through the forty some odd panes of glass that composed the nearest window, its sky-blue drapery tied back, its surface running with rain that sometimes glinted with the gold of a passing lantern. When that happened all beyond it went dark. But then the lantern would pass away, and the dim hulks of the other side of the water would reveal themselves again, the sky as luminous and pearlescent as ever.
He was making a little poem aloud with just a little music to it, something that said, darkness come early, darkness open up the doors and open up the streets so that I can go out of here. He was tired and full of shame, and if Ernestino and the others wouldn’t brave this rain, he would go it alone, he would find some place to sing, some place where, anonymous and numbed by drink, he could sing until he had forgotten everything.
This afternoon he had left San Marco with a feeling of despair. All the many processions of his childhood had come back to him in that place, his father walking behind the Doge’s canopy, the smell of incense, those endless, translucent waves of ethereal singing.
Then afterwards he had gone with his cousin Catrina to visit her daughter, Francesca, in the convent where she would live until she was his bride. And then home again, in the incessant rain, to be alone with Catrina.
They had not meant to make love, surely, this woman who was older than his mother, and he. But they had done it. The room was warm, full of firelight and perfume. And she had marveled at his skill, and the vigor with which he drove between her legs, her body lush and full as he had always imagined it. Afterwards, he felt appalling shame, all the scaffolding of his life giving way under him.
“But why are you behaving so?” she had demanded. He must give up these nights out, was there ever a time when it was so important to be exemplary? A strange lecture, he remarked softly, from this bower of fragrant pillows. “How can his malice eat at you like this?” she insisted.
He had no answer. What could he say? Why didn’t you warn me she was the girl! Why didn’t anyone warn me?
But he could not speak, for there was a fear gathering in him, growing stronger with every passing day that was too terrible for him to articulate even to himself, let alone to another. He turned away from Catrina.
“All right, my troubador,” she had whispered. “Sing while you can; young men have done a lot worse; we can put up with it for a little while; it’s harmless for all its absurdity.” And then teasing him gently between the legs, she said: “God knows you haven’t very long to enjoy that lovely soprano.”
A voice in the empty church turned round by the golden walls came back to mock him.
And he had come home. Why? To hear it from Lena that his brother had sent Alessandro out of the house saying his services as tutor to Tonio were extraneous? Alessandro was gone. His mother was somewhere lost to him behind closed doors.
And now as he sat alone at the supper table where he had not dined in months, he did not even stir when he heard steps in this great hollow shadowy house, steps entering this room, when he heard those massive doors creak shut, first one pair of them and then another.
The light changed, did it not?
I cannot avoid him forever.
The sky was darkening. From where he sat he could see yet the farthest edge of the water. And he kept his eyes fixed there, even though two figures, it seemed, had approached him. Almost desperately he emptied the wine in his silver cup. And she is come, too, he thought. This is pure agony.
A hand came out to refill the wine.
“Leave us alone now,” said his brother.
He was speaking to the servant who set the bottle down and was gone with just a dry shuffle on the stones. Something like the sound of a rat in a dusty passageway.
Tonio turned slowly to look at these two. Ah, yes, it is she, with him. The candles dazzled him. He raised the back of his hand to shield his eyes, and then he saw what he thought he had seen, her face reddish, swollen.
His brother seemed uncommonly raw as if some quarrel had brought him to the brink. And as he