Cry to Heaven (52 page)

Guido had enough talking to do in the evenings. He was received everywhere, thanks to the Contessa, who wrote to him regularly, and everywhere he asked questions about the local taste and, pretending ignorance, had people describe to him all the recent operas in simple detail.

Making his way through immense ballrooms, up and down the steps of cardinals’ palaces and lodgings of foreign dilettanti, he sensed a massive society here, infinitely more sure of itself and more critical than he had known in any other place.

And why should it not be so? This was Rome, this was the magnet of Europe. All came here sooner or later to be elevated, humbled, absorbed, conceivably annihilated, or repulsed and driven away.

Whole communities of expatriates lived in this place. And though it had produced no recent outpouring of composers as Naples had done, or Venice in the past, this was where reputations were made or broken. Fine singers who had won laurels in the north and south might be destroyed in Rome, famous composers driven right out of the theater.

The south seemed soft to these people. If its beauty intoxicated them when they went there, it was not enough to keep them from returning to Rome. And they ridiculed the Venetians, saying it was all
barcarola
from there, that is, the kind of music one expects from the gondoliers on the water, and they felt no compassion for those whom in the past they had ruined.

Sometimes it angered Guido, this strident snobbery, especially
since Naples supplied the world with her talent. And Vivaldi, the Venetian, was as fine as any composer in Europe. But he held his peace. He was here to learn.

And he was fascinated.

By day he haunted the coffeehouses, drank up the life of the thriving Via Veneto and the narrow Via Condotti, musing as he watched the young castrati come and go, some boldly done up in luxuriant female dress, others slinking about like beautiful cats in the beguiling severity of clerical black, their fresh complexions and lovely hair drawing eyes to them everywhere.

And wandering into the summer theaters where the comic opera or the plays were being performed, he studied these boys as they pranced on the stage, coming better to understand here in Rome than in any other place he’d ever been, how eunuchs had come into fashion and necessity.

Here the Church had never relented its ban on performing women, that prohibition which had once dominated the stages of all Europe. And these audiences simply never saw a female creature before the footlights, never witnessed that spectacle of womanly flesh magnified by the cheers and clapping of thousands packed in a dark hall.

Even the ballet had its male dancers frolicking in long skirts.

And Guido perceived that when the woman is taken out of an entire realm of life that must needs imitate the world itself, then some substitute for that woman is inevitable.

Something must rise to take the place of what is feminine. Something must rise to
be
feminine. And the castrati were not mere singers, players, anomalies; they had become woman herself.

And they knew it. How they swung their hips, how they mocked and taunted their hungry audiences.

Guido wondered could Tonio see it, or did it make Tonio suffer beyond endurance? Could he not recognize in this place the violent amplification of all his powers which a female role would mean?

It was a grand irony, really, Guido reflected, hearing these sopranos rise and fall. There was the skill he’d known all his life, but here it had become a divine obscenity, more fraught with the sensual than that which it so reincarnated.

“It will give my enemies something to talk about,” the Cardinal had said in his unguarded moment. And he was right.

Guido sighed. He scratched a few notes on the pad he carried in his pocket. He noted the temperament, the habits, the unrestrained tastes of those he saw.

And he knew that on that stage at the Teatro Argentina on the first of the year, Tonio must appear as a woman. His voice could call the gods to attention; but in Rome, he and he alone must shine with that carnal power, and could suffer no other young singer to have that advantage if he did not have it; he
must
have it. Guido must win.

And this was but one aspect of the war that lay ahead of him. Guido must triumph on all counts. He must come to understand this city, forgive it its mercilessness, or he would be too afraid to do what he must do. And making it his landscape day after day, he sought to compass it with his mind.

And he fell in love with it.

