Cry to Heaven (65 page)

And wandering the alcoves, Tonio saw a saint he’d never known. And in the shadows before the little altar he went down on his knees, and then stretched out full length on the stones, burying his face in his arms as he cried and cried, unable to stop himself even for those gentle Roman women who knelt beside him again and again to whisper some small comfort.

F
OR THE NEXT WEEK
, Guido and Tonio lived and breathed opera as never before. All day they went over the “mistakes” and the weaknesses of the previous night’s performance, Guido scribbling changes in accompaniment and giving Tonio a refinement of instruction never possible in the past. Signora Bianchi ripped stitches, adjusted panniers, sewed on new lace and paste jewels. Paolo was ever ready for the slightest errand.

Bettichino outdid himself with trills and high notes while Tonio bested his every trick. In the duets, their voices created a singular loveliness unrivaled in the memory of those who heard them, and the theater, silenced over and over by these flashes of brilliance, quickly erupted in shouts and Bravos. A thunderous applause followed every curtain.

Society congregated without cease in the first and second tiers. Foreigners swelled the card games and suppers, and every performance was sold out before Ruggerio even opened the doors.

Each night Guido struggled through the backstage corridors,
pushed and shoved by the crowd, agents at his elbow with offers for seasons in Dresden, Naples, Madrid.

Flowers were brought in, snuffboxes, letters tied with ribbon. Coachmen were waiting for answers. The glum Count di Stefano nodded once again patiently when a firm Maestro insisted Tonio was not yet free for the social whirlwind.

Finally, after the seventh successful performance, Guido sat down in the cluttered dressing room with Signora Bianchi to make a list of those invitations that Tonio must accept first.

For now, he could see Count Raffaele di Stefano any time he wanted. He could go tonight.

Guido had no doubts any longer. His pupil had passed every conceivable test. He had offers from some of the best opera houses in the world. And for the first time, Guido accepted Ruggerio’s assurance that the opera would run through the carnival.

But Guido, tired as he was, had not fully felt his exultation until early the following morning when he awoke to see Tonio by his bed, gazing out of the open window.

Count di Stefano had taken Tonio away that evening almost by force. They’d quarreled, made it up, and driven off. And though di Stefano’s devotion alarmed Guido somewhat, he had also found it amusing.

He, himself, free of the Contessa, who had gone back to Naples, had spent a delicious four hours with a young dark-skinned eunuch from Palermo. The boy—Marcello was his name—sang well enough for small parts, Guido had told him that frankly.

And then it was lovemaking of the slowest, most rapturous and delicate sort, the young one a master of every sensuous secret. His skin had smelt like warm bread, and he’d been one of those few eunuchs with plump little breasts as delectable and succulent as those of a woman.

He’d been grateful afterwards for the few coins Guido pressed in his hands. And begging to be allowed backstage, had promised to buy a new frock coat with the money Guido gave him.

Guido, realizing these delightful encounters awaited him nightly, was trying to take it in stride and think like a human being.

Now it was almost dawn and a cold wintry light filled the room like a vapor as Tonio turned and approached him.

Guido rubbed his eyes. It seemed to him Tonio was covered with tiny pinpoints of light. He realized that these were droplets of rain, yet Tonio seemed an apparition, the light sparkling on his gold velvet coat, on the white ruffles at his collar, and on his softly mussed black hair. When he sat beside Guido, he appeared full of a shimmering energy as if he had not slept the entire night.

Guido sat up and put out his arms. He felt Tonio’s lips brush his forehead, and then his eyelids, and then that close, utterly familiar embrace.

Tonio seemed splendid and almost miraculous to him in this moment, and then Guido heard him say in a low voice:

“We’ve done it, haven’t we, Guido? We’ve done it!”

Guido sat silently looking at Tonio, a delicious air washing over him from the open window. It was full of the scent of rain. And an odd thought came to him, random, beautiful, that the winter wind smelled as fresh suddenly as if he were far, far away from the decay of the city, in the open hills of Calabria where he had been born.

