Authors: Anne Rice
Another bellow sounded from the earth, and again that flash of light that brought midday to the struggling trees, and in it a small house above distinguished itself. Yet another figure appeared just as from above a shower of small stones filled the air, raining down with thumps and thuds everywhere. One rock struck Tonio’s shoulder but with no force. He shouted for the guide to continue.
The man who had just appeared was waving his arms.
“You cannot go higher!” he declared, and drawing near to Tonio, he let the moon discover him through the olive branches. His face was gaunt, his eyes bulging as if with some wasting sickness. “Go back down. Can’t you see you’re in danger?” he cried out.
“Go on,” said Tonio to the guide.
But the guide had stopped.
And then the man pointed to a great mound that stood before him.
“Last night that was a grove of trees as flat as this,” he said. “I saw it rise and buckle within a matter of hours. I tell you, you are courting death to go higher.”
He ducked as the rain of stones came flying again, and this time Tonio felt the trickle of blood on the side of his face though he didn’t hear or feel the weight of the stone that had struck him.
“Go on,” he said to the guide.
The guide dug in his staff. He pulled Tonio a few yards farther up the slope. Then he stopped. He was gesturing, but over the noise of the mountain Tonio couldn’t hear what he was saying. Again he shouted go on. But he could see now the man was finished and nothing would make him continue. In Neapolitan, he begged Tonio to stop. He released him from the
leather thong, and when Tonio started up the slope hand over hand, his fingers digging into the dirt, the man cried out in Italian that Tonio could understand:
“Signore, it spills lava tonight. Look, above. You cannot go farther!”
Tonio lay on the ground, his right arm up to shield his eyes, his left cupped loosely over his mouth, and dimly through the particles of ash that hung in the air, he could see the faint glimmer of a stream defining the slope to his right as the lava poured down and away, disappearing into the amorphous shapes of the overgrowth. Tonio stared at it without moving. More ash belched from above, and there came the stones again falling on his back and his head. He covered his head with both hands.
“Signore!” screamed the guide.
“Get away from me!” Tonio cried out. And without looking back to see if he was obeyed, he rose on all fours and ran up the incline, gaining speed as he grabbed for roots and scorched tree limbs, digging the toes of his boots into the soft crush beneath him.
Again came the shower of rocks; it was in a rhythm that these bursts were occurring, but he could not time it, nor did he care, dropping down again and again to protect his face and rising as soon as he could, the fire above lighting up the sky even through the haze of the ash which had become a veritable cloud over him.
A fit of coughing stopped him. He ran on. But now he had his handkerchief over his mouth and he was going slower. His hands were bruised, so were his knees, and when the rocks showered down on him this time, they cut his forehead and his right shoulder.
The mountain gave another roar, the rumble collecting into a greater and greater sound until it was once more that appalling bellow. The night was again fully illuminated.
And he saw beyond the half dead trees that lay ahead that he had reached the foot of the giant cone itself. He was almost to the summit of Vesuvius.
He reached out for the earth above, taking it in tight handfuls as it fell away, pebbles and rocks rolling back into his mouth, and suddenly he felt the ground itself moving! It was heaved upward. The raging bellow deafened him. And the
smoke and ash swirled about the great blinding flash that showed the high barren cone slanting heavenward. Again he went forward. He groped for the tree that he could see only a few yards ahead, a last gnarled and tortured sentinel. But falling down, he felt himself thrown up again as with a tremendous crack, the tree itself split open.
Half the trunk swung to the right, seemed to catch itself. And then it crashed in a thunderous crackling. A seething steam rose from the cracks opening everywhere. And he found himself scrambling desperately backwards.
He slid against the earth. He felt the dirt in his mouth, the dead leaves caked against his eyelids. And even blinded as he was, he still saw the red flash as if from an explosion. But he clung fast. The ground carried him up, shifted him to the side, but he lay motionless. The bellow rose again, shattering him. And though his throat convulsed with cries, though his hands clawed into the rubble, he heard no sound from himself, felt no life in himself as he became part of the mountain and the roaring cauldron within it.
