Cry to Heaven (29 page)

He seemed perfectly willing to accept Tonio.

Then there was Piero, that blond-haired one from the north of Italy, too, who had hissed so many epithets at Tonio, only to turn his head afterwards as if he hadn’t spoken. He had a better voice, a contralto that might even be great someday, but from what Tonio had heard of him in church he lacked something. Maybe it was passion, maybe it was imagination. He drank the wine now with a slight sneer, and his eyes were cold and suspicious. Yet when Tonio addressed him he seemed to
melt immediately. When Tonio asked him questions, he preened with the answers. So what he wanted was attention.

By the end of this short visit he was attempting to woo Tonio and make an impression upon him, as if Tonio were the elder, which he wasn’t, as though Tonio were his superior.

And lastly, there was the sixteen-year-old Domenico. He was so exquisitely beautiful that he might have passed for either a man or a woman. His chest having expanded from the use of his lungs in singing and the flexibility of his eunuch bones, he had in fact the shape of a woman, with a narrow waist and a flare above it that suggested a bosom. But this was so subtle it could be missed by some. His dark eyelashes and pink lips had such a sheen to them they appeared to have been painted. Of course they weren’t. And on his fingers he wore an assortment of rings that caught the light as he used his hands with deliberate grace in the most languid movements. His black hair he left curled naturally at his shoulders; it was just a little too long. And he didn’t talk at all, which made Tonio realize he had never heard the sound of Domenico’s voice, either in song or speech. It intrigued him. Domenico was just always there looking on. He had seen Lorenzo stabbed with no change of expression.

As he took the bottle of wine now, wiping his lips first with a lace napkin, his eyes fixed on Tonio and their stare was unnerving. He was appraising Tonio in some new light. And Tonio thought, This creature knows so well he is beautiful that he is beyond vanity.

In the coming opera production on the little conservatorio stage, Domenico would play the part of the first woman. And Tonio found himself suddenly fascinated by the prospect of seeing this boy transformed into a girl. He thought of the stays of a corset closing around Domenico’s waist and it actually made him blush so that he lost track of what Giovanni was saying to him.

So he stopped thinking about it. And then the thought that this was a woman in breeches began to unnerve him. He took a little uncomfortable breath. Domenico’s head was slightly to the side. He was almost smiling. In the candlelight his skin looked like porcelain, and he had a little cleft to his chin that suggested a man, which made him all the more confusing.

When they had gone, Tonio sat on the side of the bed thinking.
He blew out the candle and lay down and tried to sleep, and when sleep wouldn’t come right away, he imagined he was on Vesuvius. He felt that trembling earth again; he felt it against his eyelids.

And this became a ritual with him every night for years, the feel of that earth and the rumble of that mountain.

B
UT
T
ONIO HAD
no real need to induce sleep after this first evening.

The next morning, though he was still bruised from the night on the mountain, he awoke in exceptional humor. He was to start his studies with Guido immediately.

Even the colors and the scents of the conservatorio rather appealed to him. There was in particular a fragrance which he associated with wood instruments that seemed to linger in the hallways, and he liked it. He liked the sounds of the practice rooms coming alive.

And enjoying a somewhat plain breakfast, especially the fresh milk, he found himself just a little entranced with the early morning stars which he could just see over the wall from the refectory window.

The air was almost silky, he was thinking. It had an inviting warmth. You felt you could have walked outdoors naked.

And it was exhilarating to him to be awake so early.

Even Guido Maffeo looked good to him.

The Maestro was at his harpsichord, making notes with his pen, and it appeared he’d been working for hours. His candle had burned low; the darkness was turning to mist outside his
window; and settling back to wait at a bench against the wall, Tonio for the first time absorbed the details of this little studio.

It was a stone room, its hard floor relieved only by a rush mat. And yet all its furnishings—the harpsichord, high desk, chair and bench—were lavishly painted with floral designs and shining enamel. They seemed vibrant against the cold walls. And the Maestro in his black frock coat and small linen stock looked somber and clerical here, but as if he belonged to all of it.