But in the grip of this moment, with all of his life before him, the past, the future, he could not speak. He had worked so hard, he was so tired. And his mind was too unaccustomed to such happiness.

Yet he knew he was answering Tonio with his eyes.

“We can do it now, can’t we?” came Tonio’s low whisper. “We can make a life for ourselves if we want it. It’s all there.”

“If we want it? If, Tonio?” Guido said.

The room was so cold. Guido found himself looking past Tonio, at the milky sky. The gray rain clouds appeared substantial and to have their own luminous, almost silver terrain.

“Why do you say ‘if’?” he asked gently.

Tonio’s face had become unspeakably sad.

But this may have been an illusion because when he looked up at Guido again he smiled.

His black eyes crinkled at the corners, and there was such a radiance to his expression that Guido found himself feeling an inevitable sorrow: he could never really merge with Tonio and become part of that beauty himself, forever.

“We’re going to Florence next.” Guido took both Tonio’s
hands. “And then who knows where we’ll go? Dresden, maybe, maybe even London. We’ll go anywhere we want!”

And he could feel a tremor passing from himself into Tonio. Tonio was nodding, and it seemed this moment was too perfect really to endure. But Guido was silently and completely thankful for it.

Tonio was now in his own thoughts, and a stillness had settled over him, sealing him off, and what was left to Guido was the vision of his youth and that radiance.

And Guido realized that as he looked at him he was recalling an image of Tonio he had only lately seen, an image painted exquisitely on porcelain which had given him this same overwhelming and almost mysterious sense of Tonio.

He was seized with a small excitement. Almost tenderly, which was not usual for him, he kissed Tonio, and then he rose, and placing his feet on the chill floor, he walked silently across the room and, in the clutter of his desk, found that small porcelain portrait. It was oval in shape, framed in gold filigree, and he could not see it now in the dark. He hesitated, staring at the dim figure on the side of the bed.

And then he put the picture in Tonio’s hands.

“She gave it to me days ago to give to you,” he confessed, and he did not examine the pleasure it gave him now to present this little gift to Tonio.

Tonio looked at it, his neglected hair falling out of its ribbon so that it veiled his face.

“She’s captured you perfectly, hasn’t she? And from memory, completely.” Guido shook his head.

He stared down at the little image, the white face, the black eyes. It was a white flame burning in the center of Tonio’s open palm.

“She’ll be angry with me,” Guido said, “for having forgotten it.”

But he hadn’t forgotten it. He had only waited for a moment such as this when all was quiet and still, for once, and he did not know why it gave him this little satisfaction.

“And how has it been with her?” Tonio whispered. It had a thin sound to it as though he had drawn in his breath with the words, rather than letting it out. “Living alone in Rome, painting portraits.”

“Oh, she is quite the rage.” Guido smiled. “Though lately I
think she has been spending much too much time at the opera.”

Guido watched as again Tonio lowered his eyes to the portrait.

At every curtain call it seemed Tonio looked up to Christina’s box and made her a low, graceful bow. And she, bent over the rail, beamed down at him, her hands in a little flurry of clapping.

“But how is it with her!” Tonio pressed. “Does no one look out for her! Does the Contessa not…? I mean…”

Guido waited for a moment and then he turned slowly and went to his desk. He sat down, looking off at the window and the sky that was brightening and changing its shape, devoid of stars, yet revealing the sun’s first wintry shimmer.

“Has she no family that cares what she does?” Tonio whispered. “And what would they think if they knew she sent such a gift to a…” But again he broke off, holding the little portrait in both hands now as if it were dreadfully fragile.

Guido could not help but smile.

“Tonio,” he said softly, “she is an independent young woman, and lives her life as we do ours.” And softening his tone even more, he asked, “Must I be the one to give you away again?”

A
S SOON AS HE HAD
taken his final bows, Tonio forced his way through the suffocating backstage press to his dressing room and, telling Signora Bianchi to send Raffaele’s coachman away with polite regrets, quickly changed his clothes.

He had sent his note to Christina after the second intermission, and the remainder of the performance had been something of an agony for him.

Finally as the last curtain came down, Paolo had put her answer in his hands.