T
HE SUN WAS WARM
on his face.
Smoke hung in the air in thousands upon thousands of tiny particles. Yet far off the birds were singing. And it was not early morning. It was noon, he could tell by the slant of the sun, by the feel of it on his face and his hands. And the mountain gave off but a faint murmuring.
He had just opened his eyes. For a long moment he lay very still, and then he realized that a man was standing before him. The figure wavered against the blue sky, and so consumptive
was it, so pale, so wild of eye, it seemed the very visage of death itself, while behind it lay the lush green slopes, knotted with trees, that melted down to the fertile plain in which lay the jumbled facets of color and light that were Naples.
But it wasn’t the figure of death. It was only that man who had come out of his hut the night before to warn Tonio to go no higher.
And mutely, he extended his hand. He caught Tonio up out of the dirt and led him slowly down the mountain.
As soon as Tonio reached the city, he went to one of the better
alberghi
on the Molo, and rented for himself an expensive suite of rooms in which he could bathe, after sending a servant to purchase fresh linen.
When he was finished with the bath, he had the tub taken out and he stood alone for a while, naked, in front of the mirror. Then he put on his clean shirt, arranging the lace neatly at the collar and at the cuffs, and having had his frock coat brushed, he put that on too and his breeches and stockings and went out onto the veranda.
Fruit and chocolate were brought to him for his breakfast, and the Turkish coffee he had liked so much all his life in Venice.
And there he sat in the open air, looking beyond the morning traffic to the white beach and the blue-green water.
The sea was a swarm of fishing boats and vessels drifting into port.
And beneath him the open space called the Largo was full of all that minute and busy life he had grown accustomed to seeing here.
Tonio was thinking.
But seldom in his life had he so little need to do so.
For fourteen days, he had been at Naples. And for fourteen days on the road before that, after leaving that filthy room in Flovigo. And during all of this time, it was entirely possible that he had never once really used his reason.
All that had happened to him weighed on him
totally
. And yet he could not see it as a whole, nor see around it. Rather all its aspects beset him like so many buzzing flies come from hell to drive him out of his mind and they had almost succeeded. Torn with hatred, torn with grief for the man he would
not be, he had flailed against everyone around him, even himself, without purpose, and without hope, rectifying nothing and vanquishing no one.
Well, that was over.
That had changed.
And he was not entirely sure why it had changed, either.
But after a night of lying on Vesuvius, of moving only when the mountain chose to move him, it had all of it done its damnedest to him, and now it was over.
And central to this change was the realization—not made in the heat of anger or pain, but coldly, in the midst of danger—that he was entirely alone now.
He had no one.
Carlo had done evil to him, irrevocable evil.
And that evil had separated Tonio from everyone he loved, completely. He could never live among his family or friends as he was now. If he did, their pity, their curiosity, their horror would simply destroy him.
Even if he were not banished from Venice, an inalterable fact that caused him excruciating humiliation, he could never return there. Venice and all those he knew and loved were lost to him now.
All right. That was the simpler part.
Now came the harder part.
Andrea, too, had betrayed him. Surely Andrea had known Tonio was not his son. And yet Andrea had led him to believe that he was, setting Tonio against Carlo, to fight Andrea’s battle after Andrea’s death. That was a terrible, terrible betrayal.
Yet even now, Tonio knew what Andrea would say on his own behalf. Save for Andrea, what would Tonio have been? The first of a wretched brood of bastards, children of a disgraced nobleman and a ruined convent girl? What would Tonio’s life have been? Andrea had chastised a rebellious offspring who deserved nothing, saved the honor of his family, and
made
Tonio his son.
But even the will of Andrea could not work miracles. At his death, the illusions and laws he had created in his own house had crumbled. And he had never made Tonio understand what lay before him. He had sent Tonio to fight the battle sustained only by lies and half-truths.
