by Anne Rice
"What is it, Excellency?" she whispered. She was naked beside him, her clothes a shapeless mass of darkness in her lap, her shoulders so exquisitely sloped, her eyes just two places that didn't exist in all the whiteness of her face as she looked at him.
He sat upright. He disentangled himself from her gently. I've had her, he was thinking, loved her, had her, known her. And yet it gave no savor, no wondrous thrill, and he clung to her for a moment, smelling her hair, and kissing the hard roundness of her little forehead. And the voices drew nearer and nearer. They were his singers! And they were on their way home, most likely, and if he could just overtake them...He pushed his shirt into his breeches, tied back his hair.
"Excellency, don't go," she begged.
"Dearest," he said, putting gold coins in her hands and closing her fingers on top of them. "Tomorrow night, right after dark, wait for me." He slipped her skirt over her head, pulled on her soft rumpled blouse, and laced up her vest tightly, feeling with the last bit of pleasure the way that it hugged her and bound her.
The singers were almost to the canal, and it was Ernestino--how many times had he heard that name spoken under the window? And the basso, it was Pietro, the one with the light basso that had no thickness to it, a pure sound for all its depth, and the fiddler tonight was Felix.
As the boat shot away from him under the nearby bridge and vanished into the dark, he wished just for a moment he were very drunk, that he had had the presence of mind to buy a jug of wine at the piazza. He crept along the wall towards the calle, the stones so slick he might easily have fallen down into the water.
What do they look like? He had seen so little of them in the dark. Would they know him?
And in the light of an open door, he caught sight of the little band immediately. The big, heavyset one, bearded, coarsely dressed, that was Ernestino, and he was serenading a thick-armed woman who slouched on the step laughing softly at him. And the violinist pranced back and forth, his bow working furiously. The music was shrill and sweet.
And then Tonio raised his voice, an octave higher than Ernestino as he sang the same phrases right in time with him. Ernestino's voice swelled; Tonio could see the change in his expression.
"Ah, it's not possible!" he shouted. "It's my seraph, it's my prince from the Palazzo Treschi."
And when he opened his arms, catching Tonio up, swinging him off his feet and around before setting him down again, "But, Excellency, what are you doing here?"
"I want to sing with you," Tonio said. He took the jug of wine offered him. It spilled down his chin as he filled his mouth. "Wherever you're going, I want to sing with you."
He threw back his head. The rain was hitting his eyelids, and he sang an infinite ascension of notes, a pure and magnificent coloratura. He heard it echoed by the walls; it seemed to rise to the very margin of sky above, and in the narrow darkness lights flickered describing the shapes of small windows. Ernestino's deeper voice rose under his, buoying it, dropping back to let Tonio soar, and waiting again for the closing phrase in rapturous harmony.
A voice called out a sharp "Bravo," and there came soft explosions of compliments from the walls themselves, it seemed, dying as suddenly as they were uttered. And when the coins hit the wet stones, Felix scrambled to gather them.
*
Until dawn they wandered singing along the windy quais where they could find it; they went arm in arm through the spiderweb of calli. Sometimes the walls hugged them so tight they had to go one by one, but their voices became preternatural. Tonio knew all their favorite songs; he taught them others. Again and again he took the jug and when it was empty bought another.
Buttery windows broke open above them everywhere they went, and now and then they lingered to serenade some dim figure. Behind the big palazzi they roamed, drawing the richly dressed men and women away from their late-night gambling and supper tables. The blood pounded in Tonio's head; his feet were reckless, slipping on the slick stones, but it seemed his voice had never known such unbridled power. Ernestino and Pietro were mad for him, and whenever he flagged, they taunted him into greater feats, giving their own applause for the piercing high notes, the long tender swelling as his songs grew slower, and full of some sweet and caressing sadness. He remembered once rocking with his arms folded on his chest; Ernestino was leading him in some lullaby, and the night was without form or end, the moon now and then released from the heavy clouds to show the rain in a silent, silvery torrent.
