"You can come at noon," she was saying with that faint tremolo to her voice. "I'm English, I don't sleep in the afternoons, but you could come later if you prefer. I should like to paint you before you're so wildly famous that everyone will want to paint you. It would be a favor to me."
"Ah, such modesty, these gifted children," Guido said. "Tonio, the young Signora is speaking to you...."
"You're going to live in Rome?" Tonio murmured. The words sounded so feeble he was certain she would ask if he were ill.
"Yes," she said. "There is so much to study here, so much to paint." Then her expression underwent one of those dramatic alterations, and she added in a strangely simple tone, "But maybe when the opera closes, I'll follow you, Signore Treschi. I'll be one of those madwomen who follows a great singer all over the Continent." Her eyes grew wide, but she was grave. "Maybe I cannot paint if I am too far from the sound of your voice."
Tonio blushed furiously. And stunned, he heard Guido laugh.
She was too young! She understood nothing of the implications of her words! She couldn't be here all alone without the Contessa! And to look at her, her exquisite white breasts flattened almost cruelly under that stiff lace border....
The blood was positively stinging his face.
"That would be marvelous," Guido said. "Everywhere we go you would go, and portraits by the great Christina Grimaldi would appear, and word would get around. Very soon, we'd be summoned to sing by those who are absolutely tone deaf and merely wanted to see themselves immortalized in oil or pastel."
She laughed, her cheeks reddening, and gave her hair the slightest toss. It was moist on her white neck, and tiny ringlets clung to her cheeks. But there was the faintest edge of strain in her voice.
"The Contessa would come with us," Guido went on with feigned boredom, "we'd all travel together, a regular cavalcade."
"Wouldn't that be lovely," she whispered, but she was slightly miserable.
And Tonio realized he was staring at her as if he had lost his wits. He looked away from her; he tried to think; even the smallest sentence, what could he say? This talk was all wrong for her; she didn't understand. It was clever, and for cavalieri serventi and adulterous women, and there was something pure and serious about her. Freshly widowed, she was a butterfly struggling from the cocoon.
But she seemed alien in her fragility, something exquisitely exotic. He lifted his eyes to her again because he couldn't stop it, and without ever looking at Guido, he sensed in him a slight change.
"But to answer you seriously, Signore Treschi," she said in that same simple manner, "I've let a studio in the Piazza di Spagna. I'm going to live there. Guido was kind enough to sit for me so I could make up my mind about the light."
"Yes, we had to move from place to place every five minutes or so," Guido said, feigning complaint, "and to pin dozens of pictures to the walls. But it's a fine studio, actually. And I can walk there from the palazzo and watch Christina paint when I'm tired and cross."
"Oh, you must do that," she said with obvious delight. "You must come all the time. And you must come, too, Signore Treschi."
"And my dear," Guido said, "I don't mean to rush you, but if we're to get your maids moved in, and the trunks brought up, we should leave now, or we'll be stumbling about in the dark."
"Yes, you're right," she said. "But will you come tomorrow, Signore Treschi?"
For a moment Tonio said nothing. Then he heard himself make a faint sound very much like the word "yes." But quickly he stammered: "I can't. I can't I mean, Signora, I thank you, but I have to practice, we have less than a month before opening night."
"I understand," she said softly. And offering him that radiant smile again, over her shoulder, she excused herself and left the room.
Tonio turned at once to the door and he had reached the garden walk before Guido caught his arm.
"I'd say you were very rude if I couldn't see the reason for it," Guido said seriously.
"And what's the reason!" Tonio demanded between clenched teeth.
Guido seemed on the verge of anger. But then he pressed his lips together and his eyes puckered as if he were about to smile.
"You mean you don't know yourself?"
10
FOR THE NEXT THREE DAYS, Tonio practiced from early morning until late at night. Twice he started to leave the palazzo, only to abruptly change his mind. Guido had finished all his arias; Tonio must now work out his ornaments to perfection, preparing himself to vary the arias in an infinite number of ways. No encore must sound exactly like what had gone before it; he must be ready for any expediency or change of mood in himself or his listeners. So he stayed home, even taking his meals at the keyboard, and working until he fell into bed.
