Authors: Anne Rice
He faltered.
He stopped.
He stared straight ahead and it seemed for a moment his mind emptied itself, and the surge of energy which had fired him was dissipated, leaving him weak and spent.
His mind was grasping for something, but for what he did not know.
Save that there was a thread to all of it. And if he grabbed hold of the thread and followed it back and back through the labyrinth of his own ravings, he would surely come to the piazza again in the rain, and that moment, that perfect moment with the gulls soaring, and the banners whipped in the wind. He saw that lustrous sadness, whole and complete and at a great remove from him, and that moment when there had been resignation and hope and some glorious gratitude that for one moment it had all of it made sense. If only Tonio were dead, if only Tonio were finally buried, if only…and then he could breathe.
He stared at Tonio. It seemed an eternity they had been together in this room.
The candles were sputtering in their wax, and the fire was almost gone, yet the air was still as warm as a noxious liquid, and his head, how his head throbbed.
But something was wrong.
Something was hideously wrong, and it was wrong in his mind. Something was wrong because these were not lies he had been telling, this was not subterfuge and chatter to buy time so that his men would come. This was something else pouring out of him that had the force and the luster of truth to it, only it could not have been truth, not what he was saying, this could not have been his life.
Tonio’s face was contorted, that youthful beauty not so much erased as alchemized into something richer and more complex than innocence, a soul seething inside the temptress, the sorcerer.
But Carlo did not care about Tonio.
He was staring into the chaos that his mind had now become. And the horror was very near him, the horror he had tasted in the piazza, and what had he called it to himself, something curled in the mouth like a dry scream!
He wanted desperately to explain something, something that never never had been understood.
When had he ever wanted to murder, to castrate, when had he ever wanted to struggle as he had been forced to struggle…?
But his silence terrified him. He was terrified of the stillness, and then, as though by his silence he had failed any
longer to prevent it, he realized that Tonio was rising from the chair.
He stared at the long lean arms that reached for those black clothes, bodice, skirts, the wig with its tiny pearls.
And as he watched in horror, Tonio heaped this in the fireplace on the dying coals.
A flame erupted against the blackened tiles, as with the poker Tonio stirred the fire before him, and the great hollow of the wig was filled with smoke.
Its pearls glinted in the light, and then it commenced to collapse upon itself as all at once it ignited with tiny flames. It gave off a crackling as it grew narrow, like a mouth pinched on both sides. And the black taffeta under it had exploded in a blaze.
“But why are you burning those things?” Carlo heard himself ask. Again, he ran his tongue over his dried lips. The flask was empty, the cup was empty….
He had never in his life known the apprehension he knew now. It seemed he must say something, he must commence again, he must find some way to delay, delay until his men could find him but he could not shake this horror….
“Driven to it,” he whispered, his voice so frail it was only for himself, “driven to it, all of it, got at such a price finally that what was it worth then, what was it worth?” He was shaking his head, but these words weren’t for Tonio, these words were only for himself.
Yet Tonio had heard.
Tonio held the poker in his hand. Its tip glowed red in the shadows, and now with that slow and feline grace he approached Carlo, the poker held at his side.
“But you have left one thing out, Father,” he said, and his voice was calm and cold as if he were speaking formally to a friend. “You have told me of the wife who disappointed you, of the government that drains you and oppresses you, of the peers who persecute you, of my cousin who ever accuses you, you have told me of so much that plagues you and makes your existence nothing but a litany of misery. But you have not told me of your sons!”
“My sons…” Carlo’s eyes narrowed.
“Your sons,” Tonio repeated, “the young Treschi, my brothers. What is it they do to you, Father? Infants that they are,
what is it they do to torment you, what is their injustice to you, do they not keep you awake nightly with their wailing, do they not rob you of your well-deserved sleep?”
Carlo made some uncertain sound.
“Come, Father,” Tonio said softly between his teeth. “Surely if all the rest is nothing but obligation and drudgery, surely they are worth it, Father, that four years ago you broke the course of my life!”