He was not always so terrible to look at, Tonio was thinking, in fact, he was somewhat handsome. But his expression was so often full of rage, and those brown eyes of his were just a little too large for his face and gave the rest of it a pugnacious quality. But it was altogether such a mobile and expressive face; it was so full of turbulence and caring that Tonio could not help but be fascinated with it.

Yet he could not think of this man in Flovigo, or in Ferrara, or in Rome in that garden where they had embraced. If he thought of these things, Tonio would despise him. So he did not think of them.

Finally the Maestro put down his pen, blew out the candle which had become nothing but a solid little flicker of yellow in the bluish light, and started talking without any formal greeting.

“Your voice is extraordinary. You’ve been told that enough,” he said as if arguing with somebody, “so don’t expect further praise from me until you earn it. But you have gotten by for years doing what you like and what you don’t understand, singing songs well only because you have a perfect ear and you have heard others sing them properly. You shied away from anything you found difficult, taking refuge again and again in what was enjoyable to you, what was easy. So you have no real control over your voice, and you have many bad habits.”

He stopped and ran his right hand back through his brown curly hair as if he hated it. It had the shape of a cherub’s mop in some painting of the last century, luxuriously full and curling upward at the ends; but it looked neglected and slightly dusty.

“And you’re fifteen years old, which is very late to start really singing,” he continued. “But I can tell you right now that
you’ll be ready to perform on any stage in Europe in three years if you do everything that I tell you to do. Whether or not you really want to be a great performer doesn’t matter to me. I don’t care. I’m not asking you. You have a great voice, therefore I’ll train you to be a great performer. I’ll train you for the stage, for the court, for all Europe. And after that you can do what you want with it.”

Tonio was furious. He rose to his full height and advanced on the glowering, flat-nosed figure at the harpsichord.

“You might have asked me why I came back here yesterday!” he said in his haughtiest, coldest manner.

“Don’t ever speak to me like that again,” Guido sneered. “I’m your teacher.”

And without further explanation he presented the first exercise.

They began that day with a simple
Accentus
.

Six notes were shown to Tonio on an ascending scale, “Ut, Re, Mi, Fa, Sol, La.” Then he was presented with a more complicated embroidering upon these notes, so that in singing the whole he was singing a gently ascending melody with little ups and downs, each tone having at least four notes around it, three going up, one coming back down again.

It was to be sung in one breath and each note was to be sung with equal attention. At the same time the vowel sound was to be pronounced perfectly. And the whole was to be absolutely fluid.

And it was to be sung over and over and over again, day after day, in this quiet empty room, without the harpsichord for accompaniment until it ran naturally and evenly like a golden stream from Tonio’s throat with no indication of the breath he had taken at the start of it, or of any breathlessness at the end of it.

The first day Tonio thought he would lose his mind from singing it.

But commencing the second day, certain this monotony was a subtle form of torture, he witnessed a change in himself. It was as if his temper had created a bubble, and at some point in the afternoon the bubble popped. And the peeling of the bubble fell back like the petals of a bud and a great flower rose out of the center.

This flower was a hypnotic attraction to the notes Tonio was singing, a drifting with them, a slow dreamy awareness that each time he started again with the
Accentus
, he was tackling some new and fascinating little aspect of it.

By the end of the first week of this, he lost all track of various problems he solved, he knew only that his voice was changing completely.

Again and again Guido pointed out to him that he had sung Ut and Re and Mi more lovingly than the other tones. Did he love them more? He had to love all equally. And over and over again Guido reminded him
“Legato,”
link them all slowly, perfectly together. Volume didn’t matter. Expression of feeling did not matter. But each tone
must
be beautiful. It is not enough that it be perfectly on pitch (he told Tonio several times almost begrudgingly that he had the gift of singing on perfect pitch, but Alessandro had long ago told Tonio this), the tone must be beautiful in itself like a drop of gold.