Sadness, it was such an arresting emotion. You could almost convince yourself of the rhyme and reason of heartbreak.
It was daylight.
Garbage littered the piazza; bawling voices ran out under the arcades; little clusters of maskers danced about arm in arm, a whole population of black-draped persons with faces the color of skulls, and the great church itself shimmered and wavered in the morning rain as if it were painted on a silk scrim hung from the heavens.
Bettina's face was puffy from sleep, she was pinning up her hair and rushing to wait on him.
She put hot bread and butter down, and strong Turkish coffee. She put the napkin in his lap, and when he wouldn't lift his head, she held it for him.
He ran his finger down the pale flesh of her throat and asked:
"Do you love me?"
2
IT WAS A WEEK before he even trusted himself to approach his mother's door, only to be told she'd gone to church. Then she was asleep.
And next time he knocked, gone to the Palazzo Lisani.
She was anywhere but there when he came to see her.
By the fifth morning, he was laughing out loud as he left her door.
Then lapsing into a paralytic silence in which he could not and would not pursue her.
But no matter how his head ached from lack of sleep, he washed, swallowed food, found his way finally to the library.
Catrina Lisani came to tell him that Carlo, with a substantial fortune acquired in the Levant, had cured all debts against the estate, which had been considerable, and now he meant to restore the old Treschi villa on the Brenta.
Tonio was so tired from his nightlong serenades, he could scarce pay attention to her.
"He is behaving himself, don't you think?" she asked. "He is doing his duty. Your father could not have wished for better."
Meantime Carlo had three bravos with him wherever he went. Husky, taciturn bodyguards who hung about the house, attempting to melt into the shadows. They followed him every morning when in his patrician robes he went to make his bows to those senators and councillors on the Broglio.
He was ingratiating himself with everyone, and that he meant to reenter civil life was now obvious.
Tonio took to coming to the piazzetta every morning after the night's roaming. And there he would watch his brother from afar; he could only imagine the content of those quick conversations. Clasped hands, bows, some subdued laughter. Marcello Lisani appeared; together they moved up and down, up and down, losing themselves in the crowd against a backdrop of the masts of the ships, and the dull gleam of the water.
And convinced Carlo would be away for a long time, Tonio would finally slip into the house and walk the endless stretch of ancient floor to his mother's apartments. No answer to his knock. The old excuses.
It didn't take Catrina long to find out what Tonio had been up to. He lived for the moment when darkness fell down around the house, dropped out of the winter sky so abruptly. He was out then. He stood in the calle waiting for Ernestino and the band to come for him.
Catrina was distraught. "So you are the singer everyone is talking about. But you can't carry on like this, Tonio, you must listen to me. You let his malice eat at you...."
Ah, but why didn't you tell me, he thought, but he did not so much as whisper it. His tutors scolded, he looked away. Alessandro's face bore the mark of fear, unmistakably.
It was almost evening. He could stand it no longer. The house was dreary and only reluctantly invaded by the gentle spring twilight. Leaning ag
ainst her door, he felt weakened at first. And then consumed with rage, he forced the double doors until the bolt splintered the wood and he found himself staring into her empty apartments.
For a second, it was impossible for him to discern anything in the shadows, even the most familiar objects. And then gradually he saw his mother sitting quite still at the dressing table.
Here and there a bit of light gleamed along her silver brushes and combs. And then there was the gleam on her throat of pearls; and he realized that in this solitary darkness she was dressed not in her black silk mourning dress but something rich and brilliant in color and strung with little jewels like pinpoints of light that sparkled and vanished as she moved her hands to cover her face.
"Why do you break my door?" she whispered.
"Why don't you answer my knocking?"
He could make out her white fingers clawing at her hair. And it seemed she crossed her breasts with her arms like a saint and bowed her head as if she were pulling herself down. He saw the white nape of her neck, her hair parting, falling in front of her like a veil.
"What will you do?" she asked suddenly.
