And against the wall at the door stood a stocky man, brown-haired, with large menacing eyes and a nose that was pushed flat to his face as if someone had smashed it. He was young. He wore a tattered coat, a sword with a brass handle. And he was staring rudely at Tonio as he lifted his tankard.
3
IT WAS ALMOST completely dark in San Marco, only a score of scattered lights pulsing throughout the immense church to give the faintest glint to the old mosaics. Old Beppo, Tonio's elderly castrato teacher, held a single taper in his hand as he gazed anxiously at the young maestro from Naples, Guido Maffeo.
Tonio stood alone in the left choir loft. He had only just finished singing, and there was a distinct echo of his last note lingering in the church as if nothing could put an end to it.
Alessandro was standing mute, his hands clasped behind his back, looking down at the two smaller figures, Beppo, and Guido Maffeo beside him. He was the first to see the distortion in Maffeo's features. Beppo did not see it, and at the first guttural blast from the southern Italian, Beppo was visibly stunned.
"From the greatest of Venetian families!" Guido repeated Beppo's last words. He bent forward slightly to glare into the face of the old eunuch. "You brought me here to listen to a Venetian patrician!"
"But, Signore, this is the finest voice in Venice."
"A Venetian patrician!"
"But Signore..."
"Signore," Alessandro ventured softly, "Beppo did not perhaps realize that you are searching for students for the conservatorio." Alessandro had sensed this misunderstanding almost from the beginning.
But Beppo still did not comprehend. "But, Signore," he insisted, "I wanted...I wanted that you should hear this voice for your own pleasure!"
"For my own pleasure, I could have stayed in Naples," growled Guido.
Alessandro turned to Beppo, and with obvious disregard for this impossible southern Italian, he spoke in the soft Venetian dialect. "Beppo, the Maestro is looking for castrati children."
Beppo was miserable.
Tonio had come down from the choir loft and his slight, dark-clad figure appeared behind the echo of his footsteps in the gloom.
He had sung without accompaniment, and his voice had easily filled the church, its effect upon Guido being almost eerie.
The boy was so near manhood now that the voice had lost its innocence. And long years of study had obviously contributed to its perfection. But it was a natural voice, singing in effortless perfect pitch. And though it was a boy's soprano which had not yet begun to change, it had a man's sentiment in it.
The performance had yet other qualities to it which Guido, angry and exhausted, refused to define further.
He stared at the boy who was almost as tall as himself. And realized it was just as he'd supposed the instant he'd heard the voice from the choir loft: this was the vagabond nobleman who roamed the streets at night, the dark-eyed, white-skinned boy with a face chiseled out of the purest marble. He was narrow, elegant, suggesting a dark Botticelli. And as he bowed to his teachers--as if they weren't, in fact, his inferiors--he showed nothing of that natural insolence which Guido associated with all aristocrats.
But there was no accounting for the Venetian patrician class. They were unlike anything Guido had ever known in their habitual courtesy to all men around them. Perhaps the fact that everyone went on foot in this city had something to do with it. He wasn't sure. He didn't care. He was furious.
But he did note that the boy's face was remote for all its politeness. He was leaving this assemblage with humble but indifferent apologies.
The door let in a blinding flash of sunshine as he left the church and the flustered group behind him.
"You must accept my apologies, Signore," said Alessandro. "Beppo did not mean to waste your time."
"Oh, no. No, no, no...nonono!" Beppo muttered with all the variety in tone of a regular sentence.
"And this arrogant young boy, who is he?" demanded Guido. "This patrician's son with the larynx of a god who does not even care whether or not his voice has made a favorable impression."
This was too much for Beppo, and Alessandro took the initiative of dismissing him. It was against Alessandro's nature to be rude, but he was now short of patience. And the fact was that he harbored a deep, secret, and iron-hard hatred of those who went out from the conservatorios of Naples to search for castrati children. His own childhood training in that distant southern city had been so cruel and relentless that it had obliterated all memory of the years that preceded it. Alessandro had been twenty years old before he met one of his brothers in the Piazza San Marco, and even then he did not know the man who said, "See, the little crucifix you wore as a child. Our mother sends it to you." He remembered the crucifix but not the mother.
"If you will forgive me, Maestro," he said now, bending down to look into the fiercesome dark face (he had taken the taper from Beppo), "the boy has not the slightest doubt that his voice pleases everyone who hears it, though he would never be so ill-mannered as to say so. And please understand he came here today out of kindness to his teacher."
But this boor was not only crude, he was uninsultable. He was not even listening to Alessandro. He was rubbing at his temples, rather, with both hands as if he suffered from a headache. His eyes had the malice of an animal but they were too large to suggest an animal.
And it was not until this very moment, while standing this close, candle in hand, that Alessandro suddenly realized he was gazing down upon an unusually stocky castrato. He studied the smooth face. No, it had never grown a beard. This was yet another eunuch.
He almost let out a little laugh. He had thought him a whole man with a knife tucked under his belt, and a strange mingling of feelings took place in him. He softened slightly towards Guido, not because he felt sorry for him, but because he was a member of a great fraternity more likely to appreciate the pristine beauty of Tonio's voice than any other.
