Cry to Heaven

  "So how could I strike him down? How could I make a widow of my mother once again, and orphans of her children? How could I bring darkness and death to that house? And how could I raise my hand to him when he was my father, and in love for my mother he had given me life? How could I do this when, save for the hatred of him, I lived in the happiness and contentment I had never known as a child?

  "So I put off the doing of it. That he must have not one child, but two, I waited. That my mother should finally be released to heaven, I waited. And even then, when nothing remained to prevent me, when I had discharged my duties to those I loved, and nothing stood in my path, it was my happiness and the leaving of it that caused me to waver. But more to the point, my lord, it was my happiness that caused me guilt that I should strike him down! Why must he die if I had the world, and love, and all a man could hunger for? These are the questions I asked myself.

  "And even on this very day, I wavered, struggling with my conscience and my purpose, the arguments I gave others but arguments with myself.

  "But you see, he has been his own undoing! He has sent his men to kill me. He can do it now. My mother is dead and buried, and four years stand between him and the obvious motives that would have proved his death sentence had he done it before when he counted so upon my allegiance to my house, and my name, and yes, even to him, the last of my family.

  "And sending these assassins to cut me down, he has sought to snuff out the very life that was luring me away from him, that was saying to me, forget him, let him live!

  "But I cannot forget him. Now he has left me no choice. I must go there and strike him down, and there is no reason under God I cannot do this and come back to those I love who are waiting for me. Tell me there is no reason I must destroy myself to destroy this man who has this very day attempted to kill me!"

  "But can you destroy him, Marc Antonio," the Cardinal asked, "without forfeiting your own life?"

  "Yes, my lord," Tonio answered with quiet conviction. "I can do it. For a long time I have known a way to get him in my power with little danger to myself."

  The Cardinal weighed this silently. His eyes narrowed as he looked at the distant tabernacle.

  "Ah, how little I knew of you, how little I knew of what you suffered...." he said.

  "An image has come to my mind," Tonio went on. "All evening it has plagued me. It is that old tale told to children and grown men alike of how the great conqueror Alexander, presented with the Gordian knot, cut through it with his sword. For that was what was inside of me, a veritable Gordian knot of wishing to live and yet believing I could not live until I'd destroyed him and thereby proved my own ruin! Well, he has cut the Gordian knot with the knives of his assassins. And often enough tonight when others thought I smiled or talked or even sang on the stage, I was thinking to myself I understand now how fully that old tale has always disappointed me. What wisdom was there slicing through a puzzle which had defeated finer minds? What a brutal and tragic misunderstanding! Yet these are the ways of men, my lord, the slicing through, the cutting away; and it is only those of us, perhaps, who are not men who can see the wisdom of good and evil in a fuller light and be paralyzed by our vision of it.

  "Oh, I would spend my time with eunuchs, with women, with children and saints, who shun the vulgarity of swords if I were but free to do so. But I am not. He comes for me. He reminds me that manhood is not so easily dispatched after all, but can be yet summoned from my bowels to stand against him. It is as I always believed it was: I am not a man and yet I am a man and cannot live as one or the other as long as he lives unpunished!"

  "Then there is but one certain way out of this difficulty." The Cardinal turned to him at last. "You cannot raise your hand against your father without suffering for it. You have told me so yourself. I need not quote the Scriptures to you. And yet your father has sought to kill you because he is afraid of you. Hearing of your triumph on the stage, your fame, your fortune, your swordsmanship, the powerful men who have befriended you, he cannot but believe you mean to move against him.

  "So you must go to Venice. You must get him in your power. I can send men with you, or those of Count di Stefano, however you choose. And then confront him if you will. Satisfy yourself that he has suffered these four years for the wrong he committed against you. Then let him go. And he will have the certainty he needs that you will never do him wrong; and you will have your satisfaction. The Gordian knot will be unraveled and there will be no swords.

  "These things I don't say to you as a priest, as your confessor. I say them as one who is in awe of all you have suffered and lost and gained in spite of everything. I have never been tested by God as you have. And when I failed my God, you were gentle with me in my sins and showed me no contempt nor monstrous advantage in my weakness.

  "Do as I tell you. The man who let you live for so long does not truly wish to kill you. What he wants above all is your forgiveness. And only when you have him on his knees can you convince him that you have the strength to give it."

  "But do I have that strength?" Tonio demanded.

  "When you realize it is the greatest of all strengths, you will possess it. You will be the man you want to be. And your father will bear eternal witness to it."

  Guido was not asleep when Tonio came in. He was at his desk in the dark and there came from him the soft sounds of the cup being lifted, of the liquid in it being drunk, and the cup being set down on the wood again almost silently.

  Paolo lay curled in the middle of Guido's bed, the moon laying bare his tear-stained face and loose hair, and the fact that he had never undressed and was cold, with his arms close around him.

