The two men sat before the fire, drinking brandy and avoiding telling eye contact, as the woman fussed with the baby. The host already knew he had won. The guest's father sat in the shadows, weak and spent but eyes darting about, seeing and understanding everything. Gazing at the baby lovingly and longingly, the host thought, "Someday." When the woman took the baby away to settle him for the night, the host looked at her husband, the glass artist, and said, "I believe the garden beckons."
Being lifted to his feet in front of the garden seat on which the host had been sitting while his guest took the host's cock in his mouth and gave him suck, the glass artist dutifully stood in submission while the host unbuckled and lowered the guest's trousers. "The men of this family are so weak," the host thought, "but so winsome, nourishing, and satisfying." As the guest straddled the host's lap and rose and fell on the engorging cock, the host nuzzled his face in the hollow of the other man's throat, pierced the carotid artery with his sharp fangs, and gently began to feed, matching the rhythm of the suck with the rhythm of the fuck.
* * * *
"Not you, Egon. I'm afraid you must stay behind. We have to discuss your future."
I would, of course, do what Count Ugo Cortesi told me to do—I was compliant and submissive to him in all things. But I looked longingly at my eleven eighteen-and-nineteen-year old cohorts stumbling down the external wooden staircase of the Palazzo Cortesi inner courtyard as they raced out of the smaller courtyard at the street and trundled up the Calle dei Cortellotti in the Venetian
sestriere
, or quarter, of Dorsoduro to the Zattera al Ponte Longo pier to board the motor launch. The boat was to take the Alta Academi Cortesi students out to the Lido beach for the day. We had just completed our term at the upper school of Count Cortesi's charity academy. Today was a free day at the beach; tomorrow night was to be one of the periodic masques Cortesi held in his
palazzo
, where he both lived and housed the academy he patronized. Venice loved its masques, which dominated half its year, and Count Cortesi's evenings were special and exclusive.
The next day, those turning twenty in the next few months would be moving out into the world in the positions the count had helped secure for them. I would be turning twenty in seven months but thus far there had been no position identified for me. At the academy each of the young men, under Cortesi's patronage from an early age, starting in the lower academy, which was housed elsewhere, through the upper school for eighteen and nineteen-year olds, specialized in some reputable and noble profession. Many were training for the arts. I was training to be a novelist. Therefore, I would normally be apprenticed to a leading man of letters.
All at the school were from noble Venetian families, ones that had fallen on bad financial times. Cortesi, though, had established his school to maintain the sons of such families in the upper reaches of Venetian society.
I, Egon Sarto-Bausch, was only half Venetian. My father was Austrian and lived in Vienna. My mother was from an old and highest-drawer Venetian family, though, the Sartos. She and my father were estranged by an ancient scandal that kept on providing gossip, and thus the hyphenated name. My mother, Teresa Sarto, had returned to her family's name and had entered a convent in Milan in her embarrassment, but she had not been able to erase the Bausch from my name. Normally, the scandal that had ensued decades ago and kept spinning out would have denied me entry into the Academi Cortesi. But it was the Sarto name that won through. My mother's uncle—and thus my granduncle—had been Giuseppe Sarto. He had died six years earlier, in 1914, but his fame and influence lived on. As Giuseppe Sarto he had been the Patriarch of Venice. As Pius X he had been the pope of Rome.
That Granduncle Giuseppe had recently been the pope didn't help dampen gossip that both my Grandfather Bausch and my father had been the submissive gay lovers of a flamboyant and prominent Austrian opera and Lieder lyricist, Baron Klaus von Hausmann—simultaneously. The rumors extended to the claim that the baron had kept both father and son in separate wings of his castle outside Vienna, visiting their beds on alternate nights, and that the two were so controlled by the Austrian that they tolerated the arrangement. My mother hadn't tolerated the arrangement, though, and had made much noise before the marriage broke up. Apparently, in Vienna all was forgiven as long as it wasn't made public, but not taken into account was the fiery temper of the niece of the pope from the hot-blooded shores of the Adriatic Sea.
The marriage between my parents had been unfortunate from the beginning. My mother had had her sights on the son of a prominent Venetian family and, in view of my father's later lifestyle and the timing of my birth, part of the ancient scandal was that perhaps I wasn't really a Bausch. In Venice, that possibility, actually was marked as in my favor. But my father had claimed paternity, so that rumor became a minor thread in the story. Elham Bausch, my artistic and sensitive father—who became a premier stained-glass artist, initially for cathedrals but after his public scandal, for private chapels and restaurants—had received an ultimatum from his family—to get on with marriage and the begetting of heirs.
The detractor-amused story of how they met was that my mother and her parents were on a train from Milan to Venice and my father had entered the carriage and observed my mother sleeping on one of the facing seats. Before the train reached Milan—or my mother had awakened—Elham had taken Teresa's father out into the corridor and proposed marriage to Teresa. Faced with the need for money that Venetians had at the beginning of the twentieth century and the Austrians didn't and, reportedly, my mother possibly being pregnant from previous contact, Teresa was engaged before she woke and had anything to say about the arrangement.
By that time my grandfather, Edvard Bausch, a minor composer, was already under the sway of the lyricist Klaus von Hausmann. Klaus's baron father, Kurt, was a patron for musicians in Vienna and, through him, his son was apprenticed to the composer Franz Paradis, who bedded the young man as well as mentoring him and introducing him to composers Klaus could write lyrics for. More pointedly, Paradis lay under Klaus. When Paradis also took Edvard on to mentor, Klaus also covered Edvard. All of this was within the swirl of contact with such leading Viennese composers as Gustav Mahler; Johann Strauss, the younger; and Arnold Schoenberg.
When Paradis died, of anemia, the baron was established as a writer and Edvard was still struggling to gain a name for himself as a composer. Klaus returned to his castle by horseback from Vienna an hour after Paradis died and took Edvard with him. When it became known that the baron was bedding Edvard, who also had been bedding Paradis, and that Edvard's wife, whose family was more prominent in Vienna than the Bauschs were, had left him, Edvard became estranged from his son, Elham.
When I reached four and hadn't died—I was a small, pale baby as I am small and very blond in adulthood—my parents decided that I should at least be shown to my grandfather, although he hadn't shown particular interest in seeing me. My family visited Edvard at the baron's castle. I am told that Edvard was lethargic, pale, and distant when we met and that my parents thought he was not long for the world, but fourteen years later it appears that he still lingers.
Something happened between the baron and my father during this visitation, because a year later, my father had moved into the baron's castle, without either my mother or me, and joined my grandfather as the baron's captive bedwarmer. Through the unpleasantness that followed, however, Elham consistently denied that he and his father occupied the baron's bed at the same time. The times I have seen my father since then, when he has visited Venice, he has been as withdrawn and lethargic as my parents described my grandfather to have been when I was taken to meet him.
And, so, here I was in Count Ugo Cortesi's Alta Academi Cortesi, at the sufferance of Cortesi as a patron, my father living in twittering scandal in Vienna, my mother in retreat in a convent. I thus was fully at the count's mercy for my entire future if I didn't want to sink in the morass of post-world war poverty and deprivation. Therefore, there was no question that I would follow him back up the wooden staircase to his study in the apartment he occupied solely, never having married, on the top floor of his Dorsoduro
