by Anne Rice
But he was found before he died. He was taken back to the conservatorio. And there, his wrists bound up, he awoke in his own bed with Maestro Cavalla, his teacher, weeping over him.
12
WHAT WAS HAPPENING? Was everything actually changing? Tonio had lived so long with the hideous notion that nothing ever would, he could not now get his bearings.
His father had been in his mother's room off and on for two days. A physician had come. And Angelo shut the doors of the library each morning and said, "Study." They weren't going out in the piazza anymore, and in the night he was certain he had heard his mother crying.
Alessandro was in the house; Tonio had caught a glimpse of him. And he was certain that he'd heard the voice of his cousin Catrina Lisani. Comings, goings, yet his father did not send for him. His father required no explanations. And when he went to his mother's door, he was shut out as once his father had been shut out. Then Angelo would take him back to the library.
Then came the word that Andrea had stumbled on the dock while getting into the gondola. Never a day in his life had he missed the convening of the Senate or the Grand Council, but this morning he had fallen. And though it was only a sprain, he would not be going out behind the Doge on the Senza.
But why do they talk of this, Tonio thought, when he is as indestructible and powerful as Venice herself? Tonio could think of nothing but Marianna.
But the worst was this: throughout these hours of waiting, he felt an undeniable exhilaration. That feeling came back to him from earlier in the year: something was going to happen! And when he thought of her screaming and hitting him in the supper room, he felt like a traitor!
He had wanted her to be caught; he had wanted his father to see to the core of her illness. Take away the wine, make her give it up, bring her out of this darkness in which she languished like a sleeping princess in a French fairy tale.
But he hadn't led her to the supper room for this to happen! He had not meant to betray her. And why was no one angry with him? What had he been thinking to take her there? When he thought of her alone now, with physicians, and with cousins who weren't of her blood, he couldn't endure it. His face felt hot. The tears were right behind his eyes. And this was worse than anything.
Yet somewhere embedded in all this, and quite beyond his reach, was the mystery of why she had changed so, why she had screamed, why she had struck him. Who was this mysterious brother in Istanbul?
It was the second night after the incident that he was to learn the answer to everything.
As he took his supper alone in his room, he had no inkling of it. The sky was a lovely deep blue, full of moonlight and spring breeze, and all up and down the canal, it seemed, the boatmen were singing. A verse flung out here to be answered there; deep bassos, high tenors, and someplace far away the violins and flutes of his street singers.
But as he lay on his bed, fully dressed and too tired to ring for his valet, he thought certain he heard within the labyrinth of the house itself his mother singing. And when he dismissed that as foolish, there came the high and remarkably powerful soprano of Alessandro.
When he closed his eyes and held his breath, he could hear the thin rapid notes of the harpsichord.
It had just become real to him when there came a knock on his door, and his father's elderly valet, Guiseppe, told him to come: his father wished to see him.
He saw his father first among the assemblage. He was in his bed, and even against his pillows, he appeared regal. He wore such a heavy dressing gown, it had the shape of patrician robes and it was made of deep green velvet.
But there was a frailty to him, a remoteness.
The little group in the room was at a distance from him, and when Tonio entered, his mother stood up from the keyboard. She wore a dress of pink silk, and her waist was frighteningly small, and her face had a pallor. But she was restored to herself, and her eyes were clear and brimming with some wondrous secret. Her lips were warm on his cheek; and it seemed she wanted to speak, but knew she must wait.
As he bent to kiss his father's hand, she was very near him.
"Sit there, my son," said Andrea. And then at once he commenced to speak, his voice having something of that timelessness that characterized his lively expression. It made his obvious age seem just a slight injustice.
"Those who love the truth more than they love me have often said I don't belong to this century."
"Signore, if that is so, then this century is lost," said Signore Lemmo immediately.
