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against a nest of white pillows, her face gaunt, her eyes bulbous and glittering, and listen to whatever concerts he wanted to make for her.
    By twilight she was often quarrelsome and bizarre. Of course she didn’t want to go out to the Pietà. Why would she want to go there? “Do you know,” she said one evening, “that when I was there everybody knew me. I was the talk of Venice. The gondoliers said I was the best singer of all the four schools, the best they’d ever heard. ‘Marianna, Marianna,’ people knew that name in the drawing rooms of Paris and London; they knew me in Rome. One summer we went on a barge down the Brenta; we sang in all the villas; we danced afterwards if we wanted to; we had wine with all the guests….”
    Tonio was shocked.
    Lena washed and combed her as if she were a baby, pouring out the wine to calm her, and then took him aside.
    “All the girls of the conservatorios are praised like that; it was nothing, don’t be so foolish,” she said. “And it’s the same today. You talk to Bruno; the gondoliers love the girls, whether they are fine ladies destined to marry patricians, or merely nameless little girls. It’s not the same at all as being on the stage, for the love of heaven, why do you look this way?”
    “I should have gone on the stage!” Marianna said suddenly. She threw back the covers, her head wagging forward, her hair spilling in rivulets over her sallow skin.
    “Hush now,” Lena said to her. “Tonio, go out for a while.”
    “No, why should he go!” Marianna said. “Why are you always sending him away! Tonio, sing. I don’t care what you sing, sing things you make up. I should have run away with the opera, that’s what I should have done. And you would have lived out of trunks, playing with the scenery backstage. Ah, no, but look at you, His Excellency, Marc Antonio Treschi—”
    “This is utter lunacy,” Lena said.
    “Ah, but what you do not know, my dear,” Marianna cried, “is that lunatics are made by asylums!”
    *  *  *
    These were terrible times.
    When Catrina Lisani came to call, Lena put her off with vague diagnoses, and on those rare but regular mornings when Andrea Treschi came to his wife’s bedroom, Lena stopped him with the same excuses.
    For the first time, Tonio was severely tempted to sneak out of the palazzo.
    The city was in a frenzy of preparation for the grandest of all Venetian holidays—the Feast of the Ascension, or the Senza—when the Doge would go out in the magnificently gilded barque of state called the
Bucintoro
to cast his ceremonial ring into the sea, signifying his marriage with it and the dominion of Venice over it. Venice and the sea, an ancient and sacred wedding. It sent pleasant chills over Tonio, though he would see no more of it than what he could glimpse from the rooftops. And when he thought now of the two weeks of carnival after it, seeing the maskers in the
calli
and on the quais—even little children with their masks, babes in arms with masks, all rushing to the piazza—he was sickened with expectation and resentment.
    More diligently than ever he gathered little gifts to throw down to the street singers at night so they would stay under his window. He found a broken gold watch, wrapped it in a fine silk handkerchief, and tossed it out to them. They didn’t know who he was. Sometimes in song they asked.
    And one night when he felt especially reckless, and the Senza was only two weeks away, he sang a reply: “I’m the one who loves you tonight more than anyone in Venice!”
    His voice resounded off the stone walls; he was thrilled almost to laughing, and he went on, weaving into his song all the flowery poetry in praise of music that he knew until he realized he was being ridiculous. Yet it felt so marvelous. He didn’t even note the silence below. And when the applause came, the wild clapping and shouting up from the narrow sidewalk, he blushed in shyness and silent laughter.
    Then he tore all the