Donna Russo Morin
Page 40
Zeno stared at the expectant faces. His lips floundered, but no words formed. His head tilted to the side and his gaze grew vacant. He looked down at the empty space on the pew beneath him, and without further statement, sat down.
Sophia released her straining toes and flexed calf muscles and leaned her back against the warm russet bricks of the church. Her young features scrunched unbecomingly; she didn’t understand why her father had not said more. He had appeared as if about to speak but the words or their sentiments had been lost on the journey from brain to lips.
Within the church, the same confusion cloaked the congregation; men shared silent, questioning glances, their faces changing in the shifting shadows as the rising sun began to stream in through the windows.
Cittadini took advantage of the appeasement. Stepping out from the podium, he crossed the altar, and stood in line with the first of the many rows of blond oak pews, at the intersection of forward and sideward paths.
“Tell me, de Varisco.” The steward addressed a middle-aged man sitting close to the front, Manfredo de Varisco, owner of the San Giancinto glassworks. “You are not a nobleman, yet you live in a virtual palazzo. You own your own gondola. Sì?”
De Varisco nodded his head, dirty blond curls bouncing, with an almost shameful shrug.
“And you, Brunuro, you are always wearing your bejeweled sword and dagger.”
Cittadini strode down the aisle, approaching a handsome man, black-haired and ruddy, sitting a third of the way down. Baldessera Brunuro, with his brother Zuan, ran both the Tre Corone and the Due Serafini.
“Would you enjoy such privileges, such luxuries, if you weren’t glassworkers?”
No one spoke, though many shook their heads, for the answer was most assuredly no; other Venetian members of the industrial class did not—could not—relish such refinements as did the glass-makers.
Jerking to his right, the robust and rotund Cittadini raised an accusing finger, pointing to another middle-aged man, one with finely sculpted features, the owner of Tre Croci d’Oro.
“You above all, signore Serena, your daughter is to marry a noble. Your grandchildren will be nobles. For the love of God, your male heirs may sit on the Grand Council, may one day become Doge, Il Serenissimo, the ruler of all Venice!”
Cittadini punctuated his impassioned plea, throwing his hands up and wide with dramatic finality.
Serena’s brown eyes held Cittadini’s, beacons shining from out of puffy, wrinkle-rimmed sockets. He struggled to stand, his long white beard quivering from his chin onto his chest with each strain of exertion. For a few more seconds he held the steward’s rapt attention in the preternatural quiet of the packed church. The women outside became captives, their noses pressed to the sills, their fussing and fluttering ceasing once and for all.
“None of us wants to give these things up, these glories that make our lives so rich, so abundant.” Serena spoke of their splendors, yet the sadness in his face, his furrowed brow, his frowning mouth, told another tale. “But at what price? It is naught more than extortion. We should be, we must be, able to live as we please, go where we please. We have earned the right.”
Cittadini didn’t answer. He studied the familiar face of his friend. He turned, impotent, to the righteous faces all around and curled his broad shoulders up to his ears. “Then … what do we do?”
Within this house of God, amidst the aura of his benevolence, no one had an answer.