Cry to Heaven (23 page)

And Tonio had left their private dining room where the boys still scraped their plates, and had gone out into a narrow, high-walled garden.

For a long time, Guido sat thinking. He was thinking still as he led the boys to bed, and saw them under the covers.

But stepping out into the night, he still did not understand his own anger. He only knew that he resented this boy, resented his disregarding gaze, his eternal silence. He attempted to remind himself of the boy’s inevitable pain, his inevitable anguish. But he could not think of this. All along he had prevented himself from thinking of it, because it was simply too terrible to think about in the first place.

And every time his mind had forced him to ask what is happening to this boy now, what does he think, what does he feel, some stubborn little voice in Guido said, Ah, but you have always been a eunuch, you can never know, and all of this with the mock tone of superiority.

Whatever the reason, he felt rage when he stepped into the garden, and saw in the moonlight an immense reclining statue over a shell-shaped pool, and the slender, very straight figure of Tonio Treschi standing before it.

Rome is full of such statues, statues that are three or four times the size of a normal man. It seems they grow in every nook and cranny of the town, against walls, over gates, presiding over an infinite variety of fountains. And though one would think nothing of them in a church or great palazzo, they can sometimes be violently disturbing in a small place, when one comes on them suddenly.

Because at such a moment, one can be overcome with a sense of the grotesque. These statues are giants in these narrow circumstances, and yet they are so lifelike that it seems they might commence suddenly to breathe and then reach out with their immense hands to crush those around them.

The details of the statues impress themselves. One sees the white muscles moving under the marble, the veins on the backs of hands, the indentation on the toenail. But the whole is horrible to look at.

And Guido felt this jarring sensation when he stepped out of the cloister and into this narrow space behind Tonio.

A god reclined against the wall, its enormous bearded face hung forward. And through its fingers, open to the sky, water ran, trickling down to the moonlit surface of the pool beneath it.

Tonio Treschi was staring at its naked chest and at the broad hips that melted into a loose drapery exposing a powerfully muscled leg upon which the giant’s full weight rested.

Guido looked away from this monstrous god; he saw the moonlight shattered in the surface of the rippling water. And then he saw out of the corner of his eye that the boy had turned to him. He felt those relentless and greedy eyes moving over him.

“Why do you stare at me!” he demanded suddenly, and before he could stop himself his hand had closed on the loose cloth at Tonio’s shoulder.

He could feel the boy’s astonishment. The moon revealed his crumpling expression, his mouth slack and then silently, stupidly working.

The hard, bright angles of his young face dissolved in helplessness, in total remorse. And it seemed he would stammer some negation if he could; he started, stopped, and left off, his head shaking.

And Guido too was helpless. He reached out again as if he would touch the boy, but his hand hung in the air, and he watched in awful fear as the boy seemed all over to weaken.

The boy had looked down. He had lifted his hands and he was staring into the open palms of one and then the other. He reached out as if trying to capture something in the open air, or merely to look at his own arms. Yes, he was looking at his own arms, and suddenly there was a rattle in his throat, a groan, half strangled.

Turning to Guido he drew his breath in gasps as if he were a dumb beast that could not speak, his eyes growing wider and wider and more desperate.

And suddenly Guido understood everything.

Yet the boy still gasped, still held up his hands, staring at them, slapping them suddenly to his chest, and that half-strangled groan became a guttural cry growing louder and louder.

Guido reached out, took him in his arms, and held his stiff form with all his strength until he felt it suddenly go limp and silent against him.

The boy who lay so still against his shoulder before being led off silently to bed had uttered one word in Guido’s ear. It was “monster.”

I
T WAS THE FIRST DAY
of May when they entered Naples, and even the long drive through the green wheat fields did not prepare them for the spectacle of the great sprawling city itself, drenched in sunlight and cascading downhill in a blaze of pastel walls and burgeoning roof gardens to hold the panorama of the clear blue bay in its embrace, the harbor crowded with white sails, Vesuvius sending up its plume of smoke into the cloudless sky above it.

