Cry to Heaven (40 page)

“…is concerned about you,” Giacomo continued. “He has heard a rumor of trouble here, that you had, shortly after your arrival, made a mortal enemy of another student, that that student made an attack on your person which you were forced to defend.”

Giacomo’s brows came together in a caricature of deep concern; his tone, so pregnant with duty, had become condescending, though there was nothing in him but a tormented sincerity. Ah, youth, Tonio found himself thinking, just as if he were an old man.

But a silence had fallen between them. And Tonio could see the sudden, clear warning in Guido’s face. Guido’s face said Danger.

“Your brother is very concerned that perhaps you are not safe here, Marc Antonio,” said Giacomo. “Your brother is concerned that you did not write of this occurrence to my mother and…”

Yes, danger, Tonio thought, to my heart and my soul. For the first time since he had commenced to speak, Giacomo was again looking him in the eye.

And at some intangible little point in this exchange, Tonio saw the whole of it, what it was about, what was wanted here.
Concerned for his safety! This foolish young man didn’t even guess the nature of his own mission!

“If you are in any danger, Marc Antonio, you must tell us….”

“No danger,” Tonio said suddenly. And the coldness of his own voice astonished him, and yet he went on. “There was never any question of danger,” he said, almost sneering, and his words had such an authority to them that he saw his cousin ever so slightly recoil. “The affair ended stupidly enough, but there was nothing I could do to prevent it. You must tell my brother he worries about nothing, and that he has taken too much trouble and expense in sending you here.”

In the shadowy distance, Guido gave a desperate negative shake of the head.

But Tonio had reached for his cousin’s arm, and taking him firmly in hand, was turning him and leading him towards the front doors.

Giacomo seemed mildly astonished. Far from offended at being dismissed, he was staring at Tonio with a vaguely concealed fascination, and as he spoke now there was almost a relief in his voice.

“Then you are content here, Tonio,” he said.

“More than content.” Tonio gave a short laugh. He moved Giacomo steadily down the corridor. “And you must tell your mother that she is not to worry, as well.”

“But did this boy who attacked you—”

“This boy,” Tonio said, “as you put it, stands now before a sterner judge than you or I. Say a prayer for him at mass. Now it’s Christmas morning, and surely you do not wish to spend it here.”

Giacomo stopped at the door. This was all happening too fast for him. Yet as he hesitated, he could not prevent his eyes from moving rapidly, almost greedily over Tonio, and then he gave a small but very warm smile. “It’s good to see you are so well, Tonio,” he confessed. And it seemed just for a moment he wanted to say more, but thinking the better of it, he looked quickly to the floor. He seemed to grow smaller, to become exactly the boy he’d been at Venice, and Tonio realized silently, without the slightest change of expression, that his cousin was feeling love for him and pain.

“You were always exceptional, Tonio,” Giacomo said, almost
in a whisper, and tentatively he raised his eyes to Tonio’s eyes again.

“And how is that, Giacomo?” Tonio said almost wearily, as though he were bearing all of this, without, however, being the slightest bit rude.

“You were, well…you were always the little man,” Giacomo said, and his manner invited Tonio to understand and to smile at this with him. “You seemed to grow up so quickly, it was as if you were older than us.”

“I didn’t know very much about children.” Tonio smiled.

And when his cousin seemed lost suddenly, Tonio said:

“And you are relieved to see that I have not suffered so far away from home?”

“Oh, very relieved!” Giacomo said.

Then when they looked at each other again, neither moved to look away. The silence lengthened, and the dim wavering light of the sconces made their shadows grow large, then small.

“Goodbye, Giacomo,” Tonio said softly. He held his cousin firmly by both arms.

Giacomo could only stare at him for a moment. Then reaching into his velvet frock coat, he said, “But I have a letter for you, Tonio. I almost forgot. My mother would be so angry!” He put the letter in Tonio’s hands. “And your singing…” he started. “In the chapel. I wish, I wish I knew the language of music so I could tell you what it was like.”

