the figure seemed too motionless, the head cocked to one side as if Guido were listening to the sound of the distant birds or simply to the emptiness itself.
“Carlo,” he whispered. “Carlo!” as if he could not leave this spot until he had made his father real. And then he closed his eyes on the gentle sun, on these endless fields, and in that distant city he knew so well, he found himself stalking, feline, deadly until in some shadowy and unexpected place he’d come upon him, and in his face he saw the horror, the shock.
But dear God, what would I give if I could live but one day, just one day, with this cup passed from me?
13
ANOTHER SEVEN MONTHS PASSED before Tonio was to hear from Marianna herself, telling of the birth of her second son.
He was so shaken when he saw the letter that he carried it with him all day, opening it only when he was alone on the edge of the sea.
It seemed with the roar of the waves in his ears he would not hear her voice, which had for him some menace like the Sirens’ song.
Not an hour goes by that I do not think of you, that I do not feel pain for you, that I do not blame myself for your rash and terrible action. You are not lost to me, no matter how you protest, no matter how reckless and spiteful the course you took.
Your little brother, Marcello Antonio Treschi, was born a week ago in this house. But no child takes your place in my heart.
Only a few days separated Tonio from his first lead role in an opera entirely written by Guido for the conservatorio stage. And he knew if he could not forget this letter, he could not perform.
He drove himself almost foolishly as the production drew near, and his will stood by him. On that night he thought of nothing but music; he was Tonio Treschi of the conservatorio, and Guido’s lover, afterwards, when only a frenzied lovemaking could silence the echo of the applause in his ears.
But in the days that followed this little triumph, he was obsessed with his mother, though little of his love for her, his sense of her beauty and her sometime tenderness, remained.
She was Carlo’s wife now; she belonged to him, and how could she have ever believed him! Yet believed him she had, without doubt.
Beneath this almost blinding anger, Tonio knew the answer, of course. She had believed Carlo because she had to, she had believed him to go on living, she had believed him to escape her empty room and her empty bed. What would there have been for her in that house save Carlo?
And at times, when these thoughts revolved in his head almost incessantly, he could not escape the memory of her old unhappiness, her loneliness, those flashes of cruelty that could even now in recollection bring the chills to the surface of his skin.
Shut up in a convent she would have died, he was certain of it, and his brother, his powerful and cunning brother, his wronged and righteous and willful brother, would have taken another wife in her place.
No, she had faced an impossible choice, and to live with the man without his love would have been as unendurable as the convent cell. She must have the man’s love as well as his protection and his name. What had name and protection ever done for her in the past, after all?
“And I shall send her back to her loneliness,” he mused. “I shall send her back to her cloister….” And he saw her once more in a widow’s black veil.
It was real to him, more real than the pictures these letters conjured of babies christened, and of a life in that house such as he had never known.
She turned on him, she railed at him. With fists clenched, she cursed him. He heard her cries over the years and the miles, and over the dim vista of the imagined future, “I am helpless,” and his anger moved inexorably past her so that she became a shadow unable to affect what lay before him any more than she had ever affected the past.
She was lost from him, truly lost from him, and yet his eyes misted over again and again to think of her, and he turned sharply, his heart racing, from the everyday spectacle of those dark-clad women in the churches everywhere, widows ancient