Tears of the Salamander (2 page)

Alfredo adored being a chorister. He made friends easily among the other boys, though they teased him for his southern accent, but he was more sober-minded than most of them and thus seldom in trouble. Several of them wore little charms and tokens around their necks, as well as their crucifixes, so he didn’t need to take special trouble to hide his salamander, though he didn’t go flashing it around. Even the schoolwork did not bore him. He was naturally neat and tidy, and soon wrote well and read Italian with fluency. Latin was harder, but he had the incentive of needing to know the meanings of the words he spent such long hours singing, because he felt in his heart that the meaning was part of the music, that even in the dispassionate, almost bloodless style of church music a word of grief must sound different from a word of rejoicing.

But it was the music itself that truly mattered. Those long hours were not long to him. The dullest choir practices, with endless repeatings and repeatings of a few short bars with which the choirmaster was dissatisfied, were time contentedly spent. This was what God had brought him
into the world to do. This was how he wanted to spend the rest of his life.

He understood now what Father had been talking about when he had objected so strongly to Alfredo’s even being auditioned for the choir. Four of the adult choristers were castrati. That’s to say they’d had their testicles removed when they were boys, in the same way that farmers gelded young male sheep and cattle so that they never became normal rams and bulls and could never sire young; it kept them docile and improved the flavor of their meat. But in the case of the choristers it meant that their voices had never broken, and they now sang alto or countertenor, instead of tenor or bass. They, too, could never become fathers.

The boys of course gossiped and joked about this, but as well as the castrati there were also four tenors and two basses in the choir, all of them once choirboys; some had taken only minor orders, and thus, not being true priests, had married and had children.

This possibility had done little to appease Father. If anything, he felt extra contempt for these half-priests, as he called them. His plan was that he would simply refuse to let Alfredo have the operation, and then hope that when the boy’s voice broke, the resulting sound would cease to be pleasing to the ears of the Prince-Cardinal.

In fact, it was this prospect that Alfredo himself most dreaded. He would have preferred to end up as a tenor or bass, but rather than leave the cathedral altogether he would have chosen to undergo the pain and danger of the operation, and then the lifelong derision involved, and sing on. One of the countertenors, though elderly, still had the
most marvelous voice. The Prince-Cardinal’s favor had made him a rich man, but Alfredo could hear, plain in every note, that Brother Jesu-Maria sang for the pure joy of it.

He was lucky, of course, with his family living so close to the cathedral, that he wasn’t entirely cut off from his old life. In midweek the Prince-Cardinal retired to his country estate for study and contemplation (in fact, as everybody knew perfectly well, to enjoy a nobleman’s normal home life with a faithful wife, children—not all of whom were hers—and at least one mistress). Cathedral services were simplified and reduced so that the canons and other priests could do the same sort of thing, according to their resources and status, and after midday Mass the choirboys were left pretty well to their own devices, but with the certainty of savage beatings if they were late for evensong. Alfredo went home, singing as he trotted the few hundred yards through the steeply twisting narrow streets, almost empty now in the afternoon heat.

The day’s baking would by then be finished. Mother and Father would be having their siesta. He would go through to the bakehouse, where Giorgio would greet him with “Late again, kid? Sure you can manage on your own? See you,” before going off to join his friends and prowl, never with any success, for girls. Alfredo would then settle down to tend the ovens.

There were three of them, each with its own quirks and needs. Everybody, except for the other bakers, agreed that Father made the best bread in the city and for miles around, and ultimately his success depended on his skill in the management of his ovens, his ability to reach and
maintain an exact, even heat, different for each oven, throughout the baking process. Any change of wind affected the draft in the flues, as did the temperature of the outside air; logs from different kinds of trees burnt hotter or cooler; bone-dry logs burnt too fast and hot to be useful, but too much moisture was worse than too little; and so on.

Father had built the ovens with his own hands, making them far more massive than those in any normal bakery, so that each, when thoroughly warmed through, would become a great block of heat around the hollow in which the pale dough magically turned itself into crisp and golden loaves. The ovens had first been lit long before Alfredo was born, and since then had never gone cold, but after each morning’s baking was over they were allowed to rest for a while and then slowly, slowly reheated to be at the exact temperature needed for the next day’s baking.

Each daily cycle began in midafternoon, with the ash being raked out of the fire pit and sifted into the barrow; the larger embers, still twinkling with sparks and veins of fire, were tossed back over the fire-pit floor; a layer of laths was spread above them, the door closed to a crack and the dampers opened, and the ashes were barrowed out to the tip and fresh logs barrowed in on the return journey from the drying stacks behind the house. By now the laths in the first oven were roaring, and dry logs, already in the bakehouse, could be inserted above them with the long tongs, the oven door closed, and its dampers half closed, and a start made on the second oven. By the time the third had reached this stage Alfredo would hear his parents’ bed in the room above the bakehouse creak as his father heaved
himself out, and a few minutes later that slow, distinctive tread would come down the stairs, and the door would open. Father would glance in each fire pit, open each oven and reach in to feel the heat, close it again and say something like “That’s fine. Where’s Giorgio? After the girls again? Fat chance. He shouldn’t leave all the work to you.”

