Cry to Heaven (73 page)

“Leave me alone!”

The brandy had an exquisite heat to it; it was like liquid fire. He imagined himself threaded with it, its warmth sustaining him, and the icy air about him could not conceivably touch him and it struck him that all beauty was of its greatest use when one was utterly beyond pain.

The rain sprang afresh from the air, slanting and spattering the sheet of water that lay before him. It made a great hissing sound.

“Well,
he
will be with you very soon, my love,” he whispered, his lips twisted back in a grimace, “he shall be with you, and you will in the great bed of the earth lie together.”

How she had gone on at the end! “I will go to him, you understand me, I will go to him, you cannot keep me prisoner here, he is in Rome, I will go to him.” And he had answered: “Ah, my darling, can you even find your shoes or the comb for your hair?”

“Yeeeesss, be together again”—the words left him like a great sigh—“and then, and then, I can breathe.”

He shut his eyes so that when he opened them he might see it once more, this loveliness, the sun a sudden burst of silver and the golden towers peaking sharply above those glittering mosaics. “Death, and all my mistakes of the past corrected, death, and no more Tonio, Tonio the eunuch, Tonio the singer!” he whispered. “On her deathbed she summoned you, didn’t she? She said
your name!
”

He swallowed the brandy, loving the shudder it sent through him, his tongue gathering the last taste of it from his lips.

“And you will know how I paid for it all, how I suffered, how every moment I have given you has cost me dearly until I have no more to give you, my bastard son, my indomitable
and inescapable rival; you will die, you will die so that I can live again!”

The wind whipped back his neglected hair; it seared his ears and cut even to the thin fabric of his frock coat, lashing his long black
tabarro
out and back between his legs.

But even as he listed again, battling the vision of the death room from which not for one moment in these last few weeks had he
ever
been free, he saw moving towards him across the piazza the very real figure of a woman draped in mourning, whom he had seen over and over in the
calli
, on the
riva
, in the
calli
, throughout these last few drunken and belligerent and bitter days.

He narrowed his eyes, his head falling to one side.

Her skirts drifted so slowly above the shimmering water she seemed to move not by human effort but by the effort of his fevered and grieving mind.

“And you are part of it, my dearest,” he whispered, loving the sound of his own voice inside his head, though no one else took the slightest notice of him, nor the open bottle in his hand. “Do you know that? You are part of it, nameless one, and faceless one, yet beautiful one, as if this beauty were not enough, you come forth out of the core of it, dressed in death, black as death, moving ever towards me as if we were lovers, you and I, death….”

The piazza tilted and righted itself.

But this was the pinnacle of some miracle of the brandy and the wine and his suffering: this was that perfect moment when it was all bearable: yes; worth Tonio’s death, because I have no choice, I cannot do otherwise! And let it dissolve into poetry, if it will, songbird, singer, my eunuch son! My long arm reaches to Rome and takes you by the throat and silences you forever and then, and then, and then, I can breathe!

Under the arcade, his bravos prowled, never very far away.

He wanted to smile again, to feel it. The piazza, shining this brightly, must explode into a formless glare.

But another feeling was threatening him, an altered vision, something dissolving this lovely pleasure and offering him the taste of…what was it? Something like a dry scream in an open mouth.

He drank the brandy. Was it the woman, something in the movement of her skirts, her veil blown out behind her so that
he could see the shape of her face beneath it, inciting in him some little panic that made him swallow the drink too fast?

She was coming towards him as she had come towards him on the piazzetta earlier, as she had come near him on the
riva
before.

Some courtesan in Lenten black, what was she? And coming so steadily. It seemed from the milling crowd she’d picked him for her destination, yeeesss! Yes, she was pursuing him, and there was no doubt of it. And where were her ladies, her servants? Did they creep on the edges of things, as did his men?

He liked to imagine it for a moment, yes, she was in pursuit of him; behind that black veil she had seen his smile; she was seeing it now.

“I want it, I want all of it!” He clamped his jaw on the words. “I want it and not this suffering, only would you, would you, would they please come and tell me that he is dead!”

