Authors: Anne Rice
There was no irony in his tone, yet the blood rushed to Tonio’s face, and sick with shame he looked down, unable to form an answer.
Why hadn’t he sent the servants here at once to prepare this room? Why hadn’t he thought of it? Lord God, he had been master of this house for just that little while, had he not? And if not he, who, then, might have given the order? He stared at the stained and peeling walls, at the ruined carpet.
“Ah, but you see the love for me that was lavished here,” Carlo sighed. He laid the book down, his eyes moving over the fractured ceiling. “You see how my treasures were put away for me, my clothing saved from the moths, my books in dry and safe places.”
“Forgive me, Signore!”
“And for what?” Carlo extended his hand, and as Tonio drew near, Carlo gathered him to himself, and again Tonio felt that kindling warmth, that strength. And in some recess of his mind, untroubled, he thought, I shall look like this when I am a man; I see the future as few ever see it. His brother kissed him gently on the forehead.
“What could you have done, little brother?”
He did not wait for the answer. He had opened the book again, and his hand moved over the decaying letters,
The Tempest
, written in English and beneath it the twin columns of print, his voice dropping again, into that rhythmic whisper:
“
Full fathom five thy father lies
…” And as he looked up again, he seemed positively distracted by the vision of Tonio.
What is it, what do you see? Do you despise me, Tonio was thinking. And the ruin of the room seemed to press in on him, the dust suffocating him, and he could for the first time breathe in the stench of all that was spoiled and rotting here.
But his brother had not looked away, and his black eyes had lost all consciousness of their own expression.
“First child of the union,” Carlo whispered. “Child born at the height of passion. Blessed with everything, so the saying goes, the first child.” And now his brows knit and his mouth showed the smallest tightening at the edges.
“But then I was the last of my parents’ brood,” he went on, “and we two are so alike. There is no rule, then, is there? First child, last child, save the father’s
feeling
for the first child!”
“Please, Signore, I don’t understand what you are saying.”
“No, and why should you?” Carlo said, the tone as even as before, as gentle and without malice. Wondering, he looked at Tonio as if he liked looking at him. And Tonio beneath his gaze was wilting inside and miserable.
“Do you understand this, then?” Carlo asked. “Look around you.” It was that roar threatening again, that roaring nudging at the edge of language.
“Signore, please, let me have the servants clean this place…”
“Oh, will you do that? You are the master here, are you not?” And the voice was stretched ever thinner.
Tonio looked into his eyes. It wasn’t anger, it was outrage. And shaking his head helplessly, Tonio looked away.
“No, little brother, it is not your doing,” said Carlo. “And what a princeling you are,” he said with the gentlest sincerity. “How he must have loved you. But I dare say, I would love you too if I were your father.”
“Signore, show us the way now to love each other!”
“But I do love you,” Carlo whispered. “But leave me in this place before I say what I will regret. You see, I am not myself here yet, but rather I have come to this house to find myself slain here, and put to rest by others, and so I roam this place as if I were the ghost of myself, and in that state of mind come dangerously near to thoughts and words that are hellish.”
“Oh, please, come out of here, then. Please…His apartments on the main floor, Signore, you can take them….”
“Ah, do you give me those rooms, little brother?”
“Signore, I did not mean that I give them to you. I meant no such disrespect. I meant only surely you can take them.”
Carlo smiled, and looking up, he let the book drop to the table.
Then he took Tonio’s head again in both hands almost roughly.
“Oh, why couldn’t you have been some spoilt and arrogant boy?” he whispered. “And I could have damned him further for so indulging you?”
“Signore, we cannot speak of these things. If we do, we cannot abide each other.”
“And wit and wisdom and courage, yes, courage, that is what you have, little brother. You come to face me and talk to me. You said, what, a moment ago, that I must show you a way for us to love each other?”
Tonio nodded. He knew his voice would break if he spoke just yet. And so close to this man that he held himself stiffly, he slowly bent forward until his lips touched his brother’s cheek and he felt Carlo’s sigh again as Carlo’s arm enfolded him.
