Authors: Anne Rice
Paolo had been sent to bed; Tonio had been drowsing, a glass of wine in his hand.
“What is it?” he asked as Guido sat down heavily, his expression unreadable before he crumpled the note and threw it away.
“Ruggerio has hired the other two castrati who’ll appear with you,” Guido said. He rose and with his hands stuffed in the pockets of his satin robe seemed in the act of mapping out his thoughts. He looked at Tonio. “It could be…worse.”
“Well, who are they?” Tonio asked.
“One is Rubino, an old singer, very elegant and perhaps too antique in his style. But the Romans have liked him in the past. There’s absolutely nothing to fear from Rubino; but we must pray he isn’t losing his voice.” He hesitated, so absorbed it was as if he’d forgotten Tonio was there.
“And the other?” Tonio coaxed.
“Bettichino,” Guido said.
“Bettichino!” Tonio whispered. Everyone knew of him. “Bettichino…on the same stage.”
“Remember!” Guido said sharply. “I told you it could be worse.” But he seemed to lose his conviction immediately. He walked a few paces, made a sharp turn. “He is cold,” he said. “He is imperious, he conducts himself as if he were royalty when he came up from nothing, like the rest of us…well…like some of us.” He threw a humorous glance at Tonio. “And he invariably has the orchestra tune itself from his voice. He’s been known to give instructions to those singers he thought needed it….”
“But he is a fine singer, a great singer,” Tonio said. “This is marvelous for the opera and you know it….” Guido was staring at him as if he did not quite know what
to say. Then he murmured, “He has a very great following in Rome.”
“Have you no faith in me?” Tonio smiled.
“All my faith is in you,” Guido murmured. “But there will be two camps, his camp and your camp.”
“And so I must astonish everyone,” Tonio said with a playful lift of the head. “No’
Guido straightened his shoulders. And staring forward he went directly through the room and to his desk.
Tonio unwound himself slowly from the chair. Stepping quietly, he let himself into the cluttered little chamber which was his dressing room and settled there before a table of pots and jars, staring at the violet dress.
The cabinets bulged on either side of him with frock coats and capes; a dozen swords glimmered in the open armoire; and the window which might have been golden a moment ago was now a pale blue.
The dress lay as he’d left it, over an armchair, its underskirts mussed, its placket of cream-colored ruffles open all of a piece, as if it had been slashed along one side to reveal a yawning blackness within the rigid shape of the bodice.
He leaned on his elbow, his hand moving out just to touch the surface of the silk, and it seemed he was experiencing the feel of light itself because the dress gleamed in the dark.
He could imagine it covering him again, he could feel that unfamiliar nakedness above the ruffles and the heavy sway of those skirts. At the core of each new humiliation there was this sense of illimitable power, this exhilarating strength. What had Guido said to him, that he was free and that men and women only dreamed of such freedom? And in the Cardinal’s arms he had known this was divinely the truth.
Nevertheless it puzzled him. Each layer of him that was peeled away left him trembling for just a little while. And now as he stared at this empty dress, as it became perfectly the color of the shadows, he wondered, Will I emerge from this first night with the same strength? He could see a tier crowded with Venetians, he could hear the old, soft dialect all about him like whispers and kisses, and those faces full of expectation and half-concealed horror to see this gelded patrician got up
like the queen of France in paste and paint and that voice winding upwards. Ah!
He stopped.
And Bettichino. Yes, Bettichino. What about that? Forget about dresses and ribbons and Venetian carriages coming south and all the rest of it.
Think about Bettichino for a moment, and what this meant.
He had feared bad singers and all the mundane horrors they might bring: pasteboard swords glued in the scabbard when you tried to draw them, your wine lightly poisoned so you got sick as soon as you went on. Paid cohorts hissing before you even opened your mouth.
But Bettichino? Cold, proud, a lofty prince of the stage who brought with him reputation and a perfect voice? It was the ennobling challenge, not the degrading contest.
And it was just that sort of blinding light which might eclipse him totally, leave him struggling on the fringes to regain an audience which with Bettichino had already drunk its fill!
