Part 6 (1/2)

Only then did he think to offer me a drink, and I declined.

He seemed exhausted and emptied from his weeping. That he was genuinely miserable was beyond doubt. Indeed he was grieving, and I wondered if he was grieving because in his mind and heart his brother was already dead.

”Sit down there, please,” he said to me, and then he collapsed at his writing table, allowing a whole sheaf of papers to fall to the floor.

Behind him, from a large pot, grew a rangy and waxen-leafed tree, and one that was not at all unfamiliar to me. Again the hair rose on the back of my neck and my arms. I knew the purple flowers that covered this tree. And I knew the tiny black seeds that were left when the flowers dropped, as some of them had already done into the moist earth of the pot.

I picked up the mess of papers and put them back on the desk. I set my lute beside the chair.

The man appeared dazed as he watched this, and then he leant on his elbows and he wept very genuine tears.

”I have no great gift for poetry, and yet I am a poet for want of being anything else,” he said to me. ”I've traveled the world, and have had the joy of it-no, maybe all the joy of it was writing to Niccol and meeting him if and when he'd come to me. And now I have to think of the vast wide world, the world I traveled, without him. And when I think of this, there is no world.”

I stared past him at the earth in the pot. It was covered with black seeds. Any one of these would have been deadly to a child. Several, carefully chopped, would be deadly to a man. A small portion given regularly in caviar, of all perfect things, would have sickened the man slowly and pushed him closer with every dose towards death.

The taste of the seeds was ghastly, as is the case with many a poison. But if anything would hide it, it would be caviar.

”I don't know why I tell you these things,” said Lodovico, ”except that you look kind, you look like a man who peers inside another man's soul.” He sighed. ”You grasp how a man might love his brother unbearably. How a man might think himself a coward when faced with his brother's weakness and death.”

”I want to understand,” I said. ”How many sons does your father have?”

”We are his only sons, and don't you know how much he will despise me if Niccol is gone? Oh, he loves me now, but how he will despise me if I am the survivor. It was only on account of Niccol that he brought me from my mother's house. We don't have to talk of my mother. I never talk of her. You can well understand. My father need have acknowledged no claim against him. But Niccol loved me, loved me from the first moment we played as children, and one day, I, and all I possessed, were bundled up and taken from the brothel in which we lived, and brought here, to this very house. My mother took a fistful of gems and gold for me. She cried. I will say that much for her. She wept. 'But this is for you,' she said. 'You, my little prince, are now to be taken to the castle of your dreams.'”

”Surely she meant it. And the old man. He seems to love you so, as much as your brother.”

”Oh, yes, and there were times when he loved me more. Niccol and Vitale, what rascals they can be when they get together. I tell you, there's not much difference between a Jew and a Gentile when it comes to wenching and drinking, at least not all of the time.”

”You are the good boy, aren't you?” I asked.

”I've tried to be. With my father, I went on our travels. He couldn't pry loose Niccol from the university. Oh, I could tell you stories of the wilds of America, the wilds of Portuguese ports and savages such as you can only imagine.”

”But you came back to Padua.”

”Oh, he would have me educated. And in time that meant the university for me as well as my brother, but I could never catch up with them in their studies, Vitale, Niccol, any of them. They helped me. They always took me under their wing.”

”So you had your father to yourself those years,” I said.

”Yes,” he said. The tears were frozen now, no longer slipping down his face. ”Yes, and you should have seen how quickly he embraced my beloved brother. Why, you would think he had left me in the jungles of Brazil.”

”That plant there, that tree,” I said. ”It's from the jungles of Brazil.”

He stared fixedly at me, and then turned and appeared to stare at the plant as though he'd never seen it before. ”Perhaps it is,” he said. ”I don't remember. We brought back many a sapling and many a cutting with us. Flowers, you see, he loves them in profusion. He loves the fruit trees that you see blooming here. He calls this his orangery. It's his garden, really. I only come here now and then to write my poems as you can see.”

The tears were entirely gone.

”How would you know such a plant on seeing it?” he asked.

”Hmmm, I've seen it in other places,” I ventured. ”I've even seen it in Brazil.”

His face had changed and now he seemed calculatedly to soften as he looked at me.

”I understand your worry for your brother,” I said, ”but perhaps he will recover. There's a great deal of strength in him yet.”

”Yes, and then perhaps my father's plans for him may begin in earnest. Except there is a demon standing between him and those very plans.”

”I don't follow you. Surely you don't think your brother...”

”Oh, no,” he said coolly, his tears having dried. ”Nothing of the sort.” Then he looked dazed again and preoccupied, and he raised one eyebrow and smiled as if he were lost in his innermost thoughts.

”The demon stands in my father's way,” he said, ”in a manner you can't have known. Let me tell you a little story of my father.”

”By all means do.”

”Kindly he is, and all those years kept me at his side like his trained monkey, from s.h.i.+p to s.h.i.+p, his beloved little pet.”

”Those were happy times?”

”Oh, very.”

”But boys become men,” I interjected.

”Yes, precisely, and men have desires, and men can feel a love so keen it's as if a dagger has pierced the heart.”

”You have felt such a love?”

”Oh, yes, and for a perfect woman, a woman with no cause to look down on me, born as she was, the secret daughter of a rich priest. I needn't tell you his name for you to grasp the threads here. Only that when I set eyes on her, there was no world but the world in which she existed, there was no place where I would ever want to roam unless she were at my side.” He looked at me again fixedly, and then that dazed expression overtook him. ”Was it such a fantastic dream?”

”You love her, and you want her,” I coaxed.

”Yes, and wealth I have from my father's ever-increasing generosity and affection, abundantly in private, and in the presence of others.”

”So it seems.”

”Yet when I proposed to him her very name, what do you think the course of action suddenly became? Oh, I wonder that I hadn't seen it. I wonder that I hadn't understood. Daughter of a priest, yes, but such a priest, such a high-placed cardinal with so many rich daughters. How could I have been a fool not to see he saw her as a crowning jewel for his elder son.”

He stopped. He looked at me intently.

”I don't know who you are,” he said musing. ”Why do I tell you of the ugliest defeat of my life?”

”Because I grasp it,” I said. ”He told you the woman was for Niccol, not for you.”

His face became hard and almost vicious. Every line in it that a moment ago had seemed pregnant with sorrow and concern now hardened into a mask of coldness that was frightening, and would have been to anyone who saw him as he was.

He raised his eyebrows and gazed past me coldly.

”Yes, for Niccol, my beloved Leticia was intended. Why hadn't I known that the talks had already begun? Why had I not come to him sooner, before mortgaging my very soul? Oh, he was kind to me.” He smiled an iron smile. ”He took me in his arms. He cradled my face in his hands. His baby son still. His little one. 'My little Lodovico. There are many beautiful women in the world.' That's what he said.”