Carlo stared forward. Then uncertainly he shook his head. He drew himself up, his shoulders lifted, his feet pushing silently on the floor.
“My sons…” he said. “My sons…my sons will rise up and seek you out and kill you for this!” he shouted.
“No, Father,” Tonio said. He turned and with an easy gesture cast the poker into the fire. “Your sons will never know what happened to you here,” he whispered, “if you die in this place.”
“That is a damnable lie, they will grow up wishing for your death, living for the day when—”
“No, Father, they will be reared by the Lisani and they will never know much of either of us and our old feud.”
“Lies, lies, my men will never rest….”
“Your men will fly this city like rats when they learn they have failed to protect you.”
“The inquisitors of state will hunt you down and—”
“If they knew I was here they would have arrested me already,” Tonio replied softly, “and in the plain sight of many you left the piazza in the company of a lone whore.”
Carlo glared upward, unable to speak.
“No one will know what happened to you, Father”—Tonio sighed—“if you should die here.”
And turning he crossed the room with several long strides and opened a darkly varnished armoire.
Carlo sat petrified watching him as, with those easy graceful gestures, Tonio drew out a rusty frock coat which he put on, and then a sword which he strapped to his hip. Then he put a cloak over his shoulders, clasping it at the throat as the deep folds of black wool fell down to the floor.
Those long fingers lifted the hood of the cloak, and Tonio’s face gleamed white from beneath the dark triangle of cloth.
Carlo struggled. He convulsed, his teeth clenched in the effort,
and with all his weight, he tried to pitch the chair over backwards but it did not move.
The figure approached, the black cloak swaying with that same eerie rhythm of those black skirts in the piazza. And Tonio looked down on the ruined supper, and out of the fowl he drew the long-handled knife.
Carlo’s eyes, glassed over with tears of rage, did not flinch. It was not over yet. It was not finished. But if he thought for one instant that it was finished, he would start to scream in madness, it could not have come to this, it could not end in the same injustice, the same injustice, and there pounded in his head only hatred for Tonio and the awful regret that he had not killed him long ago.
“Do you know what I always thought I would do,” Tonio whispered, “when this moment came?” He held the knife before Carlo. It gleamed with the grease of the fowl and the ebbing light.
Carlo shrank back against the chair.
“I always thought it would be your eyes I would take,” Tonio whispered, lifting the knife carefully, “so that you who have loved as I shall never love, you who have fathered sons as I shall never father sons, you would be shut out of life as I was shut out of it, yet living as I lived!”
The glaze in Carlo’s eyes broke and the tears slid down his face. Yet his mouth worked silently as he glared at Tonio. And gathering all his saliva, he spat it into Tonio’s face.
Tonio’s eyes widened.
With an almost involuntary gesture, he lifted the edge of the cloak and wiped the spittle away.
“Very brave, aren’t you, Father?” he whispered. “You have such courage, don’t you, Father? Years ago, you told me I had courage, do you remember that? But is it courage, Father, that causes you to defy me now when I have over you the power of life and death? Is it courage, Father, that not for your sons, not for Venice, not for life itself will you bow, will you bend?
“Or is it something infinitely more brutal than courage, more base? Is it not pride and selfishness that have made you nothing more than the slave of your unbridled will, so that any opposition to it must be your mortal enemy regardless of the stakes?”
Tonio drew closer, his voice more heated.
“Was it not selfishness, pride, unbridled will that drove you to take my mother out of the convent that sheltered her, to ruin her and drive her to madness when she might have had a dozen suitors, and married a dozen times over, well and content? She was the darling of the Pietà, her singing was a legend. But you must have her, wife or no!
“And was it not selfishness and pride and will that drove you yet to defy your father, threatening with extinction a family that had endured for a millennium before you were born!
