and secret grief, it was that he had never never been able to talk to her again, to sit with her, her hands clasped in his, to tell her how much he loved her, and how it had all been beyond his power to change.
She seemed as helpless in death as in life.
But when he opened his eyes, when it was Rome again—and the Roman girls ran about tickling those who didn’t mask with their wicker brooms, and the men garbed as advocates scolded the crowd, and those the wickedest of all, the young men got up as women baring their breasts and revealing their legs, went offering themselves to others—when he saw all this life around him, he knew what he had always known, there was never ever meant to be a leave-taking of her. Never in his maddest dreams of vengeance or justice had he envisioned even a passing word, an outstretched hand, a sigh of affection. Across a dim vista, he had seen her rather in a widow’s weeds, crying among her orphaned children, her husband, the only husband she’d ever really known, murdered, taken from her.
She had been delivered from this. This had been taken away from him. She was not in a widow’s black. She slept in the coffin. And it was Carlo who had wept for her. “He grieves as a madman,” Catrina had written. “He is beside himself and vows to spare nothing in the care of his children. And though he works harder and harder, swearing he will be mother and father to them, both, he is so stricken he wanders at any hour out of the Offices of State, to roam like a fool in the piazza.”
Christina was pressing his hand.
The crowd pushed him here and there, and he struggled for a moment to secure his footing. He saw his mother in the coffin again, and wondered how they had dressed her. Had they put on her those beautiful white pearls that Andrea had given her? He saw the crimson funeral procession moving out over the undulating waves, red the color for death streaming from the black gondolas, and the sea heaving as the soft crying of the mourners was dissolved into the salted wind.
Christina’s face was full of love and sadness.
She stood on tiptoe, her arm around him. She was so splendidly real, so warm, as with her lips she sought, ever so gently, to bring him back to her.
They hurried through the Via Condotti. They pounded up the stairs to the studio above the Piazza di Spagna.
And taking deep gulps of wine from the same bottle, pulled the heavy curtains of the bed and made love feverishly and quickly.
As they lay still after, they could hear the distant roar of the crowd, or just below some singular laughter. It seemed to roll up the stone walls and vanish as it reached the open air.
“Tell me what it is,” she said. “Tell me what you are thinking.”
“That I am alive.” He sighed. “Simply that I am alive and so very, very happy.”
“Come,” she said rising suddenly. She tugged at him to bring him up from the warm bed, and threw his shirt about his shoulders. “We have an hour still before you must be at the theater. If we hurry we can see the race.”
“That’s not very much time.” He smiled, wanting to keep her here.
“And tonight,” she said as she kissed him once and twice and three times, “we’ll go to the Contessa’s and this time, you’ll dance with me. We’ve never danced, you and I, for all the balls we attended in Naples…together.”
When he didn’t move, she dressed him as if he were a child, her fingers deftly working his pearl buttons.
“Would you wear that violet dress?” he asked in her ear. “If you wear that violet gown, I’ll dance with you.”
He was drunk for the first time in a long time, and he knew that drunkenness was the enemy of sorrow. What had Catrina said, that Carlo roamed the piazza like a fool, his wine his only companion?
But the room was crowded and swirling with colors; and the music made a restless rhythm and he was dancing.
He was dancing as he hadn’t danced in years and years, and all of the old steps had come back to him magically. Every time he saw Christina’s rapt little face, he bent to steal a kiss, and it seemed that this was Naples and all those times he had longed