He shuddered. He had been so deep in his thoughts his body was coiling up on him, and he had hold of this dress, as if trying to cling to the last bit of violet color that the light could still reveal. He lifted it so that he might feel its cold smoothness with his face.
“When have you ever doubted your own voice?” he whispered. “What is the matter with you now?”
The light was gone. The window pulsed with the deep, luminous blue of the night. And rising with an angry air, he went out of his rooms and down the corridor, filling his thoughts with nothing but the echo of his heels on the stone.
Darkness, darkness, he was whispering almost affectionately. You make me feel invisible. You make me feel that therefore I’m not a man nor a woman nor a eunuch and that I am simply alive.
But when he reached the door of the Cardinal’s study, he did not hesitate, but knocked at once.
The man was at his desk, and for just one moment this room with its high walls of books and faint candles was so reminiscent of another place that he wondered at the love and the desire he felt when he saw the quick radiance of passion in the Cardinal’s face.
B
Y THE END OF SUMMER
, it was obvious to everyone that the powerful Cardinal Calvino had become the patron of Tonio Treschi, the Venetian castrato who insisted upon appearing under his own name.
“Tonio,” said the Contessa, who was visiting Rome more and more often, “you’ll hear it to the rafters, you wait and see.”
Meanwhile the Cardinal kept the nightingale in the cage, not allowing him to sing outside the palazzo from which a handful of friends carried tales of his remarkable voice.
But Guido was following another path.
To the concerts he attended, he was always sure to take with him a sheaf of his music. And when the keyboard was offered him, sometimes out of mere politeness, he accepted at once.
Now he was a regular visitor to the homes of the dilettanti, and everyone was talking about his harpsichord compositions, declaring that nothing like them had been heard since the days of Scarlatti the elder, except that Guido was more melancholy and could make you weep. This was true even in the lighter music, sonatas that were so tripping and frothy and full of sunlight you felt you were inebriated with them as with champagne.
A visiting French marquis soon sent his invitation; another came from an English viscount, and Guido was frequently summoned to the homes of those Roman cardinals who held regular concerts, sometimes in their private theaters, for which he was now gently urged to compose.
But Guido was clever. He was not free to accept any specific commission. He was preparing his opera. But any time he might step forward and take out a brilliant concerto from his portfolio of scores.
Yes, this new opera ought to be something, people murmured, if one were to judge by his shorter compositions. And Tonio, his pupil, was so remarkable to look at, so perfect in every feature, even if he did always, without exception, politely refuse to sing.
This was public life.
At home, it was relentless work for Guido, who drove Tonio through more rigorous practice than he’d ever endured at the conservatorio, particularly with high rapid glissandos, which were Bettichino’s stock in trade. After a strong two hours of morning exercises he now pushed Tonio towards notes and passages Tonio could execute only when the voice was thoroughly warm. Tonio didn’t feel safe in these realms, but practice would give him the security, and though he might never use these high notes, he must be ready for Bettichino, Guido reminded him again and again.
“But the man’s almost forty, can he sing this?” Tonio stared at a new set of exercises two octaves above middle C.
“If he can,” Guido said, “then you must.” And giving Tonio another aria, one which might not survive the day to appear in the finished opera, Guido said: “Now, you’re not in this room with me. You’re on the stage and there are thousands listening to you. You cannot make a mistake.”
Tonio was secretly ecstatic over this new music. Never in his life at Naples had he dared utter critical judgments of Guido, but Tonio knew his own taste had been educated before he had ever left home.
It was not only Venetian music he’d known; he had heard a great deal of Neapolitan music performed in the north.
And he realized that Guido, now freed of the dreary regimen of the conservatorio and the constant demands of his old students, was astonishing even himself. He was refining his performance, as well as his compositions, and delighting in all the attention he received.
After the day’s lessons were over, he and Tonio were completely free. And if Tonio did not want to accompany him to
the various parties and concerts he attended, Guido did not press.