“But I
like
doing it,” Alfredo would say.

This was less than the truth. The feeling had grown only gradually since he’d left home, but by the time he’d been away for a year he had come to see that, in some way that he didn’t understand, he would have missed looking after the ovens—by himself, without Giorgio—as much as he would have missed singing in the cathedral. Mysteriously it was the same kind of thing. He understood the ovens and their needs very much as he understood the music that he sang, the inwardness of it, its central nature. And not only the ovens. He could pick up a log from the stack and immediately sense the hidden heat within it, waiting to be woken by the flame, its intensity, its possible duration. He could sense the swirling climb of the drafts up the flues…

…and then, after the family meal—two hours earlier than usual, so that he could be back at the cathedral for evensong—he would go back to the bakehouse and stand in the middle of the floor and feel the glowing fire pits of the three ovens around him as a single larger fire, with himself in the midst of it, in the heart of the living flame—just as, in the middle of some pulsing
Gloria
in the cathedral, he was in the heart of the music. It was as though flame and music were only different ways in which a single, majestic power made itself manifest.

I
T WAS ON SUCH AN EVENING, IN
A
LFREDO’S
twelfth year, that his whole world changed. He had left home a little early because he was singing one of the solos at evensong. With the Prince-Cardinal away the choirmaster was taking the chance to give the first-year seniors a turn so that when their time came to sing for the ears of His Eminence they would not be afraid. So Alfredo robed himself and settled into a corner of the vestry and bowed his head over his clasped hands in the attitude of prayer. He didn’t understand about real praying. It was just words, the same words repeated and repeated until they were emptied of meaning. What he was really doing was allowing the fire of the bakehouse that still surged and swirled through his mind to turn itself gradually into the music that he was going to sing. He was more than happy. There were no words for it. Only the blessed souls in the presence of the Almighty could know and feel anything like what Alfredo knew and felt.

He heard a noise from the body of the cathedral. Not many people came to weekday evensong, often no more
than a few old crones, but this was actual bustle, hurrying feet. A door must have been thrown open, because now there were sounds from outside, yells, clamor. More. Worse. The noises in themselves had nothing to do with Alfredo, with the fire and the music inside him. But these things too had changed. The music was gone. And the fire…

There was madness now in the fire, the wildness of wild beasts, the fury of a howling storm. He couldn’t hold it. It would burst out of him, burn, kill…

He leapt to his feet. Several of his friends were just coming in through the vestry door, teasing each other—in whispers because the choirmaster was close behind them. Alfredo charged through, dodged the choirmaster’s grab for him, ignored his bellow to stop, wheeled out into the chancel aisle, raced down through the screen and into the already darkening nave. Somebody had opened the great west doors, and through their arch he could see the orange glow of the blaze, the nearer roofs black against it, and above it the swirling tower of smoke, almost as black against the distant reds and golds and oranges of sunset.

He stood for a moment, panting, staring, then gathered up the skirts of his robes and pelted on down the twisting route along which he had so often trotted, singing. Long before he reached it, forcing his way through the gathering crowds, he already knew what he was going to find. His home, his ovens, were the roaring heart of that furnace.

They didn’t punish him for missing evensong. He wouldn’t have cared if they had—in fact he would barely
have noticed. But the choirmaster, though strict, was a kindly man, and the boy’s whole family had perished in the blaze. Besides, he had plans now for Alfredo.

“This is a terrible thing that has happened to you, my son,” he said. “I truly grieve for you, as do all your friends here. You have no other relatives?”

“Only my uncle, Father. I don’t know where he lives. He came to my christening, but I don’t remember, of course. That’s the only time I’ve seen him.”

The choirmaster nodded. It didn’t sound as if this uncaring relative would be much of a problem. Very likely he would be glad to have the boy taken off his hands.

“You need not sing if you do not feel up to it.”

“Oh, sir, please,” said Alfredo, weeping. “I
must
sing. It’s the only thing left.”

“That’s a good boy,” said the choirmaster, remembering minor turbulences in his own life during which he had taken refuge in music, and believing he understood something of what Alfredo felt. “Soon you shall sing a solo for His Eminence.”

Next day an official from the City Watch came to talk to Alfredo. He did not, of course, explain that there was no doubt that the fire had started in the bakehouse, and that if it could be shown to be the baker’s fault, then neighbors who had lost their houses as the flames spread would be able to claim against his estate, but if not the city would be liable for some kind of compensation.

Reluctant even to think about the fire, let alone talk about it, Alfredo admitted that he had been home that evening, had prepared the ovens for restarting their cycle,
and had again been into the bakehouse after the family meal, shortly before he left, and everything had been normal. His parents had been upstairs in their room—he had heard voices there. (Bakers keep strange hours, and the early meal had interrupted their siesta.) Giorgio had gone out but he must have come back. …

“A young man was seen running into the house soon after the fire started,” said the official. “Brave, but foolish, I’m afraid. I believe your father built his own ovens. He did not employ a professional? And he let you see to their firing, a child?”