The servants meantime were gathering at the doors of his room to listen to him; he often moved Paolo to tears. Even Guido, who usually left him alone in the afternoons to visit Christina Grimaldi in her new studio, stayed behind to hear just a few more bars.
"When I hear you sing, when I stand in the very presence of your voice"--Guido sighed--"I'm not afraid of the devil in hell."
Tonio wasn't grateful for this comment. It reminded him that Guido was truly afraid.
Once in the very middle of an aria, Tonio stopped and began to laugh.
"What's the matter?" Paolo demanded.
Tonio could only shake his head. "Everyone is going to be there," he whispered. He shut his eyes for a moment and then, shuddering almost dramatically, laughed again.
"Don't talk about it, Tonio," Paolo said desperately, biting his lip. He was pleading with Tonio for reassurance, and then the tears sprang to his eyes.
"Rather like a public execution," Tonio said, catching his breath, "if it goes wrong." He dissolved into silent laughter. "I'm sorry, Paolo, I can't help it," he said. He tried to be serious, but he could not. "Everyone, absolutely everyone, will be there."
He folded his arms above the keyboard and shook with inaudible laughter. Now he understood the meaning of one's first appearance: it was a grand invitation to risk the most dreadful public failure of one's entire existence.
He stopped laughing only when he looked again at Paolo's stricken face. "Come on," he said gently, opening the score of a duet, "don't pay any attention to me."
*
By dusk on the fourth day, however, everything sounded like noise. He couldn't work anymore. And he understood the virtue of this practice: he had not had to think; he had not had to remember anything; he had not had to ponder, plan, or worry at all.
And when the Cardinal, whom he had not visited in over a fortnight, sent for him, he rose from the keyboard with a faint exasperated sound. No one heard him. Nino was already laying out his clothes. Red velvet for the Cardinal, a waistcoat threaded with gold. Cream-colored breeches and high arched white slippers that would leave a cruel mark on his instep that the Cardinal might later lovingly touch.
It didn't seem possible to him now that he could please His Eminence. But he had gone to it wearier and more distracted even than this, and had done it well.
Not until he approached the Cardinal's door did he realize this was far too early for them to be together discreetly. The house was full of busy clerics and idle gentlemen. Yet it was to the bedchamber that he had been called.
He knew something was not right when he stepped into the room.
The Cardinal was dressed for ceremony and duty, the silver crucifix gleaming on his chest. He sat at his desk behind a pair of large candles, his hands folded on the open face of a book.
There was a rare light to his expression, an innocent exuberance to him that Tonio had not seen in months.
"Sit down, beautiful one," he said. He told his attendants to go out.
The door shut; the quiet seemed to close around them like water washing back from a shore.
Tonio looked up with just the slightest hesitation; he saw the Cardinal's gray eyes were filled with an infinite patience and wondering, and Tonio felt the first pang of wa
rning. A dull sense of finality slowly came over him before the Cardinal spoke.
"Come here to me," the Cardinal whispered as though summoning a child. Tonio had slipped far, far away into some realm that was not even thought, and he rose slowly and approached the Cardinal, who had risen from his chair. They stood almost eye to eye, and then the Cardinal kissed him on both cheeks.
"Tonio," he said softly, confidentially, "there is but one passion for me in this life and that is the love of Christ."
Tonio smiled. "I am relieved, my lord, that you are no longer divided," he said.
The Cardinal's eyes appeared hazel in the candlelight, and he narrowed them now, studying Tonio before he answered:
"You mean this, don't you?"
"I feel love for you, my lord," Tonio said. "How could I not wish for your good?"
The Cardinal weighed this with far more care than Tonio expected, turning away for a moment and again motioning for Tonio to sit down. Tonio watched the Cardinal seat himself again at the desk, but he remained standing, his hands clasped behind his back.
