away, Alessandro guiding them through the tight little calle to the canal and signaling for a gondola. And now, as Tonio peeled off his moist and wrinkled clothes, he put his elbows on the sill and looked up above the close wall to the smoky sky to see no stars in it, but the thin silver rain silently falling.
“Where are my singers?” he whispered. He wished he could feel sad; he wished he could feel the loss of innocence, and the burden of life, but if he felt sad that emotion was a luxurious sweetness. And without thinking, he raised his voice and let out a long call to his singers. He felt his voice pierce the darkness. He felt his throat open; he felt the notes like something palpable cutting free, and from somewhere in the dark and tangled world beneath came another voice, lighter, more tender, he thought, a woman’s voice calling to him.
He sang nonsense to her. He sang of springtime and love and flowers and the rain, his phrases full of florid images. He grew louder and louder and then he stopped, holding his breath, to the last bit of echo.
There were singers all around him in the dark. Tenors picked up the melody he had commenced; a voice came from the canal; and there was the tink of tambourines, and the strum of guitars, and dropping to his knees he put his hand on the sill and laughed softly even as sleep threatened to close over him.
A vagrant image passed before his mind’s eye. Carlo in his scarlet robe in the embrace of his father; and it seemed all of a sudden he was someplace else, lost in an endless commotion, his mother screaming.
“But why did she scream?” His father’s voice came rapid, intimate, yet the answer eluded him. In reality he had never dared to ask that question.
“But was she the bride Carlo refused? Is that it? Was she the one Carlo would not marry? And why? Why? Did she love him? And was she then married to a man so old….”
He awoke with a start. And in the warm damp felt a shudder. Ah, no, he thought, never, never again mention it to her. And sliding into dream again he saw his brother’s face rising slowly to the surface of that picture.
15
ANGELO AND BEPPO were confused; Lena was fussing with his mother’s dress though she said over and over, “Lena, I’m wearing a domino, no one will even see it!”
Alessandro, however, was coolly in charge. Why didn’t Angelo and Beppo go out and enjoy themselves? It took approximately five seconds for them to bow, to nod, and to vanish.
The piazza was now so crowded they could scarce move. Trestle stages had risen everywhere with jugglers, mimes, wild animals snarling in their cages as tamers cracked the whip. Acrobats somersaulted over the heads of the throng, the wind bringing warm rain that dampened no one.
It seemed to Tonio that over and over again they were caught in a living stream that forced them towards the jampacked cafés or thrust them out from under the porticoes; they gulped brandy and coffee here and there; sometimes they flopped at a table, just long enough to rest, their voices sounding strange to them piping up from their masks.
Meanwhile the extravagant maskers were cropping up everywhere. Spaniards, Gypsies, Indians from the wilds of North America, beggars in tatters of velvet, young men got up to be women with painted faces and lofty wigs, and women turned out as men, their lovely little bodies inexpressibly enticing in silk breeches and close-fitting stockings.
It seemed there was so much to do, they could make up their minds to none of it. Marianna wanted her fortune told but would not stand in line at the fortuneteller’s table where the woman whispered secrets through a long tube right into the victim’s ear so no one need share the revelation of his destiny. More wild beasts; the roar of the lions was thrilling. A woman snatched Tonio by the waist, turned him twice, three times in a wild dance, and then let him go; it was impossible to tell if she was a scullery maid or a visiting princess. He fell back at one point against the pillars of the church, his mind swept clean of all thought as it had seldom been in his life, and let the crowd merge into a magnificent spectacle of color. The commedia was being enacted on a