moment he stood quite still trying to imagine what it would be like to call down upon himself his father’s anger. Never had his father been angry with him. Never.
But he couldn’t endure this a moment longer. Grimacing at the sound of the match, he stood breathless watching the candle flame grow, and a weak light suffuse all of this immense chamber. It was so far-flung it left a dim waste of shadows at the edges. But he could see the pictures.
And he went, at once, to examine them.
His brother, Leonardo, yes, and Giambattista in military dress, yes, and this one of Philippo with his young wife, Theresa. He knew all of these, and now he came to that face, the one for whom he’d been searching, and when he saw it again, the resemblance was terrifying.
“Just like Carlo…” The words were a veritable din in his ears, and he pushed the flame right up to the canvas, moving it back and forth until it lost its maddening reflection. There was his own thick black hair on this young man, his high broad forehead without the slightest slope, the same somewhat long mouth, the same high cheekbones. But what particularized it, what removed it from the general flow of resemblance among them all was the set of the eyes, for they were wide, wide apart as were Tonio’s. Large and black, these eyes gave one looking into them the feeling of drifting. Of course Tonio had never known it, though others had known it looking at him. But he felt it now as he stared intently at this tiny replica of himself lost among a dozen similar black-clad men, staring gently back at him.
“But who are you?” he whispered. He went from face to face; there were cousins here, ones he didn’t know. “This proves nothing.” Yet he could not help but see that this strange duplicate of himself stood right beside Andrea. Between Leonardo and Andrea, in fact, and Andrea’s hand rested upon the shoulder of this double!
“No, it’s not possible,” he whispered. Yet it was precisely the evidence he’d sought, and he went on and on to the other pictures. Here was Chiara, Andrea’s first wife, and there he was again, that little “Tonio,” sitting at her feet with the other brothers.
But there were more certain proofs.
He realized it as he stood fixed there. There were pictures where the brothers with their father and mother stood alone; no cousins, no strangers.
And going quickly, and as silently as he could, he opened the doors of the supper room.
There was the large picture, the family gathering, directly behind the head of the table, that had always so tormented him. And even from where he stood he could see there was no Carlo in it, and a sinking feeling came over him. He didn’t know whether it was relief or disappointment, for perhaps he had not grounds enough yet for either.
Yet something struck him about the picture. Leonardo and Giambattista were on one side of the standing figure of Andrea, and the seated figure of his dead wife, Chiara. Philippo was all by himself on the other.
“But that’s natural enough,” he whispered. “After all, there are only three brothers, what are they going to do but put two on one side….” But it was the spacing that was peculiar. Philippo did not stand directly beside his father. And the backdrop of darkness made a gulf there into which Andrea’s red robe rather crudely spread out making his left side considerably broader than the other.
“But that’s not possible. It’s not likely,” Tonio whispered. Yet as he moved closer and closer, the impression of imbalance became stronger.
Andrea’s robes on the left were not even the same color! And that blackness between his arm and the arm of his son, Philippo, it did not appear solid.
Tentatively, almost unwillingly, Tonio lifted the light and rose on his toes so that he might stare right at the surface.
And coming through that blackness, peering through it, as if through a veil, was the unmistakable figure of that one, that one who looked exactly like him.
He almost cried aloud. The tremors in his legs caused him to rest back on his heels and even to steady himself against the wall with his left fingers. And then again he narrowed his eyes, and there it was, a figure bleeding through as so often happens in an oil painting when it has been covered over. For years, nothing shows. Then