Cry to Heaven (70 page)

So it was spoken. It was done. The thing that had waited and waited in the darkness was now free and there was no curbing it.

And again that exhilaration took hold of him. Go to Venice. Do it. Let it happen. No more waiting and waiting in hatred and bitterness, no more seeing all about you life blazing and beautiful yet against this darkness, this fathomless gloom.

But Guido had rushed at him, and the Contessa had thrown all her weight against Guido to hold him back. Guido’s face was pure fury.

“Tell me how you can do this to me!” he was crying. “Tell me, tell me, how you can do this to me. If I was just a pawn
in your brother’s hands, then I took you out of that town, I took you when you were wounded and broken….”

The Contessa, trying so to quiet him, raised her voice.

“…tell me you wish I’d left you there to die, they would have killed you if I had left you there, and tell me you wish none of this, none of this, had come to pass!”

“No, stop it….” The Contessa flung out her hands.

And now that exhilaration in him was heating itself to anger. He turned on Guido, and heard his own voice, sharp, clear:

“You know why, better than anyone you know why! The man who did this to me is yet alive and unpunished for it. And am I a man, you tell me, am I a man if I can stand for this!”

He felt himself weak suddenly.

He had stumbled into the garden.

At the door of the ballroom, if the servant hadn’t taken his arm, he would have fallen.

“To go home…” he said. And Christina, her face stained with tears, nodded her head.

It was morning.

It seemed all night they had fought, he and Guido. And these rooms, so cold now, were not their bedchambers any longer so much as some dreary battleground.

And somewhere, beyond these walls, Christina waited for him. Awake, dressed, she sat at the window perhaps, her hands under her chin, looking down in the Piazza di Spagna.

But Tonio sat still, alone, and far across the void of the room, he saw himself in the dusky mirror, a white-faced specter so seemingly without expression he seemed a demon with an angel’s face. And all the world was different.

Paolo was crying.

Paolo had heard all of it. And Paolo had come to him only to be spurned by his silence.

And huddled somewhere off in the shadows, Paolo was crying inconsolably. And the sound, rising and falling, seemed to echo as if through corridors of an immense and ruined house where Tonio shuffled against the wall, his bare feet covered with dust, the tears stinging his face, as coming through the door, he saw his mother bent over the windowsill. Helplessness, terror caught in his throat as he pulled at her skirts, those cries echoing louder and louder. And just as she turned, he
covered his eyes so he couldn’t see her face. He felt himself falling. His head thumped the walls and the marble stairs, he could not stop himself. And his screams rose above him, and she, her dress billowing out as she came down, took those screams and carried them up in shrieks rising higher and higher.

He stood up. He was standing in the center of the room, staring into that shadowy mirror. Do you love me, he whispered, but without ever moving his lips, and he saw Christina’s eyes open like the mechanical eyes of a doll, and Christina’s mouth, glistening, formed the one word: “Yeeeeess…”

Paolo was near him. Paolo was a sudden heaviness against him causing him to right himself on his feet. From far far away he heard Paolo’s crying. Paolo’s hands pulled on him till he closed his own long white fingers over them, peeling them off and holding them tight as he stared forward into the mirror.

Why didn’t you warn me, he spoke to his reflection, this giant in the black Venetian
tabarro
with such a white face, and this child clinging to him, head bent, his limbs affixed to the black cloth as though he could not be torn off of it. Why didn’t you warn me that the time had run out. That it was nearly finished.

And then tugging Paolo with him, he moved clumsily towards the bed. He fell down into the pillows, Paolo nestled close to him, and it seemed Paolo’s crying went on and on in his sleep.

H
E WAS STILL TIRED
when he reached the theater. He had taken Paolo to a little café where they had both of them
eaten too much. He felt light-headed and the world was blazing around him. Colors bled into the rain that sent the maskers scurrying. Paolo wouldn’t eat until he saw Tonio eat, and Tonio had given him much too much wine.

It seemed to him that he could not possibly sing. Yet he knew that nothing would keep him from it.

