what will it matter? What will have any value? You are Tonio Treschi, you have the gifts and greatness in you for which others strive all their lives and to no purpose. Oh, you anger me, you make me want to wound you suddenly because you will not believe in me! And you will not believe in what it would be like for us together! And you make this choice for both of us, and I can never forgive you for it. Do you understand! You gave yourself to me for such a little while! I can never forgive you for it!”
She was bent, her naked breasts beneath a veil of yellow hair, her hands covering her face, her sobs short and strangled and shaking her violently.
He wanted to touch her. He wanted to comfort her, beg her to stop. But he was too angry, and too miserable.
“You’re merciless,” he said suddenly. And when she looked at him, her face tear-stained and swollen, he went on, “You’re merciless to the boy I was and the man I might have been. You’re merciless because you don’t see that every time I take you in my arms I know what might have been between us if…”
She placed her hands over his lips. He was staring at her in utter perplexity, and then he lifted her hand away.
“No.” She shook her head. “We would never have known each other,” she said. “And I swear to you on everything I hold sacred, your enemies are my enemies, and those who hurt you hurt me. But you are speaking not just of vengeance but of death. You mean to end your life for this! Guido knows it. I know it. And why! Because he must know, isn’t it? He must know it’s you who’ve come to kill him after all he’s done to you. He must know it’s you!”
“That’s right” he said softly. “That’s right. You put it better and more simply that I have ever been able to put it.”
Long after he’d thought she was asleep, her tears spent, her limbs wound hot and moist with his, he laid her gently back on the pillow and went alone in her studio and sat by the window looking up at the sweep of tiny stars.
The rain clouds were gone on a swift wind, and yet the city glistened, cleansed and beautiful under the slice of moon, a hundred little lights flickering on balconies and in windows, in the cracks of broken shutters throughout all the narrow streets below him under shining roofs.
He wondered would she ever in the years to come understand? If he turned away now, he would be turned away forever, and how could he live with that weakness in himself, that awesome failure, that he had let Carlo so wrench and destroy his life and go on with a life of his own?
He saw his house in Venice. He saw a ghostly wife he’d never known, he saw a host of ghostly children. He saw the lights go out over the canal and the palazzo shimmer and fade as if melting slowly down into the water. Why was this done to me! He wanted to cry out, and then he felt her near him, at his side.
Her small head was against him and he saw her eyes, and it seemed somehow surely he had missed the point of all his life, he must have done some terrible evil or this simply could not have happened! Not to Tonio Treschi, who had been born for so many things.
Mad thoughts.
It was the horror of this world that a thousand evils were visited on those who were blameless and no one was ever punished, and side by side with the greatest promise was nothing but misery and want. Children mutilated to make a choir of seraphim, their song a cry to heaven that heaven did not hear.
And he, fallen into it, by some glorious accident that in the alleyways of Venice, he had on winter nights sung his heart out under stars such as these.
And yet suppose it was as she said. He stood looking down at her in the dark, the small curve of her head, her naked shoulders above the cover she held loosely around her, and as she lifted her eyes to him, he saw the white of her forehead and the dark configuration of her face.
Suppose it could really be. That somehow on the glittering margin of the world that was