of himself. Tramp of feet on the stairs. And her voice in that melancholy song very like a hymn drifted through the open doors, but when Tonio rose to find her, she was only just leaving.
Prayerbook in hand, she lowered her veil, and it seemed she did not want to look at him. “Lena will go with me,” she answered. She did not need Alessandro today.
“Mamma.” Tonio followed her to the door. She was humming something to herself. “Are you content here now? Tell me.”
“Oh, why do you ask me this?” Her voice was so light, but her hand, darting from beneath the thin black mesh to pinch his wrist, startled him. He felt a tiny pain for an instant and was angry.
“If you are not happy here, you could go to Catrina’s house,” he said, all the while dreading that she would leave, and those rooms too would be alien, empty.
“I am in my son’s house,” she said. “Open the doors,” she told the porter.
At night, he lay awake listening to the silence. And all the world outside his door seemed a foreign territory. Passages, rooms he knew, even the damp and neglected places; laughter erupted below; there was that faint, almost imperceptible sound of people moving in this house, a sound no one should have been able to hear, but he could hear it.
Somewhere in the night a woman was shouting something, caustic, uncontrollable. He turned over and shut his eyes, only to realize it was within these walls.
He had slept. He had dreamed. Opening the door, he heard them below, the old exchange again, Catrina’s voice high-pitched and strident. Was he weeping?
It was early evening. The October carnival gave its faint distant din to the sounds of the night. There was a ball in the great Palazzo Trimani only yards away, and Tonio, alone in the long supper room, his hand on the heavy drape, watched the boats as they came and went, came and went below him.
His mother stood on the dock beneath the window, Lena and Alessandro behind her. Her long black veil was down to her hem, the gauze of it blown back to make a sculpture of her face as she waited for the gondola.
And was he in this house?
The Grand Salon was a sea of pitch darkness.
But as he was savoring the silence and stillness of this moment, he heard the first sounds. Someone moving in the dark, and there came that musky, Eastern perfume, the creak of the door, a heel ever so gently touching the stone floor behind him.
Caught on the open sea, he thought, and the canal shimmered in his vision. The sky was ablaze above the distant Piazza San Marco.
The hair on the back of his neck rose just a little, and he felt the faint pressure of the man near him.
“In the old days,” Carlo whispered, “all women wore those veils, and they had about them a greater beauty. It was a mystery they carried with them in the streets, something of the East they carried with them….”
Tonio looked up slowly to see him so very close they might have touched one another. The black of Carlo’s coat revealed a slash of glimmering white lace that seemed a dim mirage rather than fabric, and his wig, with its perfect curls above the ears and a rise from the forehead so natural it seemed real hair, gave off a slight shimmer.
He drew near the panes and looked down, that resemblance jarring Tonio now as it did every time he perceived it. In the meager candlelight, Carlo’s skin appeared flawless. And the only sign of age in him was those dry lines at the corners of his eyes which wrinkled so easily when there came his long smiles.
And such a smile softened his face now, evincing that irrepressible warmth as if no enmity could ever exist between them.
“Night after night, you avoid me, Tonio,” he said. “Let us dine together now. The table is set. The food is ready.”
Tonio turned to the water again; his mother was gone; the night for all its plodding little boats seemed empty.
“My thoughts are with my father, Signore,” he said.
“Ah, yes, your father.” But Carlo didn’t turn away. And there was in the shadows the movements of those silent Turkish ones taking up the small flames and touching them to branching candelabra everywhere, on the table itself, on the chests beneath that haunting picture.