And as soon as he heard the crowd stomping and howling, and caught a glimpse of Bettichino already painted, his body a proud scaffolding of silk and armor, the habitual excitement came to his rescue along with the force of his will.

He took more care than usual with his dress, highlighting his face with white paint as subtly and skillfully as Bettichino always did, and when at last he stepped before the lights, he was his old self again, his voice struggling only a little at first, and then pouring out of him in full strength. He could feel the carnival merriment in the audience, he could hear it in their hoarse and loving shouts of Bravo. For one second he permitted himself the detachment of seeing this entire theater as it rose before him, this smoky wilderness of faces, and he knew this was the night for risks and tricks and all manner of flights of fancy.

Christina came backstage after the first act. It was the first time he had ever let her close to him when he was in female dress, and he put on a jeweled mask before he let her in, and was not surprised to see that his appearance enticed her.

She let out a little gasp, gazing at him. Or rather as she gazed at this woman in plum-colored velvet and white satin rosettes.

“Come here to me, my dear,” he said in a mellow whisper just to frighten her. She herself was the little officer complete with epaulettes, her legs shapely in her tight breeches. And she looked more like a timid boychild as she approached him, almost fearfully, and lifted her hand to touch his face. He was smiling down at her, seeing the pair of them perfectly in the mirror, and as he lowered himself into the chair, his skirts spreading out all around him, he placed her on his lap. He saw the taut angular wrinkles of cloth between her legs and wanted to touch them.

He contented himself instead with the silk of her white neck.

She lifted the wine cup and let him taste it, then kissed him eagerly, and he turned her slowly so she could see the vision
in the mirror: the tall woman, powdered white with a cat’s mask of sequins and red lips, and the young boy with his exquisite face on her lap.

She turned and touched the beauty marks on his face. She pulled away the mask and seeing his painted eyes, let out another half-concealed gasp.

“You frighten me, Signore,” he whispered in that same dark feminine fashion; and she, with a little throb in her throat, made as if to assault him.

Her little hand gathered up his skirt, it felt for the nakedness underneath, and finding the hard organ, grasped it cruelly, so that he whispered under his breath, “Careful, my darling, let’s not ruin what’s left.”

She was shocked into laughter. Then pressing against him, she sighed and then lay still. He had never said such a thing to her before, never touched upon what he was with the slightest levity and he watched her now with indulgence as if she were a child.

“I love you,” she whispered.

He closed his eyes. The mirror was gone, and so were the garments that covered both of them; or so it seemed to him. And he was thinking dreamily again of how much he’d liked as a child to be invisible in the dark. No one could wound him if he were invisible; and when he looked at her again, she wasn’t seeing paint, or wig, or velvet or satin, but only him, and it was as if they were in that darkness together.

“What is it? What are you thinking when you look this way?” she whispered.

He shook his head. He smiled. He kissed her. And in the mirror saw that shimmering vision of the two of them, lost in disguises, but a perfect pair.

But as soon as he reached the studio with her that night, he knew that Guido had spoken to her.

She was ready to leave everything to be in Florence at Easter. All her portraits could be done before the end of Lent, and surely he could wait that long. They could travel to Florence together.

She walked lightly, quickly about the studio talking of how this could be finished, and how that one was almost done. She needed so little to travel; she’d bought a new leather carrying
case for her pastels; she had a desire to do many sketches in the churches in Florence; she had never been to Florence, did he know that? She pulled the ribbon out of her hair at just the right moment and let it fall down.

He felt slender and somewhat weightless as he always did after the performance, his masculine clothes so seemingly slight compared to all that Grecian armour, those skirts. And she was still the boy, only now with all this lovely corn-silk hair as if she were a page or an angel in an old painting.

And he stared at her, not speaking, wishing Guido had not told her, and at the same time knowing Guido had somehow made it easier for him. But these last nights with her…these last nights…what had he wanted them to be?

He could feel nothing wanting now as he looked at her, and she was showing him no sadness, no fear.