San Giovanni in Laterano, San Pietro in Vincoli, the Vatican Treasures, the moldering hulk of the antique Colosseum overgrown with weeds, the sprawling fragments of the ancient Forum, all this he pondered, letting the roaring carriages of the cardinals pass, caught up again and again in the spectacle of hooded friars in procession, cassocked priests, clerics come from all the world to hear the voice of the Holy Father echoing through the largest church on earth and out across continents and seas to the very edges of Christendom.

But what was it he felt in the air around him as he stood in the Piazza San Pietro, what was it that made this city so seemingly solid, so seemingly invincible?

It was as if he could feel a hum, a seething. It was as if this immense metropolis were itself the core of a volcanic mountain. It
was
that cauldron from which the fire and smoke belched forth, and all those living and striving here were bound up in that communal force.

Was it not fair then that all must come here finally to be tested? Let the audiences curse and shout and drive from the theaters and the city itself all those not fit for the pantheon. It was not their sport, finally, it was their right.

*  *  *

He went home.

He wrote until his eyes failed him and he could no longer hear the notes he scribbled. He had a sheaf of arias; he had them for all emotions, all voices.

But he did not have his story yet.

Finally the Cardinal sent for Tonio to sing.

A little supper of only some thirty-five persons, the table ablaze with light and animated faces, the flash of silver, and the harpsichord in a far corner of the room.

Guido gave Tonio only a simple aria that would reveal no more than a fourth of his talent and power, and with the music long committed to memory, he looked up from the keyboard to study this little audience as Tonio commenced to sing.

Tonio’s notes were high, pure, and tinged with sadness. They brought the appropriate pauses in conversation, here and there the unabashed turn of the head.

The Cardinal stared at his singer. His eyes, slanted down at the corners by those strange smooth lids, gave off a slight gleam.

Yet in between the many demands upon his attention, the man devoured everything on his plate. There was an undisguised sensuousness to the manner in which he ate. He cut his meat in large pieces; he drank his wine in deep gulps.

And yet he was so slight of build as though he burned all that he consumed, a vice transformed into necessity, even as he lifted the glistening grapes to his lips.

When he had finished the meal, he drove a long pearl-handled knife into the board, so that it stood straight up, and curling his fingers around it, there rested his chin.

His eyes were fixed on Tonio. He had the look of one musing, pleasant to those around him, but secretly absorbed.

Late at night, often, Guido sat alone at his desk too tired to write. Sometimes he was too tired to undress and go to bed.

He wished he could lie beside Tonio as a matter of course, but the time of night-long embraces was over, at least for this little while. And there came that fear again, against which he could find no defense in these alien rooms.

Yet there was an undeniable pleasure in seeking out his
love, something sweet and mysterious in crossing the vast expanse of cold floor, opening doors, to approach that bed.

Now he set down the quill pen, and stared at the pages before him. Why was it all so flat, so without the slightest inspiration? Soon he must drive it towards its final shape. All evening he had been reading the librettos of Metastasio, who was now the rage, and luckily a native-born Roman, but he could not find the story yet, not until he had won that last victory which he had no chance of winning tonight.

But it was not in his mind now. He wanted Tonio.

He let his passion slowly mount.

He hummed to himself, ran his knuckles along his lip, letting bits and pieces of fantasy tantalize him.

Then he padded silently across the floor. Tonio lay deep asleep, his hair in loose strands over his eyes, his face as perfect and seemingly lifeless as Michelangelo’s melting white figures. But as Guido drew close, he felt the face warm to his kiss, his hand beneath the cover to draw the body up. The eyes fluttered open. Tonio moaned, blind for a little while, struggling, his flesh so hot he seemed a child consumed with a fever. His mouth opened to let Guido in.

They lay close in the dark afterwards, Guido fighting sleep as he could not allow himself to be found here.

“Are you mine completely still?” he whispered, half expecting nothing but the silence of the room.

“Always,” Tonio answered drowsily. It seemed not his own voice, but the voice of some sleeping being inside of him.

“Has there never been anyone else?”

“No one.”