“And when you came home and found yourself still punished for these crimes, what did you do but seek to take what you would have out of pride, selfishness, and willfulness, even if it meant cruelty, treachery, and lies! ‘Yield to me,’ you said, and when I could not yield to you, you had me gelded, driven out of my homeland and separated from all that I knew and loved. Banished from Venice rather than accuse you, disgraced rather than see you punished and my house endangered, and now you tell me all this, for which you mutilated me and wronged me, is but persecution and burdens and trials!
“Dear God, a house all but destroyed for you, a woman ruined and driven to madness for you, a son gelded and broken by you, and you dare to complain of accusations and suspicions and that you are forced to tell lies!
“What in the name of God are you that your will and your selfishness and your pride demand such a price!”
“I loathe you!” Carlo cried out. “I curse you. I wish to God I had killed you. If I could, I would kill you now.”
“Oh, I believe you when you say that,” Tonio answered, his voice shaken and frayed. “And you would tell me yourself again, if you were to do it, that in this as in all else you had no choice!”
“Yes, yes, and yes again!” Carlo roared.
Tonio stopped. He was trembling still with the force of his own words, and now it seemed he sought to calm himself, to let the silence drain away the anger that had risen, his eyes fixed on Carlo, but without expression, merely innocence again.
“And you would leave me no choice now, would you?” Tonio asked. “You would have it that I must kill you now, this very instant, though every instinct in me seeks to save you even against your own will.”
Carlo’s face, frozen in fury, underwent the smallest change.
“I do not want to kill you!” Tonio whispered. “For all your hatred, your recklessness, your endless malice, I do not want to kill you! And not out of mercy for you, the miserable man that you are, but for things you have never honored, and never, never understood.”
He paused, catching his breath. His face had a sheen to it now that caught the gleam of the fire.
“That you are Andrea’s son,” he said slowly, almost wearily, “that you are his flesh and blood and my flesh and blood, that you are a Treschi, and master of my grandfather’s house. That you have in your keeping my infant brothers whom I would not orphan, that you for all your bitter complaint against it, do in the government of Venice carry our name!
“For all this, I would let you live, for all this I came here seeking to let you live, and for the wretched truth of it that you are my father,
my father
, and I do not want your blood on my hands!”
Again Tonio stopped. He held the knife still, and his eyes grew distant and dim. It seemed a great exhaustion had come over him, a great revulsion suddenly.
And keenly, Carlo marked this, though his face was full of mockery, unwilling to be deceived.
“And maybe, finally,” Tonio whispered, “because I will not allow you to force me to do it, I will not stand before God a patricide, whining as you have whined, ‘I had no choice.’
“But can you fathom this? Can you accept a wisdom beyond your willfulness, your own pride? Is there no way yet to unravel this knot of vengeance, injustice, blood?”
Carlo had put his head to the side and looked at Tonio through one narrow eye. His hatred for Tonio pounded in him as if it were the rhythm of his heart.
“I am done hating you,” Tonio whispered. “Done fearing you. It seems that you are nothing to me now but some ugly storm that drove my undefended bark off course. And what was lost to me will never be retrieved, but I want no more quarrel with you, no more hatred, nor spite.
‘Tell me, Father, though you begged for nothing, can you yet accept that I want no more now than your vow? You will not seek my life after this, and I shall leave you here unharmed. I will go out of Venice as I came, and never seek to
injure you or those you love. If you do not believe it this moment you will believe it when I leave you, but for that, Father, you must bend just a little. You must give me your vow.
“This is what I came for. This is why I have not killed you before now. I want that it should be finished between us! I want that you should be restored to your house, and to my infant brothers. I want that you should give me that vow!”
Carlo made a slow scowl. In a low guttural voice, he murmured, “You are tricking me….”
A sharp spasm divided Tonio’s face. Then it was smooth again, seemingly incapable of malice. He lowered his eyes.
“Father, for the love of God!” he whispered. “For life itself.”
Carlo studied him. His vision was clear now, painfully clear, though the room had fallen into darkness, and he felt such pure hatred for the shadowy figure that stood over him that little else filled his mind.
He saw the knife in Tonio’s hands move. Gracefully Tonio had turned it and was now holding it so that Carlo could take it by the handle.