Cry to Heaven (38 page)

But once on the long Via Toledo, they had their pick of fine taverns with the money in Tonio’s pockets and were soon feasting on roast fowl or fresh fish with that wine they both loved, Lagrima Christi, and in the pleasant glow of these clean and crowded places, they would talk.

Guido would give Tonio the names of the old masters who’d written the exercises he was studying, and explain how Guido’s own vocalises differed from these.

But the greatest pleasure now for Tonio was giving any question to Guido for an answer and having his teacher take it up at once. Had Guido ever seen Alessandro Scarlatti? Yes, certainly, when he was a boy he had in fact met him, and Maestro Cavalla had spirited him often to the San Bartolommeo to see Scarlatti at the keyboard directing his own work.

It was Scarlatti who had really brought greatness to Naples, Guido said. In the old days men looked to Venice and Rome
for the new operas. But now it was Naples, and as Tonio could see all around him, it was to Naples that foreign students came.

But opera was changing all the time. The long boring recitatives that advanced the plot with all the information the audience had to know were becoming more lively instead of such tiresome interludes between the arias. And comic opera, that was the coming thing. People wanted to hear opera in the vernacular, too, not just in classical Italian. And more and more recitatives with the orchestra were appearing in operas, where before most of recitatives had been dry.

But you had always to care about what the people wanted, and no matter how long or boring the singing in between, the people would put up with it for beautiful arias, and that would never change.

That is what opera was, Guido said, beautiful singing. And no violin or harpsichord could ever do to a man what singing could do to him.

Or so Guido, at that time in that place, believed.

Some evenings when they were tired of the taverns, they went on to the continual round of balls, especially favoring the Contessa Lamberti, who was such a patron of the arts, but here their endless dialogue did not stop.

They would find some out-of-the-way parlor, rescue a candelabrum for the clavichord or the new pianoforte, and after Guido let his fingers fly for a while, he would nestle into some high couch and once again Tonio would begin his questions, or Guido would take off on his own.

His eyes were full of some new and softening wonder at such moments; his face, relaxed, was boyish and gentle, and he seemed incapable of the bad temper of the past.

And it was on one such night in one of the Contessa’s small music rooms, when they had found a round table, a deck of playing cards, and a candle and they sat opposite each other going through some simple little game, that Tonio finally said:

“Maestro, tell me about my voice!”

“But first you must tell me something,” Guido said, and there was a flicker of temper that sent a shudder through Tonio. “Why is it you won’t sing this Christmas solo when I’ve told you it’s simple and that I wrote it for you?”

Tonio looked away.

He laid down the hand of cards in a small fan, and singled out for no reason the king and the queen. And then, unable to seek for the moment the obvious answer to Guido’s question, he found a simple solution to this next battle he must fight. He would sing the solo for Guido, if Guido wanted it. He would sing it for Guido, even if he was not yet strong enough to do it for the young man who had come down from the mountain. Yet he was afraid.

As soon as he raised his voice alone in the chapel, he would really be a castrato. That was it, wasn’t it? It was one great step beyond wearing a black tunic with a red sash. It was one immense step beyond blending his voice with others in a chorus. He would step forward in that moment; he would be fully illuminated for what he was.

It was like being stripped naked, and showing to all of them the mutilation that had been done. Inevitable, but coldly terrifying to him. And now reflecting silently on his height, on the long slender hand that was his as it lay on, the table, bent slightly to move these cards on the polished wood, he thought Will I sound like a boy anymore at all? Am I a boy? Or would I have been, by now, a man?

A man. He smiled at the brutal simplicity of that word and its great avalanche of meanings. And for the first time in all his life the word struck him as…as what? Coarse. Never mind. You deceive yourself, he half-whispered aloud. For all its vast abstraction, the word had but one fully understood meaning.

And he knew he was very young for that great natural change to have come about in him. But in a bedroom in another world a woman had teased him, saying that it would not be long. He had been proud then of those simple endowments, so utterly certain of them, and so miserable at the same time.

But that was another world.

