And she, forcing him back, drew Tonio away, her little dark face so very old, and that voice dropping down down for the profession of terrible secrets. The old plea, send assassins, there was no need for him to dirty his hands, did he not know he had friends who could take care of all of it? But say the word and now she guided him to the edges of the room. The moon was out and the garden was alive and far across the garden, he could see the windows of the ballroom they had just left, and he wondered was Christina there? He saw her in his mind dancing with Alessandro.
“I am alive,” he whispered.
“Radiant child,” she said.
Guido was weeping.
“But he always knew the time would come when he would go on alone. I wouldn’t let him go,” he said to her, “if he were not ready. They will want him in Milan just as much without me. And you know it…”
And she was shaking her head. “But radiant child, you know what will happen if you go to Venice now! What can I say to dissuade you….”
So it was spoken. It was done. The thing that had waited and waited in the darkness was now free and there was no curbing it.
And again that exhilaration took hold of him. Go to Venice. Do it. Let it happen. No more waiting and waiting in hatred and bitterness, no more seeing all about you life blazing and beautiful yet against this darkness, this fathomless gloom.
But Guido had rushed at him, and the Contessa had thrown all her weight against Guido to hold him back. Guido’s face was pure fury.
“Tell me how you can do this to me!” he was crying. “Tell me, tell me, how you can do this to me. If I was just a pawn in your brother’s hands, then I took you out of that town, I took you when you were wounded and broken….”
The Contessa, trying so to quiet him, raised her voice.
“…tell me you wish I’d left you there to die, they would have killed you if I had left you there, and tell me you wish none of this, none of this, had come to pass!”
“No, stop it….” The Contessa flung out her hands.
And now that exhilaration in him was heating itself to anger. He turned on Guido, and heard his own voice, sharp, clear:
“You know why, better than anyone you know why! The man who did this to me is yet alive and unpunished for it. And am I a man, you tell me, am I a man if I can stand for this!”
He felt himself weak suddenly.
He had stumbled into the garden.
At the door of the ballroom, if the servant hadn’t taken his arm, he would have fallen.
“To go home…” he said. And Christina, her face stained with tears, nodded her head.
It was morning.
It seemed all night they had fought, he and Guido. And these rooms, so cold now, were not their bedchambers any longer so much as some dreary battleground.
And somewhere, beyond these walls, Christina waited for him. Awake, dressed, she sat at the window perhaps, her hands under her chin, looking down in the Piazza di Spagna.
But Tonio sat still, alone, and far across the void of the room, he saw himself in the dusky mirror, a white-faced specter so seemingly without expression he seemed a demon with an angel’s face. And all the world was different.
Paolo was crying.
Paolo had heard all of it. And Paolo had come to him only to be spurned by his silence.
And huddled somewhere off in the shadows, Paolo was crying inconsolably. And the sound, rising and falling, seemed to echo as if through corridors of an immense and ruined house where Tonio shuffled against the wall, his bare feet covered with dust, the tears stinging his face, as coming through the door, he saw his mother bent over the windowsill. Helplessness, terror caught in his throat as he pulled at her skirts, those cries echoing louder and louder. And just as she turned, he covered his eyes so he couldn’t see her face. He felt himself falling. His head thumped the walls and the marble stairs, he could not stop himself. And his screams rose above him, and she, her dress billowing out as she came down, took those screams and carried them up in shrieks rising higher and higher.