of the air it seemed a great singing burst forth, voices high and clear and declaring. Tonio felt a catch in his throat. For a second he could not move, his body perfectly rigid as he absorbed the shock of this singing, and then he squirmed, eyes upward, the candles for the moment blinding him. "Be still," said his mother, who could hardly hold him. The singing grew richer, fuller.
It came in waves from either side of the immense nave, melody interwoven with melody. Tonio could almost see it. A great golden net thrown out as if on the lapping sea in shimmering sunlight. The very air teemed with sound. And finally he saw, right above, the singers.
They stood in two huge lofts to the left and right side of the church, mouths open, faces gleaming in reflected light; they appeared like the angels in the mosaics.
In a second, Tonio had dropped to the floor. He felt his mother's hand slip as she went to catch him. He dashed through the press of skirts and cloaks, perfume and winter air, and saw the open door to the stairway.
It seemed the walls around him throbbed with the chords of the organ as he climbed, and suddenly he stood in the warmth of the choir loft itself, among these tall singers.
A little commotion ensued. He was at the very rail and looking up into the eyes of a giant of a man whose voice poured out of him as clean and golden as the clarion of the trumpet. The man sang the one great word, "Alleluia!" which had the peculiar sound of a call to someone, a summoning. And all the men behind him picked it up, singing it over and over again at intervals, overlapping one upon the other.
While across the church the other choir returned it in mounting volume.
Tonio opened his mouth. He started singing. He sang the one word right in time with the tall singer and he felt the man's hand close warmly on his shoulder. The singer was nodding to him, he was saying with his large, almost sleepy brown eyes, Yes, sing, without saying it. Tonio felt the man's lean flank beneath his robe, and then an arm wound down about his waist to lift him.
The whole congregation shimmered below, the Doge in his chair of golden cloth, the Senate in their purple robes, councillors in scarlet, all the patricians of Venice in their white wigs, but Tonio's eyes were fixed on the singer's face as he heard his own voice like a bell ringing out distinct from the singer's clarion. Tonio's body went away. He left it, carried out on the air with his voice and the singer's voice as the sounds became indistinguishable. He saw the pleasure in the singer's quivering eyes, that sleepiness lifted. But the powerful sound erupting from the man's chest astonished him.
When it was over and he was placed in his mother's arms again, she looked up to this giant as he made her a deep bow, and said:
"Thank you, Alessandro."
"Alessandro, Alessandro," Tonio whispered. And as he snuggled next to her in the gondola he said desperately, "Mamma, when I grow up will I sing like that? Will I sing like Alessandro?" It was impossible to explain it to her. "Mamma, I want to be one of those singers!"
"Good Lord, Tonio, no!" She burst out laughing. And with a foppish gesture of her wrist to his nurse, Lena, she looked to heaven.
The entire household was clattering and groaning up to the roof. And gazing towards the mouth of the Grand Canal, anticipating that infinite spell of darkness that was the lagoon, Tonio saw the sea ablaze: hundreds upon hundreds of lights bobbing on the water. It was as if all the flickering illumination of San Marco had been spilled out, and in a reverent whisper his mother told him that the men of state were going to venerate the relics on San Giorgio.
All was still for a moment, except the whistling wind that had long ago torn the fragile lattices of the ruined roof garden. Dead trees lay here and there on their sides, anchored still by their overturned pots of root and earth, their leaves snapped by the wind, crackling.
Tonio bent his head. He gave the tender stretch of his neck to his mother's warm hand, and felt a wordless and terrifying dread that pushed him close to her.
Late that night, covered to the chin in bed, he did not sleep. His mother lay back, lips slack, her angular face softened as if against her will, her close-set eyes, so unlike his own, drawn to the center of her face in a frown that seemed the very opposite of sleep, more accurately preoccupation.
And shoving back the covers (his father never slept with them; he was always in his own apartments), Tonio slipped to the cold floor, barefoot.
There were street singers out in the night, he was certain of it. And wrenching open the wooden shutters, he listened, head cocked, until he picked up the faint strains of the distant tenor. There came a basso underneath, the raw dissonance of strings, and round and round the melody rising higher, wider.
The night was misted, without forms or shapes save for the aureole of a single resin torch below that lent its heavy smell to the salt from the sea. And as he listened, his head against the damp wall, knees drawn up in a loose clasp, he was still in the choir loft of San Marco. Alessandro's voice eluded him now, but he felt the sensation, the dreamy
sweep of the music.