But it was not until he was fully dressed as himself again, his hair still a tangled mess, that he tore open the note:

He was unable to do anything for a moment. It seemed Guido had come in with some momentous news about an Easter season in Florence, and the insistence for the first time that they play every major house in Italy before going away.

“They’re going to need an answer very soon on this,” Guido said, tapping the scrap of paper in his hand.

“But what is it, why do they need to know now?” Tonio murmured.

Signora Bianchi came in, shutting the door with difficulty. “You must go out only for a few minutes,” she said, just as she did every night.

“…because it’s this Easter we’re talking about, forty days after we close here. Tonio, Florence!” Guido said.

“Right, yes, I mean of course, we’ll talk about it, Guido,” Tonio was stammering, trying vainly to comb his hair.

Had he folded her note and put it in his pocket? Guido was pouring himself a glass of wine.

Paolo slipped in, red in the face, and collapsed with exaggerated relief against the door.

“Go out there, Tonio, now, get it over with!” said Signora Bianchi. And turning him, she shoved him towards the crowd.

Why was this so difficult? It seemed they all wanted to touch him, to kiss him, to talk to him, to take his hand and tell him how much it had meant to them, and there was the feeling with all of them that he did not want to let them down. Yet the more he smiled, nodded, the more they talked, and by the time he had made his way inside again, he was so frantic he took the wine from Guido and drank all of it.

The usual flowers were being brought in, great bouquets of hothouse flowers, and Signora Bianchi whispered in his ear that Count di Stefano’s men were outside.

“Damn,” he said. He felt Christina’s note in his pocket. It had no signature, but he took it out quite suddenly and while Guido and Paolo and Signora Bianchi stared at him as if he were a madman, he burned it completely by the candle flame.

“Wait a minute,” she said as he turned to go. “Just where are you off to? Tell me and tell the Maestro before you go.”

“What difference does it make!” he said crossly, and when he saw the secretive smile on Guido’s face, the feigned superiority to the childish passion, he was silently enraged.

As soon as he stepped into the corridor, he saw Raffaele’s men. These weren’t servants. These were the Count’s bravos.

“Signore, His Excellency wishes to see…”

“Yes, well not tonight, he cannot,” Tonio said quickly and started for the street.

For one moment it seemed the men were not going to let him pass. But before he reached for his sword or did anything equally foolish, he made an icy refusal again. Obviously they weren’t prepared for this, and confused as to what to do, did not have the courage to force him into the carriage waiting outside.

But as he climbed into his own carriage, he saw they had mounted their horses, and telling his driver to take him to the Piazza di Spagna he made a small plan.

At the Palazzo Sanfredo the carriage slowed to a crawl. It was at the second alleyway beyond that, the little coach all but scraping the walls, that Tonio slipped out, shutting the door quickly, and stood back in the darkness to watch the Count’s bravos pass.

Now the moment had come.

He entered the lower door of the palazzo and seeing a torch blazing on the landing, stood still looking up. The stairwell might have been a street, it was so neglected, so cold. And gazing at it, he let his mind empty of thought. He knew what thoughts would be there, too, if he let them in; that for three years, no, four, he had not held a woman in his arms, save this woman. And that he could not escape what lay ahead of him, though in truth he had no idea how it might end.

At one point, he told himself in a low humming inarticulate way that this would be a resolution. He would not find her beautiful; he would not find her sweet. He would be freed of her then.

Yet he did not move.

And he was quite unprepared when the door opened and two Englishmen entered, talking in their native tongue, who immediately greeted him in a convivial way. They seemed positively in awe of his height, though they themselves were slightly taller than Italians tended to be. He was mortified. They stared at him because he was hideous, he was perfectly sure of it, and coldly he watched them go up the stairs.

It occurred to him that if there had been a mirror near about he might have looked in it and found the overgrown child he saw now and then; or perhaps once and for all a monster. He was musing. Sadness was coming over him, weakening him, and it occurred to him that it would be so easy for him to go to the Count tonight and this girl, then finally insulted by him, would shun him from now on.