As the carriage rocked and struggled along, the tireless swarm that was the city’s population surrounded it, as if brought to life by the warmth that hung fragrant in the air, carriages whipping to and fro, donkeys blocking the path, vendors crying out their wares, or coming right to the windows to offer ices, snow water, fresh melon.

The driver cracked the whip, the horses straining uphill, and with each turn of the crooked street another vista of land and sea opened magically before them.

This was Eden. Guido had suddenly not the slightest doubt of it, and he was unprepared for the sense of well-being that flooded him.

One could not look on this place with its profusion of leaf
and flower, this jagged shore, and that ominous mountain, and not feel joy to the marrow of one’s being.

He could see the excitement of the little boys, especially Paolo, the younger one, who leapt right into Tonio’s lap, thrusting his shoulders out of the window. But Tonio had also completely forgotten himself. He was straining for a view of Vesuvius at every angle.

“But it’s breathing smoke,” he whispered.

“It’s breathing smoke!” echoed Paolo.

“Yes,” Guido answered. “It has been doing that off and on for a long time. And don’t pay it so much attention. We never know when it will decide to really show off.”

Tonio’s lips moved as if saying some private prayer.

As the horses clopped into the stable yard, Tonio was the first to jump down, with Paolo in his arms. And letting the boy go, he followed him immediately into the courtyard. His eyes moved up the four walls that enclosed it, rising as they did over a four-cornered cloister of Roman arches, the whole covered almost entirely with an unruly fluttering green vine. It was alive with small white trumpet-shaped blossoms and the song of thousands of bees.

The din of instruments streamed out of the open doors. Tiny faces appeared at the glass. And the fountain, its worn cherubs stained by time as they clung to their open cornucopia, let loose a generous and muting spray that caught the sun.

Immediately, Maestro Cavalla came out of his office doors and embraced Guido.

A widower whose sons were long gone to foreign courts, the Maestro had a special love for Guido. And Guido had always known it, and he felt a sudden warm rush of feeling for the man now. The Maestro seemed older, was that inevitable? His hair had gone entirely white.

He sent the two little boys off with a perfunctory greeting, and then his eyes settled on the elegant and remote figure of the Venetian who was wandering among the orange trees that crowded the cloister, their blossoms already turned to tiny building fruit.

“You must tell me at once what is going on here,” said the Maestro under his breath. But when he looked at Guido again, he gave way immediately to another warm embrace, holding
his old pupil for a moment as if he were listening to some distant sound.

Guido was at once steamy. “Surely you got my letter from Bologna.”

“Yes, and daily I am visited by men from the Venetian Embassy. They have all but accused me of gelding this princeling under this roof, and threaten to obtain the right to search us.”

“Well, then, send for them,” Guido growled. But he was afraid.

“Why have you gone to such lengths for this boy?” the Maestro asked patiently.

“When you hear his voice, you will know,” Guido answered.

The Maestro smiled. “Well, I see you are your old self, nothing has changed there.”

And after a moment’s hesitation, he consented that, for the time being at least, Tonio might be given a private attic room.

Tonio proceeded up the stairs slowly. He could not stop himself from glancing back at the crowded practice rooms whose doors stood open revealing some hundred or more boys all at work upon various instruments. Cellos, double basses, flutes, and trumpets gave off their roar amid the general din, while here and there at least a dozen children pounded upon harpsichords.

And in the halls themselves the boys sat at their lessons at various benches, one even practicing his violin in a corner of the stairway, another having made the landing his desk where he bowed his head as Tonio and Guido passed, hardly missing a stroke of the pen on his staff as he harmonized a composition.

The stairs themselves were worn concave from so many feet over so many centuries, and there was about everything a barren, scrubbed look which Guido had never before noticed.

He could not guess what Tonio was thinking, and he did not know that in all his life, this boy had never even for one day been subject to the rules or discipline of any institution.