  Tonio lifted the folded cover and laid it over him. He brought it up to his chin and bent to kiss him.

  "Are you weeping for me as well?" He turned to Guido.

  "Perhaps," Guido answered. "Perhaps for you, and for me, and for Paolo. And for Christina, also."

  Tonio approached the desk. He stood before it watching Guido's face slowly reveal itself.

  "Can you have an opera ready for Easter?" he asked.

  Hesitantly, Guido nodded.

  "And the impresario from Florence, is he still here?"

  Again, with hesitation, Guido nodded.

  "Then go to the impresario and make the arrangements. Hire a carriage large enough for all of you--Christina, Paolo, Signora Bianchi--and go to Florence and take a house for us there.

  "Because I promise you, if I do not come back to you sooner, I will be with you on Easter Sunday before the doors of the theater open."

  PART VII

  1

  EVEN IN THIS VEIL of gently driven rain, it was too beautiful to be a real city. Rather it was the dream of a city, defying reason, its ancient palaces sliding up from the battered surface of the leaden water to form, all of a piece, one grand and glorious and continuous mirage. The sun suffused itself through the broken clouds, burnt silver at the edges, the masts of the ships rising sharply beneath the soaring gulls, banners snapped and flapping, explosions of color against the gleaming sky.

  The wind whipped the sheet of water that was the piazzetta, and beyond came the bell of the Campanile, caught up in the cold howling so that the sound seemed the dream of itself, like the screaming of the gulls.

  Out of the porticoes of the Offices of State there came that ancient and sacrosanct spectacle of the Most Serene Senate, scarlet robes trailing in the damp, white wigs torn by the wind, as the promenade took it to the water's edge, and one by one these men drifted off into those sleek funereal barges of jet black, up the avenue of unbroken splendor that was the Grand Canal.

  Oh, would it never cease to astonish, to lay waste the heart and the mind? Or was it only that for fifteen years of bitter exile in Istanbul he had so hungered for it that it would never be enough? Ever tantalizing, ever mysterious, and ever merciless, his city, Venice, the dream made material over and over again.

  Carlo lifted the brandy to his lips. He felt it burn his throat, the vision
faltering, and then it held firm again, gulls caught in a great upward motion as the wind stung his eyes.

  He turned round, almost lost his balance. And saw his trusted men, his bravos, shadows on the edge of the piazza, drawing just a little closer, uncertain whether they should help him, ready to step forward should he fall.

  Carlo smiled. He held the flask by the neck. He drank a deep swallow and the crowd became a sluggish mass of color, mirrored in the water, as insubstantial finally as the rain itself which had dissolved into a silent mist.

  "For you," he whispered to the air around him, the sky, this miracle of the solid and the evanescent, "for you, any and every sacrifice, my blood, my sweat, my conscience." And closing his eyes, he listed against the wind. He let it ice his skin in this delicious drunkenness, beyond pain, beyond grief. "For you, I murder," he whispered. "For you, I kill."

  He opened his eyes. All those red-robed noblemen were gone. And in an instant, he imagined pleasantly, they had drowned one by one in the sea.

  "Excellency, let us take you home."

  He turned. It was Federico, the bold one, the one who fancied he was servant as well as bravo, and again the brandy to his lips, he felt it in his mouth before he made the decision to drink.

  "Soon, soon..." He wanted to say the words, but a film of tears had risen to soften his vision, empty rooms, her empty bed, her dresses yet on hooks, and some perfume faintly lingering. "And time blunts nothing," he said aloud. "Not her death, not the loss of her, not the fact that on her deathbed she spoke his name!"

  "Signore!" And with his eyes Federico exposed a shadowy figure, ludicrous in the manner in which it shrank from sight suddenly, one of those loathsome and inevitable spies of the state.

  Carlo laughed. "Report me, then, will you? 'He is drunk in the piazza because underground his wife is hostess to the worms!'" With the flat of his hand he pushed Federico away.

  The crowd swelled, a living thing, and broken open here and there only to close again. The rain, twisted by the wind, fell on his eyelids, and on his lips, drawn back in a smile he could feel with his whole face. He stepped to the side, caught himself, and with the next swallow, he said, "Time," aloud again with that recklessness that only drunkenness could give you, he thought, when time gives nothing, "and drunkenness," he whispered, "gives nothing except now and then the strength to see this vision, this beauty, this meaning of the whole."

  The rain clouds etched with silver, the gold mosaics shimmering, moving. Had she ever had this vision in all that clandestine drinking, when she pulled the wine right out of his hands as he begged her not to, "Marianna, stay with me, don't drink it, stay with me!" Unconscious on her bed, did she even dream?

  "Excellency," whispered the bravo, Federico.

  "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 cloa
k, 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?