Was it a miscalculation of pride finally? Tonio would never know.
All he knew and understood now was that he was not Andrea’s son, and the man who had given him a history and a destiny was gone from him, his wisdom and his intentions forever beyond Tonio’s reach.
Yes, he had lost Andrea.
And what of the Treschi remained? Carlo, Carlo who had done this to him, Carlo who had not the courage to kill him, but the cunning to know that for the House of Treschi Tonio could never point the finger of blame.
Clever, cowardly, but very clever. This spoilt and rebellious man who, for the love of a woman, had once threatened to doom his family to extinction, would now rebuild it on the cruelty and violence done to his blameless son.
So the Treschi were gone from him: Andrea, Carlo.
And yet the blood of the Treschi ran in his veins. There persisted in him a love for Treschi who had gone before these two men, father and grandfather, a love of Treschi who would come after, children who must inherit the traditions and the strength of a family in a world that would remember little or nothing of Tonio, Carlo, Andrea, this appalling tangle of injustice and suffering.
All right, that was hard.
But what comes now is the hardest.
What lay before Tonio? What emerged from this chaos? What had become of Tonio Treschi, who sat now on a veranda in the southern city of Naples, alone, staring out under the shadow of Vesuvius on the ever-changing surface of the sea?
Tonio Treschi was a eunuch.
Tonio Treschi was that half man, that less than man that arouses the contempt of every whole man who looks upon it. Tonio Treschi was that thing which women cannot leave alone and men find infinitely disturbing, frightening, pathetic, the butt of jokes and endless bullying, the necessary evil of the church choirs and the opera stage which is, outside that artifice and grace and soaring music, very simply monstrous.
All his life he’d heard the whispers behind the eunuch’s back, seen the sneers, the lift of eyebrows, the mock foppish gestures! All too perfectly he’d understood the rage of that proud singer Caffarelli at the footlights glaring at the Venetians
who had paid to see him like the court ape perform vocal acrobatics.
And already within the confines of the conservatorio to which he’d clung like a shipwrecked prisoner to the remnants of his prison boat in alien water, he had seen the self-loathing of these neutered children, taunting him to share their degraded state. Slipping into his room at night with barbs of uncommon cruelty, “You are the same as we are!” they all but hissed at him in the dark.
Yes, he was the same as they were. And how the world took cognizance of it! Matrimony was forever denied him, his name no longer his to give to the lowliest woman nor the most needy stepchild. Nor would the Church ever receive him, save for the lowest Orders, and even then only by special dispensation.
No, he was outcast, from family, from church, from any great institution in this world that was his world, save one:
That was the conservatorio. And the world of music for which the conservatorio would prepare him.
Neither of which had the slightest actual connection with what had been done to him by his brother’s men.
But were it not for that conservatorio, and were it not for that music, then this thing truly would be worse than death.
As it was, it was not worse.
When he had lain in that bed in Flovigo, and that bravo, Alonso, had put a pistol to his head, saying: “You have your life, take it and leave here,” he had thought then it was worse than death. “Kill me,” he had wanted to answer, but he had not even the will then to do that.
But on the mountain, this very day, he had not wanted to die. There was the conservatorio, and there was music that, even in the moments of his worst pain, he could hear, purely and magnificently, in his head.
The smallest ripple of feeling came over his face. He was staring at the sea where children moved in and out of the waves like a great flock of swallows.
So what would he do?
He knew. He had known when he had come down from the mountain. Two tasks lay before him.
The first was the revenge against Carlo. And that would take time.
Because Carlo must marry. Carlo must have children first, healthy strong children growing up well towards the day when they might marry and have children of their own.
But then he would
get
Carlo. Whether he himself survived the revenge did not matter. In all likelihood he wouldn’t survive it. Venice would get him, or Carlo’s bravos would get him, but not before he himself had gotten to Carlo and whispered into Carlo’s ear, “This is between
us
now.”