PART VI
1
AS SOON AS HE HAD taken his final bows, Tonio forced his way through the suffocating backstage press to his dressing room and, telling Signora Bianchi to send Raffaele's coachman away with polite regrets, quickly changed his clothes.
He had sent his note to Christina after the second intermission, and the remainder of the performance had been something of an agony for him.
Finally as the last curtain came down, Paolo had put her answer in his hands.
But it was not until he was fully dressed as himself again, his hair still a tangled mess, that he tore open the note:
The Piazza di Spagna, the Palazzo Sanfredo, my painting studio on the top floor.
He was unable to do anything for a moment. It seemed Guido had come in with some momentous news about an Easter season in Florence, and the insistence for the first time that they play every major house in Italy before going away.
"They're going to need an answer very soon on this," Guido said, tapping the scrap of paper in his hand.
"But what is it, why do they need to know now?" Tonio murmured.
Signora Bianchi came in, shutting the door with difficulty. "You must go out only for a few minutes," she said, just as she did every night.
"...because it's this Easter we're talking about, forty days after we close here. Tonio, Florence!" Guido said.
"Right, yes, I mean of course, we'll talk about it, Guido," Tonio was stammering, trying vainly to comb his hair.
Had he folded her note and put it in his pocket? Guido was pouring himself a glass of wine.
Paolo slipped in, red in the face, and collapsed with exaggerated relief against the door.
"Go out there, Tonio, now, get it over with!" said Signora Bianchi. And turning him, she shoved him towards the crowd.
Why was this so difficult? It seemed they all wanted to touch him, to kiss him, to talk to him, to take his hand and tell him how much it had meant to them, and there was the feeling with all of them that he did not want to let them down. Yet the more he smiled, nodded, the more they talked, and by the time he had made his way inside again, he was so frantic he took the wine from Guido and drank all of it.
The usual flowers were being brought in, great bouquets of hothouse flowers, and Signora Bianchi whispered in his ear that Count di Stefano's men were outside.
"Damn," he said. He felt Christina's note in his pocket. It had no signature, but he took it out quite suddenly and while Guido and Paolo and Signora Bianchi stared at him as if he were a madman, he burned it completely by the candle flame.
"Wait a minute," she said as he turned to go. "Just where are you off to? Tell me and tell the Maestro before you go."
"What difference does it make!" he said crossly, and when he saw the secretive smile on Guido's face, the feigned superiority to the childish passion, he was silently enraged.
As soon as he stepped into the corridor, he saw Raffaele's men. These weren't servants. These were the Count's bravos.
"Signore, His Excellency wishes to see..."
"Yes, well not tonight, he cannot," Tonio said quickly and started for the street.
For one moment it seemed the men were not going to let him pass. But before he reached for his sword or did anything equally foolish, he made an icy refusal again. Obviously they weren't prepared for this, and confused as to what to do, did not have the courage to force him into the carriage waiting outside.
But as he climbed into his own carriage, he saw they had mounted their horses, and telling his driver to take him to the Piazza di Spagna he made a small plan.
At the Palazzo Sanfredo the carriage slowed to a crawl. It was at the second alleyway beyond that, the little coach all but scraping the walls, that Tonio slipped out, shutting the door quickly, and stood back in the darkness to watch the Count's bravos pass.
Now the moment had come.
He entered the lower door of the palazzo and seeing a torch blazing on the landing, stood still looking up. The stairwell might have been a street, it was so neglected, so cold. And gazing at it, he let his mind empty of thought. He knew what thoughts would be there, too, if he let them in; that for three years, no, four, he had not held a woman in his arms, save this woman. And that he could not escape what lay ahead of him, though in truth he had no idea how it might end.
At one point, he told himself in a low humming inarticulate way that this would be a resolution. He would not find her beautiful; he would not find her sweet. He would be freed of her then.
Yet he did not move.
And he was quite unprepared when the door opened and two Englishmen entered, talking in their native tongue, who immediately greeted him in a convivial way. They seemed positively in awe of his height, though they themselves were slightly taller than Italians tended to be. He was mortified. They stared at him because he was hideous, he was perfectly sure of it, and coldly he watched them go up the stairs.
It occurred to him that if there had been a mirror near about he might have looked in it and found the overgrown child he saw now and then; or perhaps once and for all a monster. He was musing. Sadness was coming over him, weakening him, and it occurred to him that it would be so easy for him to go to the Count tonight and this girl, then finally insulted by him, would shun him from now on.
He was slightly amazed when he put his foot on the first step and went up.
The door to her studio was open, and the first thing that he saw was the firmament, a pure heaven of blackness and vivid stars.
The room itself was vast and barren and unlit, and there were these great windows reaching high above him, straight forward and to his right, and a broad slanted pane of glass set into the ceiling which opened up even more of the night.
His steps sounded hollow; and for a moment he felt himself losing the surety of his balance, as though the sky surrounding this little pinnacle of earth in the midst of Rome were moving as it might about a listing ship.
