Cry to Heaven (25 page)

I cannot bear this. I cannot stand still for this, these faces puffed with anger.
I beg you not to whip him, if you will only leave this to me. But I’ve left it to you and he has stubbornly refused…

“Put it on.”

“I will not.”

The first lash, this is a pain you must defend yourself against, but you cannot defend yourself, and the second, this is more than anyone can endure, and the third, and the fourth, and fifth, do not think about it, think of anything else, anywhere else, anything else, anything else.

“Put it on.”

“I will not.”

“Tell me, since you are so learned, my fine little Venetian, what becomes of a eunuch who does not sing?”

They are all in a row at the front gate. They move in double ranks, hands behind their backs, the red sashes dividing the soft black fabric of the tunic perfectly in half, black ribbon at the nape of the neck, all with the right foot out as the gates open. Is it possible that I will pass through this gate with them, that I will walk in this procession with these, these eunuchs, these capons, these gelded monsters?

This is more miserable than being stripped naked, and yet I am moving, I am putting one foot in front of the other, and it seems the very world is made of human beings, walls of people pressing in to get a closer look, and their voices rising, mingling, for the first time they are so beautiful and so sure, these voices rising up, up, in the open air, the very advertisement of it, and everyone who looks at us knows, knows, red sash or no, they know exactly what I am.

This is unendurable, yet it is happening. It is like descriptions of those barbarous executions, you cannot imagine the thoughts or feelings of that one at the center of it, led forward into the crowd, his hands bound so that he cannot even shield his face. All that you are belongs to this world around you, and
yet you stare forward as if this were not happening to you, you pick out the clouds overhead moving so swiftly on the sea breeze, you gaze up at the facade of the church.

Who are these southern Italians, who are they but the world, the entire world!

Leave this place, leave it.

“If you leave here”—that vicious Guido Maffeo, that dark one who knows all about it—“where will you go?”

“I will
not
.”

“Do you want to be expelled!”

And this time as the lashes come, try to think
about
the pain, instead of against it, because there is not one single aspect of life, past, present, or future, that does not tear your reason from you, to think on it. So think about the pain. This pain after all has it limits. You can chart its passage through your body. It has a beginning, middle, end. Imagine if it had a color. This first cut of the lash is what, red? Red, spreading into a brilliant yellow. And this one again, red, red, no yellow, and then white, white, white, white.

“I beg you, Maestro, leave him to me.”

“You will sing or you will be expelled from this school….”

“Where will you go…”

That’s it.
Where will you go?
Why have you incarcerated yourself in this palazzo of torture chambers, why do you not leave this place? Because you are a monster and this is a school for monsters, and if you leave here, then you will be completely, completely alone! Alone with this!

Don’t weep in front of these strangers. Swallow it down. Don’t weep in front of these strangers! Cry to heaven, cry to heaven, cry to heaven.

“W
HAT IS IT
you are attempting to accomplish? Do you even know
yourself
what it is you want to do!”

Guido strode back and forth, his face convulsed with anger. He locked the door of his practice room and put the key in his belt.

“Why did you stab this boy?”

“I did not stab him. He is merely gashed a little, he will live!”

“Yes, this time he will live!”

“He forced his way into my room. He was tormenting me!”

“And what of the next time? Do you know the Maestro has taken away your sword and your stiletto and those pistols you bought, but that won’t stop this, will it?”

“Not if I am tormented, not if I am surrounded by tormentors, no, it will not stop!”

“Don’t you understand? You cannot continue like this. You will be put out of the conservatorio, if you continue like this! Lorenzo might have died from the wound you gave him!”

“Leave me alone.”

“Oh, so that brings tears to your eyes, does it? Say it again, I want to hear it.”

“Leave me alone!”

“I will not leave you alone, I will never leave you alone, not until you sing! Do you think I don’t understand what it is that prevents you? Do you think I don’t know what has happened to you! Good God, are you mad not to realize I risked my life to bring you here when it would have been better for me if I had gotten clear of you and your tormentors? Yet I took you
out of the Veneto, I brought you here, where the emissaries of your government could have sent their bravos to tear me limb from limb out there in the street if they chose.”

