by Anne Rice
Through the haze of the smoking candles he saw the distant face still shocked with amazement, but it had become more remote, and almost sad.
"Ah, you had no choice!" Tonio whispered almost bitterly. "And what if you had come to Rome? What if we two had met as we are met now, and discoursed as we are discoursing now?"
"Met? Discoursed?" Carlo demanded disgustedly. "To what end? So that I might have begged your forgiveness for having you gelded?" He almost sneered. "Well, I begged you once over and over again to yield to me, my bastard son! And you refused. You made your fate! It was your decision, not mine!"
"Oh, you cannot believe that!" Tonio whispered.
"I had no choice!" Carlo roared. He bent forward. "Again, I say to you I had no choice! And damn the men I sent after you in Rome, that was nothing. If they prodded you on your errand, so much the better, for you would have come and you know it, and I say to you I had no choice!"
His vision clouded, but oh, that face was so beautiful even now, demon thing, the irony of it, and youth, youth, the thing he lamented most of all.
But he was seeing the bottom of the cup again. He felt the wine running down his chin. He reached for the bottle.
"Met with you, discoursed with you." He sighed, his chest heaving, his eyes half mast.
But what was he doing, what was he saying?
His eyes moved over the distant ceiling, the great shadowy vault that shivered slightly with the flames of the candles, where spiders lived, and the rain, seeping in, shimmered in droplets through hairline cracks.
It was time he needed, time for it to get dark, and what had he been saying, what had he let pour out of him, all the poison from these old sores.
But as he felt his body flooded with the warmth of the wine, and a great soft exhaustion, he did not care!
What he cared about was all the injustice of it, the brutal and relentless injustice of it that had gone on and on for years. Lies and accusations that were never ending, and all that he had paid and paid and paid! That was the mystery of it, that each dung he had sought had cost him so dearly it was not worth it in the end. Oh, what had he ever enjoyed that had not cost him youth, blood, and endless wrangling, and when had there ever been any understanding, any moment when he could lay down the whole of it before any judge?
"What do you know of it?" he demanded. "Of all those years in Istanbul when you were spoilt and pampered and she taken from me, and then to come home and have her accuse me, accuse me! She never believed me, you know! It was always Tonio, and Tonio! I begged her a thousand times to put the wine away, I'd bring physicians, nurses. What didn't I give her? Jewels, Paris fashions, servants to wait on her hand and foot, the gentlest nurses to care for our boys, I gave her everything! But what did she want when it was all said and done: 'Tonio,' and the wine, and it was the wine that brought her to her deathbed, and on her deathbed she asked for you!"
He studied Tonio. What was it now? A look of incredulity? Of unwilling pain? He could not tell. He did not care.
"That must give you solace, surely," he said bitterly, again leaning forward, his head too heavy for him now, the wine cool and fresh in his mouth. "And she in those last days! Do you know what she said to me, that I had ruined her, destroyed her, driven her to madness and drink and taken from her her only comfort, our son! She said this to me!"
"And of course you did not believe it, did you?" Tonio whispered.
"Believe it! After what I had suffered for her!" Carlo felt the leather strap against him with a sharp pain, and settling backwards, held the bottle tight in his hand. "After what I had done for her! Exiled for the love of her, and who after all those years in Istanbul, and she in my father's house, would have bothered with her again!
"But I loved her, and it was a passion that endured fifteen years only to be destroyed by what? Not time, mind you, not my father, mind you, but you! 'Tonio' and she died. She would not even look at our children in the end...."
His voice broke. He was startled at the sound of it, and would have rested his head in his hands if he could.
This bondage was endurable, but it would be worse were he to struggle and feel its limits, and desperately he told himself that, as he sat still, his hands straining to reach his face, his head moving just a little from side to side.
"You ask if I believed her. What right have you to ask me anything! What right have you to sit in judgment on me!"
He reached for the brandy flask, and quickly emptied it into the cup. He drank it down, feeling the sharper, stronger heat of it, delicious, and the whole room seemed to move under him, some convulsion in him rolling upwards until even his eyes rolled up in his head. Some image was before him, tormenting him, of his young and beautiful Marianna when he had first taken her from the convent, when they had come into his lodgings, and when she realized he was not to marry her, and she commenced to scream.
He was shuddering, remembering only the rush of his words as he had tried to comfort her, assuring her it was only time he needed, time to win over his father. "I am his only son, don't you see, he must yield to me!"
But this was not what he wanted now. He was on the verge of delirium; and without words he had some sense of the years before that, when his mother was alive, and all of his brothers, and all the world had been easy and full of hope and full of love. There stood between him and his father a great buffer, and there had been nothing he could not mend, could not make right. But that had been taken away from him, cruelly, just as she had been taken away, and his youth had been taken away, and it seemed now that all he could truly remember was struggle and bitterness that obliterated everything else.
