“Oh, you’re still here!” she exclaimed. “I heard about the escape and the fire and I was worried—I’ve looked everywhere!” She ran to his side. “Raf, are you all right? I know you don’t want me to come here, but I had to!” She looked around anxiously and saw the swords lying on the floor. She knelt beside him and saw the smear of blood on his shirt. “He was here! You’re hurt! Oh, my God, Raf!”
He sat up slowly. She saw at once that his wound was slight and had hardly bled at all. But his face was etched with fatigue and grief. She felt such a strong surge of relief that she became dizzy and had to grip the arm of the chair.
“Oh, you’re all right,” she murmured. “Thank God!”
He said dully, “He’s gone.”
“Gone? What do you mean? You mean he ran away?”
“I let him go free. And her, too. They’re both gone. With the boy.”
“You let him—! Oh, Raf, you let him go? And her? And Fosca, too?”
He gave a weary nod and closed his eyes. He relapsed into brooding.
She stared at him unbelievingly, feeling the pain of his sorrow and his loss. But suddenly a spasm of joy welled up inside her and she found that she couldn’t contain it.
“Gone!” she cried, rising to her feet. “They’re gone! Both of them. Gone!” She began to laugh, and she threw back her head and flung out her arms and whirled and hugged herself tightly. “Gone!” she said gleefully. “Oh, I can’t believe it! It’s wonderful, impossible, a miracle! I feel—I feel like the sun has come out in the middle of the night! I feel that I’ve risen from the dead, that a stone had been lifted off my heart, that a real miracle had happened! Gone! Oh, God, thank you, God! God of the Jews and the Christians and everybody, thank you!”
She laughed and cried and danced for joy in that cold, darkened room. The man at the wrecked table didn’t look up at her. She pranced and leaped higher than she ever had in her life. She soared and spun and hovered in the air like one of the seagulls for whom she was named.
“Look at me, oh, look at me!” she gasped breathlessly. “I’m free, free! The world is a beautiful, beautiful place tonight! It’s a wonderful world, a fine old world! Only it’s not old, it’s new, new! And it’s ours, Raf, ours! Your world, my world, ours! No more nobles—down with the nobles!” She crouched down and buried them all with a wave of her arms. “Look at this place, will you?” She shouted gaily, “It’s a palace, Raf! Oh, my God—will you look at this? Raf Leopardi, the Jew rebel from the ghetto, sitting in the middle of the Loredan Palace! And me, Lia, Lia Gabbiana, nothing, trash from the gutters of Naples and Venice who never belonged to anybody in her life—I’m here, too! Ha! Two bastards, Raf, that’s us. Two bastards, and Venice is ours! Ours! Oh, this is real freedom! This is happiness, and love, and everything I’ve ever wanted in the world!”
She ran over to Raf and put her arms around him. His head was slumped forward on his chest. His whole body was distorted with sorrow. She perched on the arm of his chair and cradled his head against her small breasts. His face was streaked with sweat and set in a mask of defeat. She began to rock him gently.
“Oh, Raf, Rafaello,” she crooned. “Poor darling. I’m sorry, so sorry. Left all alone. It’s so sad. My poor darling.”
With a moan he grasped her tightly around the waist and leaned heavily against her.
“Oh, Lia,” he sobbed. “Lia!”
“It’s all right, my darling,” she said gently. “I know. I understand.”
She rested her cheek on the top of his head and looked out at the lights that gleamed on the Grand Canal. They seemed blurred and indistinct, like little moons seen through a haze.
The gondola surged gently through the darkness. A half-moon glimmered in the sky and cast a broken reflection on the uneven face of the water.
Fosca twisted around in her seat and looked back. Venice rode the waves. It shone dully in the moonlight, proud as ever, as beautiful as a mirage. Fosca felt that this last view of her city would be imprinted forever on her mind and heart.
Resolutely, she turned back again and faced the front of the boat. As she did so, Alessandro glanced at her face and saw, in the pale moonlight, the glint of tears on her cheeks.
Guido guided the gondola along a broad southwesterly route that would take them well out of the way of French patrol boats. Alessandro knew where they could hire a coach once they reached the mainland. He would take them to a deserted house in the country, where they could stay safely until he was stronger.