He parted his lips, sang a few high notes in time with those distant singers in the street, and felt again Alessandro's hand on his shoulder.
What was nagging at him suddenly? What came like a gnat to the eye? His mind, ever so sharp and unclouded as yet by written language, felt again the palm of that hand resting so gently at his neck, saw the billowing sleeve rising and rising to the shoulder above it. All the other tall men he had ever known had to bend to caress a boy as little as Tonio. And he remembered that even in the choir loft, in the midst of that singing, he had been startled to feel that hand rest so easily on him.
It seemed monstrous, magical, the arm that scooped him up, the hand that had caught the bones of his chest as if he were a toy and brought him higher into the music.
But the song was tugging at him, pulling him out of these thoughts as melody always pulled him, making him feel desperate for the harpsichord that his mother played, or her tambourine, or only the mingled sound of their voices. Anything to make it go on. And suddenly, shivering on the sill, he was sleeping.
He was seven years old before he learned that Alessandro and all the tall singers of San Marco were eunuchs.
3
AND BY THE TIME he was nine years old he knew just what had been cut away from these spidery beings and what had been left them, and that it was an accident of the knife, their height and their long limbs, for after that terrible cutting their bones didn't harden like those of men who could father children.
But it was a commonplace mystery. They sang in all the churches of Venice. They taught music when they were old. Tonio's tutor, Beppo, was a eunuch.
And in the opera, which Tonio was much too young to see, they were celestial wonders. Nicolino, Carestini, Senesino, the servants sighed as they said the names the next day, and even once Tonio's mother had been lured out of her solitary life to see the young one from Naples, whom they called The Boy, Farinelli. Tonio cried because he couldn't go. And waking hours after, saw she'd come home, and sat at the harpsichord in the dark, her veil sparkling with rain, her face as white as a porcelain doll's as in a faint uncertain voice she echoed the threads of Farinelli's arias.
Ah, the poor do what they must for food and drink. We will always have these miraculous high voices. Yet every time Tonio saw Alessandro outside the church door, he could not help but wonder: Did he cry? Did he try to run away? Why didn't his mother try to hide him? But there was nothing in Alessandro's long face but that sleepy good humor, his chestnut hair a lustrous frame for skin that was as pretty as a girl's, and that voice slumbering deep inside, waiting for its moment in the choir loft, waiting for the backdrop of hammered gold that seemed to make him one--for Tonio--with the angels.
But by this time, too, Tonio knew he was Marc Antonio Treschi, the son of Andrea Treschi who had once commanded the galleys of the Serenissima on foreign seas, and after years of service in the Most Serene Senate, had just been elected to the Council of Three, that awesome triumvirate of inquisitors whose power it was to arrest, to try, to pronounce sentence, and to carry out that sentence--even if it were death--upon anyone.
In other words, Tonio's father was among those more powerful than the Doge himself.
And the name Treschi had been in the Golden Book for a millennium. This was a family of admirals, ambassadors, procurators of San Marco, and senators too numerous to mention. Three brothers of Tonio, all long dead--the children of a first wife gone to the grave, too--had served in high places.
And on reaching his twenty-third birthday, Tonio would certainly take his place among those young statesmen promenading that long strip of the piazzetta before the Offices of State known as the Broglio.
It would be the University of Padua before that, two years at sea, a tour of the world perhaps. And for now, hours spent in the library of the palazzo under the gentle but relentless eyes of his tutors.
Portraits hung on these walls. Black-haired Treschi with fair skin, men cut from the same mold, delicate-boned but tall, with broad foreheads that rose straight to the full hair that grew up and back from them. Even as a little one Tonio perceived his resemblance to some more than others: dead uncles, cousins, those brothers: Leonardo who had died of consumption in an upper room, Giambattista drowned at sea off the coast of Greece, Philippo of malaria in some distant outpost of the empire.
And here and there appeared a face that was more perfectly Tonio's own, a young man with Tonio's wide-set black eyes and the same full but long mouth always on the verge of smiling; he peeked only from great clusters of richly clad men in which Andrea might be yet young with his brothers and nephews around him. But it was hard to fix a name for each face, to distinguish one from another among so many. A communal history absorbed them all in wonderfully wrought tales of courage and self-sacrifice.
All three sons with their father and his somber first wife peered from the grandest of gilt frames in the long supper room.
