Of Love And Evil Part 6

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 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 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."

"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."

"No wonder you weep," I said.

"Why do you say that?" he demanded.

"Because your soul is rent," I said. I shrugged. "How can you not watch your brother's illness without these thoughts...."

"I would never wish his death!" he declared. He brought his fist down on the writing table. I thought it might crack and give way, but it did not. "No one has gone to greater lengths to save him than I. I've brought the doctors one by one to see him. I've sent for the caviar which is the only thing that he will eat."

Suddenly the old tears returned and with them a deep and genuine and exhausting pain. "I love my brother," he whispered. "I love him in all this world more than any being I have ever loved, even this woman. But I tell you there came a day when my father took me through that empty house, while Vitale and Niccol were still in Padua, drinking themselves drunk, no doubt, and when my father took me through the place room by room to show me how very beautiful it would be and, yes, even into the bedchamber and how it would be so beautiful for them, and how and how and how!" He stopped.

"He hadn't known then."

"No. It was his secret, the name of the woman so carefully chosen. And I was the first one to bring up her name in these, these poems I wrote for her which I was fool enough, fool enough, I tell you, to reveal to him!"

"Cruel things, terribly cruel."

"Yes," he said, "and cruel things will make cruel men." He sank back in the chair, and stared before him as though he didn't know the meaning of his own story, or what it could conceivably mean to me.

"Forgive me that I've caused you this pain," I said.

"No, you require no forgiveness," he said. "The pain was in me and the pain would come out. I fear his death. I am terrified of it. I am terrified of the world without him. I am terrified of my father without him. I am terrified of Leticia without him, because she will never, never be given to me."

I wasn't sure what to make of these statements except that he meant them.

"I must get back to Vitale," I said. "He brought me here to play for your brother."

"Yes, of course. But tell me first. This tree-." He turned in his chair and looked up into the rangy green branches. He looked at the purple blossoms. "Do you know what they called it in the jungles of Brazil?"

I thought for a moment and then I said, "No. I only remember seeing it there, and I remember its blossoms and how very fragrant and beautiful they are. I should think a dye could be made from such purple blossoms."

Something changed in his face. He appeared calculating, slightly cold. I could have sworn that his mouth hardened.

I went on talking as if I hadn't noticed this, but I was beginning to dislike this man intensely.

"These blooms make me think of amethysts and there are such beautiful amethysts in Brazil."

He was silent, his eyes narrowing ever so slightly.

I couldn't bear the feeling of contempt and distrust that was growing in me. Surely I wasn't sent here to judge or to hate, but merely to prevent the man above from being poisoned.

I rose. "I should get back to Vitale," I said.

"You've been kind to me," he said, but when he smiled, only his lips moved, and it was frankly hideous. "Too bad you're a Jew."

A chill pa.s.sed over me, but I held his gaze. Again, I felt that vulnerability I had known when I'd realized I was wearing the round yellow badge on my clothes. We merely looked at each other.

"Is it?" I asked. I made a small bow as if to say, I'm at your service.

He smiled again, so coldly that it was almost a grimace.

I felt the blood throbbing in my ears. I struggled to remain calm.

"Have you ever loved a woman that you couldn't have?" he asked.

I thought for a moment, unsure what to say or why to say it. I thought of Liona. I saw no point in thinking of her now, here, with this strange young man.

"I pray your brother recovers," I said suddenly, blundering, uncertain. "I pray that perhaps he'll begin to recover today. Such a thing is possible, after all. Even sick as he is, he may suddenly begin to recover."

He made a small ugly derisive sound. The smile was gone. He was looking at me now with bold hatred. And I feared I was looking at him in the same way.

He knew. He knew that I was on to him, and what he had done.

"Such a recovery could happen," I persisted. I struggled. "After all, all things are possible with G.o.d."

Again, he studied me, and this time his face was a picture of menace.

"I don't hope for that," he said, in a low iron voice. He sat upright as though gaining in strength as he spoke, "I think he will die. And if I were you, I would be gone from here before you Jews are blamed for his death. Oh, do not protest. Of course I don't suspect you of anything, but if you're wise, you'll leave Vitale to his own devices. You'll slip out of here now and go on your way."

I'd encountered many ugly and violent moments in my life. But never had I felt such menace emanating from another human being as I felt coming from him now.

What did Malchiah expect of me here? What was I to do for this man? In vain, I tried to remember Malchiah's advice to me about the difficulties I would encounter here, about the very nature of this a.s.signment, but I couldn't recover either the words or the intent.

The fact was, I wanted to kill this man. Horrified by my own feelings, I sought to hide them. But I wanted to kill him. I wanted to grab up a handful of those lethal black seeds and force them into his mouth before he could stop me. I must have burned with the shame of it, that far from being someone's answer to a prayer, I was thinking like a very dybbuk myself. I took a deep slow breath, and made my voice as calm as I could.

"It's not too late for your brother," I said. "He might begin to mend from this very day."

There was a flash of something unnamable in his eyes, and then the rigid stillness again, the deep hostility unmasked.

"You're a fool if you remain here another moment," he whispered.

I looked down for a moment, and uttered a small wordless prayer, and when I spoke I made it as soft and gentle as I could: "I pray your brother recovers," I said.

And then I went out.

CHAPTER SEVEN