He widened his eyes; she was not a human thing at all, but some specter sent to haunt him and comfort him, as he saw the dim oval of her white face, and the movement of those pale hands beneath her floating veil.

She changed suddenly; she turned her back, but she had never ceased her progress. No! It was so remarkable, he moved his head forward slightly, eyes narrowed again, the better to see.

She was walking backwards, letting all those layers of gauze unravel before her face, and her skirts blow out before her. She walked backwards on her heels, never losing her stride, just as a man would do in this wind, to straighten out his gathered cloak, and then she turned back around.

He laughed, softly, unobtrusively. He had never seen a woman do such a thing in all his life.

And when she turned, her garments were looser around her, and on she came with that same eerie weightless motion, and he felt a sharp pain catch at him, in the side.

He let out his breath with a hiss.

Blind, foolish courtesan, widow, whatever you are, he thought, a malevolence seeping into him as if some little dark place had been lanced suddenly so the poison might spread. What do you know of all of it around you, and how you are
part of it, beauty, beauty, just part of it, no matter what your own ugly and trivial and inevitably repulsive thoughts!

The bottle was empty.

He had made no decision to drop it and yet it burst on the wet stones at his feet. The thin water moved out in ripples, and the pieces glittered and settled. He stepped on them. He liked the sound of the crunching glass.

“Get me another!” He gestured. And one of the shadows in the corner of his eye moved forward, grew larger, taller.

“Signore.” The bottle was given him. “Please, you should come home.”

“Aaaah!” He opened the bottle. “All men, my friend, give license to those of us who grieve, and have I not cause to grieve today more than any other?” He leered into Federico’s face. “He is most likely putrefying as we stand here, and all those women swooning for his voice are now wailing, and his friends, the rich and powerful of Rome and Naples, are even now laying him out in state.”

“Signore, I beg you….”

He shook his head. The sick room again, and that…what was it?…horror that he could almost taste like a coating on his tongue. She sat up suddenly. “Tonio!”

He laid his hand squarely on Federico’s chest and pushed him away.

He drank deep, deep, and slowly, beckoning the sadness to come again, that luminous and fathomless emotion that was without turbulence.

And she, his woman in black, where was she gone?

He turned on his heel and, seeing her not ten paces away from him, was certain that she had turned her head to look at him just as he had looked at her!

Yes, she had done that.

She was looking at him from out of that darkness. He despised her, even as he knew his eyes were full of some lustful glitter, as he gave her his slow, his adoring smile. Always the same insolence, this coquetry, this game of cat and mouse while the grief beat inside of him: you think I want you, you think I desire you, drink you down like wine I will, and cast you aside before you even know what happens to you. But her! Now that was love that time could not touch. No, it took
him
to destroy it. “Tonio!” and she did not speak another word until she died.

He took the brandy too fast; it spilt down the side of his face and onto his clothes.

Someone had greeted him, bowed, and moved off hurriedly seeing the state of things. But they would forgive; everyone forgave; his wife dead, the children crying for her, and him crying for her. And somewhere five hundred miles to the south that disgrace, that old scandal. “Ah, Senator Carlo Treschi,” they must be saying to themselves, “what he has had to bear.”

Something else. Federico at his elbow. He stared at the woman in black. She was definitely attempting to lure him. “I told you to leave me alone.”

“…is in, and no one was on it, Signore.”

“On what? I can’t hear you.”

“The packet, Signore, there was no…”

Graceful, feline whore, something unmistakably elegant, the sway of her dress, and the way she bent with the wind. He wanted her, wanted her, and when this was over he would go down on his knees in the confessional: “I killed him, I had no choice, I did not…” He turned round and tried to see Federico more clearly. “What did you say?”

“There was no one on the packet, Signore. There was no message”—and lowering his voice so it wasn’t even a whisper—“no message from Rome.”

“Well, there will be.” He drew himself up. And so the wait goes on, and the guilt with it. No, not the guilt, merely the discomfort, the tension, this feeling of being unable to breathe.

