in Istanbul when you were spoilt and pampered and she taken from me, and then to come home and have her accuse me, accuse me! She never believed me, you know! It was always Tonio, and Tonio! I begged her a thousand times to put the wine away, I’d bring physicians, nurses. What didn’t I give her? Jewels, Paris fashions, servants to wait on her hand and foot, the gentlest nurses to care for our boys, I gave her everything! But what did she want when it was all said and done: ‘Tonio,’ and the wine, and it was the wine that brought her to her deathbed, and on her deathbed she asked for you!”
He studied Tonio. What was it now? A look of incredulity? Of unwilling pain? He could not tell. He did not care.
“That must give you solace, surely,” he said bitterly, again leaning forward, his head too heavy for him now, the wine cool and fresh in his mouth. “And she in those last days! Do you know what she said to me, that I had ruined her, destroyed her, driven her to madness and drink and taken from her her only comfort, our son! She said this to me!”
“And of course you did not believe it, did you?” Tonio whispered.
“Believe it! After what I had suffered for her!” Carlo felt the leather strap against him with a sharp pain, and settling backwards, held the bottle tight in his hand. “After what I had done for her! Exiled for the love of her, and who after all those years in Istanbul, and she in my father’s house, would have bothered with her again!
“But I loved her, and it was a passion that endured fifteen years only to be destroyed by what? Not time, mind you, not my father, mind you, but you! ‘Tonio’ and she died. She would not even look at our children in the end….”
His voice broke. He was startled at the sound of it, and would have rested his head in his hands if he could.
This bondage was endurable, but it would be worse were he to struggle and feel its limits, and desperately he told himself that, as he sat still, his hands straining to reach his face, his head moving just a little from side to side.
“You ask if I believed her. What right have you to ask me anything! What right have you to sit in judgment on me!”
He reached for the brandy flask, and quickly emptied it into the cup. He drank it down, feeling the sharper, stronger heat of it, delicious, and the whole room seemed to move under him, some convulsion in him rolling upwards until even his eyes rolled up in his head. Some image was before him, tormenting him, of his young and beautiful Marianna when he had first taken her from the convent, when they had come into his lodgings, and when she realized he was not to marry her, and she commenced to scream.
He was shuddering, remembering only the rush of his words as he had tried to comfort her, assuring her it was only time he needed, time to win over his father. “I am his only son, don’t you see, he must yield to me!”
But this was not what he wanted now. He was on the verge of delirium; and without words he had some sense of the years before that, when his mother was alive, and all of his brothers, and all the world had been easy and full of hope and full of love. There stood between him and his father a great buffer, and there had been nothing he could not mend, could not make right. But that had been taken away from him, cruelly, just as she had been taken away, and his youth had been taken away, and it seemed now that all he could truly remember was struggle and bitterness that obliterated everything else.
He moaned. He was gazing at the supper table. Dimly, he knew where he was and that it was Tonio who held him here. He felt the strap cutting him, and drifting, he struggled to see clearly, to remember again that what he needed now was time.
The candles were burning low, and the fire on the hearth was a heap of glowing cinders. When he had gone drunk to the Broglio that morning, swearing he would marry her with or without permission, his father had stood over him, turning him back, that horrid