The room seemed filled with gray, almost ashen light. Its objects seemed alien to Tonio and unimportant; he wished only that the candles could give a greater illumination, and not merely a dismal shape to the gloom. He turned his eyes to the high mullioned window and the first sprinkling of evening stars.
The Cardinal sighed. He seemed lost in his thoughts for a moment and then he said, "This morning for the first time in months I said my mass in the state of grace." But now he looked up at Tonio, and his face filled with trouble, and gently, as if with respect, he asked, "And what of you, Marc Antonio, what of the state of your soul?"
It was no more than a whisper, and it carried with it no judgment.
But Tonio wished for anything now but this exchange of words. He knew only that this chapter of his life had come to an end. He did not know whether or not he would weep when he left these rooms, and maybe he wanted to find out. He felt strangely vulnerable to remain here now.
"My feeling for you was evil, Marc Antonio." The Cardinal struggled. "It was a depravity that has destroyed men infinitely stronger than I. But try as I might..." He faltered. "Try as I might I cannot find in you the evidence of evil, I cannot find the malice and the decay that must follow the willful commission of such sin." He implored Tonio. "Help me to fathom this. Have you no guilt, Marc Antonio, have you no regret? Help me to understand!"
"But why, my lord!" Tonio answered suddenly, without thinking. It wasn't anger he felt so much as astonishment. "Anyone who has ever known you but for a little while knows you belong to Christ. When I first set eyes upon you, I said, 'There is a man who has a reason to be alive.' But I haven't your faith, my lord, nor do I suffer from the lack of it, and I do not have your guilt."
This seemed to agitate the Cardinal greatly, and he rose again and took Tonio's head in his hands. The gesture disturbed Tonio, but Tonio did not move away. He felt the Cardinal press his thumbs softly into the flesh just beneath his eyes.
"Marc Antonio, there are men who believe in no god," the Cardinal averred, "and yet would condemn what passed between us as unnatural, as calculated to bring ruin to us both."
"My lord, why should it bring ruin!" Tonio demanded. He resented all of this terribly. He wanted for the Cardinal simply to send him away. "You are speaking a tongue foreign to me," he said. "This brought pain to you because you had made your vow to Christ. But had there been no vow, what would it have mattered? Our union was sterile, my lord. I cannot procreate. You cannot procreate with me. So, what does it matter what we do with one another, the affection, the warmth we feel? It did not bring ruin to your day-to-day life. It certainly brought no ruin to mine. It was love finally, and what is the ruin in lover?"
Tonio was angry now, but he was not sure why.
He was vaguely aware that once, a long time ago, Guido had spoken words to him that echoed these same sentiments in a much simpler way.
And it was such a vast question that he could not feel the dimensions of it, and he did not like this. It put him painfully in mind of the fragility of all ideas.
There lingered in him a numbing sense of his mother's loneliness, that empty bedchamber in which she'd spent her youth, paying for an exuberant passion that had brought him into the world. And there was in him a devastating anger against the old man who had shut her up there in the name of honor and right.
And it is I who paid the highest price for all of it, he thought. Yet even in his darkest moments he could not really condemn her lying in Carlo's arms. And there were times when even in clearest rage, it tore at him like a vulture's claw that he, Tonio, might one day drive her back into that empty room again. Widow's black. He felt himself shudder and strained to conceal it, moving his eyes away.
To this very day he could be driven from a room by the common sight of a moth beating against a pane. He could not even bring himself to take it in his hands and free it, that moth, for thinking of her in that bedchamber alone.
But in the arms of others, he had known a healing satisfaction so powerful it had been for him his sanctifying grace.
Sin, that was malice. That was cruelty. It was those men in Flovigo annihilating his unborn sons.
But his love for Guido, his love for the Cardinal, no one would ever convince him this was sin.
Not even in that locked carriage with the toughened and dark-skinned youth had there been sin. Nor had there been sin in Venice in the gondola where little Bettina had put her head against his chest.