"Flattery and nonsense," said Andrea. "I fear it is true and the century is lost but there is no connection. As I was saying before my secretary rushed to give me unnecessary comfort, I am not of this time and have not bent easily with it.
"But I won't bore you with a litany of my failings, as I trust they would prove more tiresome than instructive. I've come to a decision that your mother must see more of this world, and you must see more of it with her. And Alessandro, having long wished a leave from the Ducal Chapel, has consented to become a member of this household. From now on, he will give you your music lessons, my son, as you have a great talent; and perfection in that art can teach you much about the rest of life if you let it. But he shall also escort your mother whenever she goes out, and it is my wish that you take time from your studies to accompany both of them. Your mother is pale from seclusion; but you suffer none of her inveterate shyness. You must see she enjoys the carnival this year, you must see she enjoys the opera. You must see she accepts those invitations she will shortly be receiving. You must see that she allows Alessandro to take you both everywhere."
Tonio glanced at his mother. He couldn't help it, and in an instant he saw her irrepressible happiness. Alessandro was gazing at Andrea with admiration.
"It will be a new existence for you," Andrea said. "But I trust you'll meet its demands somewhat gladly. And you commence by going out day after tomorrow during the Senza. I cannot go. You go to represent this family."
Tonio tried to hide his excitement. He tried not to look too overjoyed, yet his face was working into a smile, even as he bit his lip and bowed his head and murmured a respectful assent to his father.
When he looked up, his father was smiling. And for one protracted moment it seemed his father was enjoying some special vantage point on this room and its occupants. Or perhaps he was lost in a memory. But then the pleasure melted from his face, and with a touch of resignation he dismissed the gathering.
"I must be alone with my son," he said, taking Alessandro's hand. "And it will be quite late before I release him. So you must let him sleep in the morning. Oh, and yes, lest I forget. Find some important questions to ask of his old tutors; make them feel they are needed here, assure them in small ways they won't be dismissed without ever raising the question."
There was a quiet graciousness to Alessandro's smile, to the way he nodded to this without the slightest surprise.
"Take the candles into my study," Andrea said to his secretary.
He rose from bed with difficulty. The doors were shut; the rooms were almost empty.
"Please, Excellency, stay here," Signore Lemmo said.
"Go away," said Andrea, smiling. "And when I'm dead please don't tell anyone how cross I've been with you."
"Excellency!"
"Good night," Andrea said. And Signore Lemmo left them. Andrea moved towards the open doors, but he motioned for Tonio to wait behind him. Tonio watched him pass into a large rectangular room which Tonio had never seen before. He had never seen this one either, for that matter, but the other held a greater fascination. He saw books to the ceiling between the multipaned windows that looked on the canal. He saw maps on the walls that showed all the great territories of the Venetian Empire. And even from where he stood he perceived this was the Venice of long ago. Hadn't many of these possessions been lost? But on this wall, the Veneto was still a vast dominion.
He realized his father was standing on the other side of the threshold, looking back at him with
an expression of almost private reflection.
Tonio started forward.
"No, wait," said Andrea. It was such a spiritless murmur he might as well have been talking to himself. "Don't be so quick to enter here. At this moment, you're a boy still. But when you leave this room, you must be prepared to become master of this house as soon as I leave it. Now reflect on your illusion of life for just a little longer. Savor your innocence. It's never appreciated until it's about to be lost. Come to me when you are ready."
Tonio said nothing. He lowered his eyes and was conscious of a deliberate obedience to this command, in which he allowed his life to pass before him. He found himself in his imagination standing in the old archive of the lower floor; he heard the rats; he heard the movement in the water. The house itself, anchored for two centuries in the marshland beneath it, seemed to be moving. And when he looked up again, he said quickly, in a small voice, "Father, let me come in."
And his father beckoned to him.
13
TEN HOURS PASSED before Tonio again opened the doors of his father's study. A pure morning sunlight seeped in around him as he walked into the Grand Salon and towards the front doorway of the palazzo.