Tonio knew nothing of children either. And he was staring at them as though they were quite an unusual phenomenon.

He paused, stranded, at the door of the long dormitory in which Guido had spent his nights as a boy, and turned willingly
enough to be led down an attic corridor to the little slope-roofed room that would be his own chamber.

All within was neat and ready for some special occupant, a castrato who had in his last years of residency here distinguished himself. In fact, Guido himself had once slept in this chamber.

The shutters opening inward from the dormer window were painted with green leaves and soft overblown roses, while a similar border of flowers ran along the tops of the walls.

And bright enameled decorations covered the desk and chair, the dark red cabinet with its gilded edges waiting for Tonio’s possessions.

The boy glanced back and forth, and then suddenly he saw through the open window the distant bluish peak of the mountain again, and he moved almost mindlessly towards it.

For an eternity he stood gazing out at that plume of smoke that rose so straight to the faint disintegrating clouds and then finally he turned again to Guido. His eyes were filled with quiet wonder. And they moved again over the furnishings of this little place without the slightest censure or complaint. It was as if, for an instant, he liked all that he saw. As if the weight of his pain were something any human being could carry, day in day out, hour by hour, without some final alleviation. He turned again to the mountain.

“Would you like to climb Vesuvius?” Guido asked.

Tonio turned with such a bright face that Guido was startled. It was the boy again enhanced by the softest natural radiance.

“We’ll go up some day if you like,” Guido said.

And for the first time Tonio smiled at him.

But Guido was stricken to see the light go out of the boy’s face when he explained to him that he must meet with the Venetian representatives.

“I don’t wish to meet with them,” Tonio whispered.

“This can’t be helped,” Guido answered.

As they assembled in the large ground floor office of Maestro Cavalla, Guido understood Tonio’s reticence.

These two Venetians, unknown to the boy obviously, entered the room with all the pomp one associated with the last century. Or rather, in their great wigs and frock coats, they resembled galleons at full sail proceeding into a narrow harbor.

It was with undisguised contempt that they examined Tonio. Their questions were rapid, hostile.

There was a slight quiver to Tonio’s eyes; he had gone dead white, and the hands clasped behind his back were working against each other. Yes, he replied, he had decided upon this course of action on his own, no, no one from this conservatorio had influenced him, yes, the operation had been performed, no, he would
not
submit to an examination, and no, he could not reveal the name of the physician. Again, no one of this conservatorio had had any knowledge of his plans….

And here Maestro Cavalla interrupted, furious, his Venetian dialect as rapid and sure as Tonio’s, to state that this conservatorio was made of musicians, not surgeons. Boys were never operated on here! “We have nothing to do with it.”

The Venetians sneered at this.

And Guido almost sneered at it himself, but he managed to conceal his feelings.

The interrogation was obviously over. And now an uneasy silence fell on all present and it seemed that the elder of these two Venetians was wrestling with some latent emotion.

Finally he cleared his throat, and in a low, almost rough voice, he asked:

“Marc Antonio, is there nothing more to this!”

Tonio was caught off guard. His lips whitened as he pressed them together, and then obviously unable to speak, he shook his head, his eyes moving off to one side where they widened slightly as if deliberately blurring their focus.

“Marc Antonio, you did this of your own will!” The man took another step forward.

“Signore,” Tonio said in a voice that was hardly recognizable, “it is an irrevocable decision. Is it your purpose to make me regret it?”

The man flinched as if what he had to say to this were better unsaid. And then he lifted a small scroll in his right hand which had hung all this time at his side. And in a lackluster voice, he said quickly, bitterly:

“Marc Antonio, I fought with your father in the Levant. I stood on the deck of his ship at Piraeus. It gives me no pleasure to tell you what you must already know, that you have turned your back on your father, on your family, and on your homeland. You are henceforth and forever banished from Venice.
As for the rest, your family commits you to this conservatorio, in which you must remain, or you will receive no further support from them.”