Tonio told himself he was happy to see all this. But he was not. Guido’s independence confused him. Guido took to wearing finer clothes than he had in Naples, thanks to the Contessa’s generosity, and he almost always wore a wig. The white frame for the face worked its civilizing and formalizing miracle, and those odd features—the immense and challenging eyes, the flat and brutal nose, and those lips spread so generously in a sensuous smile—made Guido a magnet even in a crowded room. And the sight of a woman on Guido’s arm, her breasts often pressed right against his sleeve, made quiet fury erupt in Tonio which he could only turn on himself.
It was all changing.
There is nothing you can do about it, and you are as spoiled and vain as anyone ever accused you of being, Tonio thought, if you begrudge him this.
Yet he was glad to leave these social gatherings at times. He couldn’t sing. The constant conversation wore him out. And with a bitterness, he reflected that Guido had “given” him to the Cardinal; he wanted still to be angry with Guido. Sometimes he wanted still to believe it was all Guido’s fault.
But by the time he reached the gates of the Cardinal Calvino’s house, he’d forgotten this.
He had but one thought in his mind and that was to be in the Cardinal’s bed.
It commenced early on those evenings when the Cardinal did not have guests. Paolo was sound asleep, Tonio always saw to that. And then he slipped into the Cardinal’s rooms without so much as a knock on the door or an exchange of words.
The Cardinal was in a fever of waiting, and his first act was always to remove Tonio’s clothes. It was his wish that Tonio be like a child in his hands, and he fought buttons and lace and hooks, even when they maddened him, without Tonio’s aid.
Once it had been told to him that Tonio was now and then going about in women’s clothes, far from being shocked, he wanted to see them, and frequently had the violet dress with the cream ribbons brought in so that Tonio might be put into it by him, and then stripped of it, as he chose.
It seemed at times it was Tonio’s skin he craved more than anything else. Pushing the fabric back, he would taste it with his tongue as well as his lips.
Tonio was as pliant in his arms as Domenico had ever been in his own. He would watch with the softest smile as the Cardinal tore away that wealth of cream ruffles merely to lay his hands on the flatness beneath it, then pinching the nipples hard until Tonio couldn’t keep silent, only to kiss him then as though begging forgiveness and then push up those skirts to drive his horn between Tonio’s legs. Each time that awesome length brought its pain, but he would close his mouth over Tonio’s mouth as if to say, If you cry out, cry out into me.
There was soft delight in all that the Cardinal did, his hands running through Tonio’s hair, his kisses on the eyelids, this feverish adoration which moved at its own pace.
But it was not this soft kneading and kissing that made Tonio’s passion burn white hot. What excited Tonio was not what the Cardinal did to him, but the Cardinal himself. And it was when he had the man’s hips locked in his arms, when he could cover that root with his mouth, when he felt the Cardinal’s seed flood into him, buttermilk sour and sweet at the same time, that was when his body shuddered with an ecstasy that threatened to tear him apart.
That, and the inevitable rape the Cardinal always preferred, that iron driven hard between the legs.
And so Tonio bore the rest, enthralled that it was
this man
who did it to him, thinking, Yes, it is the Cardinal Calvino, it is this prince of the church, who attends the Holy Father, who sits in the Sacred College, it is this powerful one to whom I surrender, whom I take in my arms. His hands were all too eager to hold those heavy testicles, to breathe their warmth, to feel their loose hairy sheathing, to press them ever so lightly as if in menace only to feel the Cardinal’s body become one awesome and cruel shaft.
Yet he came to understand that for the Cardinal even the gentle play was its own form of rape. As surely as he wanted to pound Tonio into the sheets beneath him, he wanted to see Tonio groan with pleasure, he wanted to invade Tonio with pleasure, he wanted to enslave him with it, as surely as with any pain.
And so the hours passed between them. Tonio, his eyes
glassy and unseeing, lay against the Cardinal afterwards, almost like a wrestler taking one moment to steal from his opponent a limp embrace.
But there was more to it all even than this. Because almost with the first night there had begun some other exchange.
They would dress together after lovemaking. Perhaps they would dine. The Cardinal had various wines to offer, all of them excellent. Then summoning old Nino with his torch, they would begin their regular promenade through the Cardinal’s halls.