He moaned. He was gazing at the supper table. Dimly, he knew where he was and that it was Tonio who held him here. He felt the strap cutting him, and drifting, he struggled to see clearly, to remember again that what he needed now was time.
The candles were burning low, and the fire on the hearth was a heap of glowing cinders. When he had gone drunk to the Broglio that morning, swearing he would marry her with or without permission, his father had stood over him, turning him back, that horrid countenance: "You dare to defy me!" And she, sobbing across the bed in those filthy lodgings, "O God in Heaven, what have you done to me?"
He must have made some sound again, some moan.
With a start he realized the room had darkened and grown enormous, and Tonio, opposite, stared at him still without expression save for the hardest line to that long mouth.
His black hair was softened now and fallen down more naturally about his face, and what did he look like? Even after the knife there was still the old resemblance, yes, like a dozen portraits painted years and years ago when they were all together, his brothers and he, and his mother, but this was Tonio!
He felt the sickness rising in him again.
"You..." He seethed, his body shuddering. "You hold me prisoner here, you sit in judgment on me! Is that what you've come for, judgment on me! You, the pampered one"--he smiled, that laughter commencing again, low, rustling dry laughter that seemed to carry his words along--"the chosen one of my father, and the singer, yes, the great singer, the celebrity in Rome with women pelting his carriage with flowers, and royalty receiving him, Tonio with gold overflowing his purse, and the great Cardinal Calvino doting on his every wish."
There was just a flicker of feeling in Tonio's face.
"Yes, yes." He laughed, his laughter low and dry. "Do you think I don't know the odious fate to which I so rashly and impulsively condemned you, do you think I haven't heard tell of your lovers, your worshipers, your friends? What door is there that has not opened to you? What is there you would have that has been denied you? Eunuch. What in God's name did they hack away from you that you have laid a siege to the beds of Rome as great as that of the barbarian hordes?
"And you come here, rich, young, blessed by the gods even in your monstrousness, so that you seduce your own father, and you sit in judgment on me! Ask me why I did this and why I did that!"
> He rested, his fingers trying vainly to wipe at his lips. There was a taste of brandy yet in the cup and it burned him.
"Tell me"--he bent forward again, head cocked to one side--"would you give up all of that if you could have it back, Tonio! Would you give up all of that for the life I've had since!" He leered into Tonio's face. "Think before you answer. Shall I tell you just what it has been! And never mind my wife wailing ever for her lost son, and your cousin, your dear cousin, Catrina, a harpy at me night and day, claws ever and ever deeper, waiting for my slightest slip of the tongue! And those old senators and councillors, his partisans, vultures, that's what they are, ever watching me out of the corner of their eye!
"No, I am talking of Venice now, the life of duty and obligation of which I so cruelly robbed you, Tonio, the singer, Tonio, the celebrity, the castrato. Well, hearken to me."
He softened his tone as if confiding a secret, his words almost feverish: "A great moldering palazzo to begin with, that drains your fortune for its countless rooms, its crumbling walls, its rotting foundations, like a giant sea sponge sucking up all that you give to it and ever wanting more, an emblem finally of the Republic itself, that great government which every day of your life summons you to the Offices of State, there to bow, to smile, to haggle, to lie, to plead and preside over the incessant and never-ending cacophonous babble that is the day-to-day workings of this proud and powerless city without empire, without destiny, without hope! Spies and inquisitors and rubrics and tradition and pomp on the verge of madness, your pocket picked for every new spectacle, feast day, anniversary, celebration, and extravagant display.
"And after that, when finally you are quit of those elephantine robes, and mumbling inanities, your feet blistered, the very muscles of your face aching from dissimulation, what then, but that you are free at last for the one hundredth time to lose your money at the Ridotto, or sleep with the same courtesan or the same tavern girl, or the same adulteress with whom you quarreled seven times the week before, the spies of the state ever at your elbow, your enemies ever judging you, your conduct ever under scrutiny, and when you are weary of it, sick of it, suffocated with it, only to turn round and look about you, from one end of this narrow island to the other, and realize that on the morrow it will all begin over again!
"And you have come home to judge me!
"You want it back! You want to take it in place of the opera, you want it instead of your English beauty in the Piazza di Spagna, you want to give up that voice of yours that has made you a god among the people and a nonpareil, so that you can return here but one of a thousand grasping noblemen all struggling for the same few expensive and dreary offices within this Republic all but shrunk to the very walls you saw around in the piazza when you played your little dance of cunning for me!"
Low laughter. It had its own momentum, good like the words, an outpouring that could not be checked.
"You take the damned stinking house. You take the damned stinking government. You take it all and..."
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.
