Cry to Heaven (6 page)

How long did it go on? Two hours, three? Tonio lay in bed later clinging to every syllable, every bit of laughter. Afterwards they had gone into the parlor again, and for the first time in his life, Tonio had sung for his father. Alessandro sang, too, and then they had shared coffee and slices of fresh melon, and a lovely elaborate ice was brought in to be divided on little silver plates, and his father had offered a pipe of tobacco to Alessandro and even suggested that his young son sample it.

Andrea looked ancient in this company, the translucent skin of his face so drawn that the skull showed its shape through it; yet the eyes, timeless, softly radiant, were as ever in sharp contradiction to the picture. Nevertheless, his mouth moved at times with an uncertain quiver, and when he rose to bid Alessandro farewell, he did so as if the exertion were painful to him.

It must have been midnight before the company was gone. And with the same slow and careful movement, Andrea followed Tonio to his rooms, where he had never been save when Tonio was ill. And standing almost ceremoniously in the bedchamber, inspected all with obvious approval.

He seemed too immense for this place, too grand, and hovered like a pool of shimmering purple light in the midst of it.

The candle made a melting glow of his thin white hair that seemed to float about his face as if there were no weight to it.

“You are quite the gentleman, my son,” he said, but there was no reproach in it.

“Forgive me, Father,” Tonio whispered. “Mamma was ill and Alessandro—”

His father stopped him with a very slight gesture.

“I’m pleased with you, my son,” he said. And if there were any other thoughts in his mind, he concealed them.

But as Tonio lay on the pillow, he felt an agonizing agitation. He could find no place to rest his limbs. His legs and his arms tingled.

This simple supper had been so like his dreams, his fantasies in which his brothers came to life. Even his father had come to the table. And now that it was over, he was aching inside, and nothing could soothe him.

Finally, when the clocks struck the hour of three throughout the house, he rose, and slipping a taper and a sulphur match into his pocket, neither of which he would really need, he went to roaming.

He wandered through the upper floors, into Leonardo’s old rooms where his bed stood like a skeleton, and to the apartments where Philippo had lived with his young bride, leaving behind nothing but faded patches on the walls where there had been pictures. He went into the small study where Giambattista’s books still stood on the shelves, and then, out past the servants’ rooms, he went up onto the rooftop.

The city lay under a mist, rendering it visible but touched with a special beauty. The dark tile roofs glistened with the damp, and the light of the piazza glared against the sky rosy and even in the distance.

Odd thoughts came to him. Who would be his wife? The names and faces of cousins in convents meant nothing to him; but he envisioned her lively and sweet, and throwing back her veil to give out a secretive and passionate laughter. She would never be sad; melancholy wouldn’t touch her. And together they would give great balls; they would dance all night; they would have strong sons, and in the summer they would go with all the great families to a villa on the Brenta. Even her old aunts and unmarried cousins could come to live in this house,
her uncles, brothers; he would make room for them. And the wallpaper would go up, and the new draperies. And the knives would scrape at the mold on the murals. And never would there be any place empty or cold, and his sons would have friends, dozens of friends forever coming and going with their tutors and nurses. He saw scores of such children poised for the minuet, their coats and frocks a medley of splendid pastel silks, the house tinkling with music. He would never leave them alone, his children. No matter how busy he was with affairs of state, he would never, never leave them alone like this, in this vast empty house, he would never….

And these thoughts were still in his head as he wandered back down the stone steps and entered the chill air of his mother’s apartments.

Now he lit his match, with a sharp strike on the sole of his shoe, and touched it to the little candle.

But she lay so sound asleep nothing could disturb her. Her breath was bitter when he drew near, yet her face was so perfectly innocent in its miraculous smoothness. He stood for the longest time watching her. He saw the point of her small chin, the pale slope of her throat.

And blowing out the candle, he climbed into bed beside her. She was warm under the covers. She drew close to him, her hand working around his arm as if to cling to it.

And as he lay there, he dreamed dreams for her.

He saw the fashionable ladies at mass; he saw the cavalieri serventi. But it was no good.