He was a castrato and he would be a castrato in that chapel when he raised his naked voice.

And it was but the first exposure. There would come so many others, and that final moment: when he stepped out on the stage of some vast theater, alone. If he was fortunate enough! If he was good enough, if his voice was strong enough, and his discipline strong enough, and Guido’s teaching
strong enough, yes, that was what he had to look forward to: the eunuch revealed to all the world.

He looked at Guido. And there seemed in him a fathomless innocence of all these dark and continuous things. He loved Guido. He would sing it for him.

And he remembered almost suddenly, unexpectedly, that when Guido had first spoken of it, he’d said, “It’s the first time anything of mine will be performed here.” Good God, had he been such a child that he had not even considered what this might mean to Guido? Had he been such a fool?

He had known all along that those splendid arias given him to sing at the end of the day were Guido’s own arias.

“It means a great deal to you that I sing it,” Tonio said, “because you’ve written it, isn’t that so?”

Guido’s face reddened, his eyes quivering slightly.

“It’s important because you are my pupil and you are ready!” he insisted.

But Guido’s anger flashed and died. Guido rested his elbow on the table with his chin on his hand.

“You asked me to tell you about your voice,” Guido said. “Maybe I’ve failed you in not telling you more about it, in being so very hard with you. Well, it was the only way I knew how to be….”

One of those silent wraithlike servants had ventured into the room with a flicker of blue satin and a hand descending into the soft airy light around the candles to pour some wine.

Guido watched the glass fill, motioning for the man to wait, and then he emptied it and watched it fill again.

“I’m going to speak plainly to you,” he said. “You are the finest singer I’ve ever heard, short of Farinelli. You could have sung this solo the first day you came to the conservatorio. You could have sung it in Venice.”

His eyes narrowed slightly as he studied Tonio. And there was about him an unusual combination of softness and intensity released by the wine.

“This solo was written for you,” he continued. “It was written for the voice I heard in Venice, for the boy singer whom I followed there night after night. I knew your range then, your power. I knew where you faltered when no one else would have noticed it. I knew what you had managed to learn on your own with just a little prodding from your teachers and I
was amazed. The accuracy of pitch, the natural sentiment.” He shook his head, drawing in his breath with a hiss.

“All I’m giving you is flexibility and strength.” He sighed. “In two years, you’ll have the skill to pick up any aria from any opera and know just how to ornament it and deliver it perfectly anywhere under anyone’s direction at any time. That’s all I’m giving you….” He paused. He looked away, and when he glanced back to Tonio again, his eyes were large and shadowed, and his voice was just a little deeper.

“But you have something else, Tonio, something beyond a voice,” he said. “Those singers who don’t have it almost never acquire it, and others who possess it haven’t your purity and power of tone. It’s this: some secret power that shocks people when they hear you, some power that enflames them so that they become absorbed with you and with you alone.

“When you sing in the church at Christmas, people will turn their heads to see your face, they’ll be drawn out of their petty thoughts and distractions, and when they go out they’ll ask for your name.

“Oh, for long years, I’ve tried to anatomize this, to figure exactly what it is. I had it when I was a boy. I know from within how it feels. But I cannot lay it all down. Perhaps it’s some subtle sense of timing, some infinitesimal and infallible hesitation, some instinct for knowing just when to increase the swell of a note, when to stop. And perhaps it’s bound up with the physical, with the eyes, with the face, with the way that the body holds itself as the voice rises. I don’t know.”

Tonio was engrossed. He was remembering that moment when Caffarelli stepped before the footlights in Venice; he was remembering the ripple of expectation that ran through the crowd. And how he, rushing down to the pit, had been magnetized by this eunuch even when Caffarelli was merely walking back and forth, not singing a note.

Could he do that to people? Was that possible?

“Now, there’s more,” Guido said. “You would have had this special fire in you even if you had been cut at the age of six as I was. But you were not cut then….”

Tonio felt a tensing, a sudden violent shock.

