Cry to Heaven (24 page)

The Maestro was beside himself. He was furious. He stared stupefied as the doors closed.

Then he seated himself at his desk, gathered up Tonio’s papers into a black leather folio cover, and shoved them to the side angrily.

Guido gestured for a moment’s patience.

Tonio had not moved, and when he did finally turn to face the Maestro, his face had a studied look of sheer emptiness. Only the red glimmer of his eyes betrayed him.

But Maestro Cavalla was too insulted, too outraged, too perfectly angry to sense anything around him.

He regarded the Venetians as utterly ridiculous and was muttering as much under his breath, with the sudden outburst that their lofty statements meant next to nothing. “Banishment! A child!” he stammered.

He emptied Tonio’s purse on the desk, noted the contents, dropped the whole into the top drawer which he locked as a matter of course, and then drew himself up to address Tonio.

“You are now a pupil of this institution,” he commenced, “and due to your advanced age I have consented that you shall for the time being have your own private quarters on the attic floor away from the rest of the castrati. But you shall at once put on the black tunic with the red sash that is worn by all castrati children. In this conservatorio we rise two hours before dawn, and classes are dismissed at eight o’clock in the evening. You will have an hour’s recreation after the noon meal as well as two hours of siesta. As soon as your voice is tested and—”

“But I do not intend to use my voice,” Tonio said quietly.

“What?” The Maestro stopped.

“I do not intend to study singing,” Tonio said.

“What?”

“If you will look at those papers again you will see that I intend to study music, but nowhere does it say that I must study singing….” Tonio’s face had hardened again, though his voice was quavering.

“Maestro, allow me to talk to this boy…” Guido started.

“Nor do I intend to wear any costume,” Tonio continued, “that advertises that I am a…a castrato.”

“What is the meaning of this!” The Maestro rose, his knuckles white as he pressed them to the desk.

“I shall study music…keyboard, string, composition, whatever you put me to study, but I will not study singing!” Tonio said. “I will not now, nor will I ever sing! And I will not be costumed like a capon.”

“This is madness!” The Maestro turned on Guido. “Is there no one from that marshland in the north who is not out of his senses! Why in the name of God did you consent to have yourself castrated! Get the physician!” he said to Guido.

“Maestro, the boy’s been cut, please allow me to reason with him.”

“Reason with him!” The Maestro glared at Tonio. “You are under my care and my authority,” he said, and reaching out for the neatly folded black uniform that lay on the desk beside him, he thrust it at Tonio. “And you will put on the official dress of a castrato.”

“I will never. I will obey in all else, but I will not sing and I will never wear that costume.”

“Maestro, dismiss him, please,” Guido said.

As soon as Tonio had left, the Maestro slumped back in his chair.

“What is happening here?” he demanded. “I have two hundred students under this roof, I do not intend to—”

“Maestro, let the boy enroll in the general program, and allow me please to reason with him.”

The Maestro said nothing for a while. Then when his temper had cooled, he asked, “You have heard this boy sing?”

“Yes,” Guido answered. “More than once.”

“And what sort of voice is it?”

Guido was considering. “When you are alone, and you are reading a new score, and you shut your eyes for a moment to hear it sung perfectly…it is that voice which you hear in your head.”

The Maestro absorbed this. Then he nodded. “All right, reason with him. And if that fails, I shall not be ordered around by a Venetian patrician.”

T
HIS WAS A NIGHTMARE
, yet it was impossible to wake up or get out. It went on and on, and every time he opened his eyes he was still there.

Two hours before dawn, the first bell sounded. He sat upright as if jerked by a chain, sweating, staring out into the black sky with its wealth of stars drifting slowly down into the sea, and for a moment—for a moment—there was that ineffable beauty like a hand laid on his head.

It was not possible that this was happening to him, that he was in this low-ceilinged room five hundred miles from Venice, that this had been
done
to him.

He rose, washed his face, staggering into the corridor, and with the other thirty castrati filing out of the dormitory descended the stone stairway.