His father had told him to go out, to stand alone for a while in the piazza, to gaze on the daily spectacle of the great statesmen moving back and forth on the Broglio. And Tonio wanted this now more than anything. It seemed a delicious silence surrounded him which strangers could not conceivably break.
And as he stepped onto the little dock before the door, he hailed a passing gondolier and proceeded to the piazzetta.
It was the day before the Senza, and the crowds were as great as ever, the statesmen in their long line before the Palazzo Ducale, receiving respectful kisses on their deep sleeves, making their ceremonial bows to one another.
Tonio gave little thought to the fact that he was alone and free, as this no longer had the same meaning.
The tale told to him by his father was full of shocks, and shot through with the blood of reality and immense sadness. And the story of Treschi was but a part of it.
All his young life Tonio had believed Venice to be a great power in Europe. He had been brought up with the sterling concept that the Serenissima was the oldest and strongest government in Italy. The words empire, Candia, Morea, were connected in his mind with vague and glorious battles.
But in this one long night, the Venetian State had grown old, decadent, teetering on her foundations, all but crumbling to a lustrous and glittering ruin. In 1645 Candia had been lost and the wars in which Andrea and his sons had fought had not recovered it. In 1718, Venice had been driven once and for all from the Morea.
Nothing remained of the empire, in fact, except the great city herself and her holdings on the mainland which surrounded her. Padua, Verona, small towns, the great stretch of magnificent villas along the Brenta River.
Her ambassadors no longer wielded significant power in courts abroad, and those sent to Venice came less for politics than for pleasure.
It was the vast rectangle of the piazza, thronged with the bacchanalia of carnival for three different periods during the year, that drew them. It was the spectacle of jet-black gondolas gliding through flooded streets; it was the incalculable wealth and beauty of San Marco; it was the orphan singers of the Pieta. Opera, painting, gondoliers who sang in verse, chandeliers from the glassworks of Murano.
This was Venice now; her allure, her power. In sum, it was all that Tonio had seen and loved ever since he could remember; but there was nothing more to it.
Yet this was his city, his state. His father had bequeathed it to him. His ancestors were among those dim protagonists of heroic history who had first ventured into these misty marshes. The Treschi fortune had been built on Eastern trade as had so many great Venetian fortunes.
And whether the Serenissima ruled the world or merely prevailed against it, she was Tonio's destiny.
Her independence lay in his keeping as it lay in the keeping of all those patricians who were yet at the helm of the state. And Europe, craving this magnificent jewel of a city, must not ever be allowed to clasp her to its bosom.
"You will, with your dying breath," Andrea had said, his voice then as disembodied and energetic as those glittering eyes, "keep our enemies beyond the gates of the Veneto."
That was the solemn charge of the patrician in a day and age when fortunes made in Eastern trade were now dissipated in gambling, pomp, and spectacle. That was the responsibility of a Treschi.
But finally had come the moment when Andrea must unfold his own story.
"I know you have learned of your brother Carlo," he said, divorcing himself from the greater scheme of things, the measured voice for the first time giving way to a slight quaver of emotion. "It seems that you but step out this door and the world hastens to disillusion you with that old scandal. Alessandro has told me of your brother's friend, only one of his many confederates who yet oppose me in the Grand Council, on the floor of the Senate, wherever they wield influence. And your mother has told me of your discovery in the supper room portrait.
"No, don't interrupt me, my son. I am not angry with you. You must be told now what others will twist and use for their own purposes. Listen and understand:
"What was left to me when I at last came home from sea, after so many defeats? Three sons dead, a wife lost after lingering and painful illness. Why did God so choose that it would be the youngest who would survive the lot, a son so rebellious and violent of temper that his greatest pleasure came from defying his father?