Tonio shifted, pressing in, winding his arm around Guido so he could nuzzle into Guido’s chest and they were clamped together, Tonio’s smooth hot belly against Guido’s sex, Guido feeling that fine black hair that always amazed him with its texture.

“And don’t you sometimes wonder what it would be like?” he asked slowly. “A man? A woman?”

He closed his eyes and had almost drifted off when he heard the answer come low as before.

“Never.”

I
T WAS VERY LATE
when Guido came in.

The palazzo was absolutely quiet as if the Cardinal had retired early. Only a few lights burned in the lower rooms. The corridors stretched out in pale darkness, the white sculptures—those broken gods and goddesses—giving off an eerie illumination of their own.

Guido was exhausted as he climbed the steps.

He had spent the afternoon with the Contessa at her villa on the edge of Rome. She had come up to make arrangements for the opening of the house later in the year, and she would remain in Rome only a few days now, returning before Christmas to spend the opera season here.

It was for Guido and Tonio that she was doing this, as she much preferred the south, and Guido was grateful for her decision to come.

But when he saw they might have no opportunity to be alone together today, he had become incensed. He was almost rude.

The Contessa, surprised at this but understanding, took him with her back to the palazzo where she was stopping as a guest. And once they were in bed, his hunger for her astonished them both.

They had never spoken of it, but it was she who led the way in their couplings. Fearless and loving with her mouth and hands, she had always enjoyed teasing Guido and hardening him for the act. In fact, she treated Guido exactly as if she owned him. She caressed him as if he were a child, possessively,
with little gasps, as though he were infinitely enticing to her and someone of whom she hadn’t the slightest fear.

Guido liked the attention. Almost everyone else was afraid of him, and he didn’t care what she
thought
.

On some inarticulate level, he knew she was purely symbolic to him. She was
woman
, and Tonio was Tonio with whom he was miserably in love.

He reasoned it was always so with men and women, and men and men, and if he ever found himself thinking about it, he dismissed it at once from his mind.

But this afternoon, he behaved somewhat like an animal. And the new unfamiliar bedchamber, his odd behavior, and their brief separation from each other, all conspired to make the love play especially rich.

They did not get up right away. They drank coffee, a little liqueur, and they talked.

Silently, Guido wondered why he and Tonio were so at war. Their quarrel this morning over the question of a female role had reached an ugly climax, when Guido had produced the contract Tonio had signed with Ruggerio in which it was plainly stated Tonio had been hired as the prima donna. Tonio, shoving it aside, felt betrayed.

But Guido saw the first signs of defeat in him, only to be angered moments later when Tonio insisted that he would never take a stage name. He would be known to the audience as Tonio Treschi. They could call him Tonio if they must have a single name.

Guido was furious. Why such an irregularity? Tonio would be accused of haughtiness. Didn’t he realize that most people would never believe he was a Venetian patrician? They would think this an affectation on his part.

Tonio was clearly wounded.

After a long moment he said softly, “I don’t care what people believe. It has nothing to do with where I was born, or who I might have been. My name is Tonio Treschi. That is all.”

“All right, but you will perform the role I write for you,” Guido had said. “You are being paid as much as or more than experienced singers. You were brought here to play a female part. Your name, whether it’s Tonio Treschi or anything else, will be on the posters in big letters when you’re nobody. And it’s your youth and your looks as well as anything else that
will bring them in. The audience expects to see you in female dress.”

He could not look at Tonio after these words were spoken.

“I don’t believe that,” Tonio had replied softly. “You have told me for three years the Romans are the strictest critics. Now you tell me they want to see a boy in skirts. Have you ever looked at those old engravings of torture instruments? Iron masks and manacles, veritable suits of pain? That is what female dress would be to me, and you say: ‘Put it on.’ I say I will not.”

Guido couldn’t understand any of this. He had performed female roles a dozen times before he was eighteen. But the complications of Tonio’s mind always discouraged him. He could only follow one path: