Lucia - Andrea Di Robilant [53]
Lucia stayed but a few months. In the summer she returned to Le Scalette, their villa on the Brenta, while Alvise shuttled back and forth between Verona, Le Scalette and Molinato. Alvisetto was in fine shape during the entire villeggiatura (summer season), taking his mother’s milk but also eating solids. He ventured about the house and the garden on his own feet, and uttered his first syllables. He played and laughed and basked in his mother’s company. In early autumn, they all travelled back to Verona. It was their last stint in the Palazzo del Capitano as Alvise’s tenure would soon be over. Lucia did not look forward to spending another winter in those inhospitable rooms, but at least she felt more confident about Alvisetto’s ability to endure the cold season.
With the first chills, however, Alvisetto’s catarrh began to thicken, and his breathing difficulties started again, with coughing bouts and the inevitable fevers. He ate with difficulty and often refused to take his mother’s milk. Lucia held him close to her. She stroked his chest and massaged his spindly legs and arms. She felt the frailty of her little boy at the end of her fingertips. In February the days grew longer and Lucia beheld the first promise of spring in the air. The worst seemed behind them. The winter would soon be over, she told her sister, and Alvisetto was going to be all right. The first couple of years were always the most difficult. It would be easier as time went by. Each day, each week that passed strengthened his chances.
Then the sudden cold spell at the end of February caught everyone by surprise. It all happened very swiftly. Alvisetto’s chronic catarrh problems worsened. The infection moved to his lungs. He breathed with increasing difficulty and would not take any food. Soon his body was burning hot. Lucia pressed damp cloths on his face and limbs to cool him down but the temperature would not abate. The doctors insisted on puncturing his veins and the bleedings made him weaker each day. “He is struggling against the illness,” a distraught Alvise wrote to his father on 9 March.51 The little boy fought a few more days but the odds became overwhelming, and he stopped breathing in the early morning on the 12th.
Alvisetto was buried the same day in the church of San Sebastiano, around the corner from the Palazzo del Capitano. He was a month shy of his second birthday.*9
The tiny coffin had barely been lowered into the ground in San Sebastiano and covered with a marble slab when Mocenigo family politics took over again. The passing away of Alvisetto meant there was no male heir. Alvise, grief-stricken as he was, moved quickly to reassert control over family affairs, pre-empting those relatives who might be tempted to take advantage of the situation in order to lay their own claim to parts of the estate. As Alvise saw it, his principal liability was his own spendthrift father, who had grossly mismanaged the estate and was sinking deeper into personal debt in order to pursue his extravagant lifestyle. If Sebastiano was allowed to persist along that path, the entire Mocenigo fortune would soon be at risk. Alvise confronted his father, who was in very poor health, and forced him to relinquish control over the estate. In May 1795, only two months after Alvisetto’s death, father and son signed an agreement that made Alvise de facto head of the family. He took over his father’s conspicuous debts in exchange for complete control of the family holdings. He also agreed to pay his father a yearly stipend of 9,000 ducats, a proviso that in the end proved unnecessary: Sebastiano died a broken man a few weeks later.
When the deal between Alvise and his father was made known, Chiara told Lucia she was now “free to move about as you please within the land of the Mocenigos.”52 It was a strange thing to say given what she herself referred to as “the sad circumstances” that had led to the new arrangement. Was it simply an awkward attempt at consoling her daughter-in-law? Or maybe