"If you will allow me, Signore, I might recommend several other boys. There is a eunuch at San Giorgio...."
"I've heard him," whispered Guido, more to himself than to Alessandro. "Is there the slightest chance that this boy...I mean, what precisely does his talent mean to him?" But before he glanced at Alessandro he knew that this was perfectly ridiculous.
Alessandro didn't even dignify the question with an answer.
A little silence fell between them. Guido had turned his back and taken a few steps on the uneven stone floor. The flame of the taper shivered in Alessandro's hand. And in this faulty light it seemed he could hear more distinctly the sigh that escaped from the singing teacher.
Alessandro saw the slump of his shoulders. And he felt emanating from the man a feeling that was almost like sorrow. Almost like sorrow. There was some violence in this eunuch that Alessandro had seldom encountered. In a momentary but sweeping recollection, he was again confronted with the cruelty and sacrifice which he himself had endured in Naples. He felt some begrudging respect for Guido Maffeo.
"You will thank your young patrician friend for me, please?" Guido murmured, defeated.
They moved towards the door.
But with his hand on it, Alessandro paused.
"But tell me," he said confidentially. "What did you really think of him?"
Immediately he regretted it. This dark little man was capable of anything.
Yet to his surprise, Guido said nothing. He stood glaring at the uneven candle, and his face became smooth and philosophical. And again Alessandro felt the emotions of the other, what seemed to him very excessive and puzzling emotions.
Then Guido smiled at Alessandro, wistfully:
"This is what I think of it: I wish I had not heard it."
And Alessandro smiled, too.
They were musicians; they were eunuchs; they understood one another.
It was raining by the time he reached the palazzo. He had hoped that Tonio would be waiting for him outside the church, but he was not. And as Alessandro entered the library off the Gra
nd Salon, he saw that Beppo was still in a turmoil. He had poured out this humiliating story to Angelo, who listened to it all as if he were witnessing some outrage to the name Treschi.
"It's all Tonio's fault," Angelo said finally. "He should give up all this singing. Did you speak to the Signora? If you don't speak to the Signora, I will."
"It has nothing to do with Tonio," said Beppo. "Why, how was I to know that he was looking for castrati children? I had no idea he was searching for castrati children. He spoke to me about voices, exemplary voices. He said, 'Tell me where I might find...' Oh, this is terrible, terrible."
"It is also over," said Alessandro quietly.
He had just heard the front doors of the palazzo shut. He knew Carlo's step by this time perfectly.
"Tonio should be in this library now," said Angelo emphatically, "at his studies."
"But how was I to know this? Why, he said, tell me where I might find the finest voices! I said, Signore, you have come to a city where you can find the finest voices everywhere but if you...if you..."
"Are you going to speak to the Signora?" said Angelo looking up to Alessandro.
"And Tonio was magnificent, Alessandro, you know he was...."
"Are you going to speak to the Signora?" Angelo banged his fist on the table.
"About what, speak to the Signora?"
Angelo had risen to his feet. It was Carlo who had spoken as he came into the room.
Alessandro made a quick gesture of discretion. He did not look at Carlo. He would not give this man an edge of authority over his younger brother, and softly now, he said, "Tonio was off with me in the piazza when he should have been studying here. It was my fault, Excellency, you will forgive me. I will see that it doesn't happen again."
As he'd expected, the master of the house was indifferent.
"But what is all this you were talking about?" he said, rousing his interest almost stubbornly.
"Oh, a hideous mistake, a stupid mistake," said Beppo, "and this man is now angry with me. He has insulted me. And he was so rude to the young master, what am I to say to him?"
This was too much for Alessandro. He threw up his hands and excused himself, as Beppo unwound the whole tale down to the very name of the hymn that Tonio had sung in the church, and how exquisitely he had performed it.
Carlo uttered a short laugh and turned towards the stairs.
Then suddenly he stopped. His hand was on the marble railing. He didn't move. He looked precisely like someone who has suddenly suffered a sharp pain in the side and cannot move without making it sharper.
And then very slowly he turned his head, gazing back at the old castrato.
The disgusted Angelo was already reading a book between his elbows. And the old eunuch was shaking his head.
Carlo took several steps to the door of the room.
"Tell me this again?" he said softly.
4
THE SKY WAS mother-of-pearl. For a long while there were no lights across the water and suddenly it seemed there were many, scattered among Moorish arches and barred windows, flickering from the torches hung to light gates, doorways. Tonio sat at the dining table looking through the forty some odd panes of glass that composed the nearest window, its sky-blue drapery tied back, its surface running with rain that sometimes glinted with the gold of a passing lantern. When that happened all beyond it went dark. But then the lantern would pass away, and the dim hulks of the other side of the water would reveal themselves again, the sky as luminous and pearlescent as ever.
He was making a little poem aloud with just a little music to it, something that said, darkness come early, darkness open up the doors and open up the streets so that I can go out of here. He was tired and full of shame, and if Ernestino and the others wouldn't brave this rain, he would go it alone, he would find some place to sing, some place where, anonymous and numbed by drink, he could sing until he had forgotten everything.