And with a vague horror he conceived of the whole of her life passing slowly before him. He saw its loneliness without hope, he saw its gradual ruin.

After a long time, she gave a little moan in her sleep. And it deepened slowly.

“Mamma,” he whispered. “I’m here. I’m with you.”

She struggled to sit up, and her hair fell down around her in a nasty veil of glinting light and tangles.

“Hand me the glass, my darling, my treasure,” she said.

He took the cork from the bottle. And then he watched her drink and settle back. And wiping the hair from her forehead, he rested a long time on his elbow just looking at her.

*  *  *

The next morning, he could scarcely believe it when Angelo announced that from now on they would take an hour’s stroll every day in the piazza. “Except when the carnival comes, of course!” he added crossly. And then he said with a little uncertainty and belligerence as if he didn’t quite approve: “Your father says you are old enough for that now.”

A
FTER HIS BRIEF MOMENTS
with the young maestro, Guido had either put on a badge for all to see or the cataracts had been removed from his eyes, for the world was alive with seduction. Each night, lying awake he could hear the sounds of lovemaking in the dark. And at the opera house women plainly smiled at him.

Finally one evening as the other castrati prepared for bed, he retreated to the far end of the attic hallway. The night concealed him, as fully dressed he sat with one leg on the deep windowsill. An hour passed, it seemed, or perhaps less, and then shadowy figures began to emerge, doors opened and shut, the moonlight showed him Gino with a finger crooked in invitation.

In the snug clean alcove of the linen closet, Gino gave him the longest, the most lush embrace. It seemed all night they lay on a bed of folded sheets as pleasure came in dizzying surges that were over and over again allowed to wane, then resurrected to be protracted forever. Gino’s skin was creamy and sweet; his mouth was strong and his fingers afraid of nothing. He played gently with Guido’s ears, he hurt the nipples of his chest just a little, and kissed the hair between his legs, only
working with the greatest patience towards the more brutal emblems of passion.

In the nights after, Gino shared his new companion with Alfredo and then Alonso; and sometimes in the dark, they lay tangled two or three together. The embrace of one above and another underneath was not uncommon, and as Alfredo’s sharp jabs pushed Guido to the edge of pain, Alonso’s hard, ravenous mouth drew him into ecstasy.

But the day came when Guido was lured out of these exquisitely modulated encounters for the more violent and unloving thrusts of the “regular” students. He was not afraid of whole men, never guessing how much his menacing looks had always kept them at a distance.

Yet he did not like these hairy and grunting young men very much either.

There was something brutal and simple about them that was finally uninteresting.

He wanted eunuchs, toothsome and delicious experts of the body.

Or he wanted women.

And as might happen, or might not, it was with women he found the greatest approximation of satisfaction. It was approximate only because he did not love. Otherwise it was engulfing. Little girls of the streets, poor, never clever, these were his favorites, girls delighted with the golden coin, and very fond of his boyish looks and thinking his clothes and his manner splendid. He stripped them quickly in lodgings let for the purpose over local taverns, and they never cared he was a eunuch, hoping for a little tenderness perhaps; and if not, he never saw them again for there were always others.

But as his fame increased, doors opened to Guido everywhere. After suppers at which he’d sung, lovely ladies spirited him upstairs to secret chambers.

He grew accustomed to the silk sheets, the gilded cherubs cavorting above oval mirrors and frothy canopies.

And by his seventeenth year, he had a lovely contessa, twice married and very rich, for a secret and sometime mistress. Often her carriage collected him at the stage door. Or after hours of practice he would throw open the windows of his attic room, to see it lumbering below beneath the heavy tree branches.

She was old to him then, past her prime, but hot and full of tantalizing urgency. In his arms, she blushed scarlet to the nipples of her breasts, her eyes half mast, and he felt himself transported.

These were rich times, blissful times. Guido was almost ready for Rome and his first lead role there. At eighteen, he stood five feet ten inches tall, with the lung power to fill a vast theater with the chilling purity of his unaccompanied voice.