“The language of music is only sounds, Giacomo,” Tonio answered. And without hesitation they embraced.

Guido was lighting the candles when he stepped into the room. And for a long moment, they stood locked in each other’s arms.

But the letter was in Tonio’s hand, and he couldn’t dismiss it from his mind. And when he drew away to sit down with it at the table, he saw for the first time the mingled concern and anger in Guido’s face.

“I know, I know,” Tonio whispered, tearing open the parchment envelope. It bore Catrina’s seal.

“Do you know?” Guido bore down on him, but despite the anger in his voice, his hands were caressing. And he pressed his lips to Tonio’s head. “Your brother sent him here to see to
your spirit!” he whispered. “Couldn’t you have played the shy, diffident little student just this once?”

“Shy, diffident eunuch,” Tonio answered. “Say it, for that is what you mean. And I will not play it for anyone. I cannot! So let him go back to Venice and tell my brother what he will. Good God, he heard me singing with children and angels, did he not? He saw the
obedient
student, the
obedient
gelding, was that not enough?”

The letter was indecipherable before his eyes in the dim light. He had vowed a thousand times never to speak of these things to any living being, not to the priest in the confessional, not anyone, but had he been a fool to think that Guido had never guessed? And sitting still, the letter flat on the table beneath his hand, he could all but feel the weight of Guido’s unspoken words as he saw the shadow of Guido moving slowly back and forth across the room.

It seemed an age he sat there after he had finished.

Then he read it again. And when he was finished this time, he lifted it, holding it to the cool flame of the candle until the fire burned hotter, the parchment crackled, was consumed, and turned to ash.

Guido was watching him. Yet it seemed all the familiar furnishings of this room were alien to him. He felt contained and cold and part of nothing. And as he looked at Guido, it was as if he did not know this man with whom he’d only just been quarreling, this man whose lips he could still feel on his own. He did not know him, nor why they were both of them here.

He looked away, coldly aware of the effect of his expression on Guido, but he was looking now into his brother’s face. No, his father’s face, he thought with the thinnest smile. Father, brother, and beyond it a backdrop of unilluminated emptiness that was very simply the end of life.

And all the church bells of Naples were ringing, this was Christmas morning, and their lovely monotonous pealing came through the walls like the rhythm of a pulse. Yet he could feel nothing, he could taste nothing. He could want nothing, save suddenly that this time should come to its inevitable end.

Why had he let himself forget what lay ahead of him? How had he managed to live as others lived, to hunger, to thirst, and to love?

Guido had poured the wine. He had placed the glass at
Tonio’s right hand. The fragrance of the grape filled the room, and Tonio, sitting back in the chair, looked dully from the corner of his eye at the letter gone to ashes and the food that lay undisturbed, the artifact of itself, on a silver plate.

He had married her.

Married her! That was what the letter had said.

Decorous, simple, hardly more than an announcement. He had married her! Tonio felt his teeth clench until he was in pain, and he saw nothing of this room anymore. Married his father’s wife, married the mother of his bastard son, married her before Doge and Council and Senate and lords and ladies of Venice. He had married her! And now he would breed those strong sons, my little brothers! Those Giacomos, those brothers, brothers, always beyond reach, as if the very idea of fraternity were some immense fiction. Others are part of it, others are locked arm in arm. Magnificent illusion.

“Tonio, whatever it was, put it out of your mind,” came Guido’s voice, soft, unobtrusive, behind him. “Put them all out of your mind. They reach across the miles yet to cut you. Don’t let them.”

“Are you my brother?” Tonio whispered. “Tell me this….” He took Guido’s hand. “Are you my brother?”

And Guido, hearing these simple words spoken with uncommon feeling, could only nod in confusion. “Yes.”

Tonio rose and drew Guido close to him, his hand on Guido’s lips as if to make him silent, just as she had reached for Carlo’s lips in the supper room that last night. But Guido was speaking yet.

“Forget them, forget them now.”