He beckoned for her to follow him into the bedroom, and she was in his arms suddenly, letting herself be lifted and carried. “Ganymede,” he whispered to her, feeling her voluptuousness through the breeches, and beneath the hard doubled-breasted front of her little coat.

It was as it had been in the café with Paolo; he felt sleepy and yet wildly alive, assaulted by colors everywhere that he looked. He felt the texture of the sheets between his fingers, the moist and warm flesh at the backs of her knees. Her shoulders were bathed, it seemed, in a bluish light from the candles, and gathering her to him, he wondered how long he could sustain it? When would come the awful, wrenching pain?

When she was softened with love, she lit the candles again. She poured the wine for both of them and commenced to talk.

“Everywhere in the world I’ll go with you,” she said. “I’ll paint the ladies of Dresden and London. I’ll paint the Russians in Moscow; I’ll paint kings and queens. Think of it, Tonio, all the churches, the museums, the castles of the German countries with their multitude of towers and turrets on the mountain peaks. Tonio, have you ever seen those northern cathedrals, so full of stained glass? Imagine it, a church of stone instead of marble with arches rising high and narrow, soaring as if to heaven, and all those tiny fragments of brilliant color made into angels and saints. Think of it, Tonio, St. Petersburg in
winter, a new city fashioned after Venice and blanketed with lovely white snow….”

There was no desperation in her voice, but her eyes had a dreamy glitter, and without answering her, he pressed her hand as if to say, Go on.

Guido hadn’t really taken these last few blissful hours from him; there was an eerie beauty to understanding everything so clearly.

“We’d go everywhere, the four of us,” she was saying. “You, Guido, Paolo, and me. We’d buy the grandest traveling coach and we’d even take that wicked old Signora Bianchi. Maybe Guido would bring that handsome Marcello, too. And in every city we’d get some sumptuous lodging, taking our meals together and quarreling together and going to the theater together, and in the days I’d paint and in the nights you’d sing. And if we liked this place better than another, we’d stay and maybe now and then go off in the country to be alone, all of us, and away from everything, as we grew all the more to love and understand one another. Imagine it, Tonio.”

“I should have run away with the opera,” he murmured softly. She bent forward, her golden eyebrows knitted in concentration, and when she saw he wouldn’t repeat it, she kissed his lips.

“We’d take the villa I showed you only a month ago, and that would be our real home. We’d come back when we were weary of foreign tongues, and how Italy would blaze around us! Oh, you can’t imagine how it would be! Guido could write sonatas in the evenings, and Paolo would grow up to be a marvelous singer. He’d make his debut in Rome.

“But we would all belong to each other. No matter what happened, we would have each other, as if we were a great family, a great clan. I’ve dreamed it a thousand times,” she said. “And if life could give you to me after all those dreams of girlhood, then this too can come true.

“What was it you said to Paolo when you took him from Naples?” She paused, watching him intently. “Paolo told me the story himself: you said to him that anything can happen, when you least expect it. And his life is like a fairy tale of palaces and riches and endless song. Tonio, anything can happen, you said it yourself.”

“Innocence,” he said. He bent forward to kiss her. He
stroked her face, marveling at that ineffably soft and almost invisible down that covered her cheeks and he touched her lip with the tip of his finger. She could never be more beautiful than she was now.

“No, not innocence,” she protested. “Tonio, this is a choice.”

“Listen to me, beautiful one,” he said almost sharply, his voice a little harder than he wanted it to be. “You love me very much as I love you. But you’ve never really known the love of men; you don’t know their strength, their necessity, their fire. You speak of northern cathedrals, stone and stained glass, of different kinds of beauty: well, I can tell you with men it’s the same, a different kind of love. And in time you’ll come to know that the wide world holds secrets for you in the ordinary acts that others take for granted, the ordinary strength of any man. And don’t you see, when all is said and done, that is what was taken from both of us, that is what was taken from me?

“What do you think it means to me to know that I can never give you what any common laborer might give you, the spark of life inside of you, the child in which we two could be one? And no matter how you protest that you love me now, how can you say the day won’t come when you will see me for precisely what I am!”