But Guido reached out and quieted him with the brush of his hand. “You were reared,” he went on, “to think and move and act like a man. And this adds its own strength to what you are,
too. You haven’t the softness of some eunuchs. You haven’t that quality of being…well, neither sex.”

Guido hesitated. “But of course,” he went on slowly, as if speaking to himself now, “there are some eunuchs cut very young who have this power, too.”

“This might change,” Tonio whispered. He could feel a stiffening all over, especially in his face, and that tendency to smile coldly which had come over him at such moments in the past, but his voice went on, even, gentle. “When I look in the mirror, I see Domenico already.”

Yes, Domenico, he thought. And my old double in Venice, the master of the House of Treschi, smiling behind him to see us at last grown so far apart.

He felt himself light and airy, something unnamable finally for all the names it was given, sprung from the husk of the boy he’d been.

“Yes,” Guido was saying, “you will resemble Domenico very much.”

Tonio could not conceal his fear, his loathing. And Guido touched his hand. But an evanescent sense of Carlo confused Tonio, some broken memory of pressing his face to that rough and closely shaven beard, of a sigh coming out of his brother, husky and muted, carrying with it sorrow and weariness and the man’s inevitable and God-given strength.

“Domenico was beautiful,” Guido scolded. “And he had this masculine power, too.”

“Domenico?” Tonio answered. “Masculine power? He was a Circe,” he said. He would never forget those caresses, and was ashamed even now of that old desire.

But Carlo was with him. Carlo had invaded this room, this moment, this intimacy with Guido which he so treasured, the sound of Carlo’s laughter drifting through those hallways. He looked to Guido and felt love for him, and looking down saw that Guido’s fingers were touching him still. Domenico. Power. Guido was laughing softly, too.

“Maybe Domenico was a Circe in bed,” Guido was saying. “Unfortunately, I’ll have to take your word on that. But when he sang, he had this other power, and his beauty gave it to him as well as his voice. Even dressed and coiffed as a woman, he was steely and formidable and made others afraid. Ah, you should have watched the faces of the men and women in the
audience when he sang. It is not hair on the chest nor a swaggering posture, this power. It is something which emanates from within. Domenico had it. Domenico wasn’t afraid of God or the devil. And you, my young one, have not begun to understand what a castrato can be.”

“I want to understand,” Tonio whispered. “But I never saw Domenico that way. I saw him as a sylph, maybe even at times an angel.” Tonio stopped. “Or maybe just a eunuch,” he confessed.

But this did not offend Guido.

Guido seemed absorbed in some little revelation. “A eunuch,” he whispered. “So you saw in him what you would become. And he saw in you his own style of beauty and strength. He always went for those who were most like him. But he was painfully lonely the last two years….”

“Was he?” Tonio asked. He would never lose the pain of disappointing Domenico, though Domenico might now have forgotten all of it.

“Yes, very lonely,” Guido went on. “Because he was better than everyone around him, and that is the worst loneliness of all. Everywhere he looked he saw envy, and fear. And then you came, and he set his sights on you. It was why Lorenzo taunted you, because Lorenzo loved Domenico and Domenico did not care.”

Tonio’s spirit was wasted. He was staring at the cards before him, the hard-eyed king and the hard-eyed queen. The queen had a Byzantine slant to her eyes. She was black-haired. She was the queen of spades.

“But don’t worry yourself over Domenico. If you wounded him as you say you did, then you taught him something which no one ever had before. It’s only in your elegance you resemble him. You have his fine bones, and that same hair that women love. But you are larger all over than he is; you’ll grow to greater height; and the features of your face, they are most unusual in that they are…“ And here Guido struggled, his eyes fixed on Tonio, his own mouth soft with his absorption. “They are all just a little farther apart from one another than one finds in most men. When you are on the stage you will be a blinding light; no one else on the boards will even be visible, including Domenico, your delicate shadow, if he were there.”

*  *  *

Tonio was silent as they returned to the conservatorio. They entered Guido’s rooms. Austere as they were, with only a few pieces of heavy furniture and a worn Turkey carpet, they were lavish for this place, and Tonio felt more than ever a part of Guido when he was with him here.