"What will I do? What can I do?" he asked angrily. "Why do you put this question to me? Put it to my guardians. Put it to my father's lawyers. It's out of my hands, it's always been out of my hands. But you, what is it you do?"
"What do you want of me?" she whispered.
"Why did you never tell me!" He drew near to her face, his lips drawn back in a grimace. "Why! Why did I have to hear it from his lips that you were the girl, you and he...."
"Stop it, in the name of God, stop!" she cried. "Shut the doors, shut the doors." And suddenly rising and running past him, she closed the doors he had forced open and, rushing to the window, pulled the heavy velvet drapes so that both of them were completely enveloped in darkness.
"Why do you torture me?" she implored. "What have I to do with your rivalry? For the love of God, Tonio, for half my life I have been in this house reading you fairy tales! I was a child then. I was no older than you are now! I didn't know what the world was, and so I went with him when he came for me!
"But tell you, how was I to tell you? After Carlo was sent away, His Excellency would have shut me up again in the Pieta or some worse place, and I would have died there! I had no honor left, and nothing else until he brought me here and married me and gave me his name. Dear God, I tried for fifteen years to be the Signora Treschi, your mother, that he wanted me to be. But tell you, how to tell you, for the love of God, I begged Carlo not to tell you! But Tonio, save for those few nights with him when I was a girl, I have lived the life of a nun in the cloister, and what did I ever do to earn this pious vocation? Do you see here the face and form of a saint! I am a woman, Tonio."
"But Mamma, with him now, under my father's roof..."
He felt her hands before he heard her movement. She was fumbling to cover his mouth, his eyes, even though he could see absolutely nothing. Her fingers lay warm and trembling on his eyelids, her smooth forehead like a stone against his lips, her body rising and falling against him.
"Please, Tonio..." She was sobbing softly. "It does not matter what I do with him now. I cannot change this rivalry. You have no power. I have no power. Oh, please, please..."
"Stand with me, Mother," he whispered. "No matter what is past, stand with me now. I am your son, Mother, I need you."
"I do stand with you, I do. But I am now and have always been without power."
He felt her head in the crook of his neck, her breasts softly heaving against him. And lifting his right hand slowly he found the silky mass of her hair and stroked it.
"This must pass," he whispered.
By the end of the month, Carlo was defeated in his first election. The elder members of the Grand Council talked again of stationing him abroad. His young associates resisted it.
And the long-drawn-out clauses of Andrea's will had been clearly and once and for all unraveled.
Beneath his strong and ominous admonitions that his elder son should not marry, there was an ironclad provision that could not be broken:
Andrea had entailed his estate. That is, it could never be divided or sold. And it could be inherited only by the sons of Marc Antonio Treschi. So do what Carlo might, the future of the family belonged to Tonio.
Only if Tonio was to die without issue, or prove incapable of fathering children, could Carlo's heirs be recognized.
But Carlo did nothing now that was violent or shameful. Advised by his father's elderly friends that it was a scandal to challenge the wishes of his dead father, he appeared to accept this. His money he continued to lavish on the household, including increased salaries for his brother's tutors.
He accepted any and all menial duties he was given by the state, set himself to pleasing everyone of importance, and soon became the model patrician.
And what some did not observe, others explained to them: it took money to hold important office in the Republic, money to rear sons for future service, and of the Treschi, ironically, it was Carlo who possessed this money. So those seeking to build their influence commenced to turn to him. It was a natural political process.
Meantime, the man was enjoying himself immensely. He did nothing unseemly, but visiting everyone, dining everywhere, gambling when he had the time, and frequenting the theaters, let everyone know that he was the child of his native city.
Tonio was never at home. He slept often with Bettina, above the little tavern her father owned not far from the piazza. Twice his cousins, the Lisani, called him on the carpet for his behavior, threatening him with the anger of the Grand Council if he didn't start behaving like a patrician.
But his life was lived in the back alleys. It was lived in Bettina's arms.