He almost dreaded it finally, the message. They had said, “We will bring you proof,” after the first outrage when he had questioned their integrity. “Oh, will you, and what will that be?” he had asked. “His head in a bloodied sack?”

He had laughed, and even they, those assassins, had been aghast, straining to conceal it behind faces that looked as if they’d been carelessly carved out of wood and never polished. “You don’t need to bring me proof. You only need to do it. The news will come to me fast enough.”

Tonio Treschi, the singer, people actually called him that now, even to Carlo, even to his brother, they dared, Tonio Treschi, the singer!

Years ago, those others had said they would bring proof, and
he had dismissed it. And when they put that mess of viscera and blood before him, the linen dried and cracking with it, he had knocked over the chair to get away from them, roaring, “Get it away from me, get it away from me!”

“Excellency…” Federico was talking to him.

“I will not go home.”

“Excellency, there is still no message and that means there is the chance…”

“What chance!”

“…that they failed.”

Just a touch of exasperation in Federico, and a touch of anxiousness, his eyes darting over the piazza, passing blindly over that dark-clad woman who had suddenly appeared again. You don’t see her? I see her. Carlo smiled.

“Failed?” He sneered. “He’s a Goddamned eunuch, for the love of God. They could strangle him with their bare hands!”

He lifted the bottle, giving Federico that almost intimate push to move him from this perfect vision. Yes, she was there again. “All right, beautiful one, come to me,” he said under his breath, and quickly drank the brandy again.

It was a great swallow this time, cleaning his mouth and his eyes. The rain was soundless and without weight, just a swirling of silver.

And the burning in his chest was luxurious; he hadn’t taken the bottle down from his mouth.

In her last days, Marianna ran round and round tearing open drawers and cabinets. “Give it to me, you have no right to take it, I put it here, you won’t keep me in this house.”

And the old physician warning, She will kill herself, and finally Nina running through the halls. “
She does not speak, she does not move
”—wailing, wailing.

Four hours before she died, she knew it. She opened her eyes and said, “Carlo, I’m dying.”

“I won’t let you die! Marianna!” he had insisted, and long after, he had awakened at her slight movement, saw her eyes open, heard her say: “Tonio!” She never uttered another word.

Tonio and Tonio and Tonio.

“Signore, home…if it was not done as it should have been done, there is a danger that…”

“That what? They went to wring a capon’s neck. If they
have not done it, they’ll do it. I don’t want to talk of this, get away from me….”

Tonio Treschi, the singer! He sneered.

“There should have been some message on the packet.”

“Yes, and proof!” he said. “Proof.” His head in a bloodied sack.
Get that away from me, get that away from meeeeee…!

She had never stopped asking him: “You didn’t do it, you didn’t do it!” He had whispered his denials a thousand times, a thousand times in those early days when everyone was on him like so many birds of prey ready to strip his flesh from him; behind closed doors, she clung to him, making her hands into claws. “My son, my only son, and our son, you didn’t do it!”

“So now you say it.” He had laughed and laughed. But no, my darling, a thousand times, I could not have done such a thing. In his rashness he did it. And then her face would soften, just for a little while at least, in his arms, she would believe.

“…no good to mourn like this.”

“Who said that?”

He turned around too fast, and saw a pair of figures retreating, the heavy black
vesti patricie
, the white wigs, his unforgiving and ever vigilant peers.

Federico was far, far away, watching from the arcade, and with him those others. Four good stilettos and muscle enough to guard him against anything save madness, save bitterness, save
her
death, save endless and terrible years without her, years and years.…

A sodden loneliness overtook him. Wanted her, my Marianna, how to describe it, even her crying in his arms, her screaming for her wine, and those drunken eyes accusing him, those lips drawn back over the whitest teeth. “Don’t you see I’m with you now,” he had said to her. “And we’re together and they’re gone, they can never separate us again, you are as beautiful as you ever were, no, don’t look away from me, look at me, Marianna!”