Two hundred pupils moved like termites through these corridors, somewhere a little child was crying—little whimpering, despairing cries—and all found without a word their place at harpsichords, cellos, study tables.

The house came alive with shrill sounds, each fragment of melody caught up in the general dissonance. Doors slammed. He struggled to listen to the Maestro, his vision blurred, the man’s words ripping fast through concepts he could barely grasp, the other students dipping their pens; he plunged into the exercise on the barest faith that it might yield itself to him as he scribbled.

And seated finally at the keyboard, he played until his back ached, the day’s pressures and miseries alleviated for these few sweet hours when he was doing what he knew how to do, and
had always known how to do, and just for this little while he was on a par with those boys his age who, if they had not been here since early childhood, had been admitted late only on account of their immense skill and talent.

“You do not even know how to hold a violin? You have never played a violin?” He struggled to draw the bow across the strings without that dissonant screech. His shoulders ached so badly, he hunched forward from time to time, no matter how sharp the tongues that ate at him, the switch coming down on the music stand before him.

If he could only for one minute fall into the music, feel it uplift him, but this is not part of the nightmare; in this nightmare music is noise, music is penance, music has become two hammers at the temples. He felt the sharp cut of the switch across the back of his hand and stared at the welt, the feeling reverberating throughout his body, the welt seeming to have a life of its own as it rose.

Then the breakfast table. Bowls of steaming hot food that nauseated him. All had turned to sand on his tongue as if the slightest pleasure must be denied him. He refused to sit with the other castrati; he asked politely, softly, for another place.

“You will sit
there
.” He stepped back in the face of the advancing figure, the fist nudging his shoulder, the peremptory “You will sit there.”

He felt his face burning, burning. It was impossible for flesh to contain this fire. All the eyes of this silent room dusting him gently—“the Venetian prince,” he understood that much of their Neapolitan dialect—everyone knowing exactly what had been done to him,
that he was one of them
, these bowed heads, these mutilated bodies, these
things
that were not and would never be men.

“Put on the red sash!”

“I will not!”

This is not happening. None of it is happening. He wanted to rise suddenly and go out-of-doors, into the garden, but even that simple freedom of motion was forbidden here, silence locking each boy to the bench in his proper place, though beside him there came that contemptuous whisper, “Why don’t you take the sash and wad it into your breeches, Signore, then no one will know!” He turned suddenly. Who had spoken
those words? Those mocking and devious smiles gave way suddenly to blank faces.

Guido Maeffeo’s door opened. He stepped inside. Blessed silence, if even for two hours he had to stare at that cold unfeeling face, those vicious eyes! The gelded master of the gelded. And worst of all, he
knew
, he
knew
exactly what had been done, that this is nightmare. He knows behind that insensible mask of anger.

“
Why do you stare at me?
”

Why do you think I stare at you, I stare at you because I am a monster and you are a monster and I want to see what it is I will become!

Why didn’t he strike Tonio? What was he waiting for? What lay behind that fixed expression of cruelty, all about the man being so much a mixture of fascination and allure, why is it that I cannot stop looking at him, though I cannot endure looking at him? Once when he was a child, Tonio’s mother had slapped him over and over again, stop crying, stop crying, what in God’s name do you want of me, stop! Looking at Guido Maffeo, he thought, I understand this for the first time. I cannot endure your questioning of me, leave me alone!

In this room for now, please, God, leave me alone.

“Sit quietly then. Watch. And listen.”

He brings this white-faced eunuch monster into the room. I do not even want to hear this, this is torture. And he commences with his instructions, he is no fool, this one, he is better perhaps than all the rest put together, but he will never, never teach me.

And at eight o’clock when the last bell sounded, going up the stairs so tired he could scarce lift one foot in front of the other, he fell down, down, down, into the nightmares within the nightmare. Please, just this one night, let me not dream. I am so tired. I cannot do battle in my own sleep, I will go mad.