"They're watching you," Lena, Tonio's nurse, teased as she ladled the soup. She was old but full of good humor and more a nurse to Tonio's mother, Marianna, than she was to him, and she only meant to amuse him.
She couldn't guess how it hurt him to look at this spectacle of ruddy and perfectly painted faces. He wanted his brothers alive, he wanted them here now, and he wanted to open doors on rooms filled with gentle laughter and commotion. Sometimes he imagined how it would be, the long supper table crowded with his brothers: Leonardo lifting his glass, Philippo describing battles at sea; his mother, her narrow eyes, so small when sad, grown wide with excitement.
But there was an absurdity to this little game that made itself known to him over the years. It frightened him enormously. Long before he knew the full import, he'd been told that only one son of a great Venetian family marries. It was custom so old it might have been law, and in those days it had been Philippo, whose childless wife had gone home after his death to her own people. But if any of those shades had lived long enough to produce a son of the Treschi name, Tonio would not be here! His father would never have taken a second wife. Tonio would not even exist. And so the very price of life for him was that they were swept away without issue.
He couldn't grasp it at first; but after a while, it was an old truth; he and those brothers, they had never been meant to know each other.
Yet he played his fantasy out; he saw these yawning rooms brilliantly lit, heard music, pictured soft-spoken men and women who were his own kin, a swarm of nameless cousins.
And always his father was about, at supper, on the ballroom floor, turning to catch his youngest son in his arms with a wealth of spontaneous kisses.
As it was, Tonio seldom saw his father.
But on those occasions when Lena came for him, whispering anxiously that Andrea had sent for his son, it was absolutely marvelous. She would outfit him in his best, a coat of rustcolored velvet he loved, or maybe the darker blue that was his mother's favorite. And brushing his hair to a lively luster, she let it fall softly without a ribbon. He looked like a baby, he would protest. Then out would come the jeweled rings, the furlined cloak, and his own little sword, studded with rubies. He was ready now. His heels made that delicious click on the marble.
The Grand Salon of the main floor was always the setting. It was an immense room, the largest in a house of large rooms, furnished only with a long heavily carved table. Three men could have lain end to end on that table. The floor was a pattern of tinted marble that made up a map of the world, while the ceiling was an endless vista of blue where angels hung suspended, unfurling a great winding ribbon of Latin lettering. The light was uneven, coming as it did through open doors from other chambers. But it was often full of morning warmth as it fell on the slight, almost wraithlike figure of Andrea Treschi.
Tonio would make his bow. And as he looked up, never once had he failed to see the awesome vitality of his father's gaze, eyes so young they appeared disconnected from the skeletal face, and brimming with irrepressible pride and affection.
Andrea bent to kiss his son. His lips were powdery soft and soundless, and they lingered on Tonio's cheek, and once in a while, even as Tonio grew taller and heavier with every year, Andrea would sweep him up in his arms and crush him for a moment to his chest whispering his name as if the word, Tonio, were a little blessing.
His attendants stood about. They smiled, they winked. There seemed in the room a ripple of soft excitement. Then it was over. Rushing to his mother's window upstairs, Tonio watched his father's gondola move down the canal towards the piazzetta.
No one had to tell Tonio he was the last of them. Death had worked such a devastation on all branches of this great house that not even a cousin remained who bore the name. Tonio "would marry young," he must be prepared for a life of duty. And on those few nights when he was ill, he shuddered to see his father's face at the door; the Treschi lay with him on the pillow.
It thrilled him; it frightened him. And he would never remember the precise moment he perceived the full dimensions of his universe. All the world, it seemed, rode the broad green waters of the Grand Canal at his doorstep. Regattas all year long with hundreds of sleek black gondolas gliding by, lavish Saturday evening parades in summer when the great families decked their peotti with garlands and gilded gods and goddesses; the day-to-day procession of patricians on their way to affairs of state, their boats lined with richly colored carpets. If Tonio stood on the small wooden balcony over the front door, he might see the lagoon itself, with the distant ships at anchor. He could hear the soft thunder of their salutes, the blare of trumpets outside the Palazzo Ducale.
There were the endless songs of the gondoliers, lilting tenors echoing up the olive-green and rose-colored walls, the rich sweet strum of floating orchestras. At night lovers cruised under the stars. Serenades carried on the breeze. And even in the early hours, when he was bored or sad, he might gaze down on the endless throng of vegetable boats heading noisily for the markets of the Rialto.
But by the time Tonio was thirteen, he was sick of watching the world through the windows.