And when the bells rang on Easter Sunday, Tonio's voice was a legend in the streets of Venice.
In the calli beyond the Grand Canal, people had begun to listen for him, to expect him. Ernestino had never seen such a rain of golden coins. And Tonio gave it all to him.
The exquisite pleasure he knew on these nights was all that he could have desired, and he himself did not fully understand its meaning.
He knew only that when he looked up at the sky full of stars, the breezes soft and salty from the sea, he could give himself to the wildest and full-throated love songs. Perhaps his voice was all that he had left of what had only a short while ago been father and mother and son and the House of Treschi. Perhaps it was that he was singing alone; he was not singing with her. She'd turned him out, so he'd taken himself to the world, and there seemed no limit to the notes he could reach, or how long he could sustain them. He dreamed sometimes of Caffarelli as he sang, imagined himself on such a stage, but all this was sweeter, more immediate, more colored with comfort and sorrow and pathos.
People wept above. They cried out vows of love as they emptied their purses. They demanded the name of this seraph soprano, footmen sent down to bring him and his little band up into fashionable supper rooms. He never went.
But he followed Ernestino to his favorite haunts as the hours grew smaller and the sky paler.
"In all my life," Ernestino said, "I have never heard a voice like that. God has touched you, Signore. But sing while you can, because it won't be long before those high notes leave you forever."
Through the soft caress of Tonio's drunkenness the words assumed their obvious meaning. Manhood, and the loss of this along with so much else.
"Does it happen all at once?" he murmured. His head was against a wall. He lifted the jug and felt the wine spilling again as it did too often. But he had to wash the bitterness out of his mouth.
"My God, Excellency, haven't you ever been around a boy whose voice changed?"
"No, I have never been around anybody at all, save an elderly man and a very young woman," he said. "I know nothing of boys, I know little of men. And when it's finally said and done, I know very little of singing either."
A figure filled up the opening at the fa
r end of the calle in which they stood. It seemed to touch the walls on either side, and a sudden wariness gripped Tonio.
"Sometimes it's fast," Ernestino was saying. "Sometimes it drags on for a long time with broken notes, you can't trust it. But as tall as you are for your age, Excellency, and...and..." He made a little smile, taking the jug. Tonio knew he was thinking of Bettina. "...Well, it may come sooner than with most." He let it go at that, and putting his heavy arm over Tonio, guided him forward.
The figure had moved away.
Tonio smiled, but no one saw it. He was thinking of his father's words to him, very nearly his last words, and suddenly an anguish deadened him and left him solitary even in this little company.
"Once you have made the decision that you are a man, you will become one." Could the mind thus instruct the flesh? He shook his head, communing with himself. Against Andrea he felt a sudden terrible anger.
And yet it seemed unforgivable that he should feel this, that he should be where he was, wandering with common singers in this mean and crooked place. Yet he walked on, leaning all the more on Ernestino.
They had reached the canal. Lanterns burned ahead beneath the dim shadow of the bridge where the gondoliers gathered.
And there appeared that figure again; he was sure it was the same, for the heavy build and the height, and the man stood by obviously watching them.
Tonio moved his hand to his sword, and for a moment he was fixed to the spot.
"Excellency, what is it?" said Ernestino. They were only a few steps from Bettina's tavern.
"That one, there," Tonio murmured, but the weight of his suspicion was breaking him, sickening him. Send death for me, like that, some paid assassin? It seemed he'd already been dealt the blow and this was not life any longer, rather some nightmare place where that sentinel stood on the bridge and these strangers urged him to a meaningless portal.
"Never mind, Excellency," said Ernestino. "That's only the maestro from Naples. A singing teacher come here for little boys. Haven't you seen him before? He's playing your shadow."
It was dawn when Tonio lifted his head from drunken sleep at the tavern table. Bettina sat at his side, her arm under his coat and warm against his back as if she would protect him from the coming sun, and Ernestino, beyond coherence, kept up an angry argument with her father.