But the stars were wondrous to him. He could see the constellations in magnificent clarity, and he allowed himself in this long moment to breathe deeply of the cool fresh air which came from all about him, and to turn very slowly under the heavens, as if he had nothing to fear in the world, and he felt himself suddenly small and very free.
It was only after this that the objects of the room revealed themselves, a table, chairs, and paintings mounted on their easels with dark figures described against whiteness, and clusters of bottles and jars, the smell of turpentine cutting through ever so suddenly the deeper more delicious smell of painters' oils.
And then he saw her, Christina, shrouded in shadow as she stood against the farthest corner of the windows, her head covered with the loose folds of a hood.
A fear gripped him, as debilitating as any he had ever known. And all the difficulties he had envisioned came to plague him: what would he say to her, how would they begin, and what was to pass between them, what was taken for granted, why were they both here?
He felt a tremor in his limbs, and glad of the darkness, he bowed his head. Sorrow was coming into this lofty open room; sorrow was walling it up and extinguishing the night itself. It seemed to him then this girl was too innocent and the memory of her beauty collected in his mind to form an almost ethereal shape.
But in reality a dark mysterious form approached him, and out of this hollow place came her voice saying his name.
"Tonio," she said, as though some intimacy already connected them, and he found himself touching his own lip as he heard her speak, her voice low and almost sweet.
He could see her face now under the hood, and the hood itself struck some note of terror as if reminding him of those friars forever accompanying the condemned to the scaffold, and he reached out, easily closing the gulf between them, and pushed the hood down from her hair.
She didn't move away. She wasn't afraid. Not even when his fingers caught in her stiff waves, forcing the gathered strands apart, and closed on the back of her head. She came near.
And suddenly rising on tiptoe, she gave her whole young body to him under its wrapping of thin wool and lace, and he felt the buttery softness of her little chin, her lips so innocent they had no hardness, no skill for the kissing, and then felt her tenderness dissolved suddenly as her body was shot through with the most palpitating desire.
It invaded him, it infected all of his limbs, his mouth drawing it up out of her lips and the warm sweet flesh of her throat and then from the roundness of the tops of her covered breasts.
He stopped, pressing her head to him so hard he might have hurt her, and then it seemed he buried his face in her hair, lifting it in glancing handfuls that even in this dark wintry room gave off their glints of yellow. He felt the tiny tendrils on his face, and stopping again, he let out a soft sound to the air.
She drew back and, taking his hand, led him to another room.
Even her fingers felt strange to him and precious, sheathed in that soft liquid flesh. He caught her hand and put it to his mouth.
A bed was before them, set against the far wall, a distant jumble of shrouded furnishings surrounding it, as if the room itself were never used.
"Candles," he whispered to her. "Light."
She stood still as if she didn't understand. And then shook her head.
"No, let me see you," he whispered, and drawing her up again on her toes, he tossed her very lightly up and caught her so that he was holding her eye to eye. Her hair fell forward as if to conceal them both and for a moment, he did nothing except feel the trembling inside himself, and her little tremors passing into his own.
Carrying her cradled in one arm, he was barely conscious of latching the door. And finding a small candelabrum, he brought it with him up into the bed itself, which he closed all around, its heavy velvet curtains giving off the thick smell of clean dust. And then as he struck the match and touched the flame to one candle, and another and another, the light filled up this entire little room of drapery and softness, and she was kneeling there in front of him, her face a marvel of lovely contrasts, her eyes that smoky blue with dark gray lashes that were wet as if she'd been crying, and her lips a virgin pink that had never been rouged. And now quite by surprise, he saw her dress beneath the black cloak she wore was that exquisite violet silk casting its ethereal glow on her cheeks, giving her rounded breasts a preternatural whiteness as, mounded above the ruffles of her bodice, they seemed almost to glow. Violet tinged the edges of her, made the palest shadows in her cheeks that were covered with the tenderest white down.
But though he saw all of this in a glance, it was her expression which went to his soul. And it frightened him, quickened his already driving pulse, because he perceived in the flesh a spirit harbored there as steely and as fierce as his own. She was not afraid of him; she was enrapt and brave and full of will, and she reached out now and, catching the candles, implored him with her eyes to blow them out.
"No..." he whispered. He reached out and hesitated, wanting to touch her face. How much easier it was to touch the rest of her in the dark; then his fingers felt that faint white down, and the flesh under it which made him grimace as if with pain. And then her face lost its seriousness; the smoky eyebrows, caught in their frown, became long and like strokes of the pencil above her radiant eyes. And the tears rose, blurring and magnifying the blue color and holding it as if afraid to flow.
He snuffed the lights, and drawing back the curtains on the dim illumination of the room, turned to her, mad for her, and even as she shrank back, alerted by his urgency, he stripped off her silk and ruffles and saw her breasts fall free.
She gave out a little cry. She struggled against him and again he caught her up and held her with kisses, feeling her teeth suddenly behind her lips, and the melting softness of that flesh just above her lip, turning her, tilting her so that it was not a mouth any longer but some little portal alive with malleable flesh.
Then he let his own clothes drop around him, crushed under them both, and mounting her, lay down low between her legs, his head against her breasts.