This afternoon he had left San Marco with a feeling of despair. All the many processions of his childhood had come back to him in that place, his father walking behind the Doge's canopy, the smell of incense, those endless, translucent waves of ethereal singing.
Then afterwards he had gone with his cousin Catrina to visit her daughter, Francesca, in the convent where she would live until she was his bride. And then home again, in the incessant rain, to be alone with Catrina.
They had not meant to make love, surely, this woman who was older than his mother, and he. But they had done it. The room was warm, full of firelight and perfume. And she had marveled at his skill, and the vigor with which he drove between her legs, her body lush and full as he had always imagined it. Afterwards, he felt appalling shame, all the scaffolding of his life giving way under him.
"But why are you behaving so?" she had demanded. He must give up these nights out, was there ever a time when it was so important to be exemplary? A strange lecture, he remarked softly, from this bower of fragrant pillows. "How can his malice eat at you like this?" she insisted.
He had no answer. What could he say? Why didn't you warn me she was the girl! Why didn't anyone warn me?
But he could not speak, for there was a fear gathering in him, growing stronger with every passing day that was too terrible for him to articulate even to himself, let alone to another. He turned away from Catrina.
"All right, my troubador," she had whispered. "Sing while you can; young men have done a lot worse; we can put up with it for a little while; it's harmless for all its absurdity." And then teasing him gently between the legs, she said: "God knows you haven't very long to enjoy that lovely soprano."
A voice in the empty church turned round by the golden walls came back to mock him.
And he had come home. Why? To hear it from Lena that his brother had sent Alessandro out of the house saying his services as tutor to Tonio were extraneous? Alessandro was gone. His mother was somewhere lost to him behind closed doors.
And now as he sat alone at the supper table where he had not dined in months, he did not even stir when he heard steps in this great hollow shadowy house, steps entering this room, when he heard those massive doors creak shut, first one pair of them and then another.
The light changed, did it not?
I cannot avoid him forever.
The sky was darkening. From where he sat he could see yet the farthest edge of the water. And he kept his eyes fixed there, even though two figures, it seemed, had approached him. Almost desperately he emptied the wine in his silver cup. And she is come, too, he thought. This is pure agony.
A hand came out to refill the wine.
"Leave us alone now," said his brother.
He was speaking to the servant who set the bottle down and was gone with just a dry shuffle on the stones. Something like the sound of a rat in a dusty passageway.
Tonio turned slowly to look at these two. Ah, yes, it is she, with him. The candles dazzled him. He raised the back of his hand to shield his eyes, and then he saw what he thought he had seen, her face reddish, swollen.
His brother seemed uncommonly raw as if some quarrel had brought him to the brink. And as he leaned over with his hands firmly placed on the table before Tonio, Tonio thought for the first time: I despise you! Yes, it is true now I despise you!
But there was no smile now. There was no pretense. The face was sharpened as if by some new perception.
Tonio lifted the silver goblet, felt the bit of stone that adorned it. He let his eyes shift slowly to the water again. To the sky's last gleam of silver.
"Tell him," said his brother.
Tonio looked up slowly.
His mother was staring at Carlo as if with deliberate outrage.
"Tell him!" said Carlo again. And she turned to go out of the room, but Carlo, moving faster than she, had caught her by the wrist. "Tell him."
She shook her head. She was staring at Carlo as if she could not believe he was doing this to her.
Tonio rose slowly from the table, out of the glare of th
e candlelight to look more closely at her, at the way that her face was being slowly infused with anger.
"Tell him now before me!" Carlo roared.
But as if infected by that very rage, she cried out:
"I will do no such thing, not now, not ever." She commenced to tremble. Her face was crumpling like that of a small child. And suddenly grabbing her in both hands Carlo started to shake her.
Tonio didn't move. He knew that if he moved he could not control what would happen. And that his mother belonged to this man was now beyond doubt.
But Carlo had stopped.
Marianna stood with her hands over her ears. And then she looked up at Carlo again and said No with her lips, her face so twisted that she was almost unrecognizable.
It seemed that roar was rising out of Carlo again, that awful roar like that of a man bewailing a death he could never accept, and with the full force of his right hand he struck her.
She fell several steps backwards.
"Carlo, if you strike her again," Tonio said, "it will be resolved between us, forever."
It was the first time that Tonio had ever called him by name, but it was impossible to tell if Carlo realized it.
He was staring straight forward. He did not seem to hear Marianna crying. Her tremors were becoming more and more violent and suddenly she began to scream:
"I will not, I will not choose between you!"
"Tell him the truth before God and me now!" Carlo roared.
"Enough!" Tonio said. "Do not torture her. She is helpless as I am. What can she tell me that will make any difference? That you are her lover?"
Tonio looked at her. He could not bear to see her in this pain. It seemed infinitely greater than all those years and years of appalling loneliness.
He wished somehow he could let her know, silently, with his eyes, with the color of his voice, that he loved her. And that now he expected nothing more from her.
He looked away, and then again, he looked up at the man who had turned to him.
"It is no use," Tonio said. "Not for both of you can I go against my father."