“So difficult, difficult,” Catrina said. It was past midnight and all the house was dark save the room in which he was pacing. Tonio could hear the wine in his voice; it was erupting. There was no modulation.
“But you have come back rich, and you are yet young…and dear God, is there not enough in this city to content you without wife, children? You are free—!”
“Signora, I am done with freedom. I know what can be bought. I know what can be had. Yes, rich, and young, and free, for fifteen years I have been that! And I tell you while he was living it was the fire of purgatory, and now that he is dead, it is hell! Don’t talk to me of freedom. Penance enough I did so that I might wed and—”
“Carlo, you cannot go against him!”
Servants with dark faces swept the corridors. Young men lingered at the doors of Andrea’s old rooms, Marcello Lisani came early to breakfast with Carlo at the long supper room table.
“Come in, Tonio!” Carlo gestured, rising at once, the chair sliding back on the tiles, at the glimpse of his brother passing the doorway.
But Tonio, bowing quickly, escaped him. And once inside
his room, stood silently against the door as if he had found some refuge.
“Resigned, no, he is not resigned.” Catrina shook her head. Her quick blue eyes narrowed just for an instant as she looked at Tonio’s lessons. Then she gave them back to Alessandro. She had a score of papers in a leatherbound folio, what to pay cook, what to pay the valet, these tutors, how much food to lay in, and what else was wanting?
“But you must bear this in silence,” she said, closing her hand over Tonio’s hands. “You must do nothing to provoke him.”
Tonio nodded. Angelo on the edge of the room, drawn and anxious, glanced up now and again from the pages of his breviary.
“So let him gather his old friends, let him see who has influence now, and who holds office”—Catrina’s voice dropped as she leaned close and looked into his eyes—“and let him spend his money if he wishes, he has brought a fortune home. He complains of these dark draperies. He is hungry for Venetian luxuries, for French trinkets and pretty wallpapers. Let him…”
“Yes, yes…” Tonio said.
Each morning, Tonio watched him leave the house, seeing him rush down the stairs with the jingle of keys and the clank of the sword at his side, his boots loud on the marble, sounds so unfamiliar here they seemed to have a life of their own, while through the crack of his door, Tonio saw white wigs in a row on polished wooden heads, and heard Andrea’s old whisper: foppery.
“Little brother, come dine with me tonight.” He seemed at times to appear out of the shadows as if he had lain in waiting.
“Please forgive me, Signore, my spirits, my father…”
Somewhere Tonio heard the unmistakable sound of his mother singing.
In the late afternoon, Alessandro sat so still at the library table he might have been the statue of himself. Tramp of feet on the stairs. And her voice in that melancholy song very like a hymn drifted through the open doors, but when Tonio rose to find her, she was only just leaving.
Prayerbook in hand, she lowered her veil, and it seemed she did not want to look at him. “Lena will go with me,” she answered. She did not need Alessandro today.
“Mamma.” Tonio followed her to the door. She was humming something to herself. “Are you content here now? Tell me.”
“Oh, why do you ask me this?” Her voice was so light, but her hand, darting from beneath the thin black mesh to pinch his wrist, startled him. He felt a tiny pain for an instant and was angry.
“If you are not happy here, you could go to Catrina’s house,” he said, all the while dreading that she would leave, and those rooms too would be alien, empty.
“I am in my son’s house,” she said. “Open the doors,” she told the porter.
At night, he lay awake listening to the silence. And all the world outside his door seemed a foreign territory. Passages, rooms he knew, even the damp and neglected places; laughter erupted below; there was that faint, almost imperceptible sound of people moving in this house, a sound no one should have been able to hear, but he could hear it.
Somewhere in the night a woman was shouting something, caustic, uncontrollable. He turned over and shut his eyes, only to realize it was within these walls.
He had slept. He had dreamed. Opening the door, he heard them below, the old exchange again, Catrina’s voice high-pitched and strident. Was he weeping?
It was early evening. The October carnival gave its faint distant din to the sounds of the night. There was a ball in the great Palazzo Trimani only yards away, and Tonio, alone in the long supper room, his hand on the heavy drape, watched the boats as they came and went, came and went below him.