“And why did you do it? Did I ask you to do it! What do you want of me, what have you always wanted of me!”

Guido struck him. Before he could stop himself, he had slapped him so forcefully that Tonio staggered backwards, reaching for his head as if he could not see. Guido struck him again. And then with both hands he grabbed hold of him and swung his head against the wall.

Tonio let out a short, guttural gasp. And again Guido’s hand caught him, twisting his head around on his neck.

Guido drew back away from him, his right hand clutching at his left wrist as if he meant to prevent himself from striking Tonio again. He stood with his back to Tonio, leaning over slightly as if trying to close into himself.

Loathing himself, in silence, Tonio could not prevent the tears from flowing, and finally with a slow resignation he withdrew his handkerchief and wiped them roughly away.

“All right, then,” came Guido’s voice, barely audible over his shoulder. “Sit there. Again. And watch.”

The afternoon sun was hot on the stone floor, and on the wall, and moving the bench to where he might rest in the sun, Tonio sat back and shut his eyes.

The first pupil was little Paolo, whose strong voice filled the room like a bright golden bell. He ran up and down the arpeggios with ease, and swelling the notes he infected them with what seemed to be almost joy.

Tonio opened his eyes to see the back of the boy’s brown head. He was drifting into sleep as he listened, and he felt some vague surprise at Guido’s admonitions, and the keen grasp of what the boy had done wrong. Or was it wrong? Guido was saying, I can hear your breath, I can see it, now go through it again more slowly, but do not let out your breath and this time…this time…this time…the little voice rose and fell, those long poignant notes….

And when Tonio awoke again, it was another child, older, this was the castrato voice, wasn’t it, just a shade richer or perhaps harder than that of a boy. Guido was angry. He banged the window shut. The boy was actually gone, and Tonio was
rubbing his eyes. Had the air become cool? The sun was gone, but it was so caressingly warm in this place, and all along the sill of this deep first-story window there fluttered the white flowers of that never-ending vine.

He stood up, his back suddenly shot with pain. What was Guido doing at the window? He could not even see Guido’s head, only the hunch of his shoulders, and some vague movement in the garden beyond, children running, crying out.

Then Guido rose up and it seemed a great sigh rose with him as if it came from all of his heavy limbs, his massive shoulders, his shaggy head.

He turned to Tonio, his face dark against the brightness framed by the arch of the cloister where the sun still lingered at a different angle on the orange trees.

“If you do not change,” he began, “the Maestro di Cappella will dismiss you within one week.” The voice was so low and so raw that Tonio could not have said that it was Guido’s voice, even as it went on. “I cannot prevent it. I have done everything that I can do.”

Tonio stared in vague astonishment. He saw those voluble features that had so often seemed the perfect expression of anger softened into some terrible defeat that he could not understand. He wanted to ask, But why does it matter to you, why must you care for me? Why did you care in Ferrara? Why do you care now? He felt helpless as he had felt that night in Rome in the little monastery garden when this man had so furiously demanded, “Why do you stare at me?”

He shook his head, he tried to speak, but he could not. He wanted to argue that he had studied all else given to him, that he had obeyed rules that were crushing and relentless, why, why…. But he knew why. They demanded only that he be what he was! And they would settle for nothing else.

“Maestro!” he whispered. The words seemed to dry in his throat. “Don’t ask this of me. It is
my
voice, and I cannot give it up to you. It is not yours, no matter how long and far you traveled to bring it back with you, no matter what you endured in Venice to bring it back here for your own purposes! It is mine, and I cannot sing. I cannot! Don’t you understand, what you ask of me is impossible!

“I will never sing again, not for you, not for me, not for anyone!”

