Authors: Anne Rice
People wept above. They cried out vows of love as they emptied their purses. They demanded the name of this seraph soprano, footmen sent down to bring him and his little band up into fashionable supper rooms. He never went.
But he followed Ernestino to his favorite haunts as the hours grew smaller and the sky paler.
“In all my life,” Ernestino said, “I have never heard a voice like that. God has touched you, Signore. But sing while you can, because it won’t be long before those high notes leave you forever.”
Through the soft caress of Tonio’s drunkenness the words assumed their obvious meaning. Manhood, and the loss of this along with so much else.
“Does it happen all at once?” he murmured. His head was against a wall. He lifted the jug and felt the wine spilling again as it did too often. But he had to wash the bitterness out of his mouth.
“My God, Excellency, haven’t you ever been around a boy whose voice changed?”
“No, I have never been around anybody at all, save an elderly man and a very young woman,” he said. “I know nothing of boys, I know little of men. And when it’s finally said and done, I know very little of singing either.”
A figure filled up the opening at the far end of the
calle
in which they stood. It seemed to touch the walls on either side, and a sudden wariness gripped Tonio.
“Sometimes it’s fast,” Ernestino was saying. “Sometimes it drags on for a long time with broken notes, you can’t trust it. But as tall as you are for your age, Excellency, and…and…” He made a little smile, taking the jug. Tonio knew he was thinking of Bettina. “…Well, it may come sooner than with most.” He let it go at that, and putting his heavy arm over Tonio, guided him forward.
The figure had moved away.
Tonio smiled, but no one saw it. He was thinking of his father’s words to him, very nearly his last words, and suddenly an anguish deadened him and left him solitary even in this little company.
“Once you have made the decision that you are a man, you will become one.” Could the mind thus instruct the flesh? He shook his head, communing with himself. Against Andrea he felt a sudden terrible anger.
And yet it seemed unforgivable that he should feel this, that he should be where he was, wandering with common singers
in this mean and crooked place. Yet he walked on, leaning all the more on Ernestino.
They had reached the canal. Lanterns burned ahead beneath the dim shadow of the bridge where the gondoliers gathered.
And there appeared that figure again; he was sure it was the same, for the heavy build and the height, and the man stood by obviously watching them.
Tonio moved his hand to his sword, and for a moment he was fixed to the spot.
“Excellency, what is it?” said Ernestino. They were only a few steps from Bettina’s tavern.
“That one, there,” Tonio murmured, but the weight of his suspicion was breaking him, sickening him. Send death for me, like that, some paid assassin? It seemed he’d already been dealt the blow and this was not life any longer, rather some nightmare place where that sentinel stood on the bridge and these strangers urged him to a meaningless portal.
“Never mind, Excellency,” said Ernestino. “That’s only the maestro from Naples. A singing teacher come here for little boys. Haven’t you seen him before? He’s playing your shadow.”
It was dawn when Tonio lifted his head from drunken sleep at the tavern table. Bettina sat at his side, her arm under his coat and warm against his back as if she would protect him from the coming sun, and Ernestino, beyond coherence, kept up an angry argument with her father.
And against the wall at the door stood a stocky man, brown-haired, with large menacing eyes and a nose that was pushed flat to his face as if someone had smashed it. He was young. He wore a tattered coat, a sword with a brass handle. And he was staring rudely at Tonio as he lifted his tankard.
I
T WAS ALMOST
completely dark in San Marco, only a score of scattered lights pulsing throughout the immense church to give the faintest glint to the old mosaics. Old Beppo, Tonio’s elderly castrato teacher, held a single taper in his hand as he gazed anxiously at the young maestro from Naples, Guido Maffeo.
Tonio stood alone in the left choir loft. He had only just finished singing, and there was a distinct echo of his last note lingering in the church as if nothing could put an end to it.
Alessandro was standing mute, his hands clasped behind his back, looking down at the two smaller figures, Beppo, and Guido Maffeo beside him. He was the first to see the distortion in Maffeo’s features. Beppo did not see it, and at the first guttural blast from the southern Italian, Beppo was visibly stunned.