“Yes, for an hour,” Tonio answered. “For a day, for a week, I should so like to do that,” he whispered.

And yet he saw her lying in that rank and darkened bedroom; he saw her deep in drunken sleep, her face the waxen mask of death, her moans inhuman. And now it’s filled with lights; it’s filled with people, those halls, those rooms, that vast salon, just as I had always dreamed, and she is in his arms, and
he
has saved her. Yes, there you have it laid bare. He has saved her! He cut you down to save her. And she is not doomed, and you are doomed, and you are in that dark room and you can’t get out, and she is no longer there!

“Oh, if I could just take the pain out of your head,” Guido
said, ever so softly, his hands on Tonio’s temples. “If I could only reach in and take it out.”

“Ah, but you do, and you do it as no one else can,” Tonio answered.

And they are married.

Married. And little Francesca Lisani clutches the convent grille to look at me, my betrothed, my bride. Married. His mother, peering up at him from the dressing table, suddenly threw back the great mane of her black hair and laughed.

Does she dance, does she sing, does she wear pearls around her neck, and is the long supper room thronged with guests, and has she her cavalier servente now, and what does she believe happened to her son, what does she believe!

But then he kissed Guido’s open mouth slowly, with all the semblance of real feeling. And then pressing Guido’s hands together, he let them go as he backed away. Never, he thought, will you ever know what happened, and what must happen, and just how brief this time is that we have together, this little span we call life.

It was near daylight when he rose from bed and penned his response to Catrina:

He signed the letter and sealed it, and sat watching the morning light appear in the little courtyard, a slow and silent spectacle that never failed to fill him with an extraordinary peace. First the shadowy shapes of the trees distinguished themselves beneath the arches of the cloister; then the light broke out in patches everywhere so that he could see the tracery of limbs and leaves. The color was the last to come, and then it was morning, and the house was giving off its full vibrations like a giant instrument sending its sounds through the pipes of a vast church.

The pain was gone.

The confusion in him had subsided. And as he looked at the smooth mask of Guido’s face in sleep, he found himself humming softly the hymn he’d sung the night before, and thinking, Giacomo, you gave this little gift to me; I had not known how much I loved it, all of it, until you came.

D
OMENICO WAS A SENSATION
in Rome, though Loretti was hissed and attacked by the audience, particularly the
abbati
—the clerics who always took the front rows of the Roman house—accusing him of stealing from his idol, the composer Marchesca, so that all during the performance they hissed “Bravo Marchesca! Boooo Loretti,” keeping quiet only when Domenico sang.

It was enough to unnerve anyone and Loretti was back in Naples, swearing never to set foot in the Eternal City again.

But Domenico had gone on to a grand court appointment in one of the German states. And the boys at the conservatorio laughed to hear that he’d enjoyed an escapade with a count and his wife, playing the woman for one and the man for the other in the same bed.

Tonio listened to all this with relief. Had Domenico failed, he would never have forgiven himself. And he still could not hear the stage name “Cellino” without shame and something of grief. Guido was distraught over Loretti’s reception, muttering as always that the Roman audiences were the worst.

But Tonio was too caught up in his own life to think of much else.

*  *  *

Right after Christmas, he began visiting a French fencing master every chance he could. No matter what his other obligations, he managed to get out of the conservatorio at least three times a week.

Guido was furious. “But you can’t do this,” he insisted. “Practice all day, rehearse with the students all evening, the opera on Tuesdays, the Contessa’s on Friday night. And now you want to spend these hours in a
salle d’armes
, this is nonsense.”

But Tonio’s face took on an elongated and determined expression, complete with an icy smile. And he won out.

He told himself that there were times when after a day of music and high-strung bickering voices, he must be away from the school and among those who weren’t eunuchs, or he would go mad.

Actually the opposite was true. It was very hard for him to go to the fencing salon, hard for him to greet the Frenchman who instructed him, to take his place among the young men who were lounging about in their lace shirtsleeves, faces already glistening from earlier exertion, and quick to offer him a match.