And that was the year he lost his voice forever.

T
HE PIAZZA
, it was a small victory, but for the next few days Tonio was ecstatic. The sky seemed a limitless blue, and all up and down the canal the striped awnings were aflutter in the warm breeze, and the window boxes crowded with fresh spring flowers. Even Angelo seemed to enjoy himself, though he looked frail in his thin black cassock, and slightly uncertain. He was quick to point out that all Europe was pouring in for the coming Senza. Everywhere they turned, they heard foreign voices.

The cafés, sprawling out of their small shabby rooms into the arcades, were aswarm with rich and poor alike, the serving girls moving to and fro in their short skirts and bright red vests, their arms deliciously naked. One glimpse and Tonio felt a hardening passion. They were unspeakably lovely to him with their ribbons and curls, their stockinged ankles well exposed, and if ladies dressed like that, he thought, it would mean the end of civilization.

Each day he pushed Angelo to stay a little longer, to roam a little farther.

Nothing, it seemed, could match the piazza itself for common spectacle; there were the storytellers under the arches of the church gathering their attentive little crowds, patricians in full robes, while ladies, free of the black
vesti
they always wore to feast day church, roamed about in lavish printed-silk fashions; even the beggars had their dim fascination.

But there was also the Merceria, and pulling Angelo with him under the clock tower with the golden lion of San Marco, Tonio was soon hurrying through this marble-paved street where all the trades of Venice mingled. Here were the lacemakers, the jewelers, the druggists, the milliners with their extravagant hats full of fruits and birds, the great French doll got up with the latest Paris creation.

But even the simple things delighted him, and he pushed on into the Panetteria full of bakeries, the fish markets of the Pescheria, and reaching the Rialto bridge, wandered among the greengrocers.

Of course Angelo wouldn’t hear of stopping in a café or tavern; and Tonio found himself famished for cheap meats and bad wine, simply because it all looked so exotic.

He was trying, however, to be clever.

Everything would come in time. Angelo never seemed so much the dried husk of a young man as he did now that he was shorter than his impetuous charge and easily led, when he didn’t have time to think, into some new devilment. Snatching a gazette from a hawker on the street, Tonio was able to read a considerable amount of gossip in it before Angelo realized what he was doing.

But it was the bookseller’s that held the strongest lure for Tonio. He could see the gentlemen gathered inside, with their coffee and wine, hear the occasional eruptions of laughter. Here the theater was discussed, people were debating the merits of the composers of the coming operas. There were foreign papers for sale, political tracts, poetry.

Angelo tugged him along. Sometimes they wandered to the very middle of the square, and Tonio, turning round and round, felt himself delightfully adrift in the shifting crowds, now and then startled by the flapping of the rising pigeons.

If he thought of Marianna at home behind the closed draperies, he would start crying.

*  *  *

They’d been going out for four days of this, each more entertaining and exciting than the one before, when they glimpsed Alessandro, and a small event occurred that was to pitch Tonio into consternation.

He was delighted to see Alessandro, and when he realized Alessandro was heading right for the bookseller’s, he saw his opportunity. Angelo couldn’t even catch up with him, and in minutes he was inside the cluttered little shop itself in the thick of tobacco smoke and the aroma of coffee, lightly touching Alessandro’s sleeve to get his attention.

“Why, Excellency.” Alessandro embraced him quickly. “How fine to see you today,” he said. “And where are you going?”

“Only following you, Signore,” Tonio said, suddenly feeling very young and ridiculous. But Alessandro, with a fluid courtesy, immediately told him how much he’d enjoyed their recent supper. And it seemed the conversation went on spiritedly around them so Tonio felt comfortably anonymous. Someone was talking of the opera, and this Neapolitan singer, Caffarelli. “The greatest in the world,” they said. “Do you agree with that?”

Then someone very distinctly said the name Treschi, and again, Treschi, but coupled with the first name Carlo.

“Aren’t you going to introduce us?” came the man’s voice again. “This is Marc Antonio Treschi, it must be.”