she enjoys the carnival this year, you must see she enjoys the opera. You must see she accepts those invitations she will shortly be receiving. You must see that she allows Alessandro to take you both everywhere.”
Tonio glanced at his mother. He couldn’t help it, and in an instant he saw her irrepressible happiness. Alessandro was gazing at Andrea with admiration.
“It will be a new existence for you,” Andrea said. “But I trust you’ll meet its demands somewhat gladly. And you commence by going out day after tomorrow during the Senza. I cannot go. You go to represent this family.”
Tonio tried to hide his excitement. He tried not to look too overjoyed, yet his face was working into a smile, even as he bit his lip and bowed his head and murmured a respectful assent to his father.
When he looked up, his father was smiling. And for one protracted moment it seemed his father was enjoying some special vantage point on this room and its occupants. Or perhaps he was lost in a memory. But then the pleasure melted from his face, and with a touch of resignation he dismissed the gathering.
“I must be alone with my son,” he said, taking Alessandro’s hand. “And it will be quite late before I release him. So you must let him sleep in the morning. Oh, and yes, lest I forget. Find some important questions to ask of his old tutors; make them feel they are needed here, assure them in small ways they won’t be dismissed without ever raising the question.”
There was a quiet graciousness to Alessandro’s smile, to the way he nodded to this without the slightest surprise.
“Take the candles into my study,” Andrea said to his secretary.
He rose from bed with difficulty. The doors were shut; the rooms were almost empty.
“Please, Excellency, stay here,” Signore Lemmo said.
“Go away,” said Andrea, smiling. “And when I’m dead please don’t tell anyone how cross I’ve been with you.”
“Excellency!”
“Good night,” Andrea said. And Signore Lemmo left them. Andrea moved towards the open doors, but he motioned for Tonio to wait behind him. Tonio watched him pass into a large rectangular room which Tonio had never seen before. He had never seen this one either, for that matter, but the other held a greater fascination. He saw books to the ceiling between the multipaned windows that looked on the canal. He saw maps on the walls that showed all the great territories of the Venetian Empire. And even from where he stood he perceived this was the Venice of long ago. Hadn’t many of these possessions been lost? But on this wall, the Veneto was still a vast dominion.
He realized his father was standing on the other side of the threshold, looking back at him with an expression of almost private reflection.
Tonio started forward.
“No, wait,” said Andrea. It was such a spiritless murmur he might as well have been talking to himself. “Don’t be so quick to enter here. At this moment, you’re a boy still. But when you leave this room, you must be prepared to become master of this house as soon as I leave it. Now reflect on your illusion of life for just a little longer. Savor your innocence. It’s never appreciated until it’s about to be lost. Come to me when you are ready.”
Tonio said nothing. He lowered his eyes and was conscious of a deliberate obedience to this command, in which he allowed his life to pass before him. He found himself in his imagination standing in the old archive of the lower floor; he heard the rats; he heard the movement in the water. The house itself, anchored for two centuries in the marshland beneath it, seemed to be moving. And when he looked up again, he said quickly, in a small voice, “Father, let me come in.”
And his father beckoned to him.
13
TEN HOURS PASSED before Tonio again opened the doors of his father’s study. A pure morning sunlight seeped in around him as he walked into the Grand Salon and towards the front doorway of the palazzo.
His father had told him to go out, to stand alone for a while in the piazza, to gaze on the daily spectacle of the great statesmen moving back and forth on the Broglio. And Tonio wanted this now more than anything. It seemed a delicious silence surrounded him which strangers could not conceivably break.
And as he stepped onto the little dock before the door, he hailed a passing gondolier and