Passion was coarsening him, it was driving the sight and scent of her together before him, and as he closed his mouth on her, first one nipple and then the other, he felt her stiffen under him, and pulling up his knees, he pulled her up too, as if trying to keep her safe for the moment from himself.
Her hair fell over his naked shoulders; her forehead was a warm stone against his cheek; and the hotness of her breasts, swollen and melting against him, was all his dreams made material, and it was sweetness, sweetness and yielding that she was, and unable to draw it out, to have her forever in all her secret parts like a flower broken open petal by petal to his fingers, he had to have her now.
He felt her struggle as he suddenly pinned her down. She stiffened and he quieted her with his lips, his hand approaching the wet hair between her legs.
And when she cried out very softly in fear, he held back waiting, waiting, touching that secret flesh there and feeling it grow fuller, its pungent smell rising right to his brain.
She was enfolding him with her arms, drowning herself in him and then finally she lifted her hips and he drove into her, feeling that tightness snap against him, his body now beyond his command. And it was then on the brink of his endurance that he felt the barrier of her innocence and went straight to ecstasy.
She was crying. Clinging to him, she was crying, with one small hand lifted to wipe the wet strands of hair from her face. He sat up in the bed, his arm anchoring her, his eyes staring down at her small bent form under the shower of her hair, and he felt as he lifted her face, he would die if she were to pull away.
"I didn't mean to hurt you..." he whispered. "I didn't know..."
But her little mouth opened to him as giving as before.
Her naked limbs, helpless, a collection of fragrant shadows and shapes cleaved to him, and there on the sheet lay the dark stain of her virginal blood.
And though he spoke to her again softly, comforting her, enfolding her with language and kisses, he heard these words of his as if they were outside of himself and far far away. He was simply and madly in love with her. She belonged to him. The sight of the blood on the sheets pushed every other rational thought out of his mind. She was his and she had been no other man's before, and he felt madness, he felt lust; he felt the course of his life shaken and obscured like a thin road winding north over an earthquake, and he felt terrified, and that absolutely blind necessity to make her feel pleasure came over him as he had watched it come over the Cardinal in those first confusing nights only months ago.
Months ago! It seemed years; that was as distant and fantastical under the moon of time as Venice had become.
He wanted to take her again now. He would show her such skill and gentleness, now, that all her pain would melt away like the blood flowing between her legs, he would kiss that spot and all the silky flesh between her thighs and under her arms, and under the heaviness of her white breasts, and he would give her not what any man might give her, but all the secrets of his patience and his skill, the frankincense and the wine of all those other nights spent lapping love for love's sake when there was not this precious one, this trembling one, this vulnerable one in his arms.
Mystery, mystery, he whispered, and the pounding in him commenced.
2
WHEN HE AWOKE at ten in the morning in his own bed in the palazzo, he quickly set to work at warming his voice with Paolo in a series of difficult duets. Then he dressed in his favorite gray velvet coat and tapestried vest, snow-white lace, and his heaviest sword, and went immediately to the Via del Corso, where his carriage came up alongside that of Christina and he slipped into her compartment as stealthily as he could.
She was a vision, and he set upon her, kissing her roughly, and would have taken her right there in the carriage if he could have persuaded her.
Her hair was warm, full of a cooked fragrance from the morning sun, and as she squinted ever so slightly, her dark lashes made her eyes seem all the
more translucently blue and lovely. He touched the edge of her lashes with the insides of his fingers. He found himself in love with her slightly pouty and full lower lip.
But if he let it, the sadness would come over him again, and when he felt that, he stopped kissing her and just held her. He'd lifted her onto his lap; he cradled her in his right arm; her hair spilled down a shower of corn yellow over him and then her face took on that beguiling look of innocence and seriousness, generously mixed, and he said her name to her for the first time:
"Christina." Mocking, he tried to say it as the English said it, the way she said it, making the sound a solid block, his face scowling, but then he couldn't and he said it as an Italian, the tongue in the front of the mouth so that all the air passed through the syllables: it sang.
She laughed, the most mercurial laugh.
"You didn't tell anyone I was there last night," he demanded suddenly.
"No, but why shouldn't I tell anyone?" she asked.
The little treble of her voice, demanding such respect, magnetized him. It was almost impossible to pay attention to her words.
"You're young and foolish and don't know the world, obviously," he said. "I won't leave you the worse for it. I couldn't bear the thought of it. And you have no care for yourself."
"And are you leaving me so soon?" she asked.
He felt himself stunned by the question; he wondered if his face betrayed his feeling. But he could concentrate on nothing now except that he was near her, holding her in his arms.
"Then let me frighten you away from me once and for all," she said. "Let me tell you how little I care for the world."
"Hmmmm..." He was trying desperately to listen. But she was too totally appetizing and the pertness with which she said her words was so especially delicious. Determination emanated from her as if she were really a human being and not some luscious creature, for surely she couldn't be human, and such loveliness couldn't harbor a brain.
No, this was nonsense, it was only that all of her was so inviting, and yet she was chirping so clearly and fiercely with intelligence.