the breeze. And even in the early hours, when he was bored or sad, he might gaze down on the endless throng of vegetable boats heading noisily for the markets of the Rialto.
But by the time Tonio was thirteen, he was sick of watching the world through the windows.
If only just a little of this life would spill through the front door, or better yet, if he could only get out into it!
But the Palazzo Treschi wasn’t merely his home; it was his prison. His tutors never left him alone if they could help it. Beppo, the old castrato who’d long ago lost his voice, taught him French, poetry, counterpoint, while Angelo, the young and serious priest, dark of hair and slight of build, taught him his Latin, Italian, and English.
Twice a week the fencing master came. He must learn the proper handling of the sword, more for fun it seemed than for ever seriously using it.
And then there was the ballerino, a charming Frenchman who put him through the mincing steps of the minuet and the quadrille, while Beppo pounded out the appropriate festive rhythms at the keyboard. Tonio must know how to kiss a lady’s hand, when and how to bow, all the fine points of a gentleman’s manner.
It was fun enough. Sometimes when he was alone he tore up the air with his blade, or danced with imaginary girls beautifully constructed from those he saw from time to time in the narrow calli.
But save for the endless spectacles of the church, Holy Week, Easter, the routine splendor and music of mass on Sunday, Tonio’s only escape on his own was into the bowels of the house, when he fled to the neglected rooms of the lowest floor where no one could find him.
There, with taper in hand, he sometimes probed the heavy volumes of the old archive, marveling at these moldering records of his family’s congested story. Even the raw facts and dates, pages crackling dangerously to the touch, fired his imagination: he would go to sea when he grew up, he would wear a senator’s scarlet robes; even the chair of the Doge was not beyond a Treschi.
A dull excitement coursed through his veins. He went to further prowling. He tried latches that hadn’t been turned in years, lifting ancient pictures from their damp corners to peer into alien faces. Here old storage rooms still smelled of spice, once brought from trade with the Orient when in olden times boats came to the very doors of the palazzo itself, unloading a fortune in rugs, jewels, cinnamon, silks. And there was the hemp rope still, in damp coils, bits of straw and those mingled fragrances pungent, enticing.
He stopped from time to time. His eerie little flame danced uneasily in the draft. He could hear the water beneath the house, the dull creak of the pilings. And far above, if he shut his eyes, he could hear his mother calling.
But he was safe from everyone here. Spiders tiptoed on the rafters, and with a sudden turn of his candle, he made a web appear, intricate, golden. A broken shutter gave to his touch, the gray light of the afternoon shone dingy through barred glass, and peering out he saw the rats swimming steadily through the debris that littered the sluggish water.
He felt sad. He felt afraid. He felt a misery suddenly, for which he didn’t know the name, a dread that made the scheme of things devoid of wonder.
His father was so old. His mother was so young. And at the very core of all this, there seemed some unknown horror awaiting him. What was it he feared? He did not know. Yet it seemed he sensed secrets in the very air about him. Sometimes a name whispered and afterwards denied, some soft reference among the servants to past conflicts. He was uncertain.
And maybe in the end it was only that all of his life his mother had been so unhappy!
4
ONCE GUIDO HAD BEEN CHOSEN for the stage, it was grueling work from then on, with the dazzle of the opera house night after night where he observed, sang in the chorus if there was one, and left with a head full of applause and the scent of perfume and powder.
His own compositions were forgotten, shoved aside for endless exercises, and other men’s arias of this season and the one after.
But these years were filled with such splendid intensity that not even the awakening of Guido’s passion could