As my father had commanded me, I went straight inside. I did not stop walking until I had reached my bedchamber and barricaded myself inside. He did not follow.
Giuseppe did, however. I had only just turned the lock in the sitting room door when he began to pound on it. “Adriana!” he called. “Open the door! Please, tell me what happened! Are you all right?”
“Leave me be, Giuseppe!” I screamed at the door, finally beginning to unravel, and at a speed I could no longer control.
“Please, Adriana!”
“No!” I shrieked. “Leave me! There is nothing you can do for me now!” My ragged voice caught in my throat as I fled into my bedchamber, closing that door as well to stifle Giuseppe’s shouts. “It is over,” I choked out, though I knew he could not hear me. “It is over, it is really over. And you were right: we have lost.”
Consumed by grief, it was all I could do to pull my heavy, ungainly body up onto the bed, burying my face in the coverlet as sobs shook my aching body.
So this is what it feels like, this heartbreak about which the poets write and the singers sing. You taught me so many wonderful and beautiful and difficult things, Antonio. Perhaps it is only fitting you would teach me this as well.
But there was nothing lovely about this despair, no music or poetry in it. It was a night without stars, a sea without bottom, a hellfire without hope of salvation.
I had not thought that anything could be as consuming as the love I had for him, until I knew the anguish of losing him. And was there anything as tragic as the fact that sorrow should be a deeper ocean in which to drown than love?
I could only let the tears come and wonder when it would be over.
* * *
I must have fallen asleep, for at some point in the early dawn I woke suddenly, roused by a dream, a fading melody. I rose, lit a candle at my desk and sat, grabbing the first quill and parchment with staves on it that I could find. I began to write, scribbling down this swirling, tempestuous melody that was storming through my head, harsh like the waves of the sea and jagged as the rocks that lay hidden near the coast. On and on for pages it went, sliding into a slower movement, and then back into fury. The siren was raging now, raging at the sorrow and pain of her heartbreak, and her force could not be contained.
I do not know how long I wrote; only that when I finished I was breathing heavily, staring down at the angry ink marks that chased each other across the pages. Almost in a trance, I got up from the desk and went back to bed, where sleep claimed me again almost instantly.