“From the greatest of Venetian families!” Guido repeated Beppo’s last words. He bent forward slightly to glare into the face of the old eunuch. “You brought me here to listen to a Venetian patrician!”
“But, Signore, this is the finest voice in Venice.”
“A Venetian patrician!”
“But Signore…”
“Signore,” Alessandro ventured softly, “Beppo did not perhaps realize that you are searching for students for the conservatorio.” Alessandro had sensed this misunderstanding almost from the beginning.
But Beppo still did not comprehend. “But, Signore,” he insisted,
“I wanted…I wanted that you should hear this voice for your own pleasure!”
“For my own pleasure, I could have stayed in Naples,” growled Guido.
Alessandro turned to Beppo, and with obvious disregard for this impossible southern Italian, he spoke in the soft Venetian dialect. “Beppo, the Maestro is looking for castrati children.”
Beppo was miserable.
Tonio had come down from the choir loft and his slight, dark-clad figure appeared behind the echo of his footsteps in the gloom.
He had sung without accompaniment, and his voice had easily filled the church, its effect upon Guido being almost eerie.
The boy was so near manhood now that the voice had lost its innocence. And long years of study had obviously contributed to its perfection. But it was a natural voice, singing in effortless perfect pitch. And though it was a boy’s soprano which had not yet begun to change, it had a man’s sentiment in it.
The performance had yet other qualities to it which Guido, angry and exhausted, refused to define further.
He stared at the boy who was almost as tall as himself. And realized it was just as he’d supposed the instant he’d heard the voice from the choir loft: this was the vagabond nobleman who roamed the streets at night, the dark-eyed, white-skinned boy with a face chiseled out of the purest marble. He was narrow, elegant, suggesting a dark Botticelli. And as he bowed to his teachers—as if they weren’t, in fact, his inferiors—he showed nothing of that natural insolence which Guido associated with all aristocrats.
But there was no accounting for the Venetian patrician class. They were unlike anything Guido had ever known in their habitual courtesy to all men around them. Perhaps the fact that everyone went on foot in this city had something to do with it. He wasn’t sure. He didn’t care. He was furious.
But he did note that the boy’s face was remote for all its politeness. He was leaving this assemblage with humble but indifferent apologies.
The door let in a blinding flash of sunshine as he left the church and the flustered group behind him.
“You must accept my apologies, Signore,” said Alessandro. “Beppo did not mean to waste your time.”
“Oh, no. No, no, no…nonono!” Beppo muttered with all the variety in tone of a regular sentence.
“And this arrogant young boy, who is he?” demanded Guido. “This patrician’s son with the larynx of a god who does not even care whether or not his voice has made a favorable impression.”
This was too much for Beppo, and Alessandro took the initiative of dismissing him. It was against Alessandro’s nature to be rude, but he was now short of patience. And the fact was that he harbored a deep, secret, and iron-hard hatred of those who went out from the conservatorios of Naples to search for castrati children. His own childhood training in that distant southern city had been so cruel and relentless that it had obliterated all memory of the years that preceded it. Alessandro had been twenty years old before he met one of his brothers in the Piazza San Marco, and even then he did not know the man who said, “See, the little crucifix you wore as a child. Our mother sends it to you.” He remembered the crucifix but not the mother.
“If you will forgive me, Maestro,” he said now, bending down to look into the fiercesome dark face (he had taken the taper from Beppo), “the boy has not the slightest doubt that his voice pleases everyone who hears it, though he would never be so ill-mannered as to say so. And please understand he came here today out of kindness to his teacher.”
But this boor was not only crude, he was uninsultable. He was not even listening to Alessandro. He was rubbing at his temples, rather, with both hands as if he suffered from a headache. His eyes had the malice of an animal but they were too large to suggest an animal.
And it was not until this very moment, while standing this close, candle in hand, that Alessandro suddenly realized he was gazing down upon an unusually stocky castrato. He studied the smooth face. No, it had never grown a beard. This was yet another eunuch.