There is someone outside the door again. He rose on his elbow. Then snatched it open so that the boy, surprised, could not get away. And there are two of them. They press forward as if they would come into this room. “Get away from me,” he snarled.

“We only want to see the Venetian prince who is too good to wear the red sash.”

Laughter, laughter, laughter.

“I am warning you, back away.”

“Oh, come now, you are not very friendly, it is not very gracious of you to let us stand at the door….”

“I am warning you….”

“Oooh? And how is that?”

Both of them were staring at the stiletto. The taller one, already monstrous with those thin dangling arms, laughed nervously. “Does the Maestro know you have that?”

He shoved hard against this one with his left hand suddenly, and the two of them, off balance, scuttle out of the room with that same eerie laughter. Even the sound of the speaking voice is not natural, it has a shrillness to it if you do not control it, pitch it down. So there is that too. He can envision a time, suddenly, when he will not even speak aloud.

He pulled at the heavy frame of the bed. At first it didn’t move, but then, as if ripped free, it slid on the bare floor, so that he might shove it up against the door, and only then fall down again into sleep.

But the sky was red suddenly, he’d seen it from the corner of his eye, and imagination told him there had been a faint sound. It seemed he heard movement throughout the building, and then advancing to the window, he saw it was the mountain in the distance on fire.

There are always two nightmares:

The first.

You are running in that
calle
and you get away. When the hands go to draw you back, you throw yourself forward and hit the quais, but then you roll into the water and you are safe. You are swimming like a rat, silently, swiftly, through the water as they run helplessly on the bank. You are terrified. But you get away! You are throwing everything into trunks and packing cases, and rushing down the steps out of the palazzo, out of Venice, you have gotten away.

And then that awful realization, that slow dawning that cracks through the darkness of the dream, that you are asleep, this is not real, it is the other that is real, you are dreaming!

This has really happened, and oh, how you played into their hands! Singing, singing, singing, it is almost possible for a moment to hear your voice echoing up those damp walls, amplified
beyond your wildest expectations, almost possible to hear it without deafening rage.

The second dream:

They
are still there. You’ve still got them between your legs because they have grown back. Or is it that they did not cut them away properly? A little part of it was left and from that the whole has grown back. They have made a terrible error. On any account
they
are still there, and a physician is explaining all this to you, matter of fact, yes, it does happen in these cases where it was not cleanly done, yes, they have completely come back, examine them for yourself if you like.

He sat in the dark. He did not remember having left the warm cleft of the bed, but he is at the window, feeling the salt breeze from the sea as it stirs the heat which is trapped beneath this low-slung ceiling. It horrified him suddenly that he could touch the roof over his head, but then he collapsed with his arms folded on the sill, the tumbling-down lights of the city a blur. Listen. Listen. There was some distant rhythm as if from a tavern. Or street singers here, wandering these low slopes. He opened his mouth as if gulping for air, and closed his eyes.

Dreams again.

It is summer and a heat like this hangs in all the great empty rooms of the palazzo. He counts the panes in the windows, there are some forty panes to a window, and he is lying naked with his mother, she having stripped off everything above her waist so that her lovely breasts are exposed, the heat tracing her damp tresses against her forehead and her cheek. She stirs, she turns over towards him, the down mattress giving with a groan, and she lifts him on his side, and draws him in so that he feels the very definite heat of her breasts against his naked back, her lips raising the hairs on the nape of his neck.

Ooooooh, God, nooooooo, you are dreaming!

The bell sounds.

It begins again.

“Put on the red sash!”

“I will not!”

“Do you want to be whipped for this?”

I do not want anything.

Why is there never a dream like this:—that I have him in my hands, that he cannot get away from me, and that I may do
to him what he has done to me,
done to me
—where is that dream?

“What is it you hope to gain by this?” Guido Maffeo was walking back and forth. “Talk to me, Tonio! Speak to me. You have admitted yourself to this place, I did not admit you! What is it you must accomplish by this, this silence, this…”