Then he sat back and said, “Again, from the beginning,” and Tonio, his vision blurred, his head aching, would start that first note and then glide into it.

But then with some infallible sense, just when Tonio was tingling all over with a desperate exhaustion, Guido would release him from this exercise and send him to the high desk to work out some problems of composition or counterpoint while standing.

“You don’t sit at desks anymore. It’s no good for your chest to be bent over. And you never never do anything that is bad for your voice or your chest,” he said. And Tonio, his legs aching, merely bowed his head, grateful for the chance to let the
Accentus
die out of his head for a little while.

But then would come some younger student to murder it.

He did not know how long he had been singing this elementary passage when Guido finally added two notes at the top and two notes at the bottom, and allowed him to sing the whole faster, and then a little bit faster. It was an event of sorts to have four new notes, and Tonio sarcastically announced that surely he ought to be allowed to get drunk to celebrate.

Guido ignored this.

But again on a hot afternoon when Tonio was on the verge of rebelling, Guido suddenly gave him several arias freshly
written and full of changes and told him he might have the keyboard to accompany himself.

Tonio snatched up these songs before the thanks were out of his mouth. For him it was like plunging into the warm sea under the summer stars. And he had sung the second all the way through before he realized that of course Guido was listening to him. And Guido would tell him in a moment that he was dreadful.

He commenced consciously to try to apply what he had learned from the
Accentus
, and he realized that he had been applying it all along. He was articulating the words of these songs very distinctly but easily; and he had been singing with a new smoothness and control which made his immediate apprehension of the music infinitely easier.

He had his first real sense of power in those moments.

And when he returned to the exercises he was thinking of his voice in terms of power.

It seemed to him late that evening when he was so tired he could not think of his legs or his feet or of a soft pillow without falling over, that he had become something inhuman. He had become a wooden instrument out of which his voice rose as if someone else were playing it. He could feel his voice rising out of him; he could feel its evenness, its smoothness.

He was light-headed by the time he climbed the stairs. And turning over in bed he realized that for at least ten days he had not thought once of any of the things that had happened to him before coming here.

The next morning Guido informed him that due to his excellent progress they would begin with the
Esclamazio
. With any other new pupil, this jump would have been unthinkable, but Guido had ideas of his own about how to proceed.

This was the
Esclamazio:
the slow and perfectly controlled swelling of a note from a soft intoning of it to a louder and louder amplification of it, diminishing slowly to a soft finish. Or it might begin loud, diminish to a soft middle and then build again to a loud finish.

In either case, absolute control was essential. Again volume didn’t matter. Again the tone must be perfectly beautiful. And again days and days would pass during which Tonio performed this exercise over and over again, first on the tone of A, then
on the tone of E, then on the tone of O, before going back and back again to the
Accentus
.

And all this was performed in the quiet, echoing stone chamber of Guido’s study with no accompaniment from the keyboard while the Maestro studied Tonio as if listening to sounds Tonio himself was not hearing.

At times Tonio realized that he despised this man so much that he could have struck him. It gave him pleasure to imagine that he was in fact striking Guido, and this made him ashamed afterwards.

But beneath these quiet peaks of unexpressed anger, Tonio knew that what tortured him truly was the realization that Guido despised him completely.

At first he had told himself, It is the man’s manner; he is barbaric. But Guido was never pleased with him, Guido was rarely polite, and the habitual rudeness seemed always to mask a deeper antipathy and displeasure. There were moments when Tonio felt this scorn from Guido as palpably as if Guido had spoken it aloud, and the past with its unspeakable humiliation threatened to press in on him.

And then, trembling with anger himself, Tonio offered to him the one thing he wanted: the voice, the voice, the voice. While surrendering to sleep afterwards, he combed the day’s experiences for the scantest memory of his teacher’s approval.