“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. Niccolò 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 Niccolò 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, Niccolò, 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 ship to ship, 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 Niccolò, 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 Niccolò, 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.”
“This cut you to the quick,” I said softly.
“Cut me? Cut me? It tore my heart as if it were food for a vulture. That’s what it did to me. And what house do you think of all his many villas and houses in Rome did he plan to give to the happy bride and groom when the marriage would be accomplished?” He laughed icily and then irresistibly as if it were too funny. “The very house which he has let to Vitale to prepare for them, to air out, to furnish, and which is now the home of a noisy and evil Jewish dybbuk!”
He had changed so completely that I wouldn’t have known him for the man who had been weeping in the corridor. But he fell into that daze again, hard as the lineaments of his face remained. He stared past me into the mingled trees and flowers of the courtyard. He even lifted his eyes as if he were marveling at the errant rays of the sun.
“Surely, your father understood the wound inflicted on you.”
“Oh, yes,” he said. “And there is another woman of immense wealth and distinction, waiting behind the inevitable curtain to make her appearance on the stage. She will be a fine wife for me, though I haven’t exchanged four words with her. And my beloved Leticia will become my devoted sister when my brother rises from his bed.”