"You've seen his image, and you have seen the likeness to yourself; but there the resemblance ends, for you have the unmistakable stamp of character. But I tell you the worst of these times was embodied in your brother Carlo. Pleasure-loving, swept off his feet by prima donnas, an idler, a reader of poetry, and a lover of gambling and drink, he was that perennial child who, denied glory in the service of the state, has no taste for quiet courage."
Andrea paused as if unsure how to proceed. Wearily, he continued: "You know as well as I do that to marry without the permission of the Grand Council is extinction for a patrician. Take a bride without family or fortune and the name Treschi is stricken from the Golden Book forever; your children are nothing but common citizens of the Serenissima.
"And yet he upon whose passion this line depended spent his life in the company of wastrels, spurning the alliances I attempted to forge for him!
"At last he chose a wife for himself as he might choose a mistress. A nameless and dowerless girl, child of a mainland noble, with nothing but her beauty to recommend her. 'I love her,' he said to me. 'I will have no other!' And when I refused his suit, seeking to direct him as was my duty, he left this house blind with drink, and going to the convent where she was lodged, took her out of it by lies and trickery!"
Andrea grew too heated to continue.
Tonio wanted to put out his hand, to still his father. It gave him physical pain to see his father suffering, and the tale itself appalled him.
Andrea sighed. "Can you at your tender age understand this outrage? Greater men have been banished for such an action, hunted throughout the Veneto, imprisoned."
Again Andrea stopped. He had no spirit, not even in anger, for the telling of the story. "A son of mine did this," he said. "The devil in hell he was, I tell you. It was only our name and our position that held back the hand of the state, while I begged for time to use reason.
"But on the Broglio itself at high noon, your brother appeared before me. Drunk, wild-eyed, mumbling obscenities, he vowed his undying love for this ruined girl. 'Buy her into the Golden Book!' he demanded of me. 'You have the wealth. You can accomplish it!' And there as Councillors and Senators gazed on, he declared: 'Give your consent or I shall marry her now without it.'
"Do you comprehend this, Tonio?" Andrea was now beside himself. "He was my sole heir. And for this scandalous alliance, he sought to extort my permission! Buy her into the Golden Book, make her a
noble, and consent to this marriage I must, or see my seed scattered to the winds, see the end of a House that was as old as Venice!"
"Father." Tonio was unable to keep quiet. But Andrea was not ready to be interrupted.
"All Venice turned its eyes to me," Andrea went on, his voice tremulous. "Was I to be the dupe of my youngest son? My kinsmen, my fellow statesmen...all waited in shocked silence.
"And the girl...what of her? I in my rage took it upon myself to see this woman who had turned my son from his duty...."
For the first time in the span of an hour, Andrea's gaze shifted to Tonio. For a moment is seemed he had lost the drift and was perceiving something for which he had been prepared. But then he continued:
"What did I find?" he sighed. "A Salome who worked her evil spell upon my son's degraded senses? No. No, she was an innocent child! A child no older than you are now, and boyish of limb, and sweet, and dark and wild with innocence as creatures of the wood are innocent, knowing nothing of this world except that which he had chosen to show her. Oh, I had not expected to feel for this fragile girl, to feel for her lost honor.
"And can you measure then the rage I endured against the man who'd so rashly corrupted her?"
A wordless panic seized Tonio. He could not keep still any longer. "Please believe me, Father," he whispered, "when I tell you that in me you have an obedient son."
Andrea nodded. Again his eyes rested on Tonio. "All these years I have watched over you more closely than you know, my son, and you have been the answer to my prayers more fully than you can realize."
But it was clear nothing could soothe him now; he pressed on as if that were the wiser course and there were little alternative.
"Your brother was not arrested. He was not banished. It was I who had him apprehended and placed on the ship for Istanbul. It was I who obtained his appointment there, giving him to know that as long as I lived he would never see his native city.
"It was I who impounded his wealth, withholding all support until he had bowed his head and accepted the post offered him.
"And it was I--it was I who then took a wife in my old age who gave me that child upon whom the life of this family is now dependent."