Yet he knew it was impossible for him to express these sentiments to a man who was a prince of the church. He could not unite two worlds: the one infinitely powerful and bound to revelation as well as tradition; the other inevitable and irrepressible, holding sway in every shadowy corner of the earth.
It angered him that the Cardinal asked him to do it. And when he saw the defeat and sadness in the Cardinal's eyes, he felt cut off from the man as though they'd known each other intimately a long, long time ago.
"I cannot account for you," the Cardinal whispered. "You once told me that music was to you something natural that God had loosed into this world. And you, for all your exotic beauty, seem natural, like the blossoms on the vine. Yet you are evil to me, and for you I would have damned my soul for all eternity. I do not understand."
"Ah, then it is not from me that you seek answers," Tonio said.
Something flared in the Cardinal's eyes. He was staring at Tonio's placid face.
"But you are enough, don't you see," the Cardinal said between his teeth, "to drive a man mad!"
He took Tonio by the arms, and his fingers closed on the flesh with uncommon strength.
Tonio breathed deeply, attempting to let this anger pass from him, saying to himself, This little pain is not enough.
"My lord, let me leave you now," he begged softly. "Because I bear you only love, and want that you should be at peace."
The Cardinal shook his head. He was glaring at Tonio, and there came from him a low humming sound. His breath was hoarse and his face was slightly flushed. The strength of his grip increased. Tonio's anger began to mount.
It was infuriating him to be held like this, to feel the man's urgency and power through his hands.
He was helpless, he was sure of it. And he could remember well enough the strength of these arms that had turned him so easily in bed as if he had been a woman or a young child. He thought of those arms clashing with him in the fencing salon, pushing him in darkened bedchambers, imprisoning him against the leather seat of the carriage, arms that might as well have been the branches of trees, and that smoldering energy that seemed to emanate from the very pores of a man as he sought the evidence of submission in the very midst of passion over and over again.
Tonio's vision faltered. It seemed he had uttered some desperate sound. And all of a sudden he moved as if he meant to escape the Cardinal, or even to strike him, and he felt that grip infused with an incalculable force. He was as helpless
as he imagined. The Cardinal held him so easily he might have broken the bones in his arms.
But the man was stunned. It was as if with this small convulsive gesture Tonio had awakened him and he was staring at Tonio as he might at a frightening child.
"Did you mean to raise your hand to me, Marc Antonio?" he asked as if he feared the answer.
"Oh, no, my lord," Tonio said in a low voice. "I meant for you to raise your hand to me! Strike me, my lord!" He grimaced, shuddering. "I should like to feel it, that force that I do not understand." He reached out and clutched at the Cardinal's shoulders. He held tight to him as if trying to weaken the lean muscularity that was there.
The Cardinal had let him go, and backed away.
"Natural, am I, like the blossoms on the vine?" Tonio whispered. "Oh, if only I understood either of you, what either of you feels. You with your limbs that are weapons against me when I am unarmed, and she with her softness, and that tiny voice like little bells ringing and ringing, and beneath her skirts that secret yielding wound. Oh, if you were not both of you mysteries to me, if I were part of one or the other, or even part of both!"
"You're speaking madness," the Cardinal whispered. He put out his hand and felt the side of Tonio's face.
"Madness?" Tonio murmured under his breath. "Madness! You have forsworn me, in the same breath called me natural and then evil; you've called me the thing that drives men mad. What could these words possibly mean to me? How am I to abide them? And yet you say I speak madness. What was the mad oracle of Delphi, but a wretched creature whose limbs had the unfortunate conformation of an object of desire!"
He wiped his mouth with the back of his hand and pressed his hand against his lips as if he meant to stop the flow of words by force.
He was aware that the Cardinal was gazing at him and that the Cardinal had become calm.
The moment lengthened in silence and stillness.
"Forgive me, Marc Antonio," the Cardinal said slowly in a low voice.