Paolo slept peacefully in his arms. He could feel the child’s breath on his face, sweet and soft, like flowers. His child. And Fosca’s. He was keenly aware of Fosca sitting desolately beside him. They hadn’t spoken a word to each other since leaving that room. He knew she was wondering how long she would have to endure those cutting silences that he used so effectively in the past. He didn’t know how to break through the almost tangible barrier that separated them, how to heal the breech that yawned chasm-like between them.
He thought about her as she had looked back at the palazzo, even more beautiful than the dreams of her that had haunted him in prison. He had raged at her then, cursed her and the Jew, called her vile names, wished them both in hell. But when they entered the boat, the rage and resentment he had felt drained away suddenly, like stinking pus from a lanced sore. She loved him. She had chosen him.
He groped in the darkness and found her hand gripping the armrest of her seat. He closed his dirty fingers over hers. In answer she lifted his hand to her cheek. He could feel the hot wetness of her tears.
“I love you, Fosca,” he said softly.
“I’m sorry, Alessandro,” she whispered. “So sorry.”
“Oh, Fosca, it is I who should be sorry.”
“Alessandro, I love you,” she said.
The barrier fell, the chasm closed. It had been so easy. His mother was right: forgive, and live. He had come very close to making a fool of himself again.
Paolo sighed and stirred in Alessandro’s lap. His leg pained him greatly and he couldn’t suppress a grunt of discomfort.
“Let me take him” Fosca said. He relinquished the sleeping child and helped her settle him on her lap. He stretched his leg and rubbed it gingerly.
“It pains you,” she said, concerned.
“A bit,” he admitted. “I fear that you will have to demonstrate your superior skills tonight, lady.”
She smiled. “It will be a pleasure, Signor.”
“God, that fellow could fight!”
“You were very reckless,”Fosca said. “It surprised me.”
“It shouldn’t. If you recall, I’ve done a lot of reckless things since we met.”
‘That you were sorry for later?” she asked slyly. He found her hand again. “No. I’ve never been sorry, Fosca.”
The boat bobbed. Guido began to hum under his breath. Fosca closed her eyes. It could have been any dream-filled evening in summer: riding in a gondola with your lover while the soft wind of the Adriatic ruffled your hair, and the gondolier sang a love song, and the music of Venice drifted across the water, magical and seductive.
“We will never go back,” she said sadly.
“No.”
“It’s like a dream, or like a story you see on the stage—hectic and noisy and so real that you forget it’s just illusion. And all of a sudden—it’s over.”
“I have all the dream I want right here,” he said.
“Alessandro,” she said after awhile, “was it true, what your mother said? Is—was Rafaello really—your son?”
He gave a little shout of laughter. “Not to my knowledge, my darling. Thank God for that!”
“You mean—your mother—?”
“Concocted the whole fairy tale,” he nodded. “She was brilliant, wasn’t she? By God, she should have been a lawyer herself: ‘You heard my son admit—!’ Oh, she was splendid. A true Venetian noblewoman to the very end, spinning her fantastic lies so charmingly that everyone believed them. I nearly be
lieved her myself!”
“Then you never knew the Jewess, Daniella?”
He hesitated, just the merest fraction of a second. “I never knew any Jewess. And I certainly never offered marriage to any woman before I met you. That part was a little wild, I confess. I’m surprised he didn’t catch her up on it.”
“Daniella was his mother, after all,” Fosca reminded him. “He would want to believe that she was honorable.”
“I’m sure she was,” Alessandro said meditatively. “The kind of girl who wouldn’t tell her lover she was pregnant, because she knew they weren’t suited to each other.” He broke off and shifted a little in his seat to relieve the pressure on his leg. “Hey, Guido,” he said almost cheerfully, “do you know that little cove about five miles below Mestre, behind those islands where they make nets?”
“Yes, Signor, I know it.”
“That’s where we’re going. And be quick about it, eh?”
“Yes, Signor,” Guido said brightly,
Alessandro shifted again. “Ah, this damned leg,” he muttered. His foot struck something under the seat. “What’s this?”
He bent over and pulled out a Carnival mask, the white beaky larva. It gleamed like a ghostly husk in the pale light. Sinister, with thrusting nose, jutting upper lip, blank, black eyes.
“Well,” said Alessandro, “I guess we won’t be needing this where we’re going.”
He tossed it over the side of the gondola, into the waters of the lagoon. Weightless and white, it rode the rest of the small waves like a cap of foam, and drifted in their wake like a fallen leaf, back towards the gleaming city from which it had come.
The Masquers Page 43