His mother stood on the dock beneath the window, Lena and Alessandro behind her. Her long black veil was down to her hem, the gauze of it blown back to make a sculpture of her face as she waited for the gondola.
And was
he
in this house?
The Grand Salon was a sea of pitch darkness.
But as he was savoring the silence and stillness of this moment,
he heard the first sounds. Someone moving in the dark, and there came that musky, Eastern perfume, the creak of the door, a heel ever so gently touching the stone floor behind him.
Caught on the open sea, he thought, and the canal shimmered in his vision. The sky was ablaze above the distant Piazza San Marco.
The hair on the back of his neck rose just a little, and he felt the faint pressure of the man near him.
“In the old days,” Carlo whispered, “all women wore those veils, and they had about them a greater beauty. It was a mystery they carried with them in the streets, something of the East they carried with them….”
Tonio looked up slowly to see him so very close they might have touched one another. The black of Carlo’s coat revealed a slash of glimmering white lace that seemed a dim mirage rather than fabric, and his wig, with its perfect curls above the ears and a rise from the forehead so natural it seemed real hair, gave off a slight shimmer.
He drew near the panes and looked down, that resemblance jarring Tonio now as it did every time he perceived it. In the meager candlelight, Carlo’s skin appeared flawless. And the only sign of age in him was those dry lines at the corners of his eyes which wrinkled so easily when there came his long smiles.
And such a smile softened his face now, evincing that irrepressible warmth as if no enmity could ever exist between them.
“Night after night, you avoid me, Tonio,” he said. “Let us dine together now. The table is set. The food is ready.”
Tonio turned to the water again; his mother was gone; the night for all its plodding little boats seemed empty.
“My thoughts are with my father, Signore,” he said.
“Ah, yes, your father.” But Carlo didn’t turn away. And there was in the shadows the movements of those silent Turkish ones taking up the small flames and touching them to branching candelabra everywhere, on the table itself, on the chests beneath that haunting picture.
“Sit down, little brother.”
I want to love you, Tonio thought, no matter what you did. I thought somehow it could be healed.
And bowing his head, Tonio seated himself as so often in the past at the head of the table. It was not even a moment before he realized what he had done, and his eyes rose immediately to confront his brother.
His heart quickened its pace. He studied this smile, this affable radiance. The snow-white wig made Carlo’s skin seem all the more dark and the beauty of the high-placed eyebrows was all the more marked as he sat gazing at Tonio with neither rancor nor censure.
“We are at odds with each other,” Carlo said. And now his smile melted slowly to a calmer, less deliberate expression. “No matter how we pretend we are not, we are at odds, and almost a month has passed and we cannot even break bread together.”
Tonio nodded, the tears standing in his eyes. “And it is uncanny,” Carlo went on, “this resemblance between us.”
Tonio wondered if a man could feel love when the other gave the silent expression of it. Could Carlo see it in his eyes? And for the first time, he realized, sitting here, very still and unable to speak even the simplest words, that he wanted so to rely upon his brother. Rely upon you, trust in you, seek your help, and yet that is beyond possibility. At odds. He wanted to leave this room now, and he feared his brother’s reckless and strange eloquence.
“Handsome little brother,” Carlo whispered. “French clothes,” he observed, his large dark eyes flickering almost innocently. “And such fine bones, from your mother, I think, and her voice, too, that lovely lovely soprano.”
Tonio’s eyes shifted deliberately away. This was excruciating. But if we do not talk now, the agony will only grow greater.
“When she was a girl,” Carlo said, “and she sang in the chapel, she moved us to tears, did she ever tell you that? Ah, the tributes she received, the gondoliers loved her.”
Slowly Tonio looked back to him.
“She was a very siren,” Carlo said. “Has no one ever told you?”
“No,” Tonio answered uneasily. And he felt his brother observe how he shifted in his chair, and how he looked away again hastily.
“And beautiful she was, too, more beautiful even than she is now….” Carlo dropped his voice to a whisper.
“Signore, best not to speak so of her!” Tonio had said it before he meant to.
“Why, what will happen”—Carlo’s voice remained calm—“if I speak so of her?”