*  *  *

It was dark in the room, though outside the cloister the sky was an even purple over the topmost gables of the house. Shadows hung down the four stories of the building into the garden itself, where only here and there a shape distinguished itself, boughs heavy with oranges, and those lilies flickering in the dark, like waxen candles. And here and there, behind the many-paned windows was the glimmer of candles. And from recesses everywhere there came the late-night sounds of the better musicians, those more pounding, constant melodies issuing from instruments on all floors.

It was not cacophony. It was just a great hum, as if this building were alive and humming, and Tonio felt the strangest sense of peace.

Was it possible that he was so weary of anger and bitterness he had let it slip away for a while? He had said, just give me this moment alone? He did not think of Venice, he did not think of Carlo, he did not pull and jerk at all the recesses of his mind where these thoughts lingered. Rather his mind was just a series of empty rooms.

And he felt this peace in this place which would have been so beautiful to him if only he could feel this for it all of the time.

Yes, just for the moment, let go.

Imagine, if you will, that life is still livable, that life is even—well, good. And that if you wanted to, you could, perhaps, approach that instrument that is still lying open, and that seated there, your fingers on the keys, you could, if you wanted to, sing. You could sing of sadness, and you could sing of pain, unspeakable pain, but you could sing. You could do anything that you wanted, really, because all that prevents it has fallen away like scales off a body that is really human, and has been by some inhuman justice rendered monstrous but is now free to return to itself.

He lay with his eyes open, on the narrow bench where sometimes perhaps Guido himself slept in between his arduous sessions, and he thought, yes, imagine all this for as long as you can.

The sky deepened. The garden changed. The orange tree beyond the arch, once full with shadow, had now lost its shape. Nothing could be seen of the fountain, nothing of the white lilies.
And those lights in the windows across the yard had the only clarity now, so many beacons in the dark.

He lay still, wondering that he was being allowed to stay here, wondering that he had been allowed to linger in this empty room and fall into such deep and empty sleep.

And it occurred to him gradually that perhaps with the glass shut and the door closed, he might just go to that harpsichord and lay his hands on it, and he might…But no, if he pushed this too far, he would lose all of it. And again he closed his eyes.

The very thought of his voice was unendurable to him. It was unendurable to him to think even for an instant of those nights roaming through the
calli
of Venice when, so in love with the sound of singing, he had played right into his brother’s hands. And if he did not leave all this, he would be thinking of it again in that obsessive, relentless way, wondering what it was now they said of him, if anyone, anyone, believed that he had done this to himself as the lie had been told.

But that was not it. It was that if he let that voice out of him, if he let it go, it could no longer be the voice of the boy who had sung with such exuberance, it would be the voice of this creature now that would never change. The thought of it was too much; it was like giving in to them, and it was entering into the very nightmare role they had written for him as if this life were an opera, and they had given him this hideous part.

It was shame, shame that he felt at the mere sound of it in his head. Might as well tear open one’s clothes and let them stare at the scars there, that withered empty…

He sucked in his breath and stopped. He was sitting up.

But when he heard the door open, now, he put his hands up to receive his bent head.

He knew that it was Guido who had come in, but he did not know why he knew, and he felt the tug of the real world at him again, ready to pick him up.

He raised his eyes, resigned to surrender himself once more, and he saw that it was the Maestro di Cappella, Signore Cavalla, who was standing in front of him with Tonio’s sword outstretched in both hands. “Take it,” he whispered.

Tonio did not understand. He saw then the stiletto on the
desk, and his pistols, and the purse which had been taken by the Maestro when he first came.

The man’s face was ashen. Its anger was gone. And in the place of it was some awful emotion which Tonio could not identify. He did not understand.

“There is no reason for you to remain longer in this place,” the Maestro said. “I have written to your family at Venice that they must make other arrangements. But you need not remain here any longer. You must get out.”

He stopped. Even in the shadows, Tonio could see that his jaw was trembling. But this was not anger. “Yes. Your trunks have arrived. Your carriage is in the stable yard. You must go.”