He almost let out a little laugh. He had thought him a whole man with a knife tucked under his belt, and a strange mingling of feelings took place in him. He softened slightly towards Guido, not because he felt sorry for him, but because he was a member of a great fraternity more likely to appreciate the pristine beauty of Tonio’s voice than any other.
“If you will allow me, Signore, I might recommend several other boys. There is a eunuch at San Giorgio….”
“I’ve heard him,” whispered Guido, more to himself than to Alessandro. “Is there the slightest chance that this boy…I mean, what precisely does his talent mean to him?” But before he glanced at Alessandro he knew that this was perfectly ridiculous.
Alessandro didn’t even dignify the question with an answer.
A little silence fell between them. Guido had turned his back and taken a few steps on the uneven stone floor. The flame of the taper shivered in Alessandro’s hand. And in this faulty light it seemed he could hear more distinctly the sigh that escaped from the singing teacher.
Alessandro saw the slump of his shoulders. And he felt emanating from the man a feeling that was almost like sorrow. Almost like sorrow. There was some violence in this eunuch that Alessandro had seldom encountered. In a momentary but sweeping recollection, he was again confronted with the cruelty and sacrifice which he himself had endured in Naples. He felt some begrudging respect for Guido Maffeo.
“You will thank your young patrician friend for me, please?” Guido murmured, defeated.
They moved towards the door.
But with his hand on it, Alessandro paused.
“But tell me,” he said confidentially. “What did you really think of him?”
Immediately he regretted it. This dark little man was capable of anything.
Yet to his surprise, Guido said nothing. He stood glaring at the uneven candle, and his face became smooth and philosophical. And again Alessandro felt the emotions of the other, what seemed to him very excessive and puzzling emotions.
Then Guido smiled at Alessandro, wistfully:
“This is what I think of it: I wish I had not heard it.”
And Alessandro smiled, too.
They were musicians; they were eunuchs; they understood one another.
It was raining by the time he reached the palazzo. He had hoped that Tonio would be waiting for him outside the church, but he was not. And as Alessandro entered the library off the
Grand Salon, he saw that Beppo was still in a turmoil. He had poured out this humiliating story to Angelo, who listened to it all as if he were witnessing some outrage to the name Treschi.
“It’s all Tonio’s fault,” Angelo said finally. “He should give up all this singing. Did you speak to the Signora? If you don’t speak to the Signora, I will.”
“It has nothing to do with Tonio,” said Beppo. “Why, how was I to know that he was looking for castrati children? I had no idea he was searching for castrati children. He spoke to me about voices, exemplary voices. He said, ‘Tell me where I might find…’ Oh, this is terrible, terrible.”
“It is also over,” said Alessandro quietly.
He had just heard the front doors of the palazzo shut. He knew Carlo’s step by this time perfectly.
“Tonio should be in this library now,” said Angelo emphatically, “at his studies.”
“But how was I to know this? Why, he said, tell me where I might find the finest voices! I said, Signore, you have come to a city where you can find the finest voices everywhere but if you…if you…”
“Are you going to speak to the Signora?” said Angelo looking up to Alessandro.
“And Tonio was magnificent, Alessandro, you know he was….”
“Are you going to speak to the Signora?” Angelo banged his fist on the table.
“About what, speak to the Signora?”
Angelo had risen to his feet. It was Carlo who had spoken as he came into the room.
Alessandro made a quick gesture of discretion. He did not look at Carlo. He would not give this man an edge of authority over his younger brother, and softly now, he said, “Tonio was off with me in the piazza when he should have been studying here. It was my fault, Excellency, you will forgive me. I will see that it doesn’t happen again.”
As he’d expected, the master of the house was indifferent.
“But what is all this you were talking about?” he said, rousing his interest almost stubbornly.
“Oh, a hideous mistake, a stupid mistake,” said Beppo, “and this man is now angry with me. He has insulted me. And he was so rude to the young master, what am I to say to him?”
This was too much for Alessandro. He threw up his hands and excused himself, as Beppo unwound the whole tale down to the very name of the hymn that Tonio had sung in the church, and how exquisitely he had performed it.
Carlo uttered a short laugh and turned towards the stairs.