by Anne Rice
If only just a little of this life would spill through the front door, or better yet, if he could only get out into it!
But the Palazzo Treschi wasn't merely his home; it was his prison. His tutors never left him alone if they could help it. Beppo, the old castrato who'd long ago lost his voice, taught him French, poetry, counterpoint, while Angelo, the young and serious priest, dark of hair and slight of build, taught him his Latin, Italian, and English.
Twice a week the fencing master came. He must learn the proper handling of the sword, more for fun it seemed than for ever seriously using it.
And then there was the ballerino, a charming Frenchman who put him through the mincing steps of the minuet and the quadrille, while Beppo pounded out the appropriate festive rhythms at the keyboard. Tonio must know how to kiss a lady's hand, when and how to bow, all the fine points of a gentleman's manner.
It was fun enough. Sometimes when he was alone he tore up the air with his blade, or danced with imaginary girls beautifully constructed from those he saw from time to time in the narrow calli.
But save for the endless spectacles of the church, Holy Week, Easter, the routine splendor and music of mass on Sunday, Tonio's only escape on his own was into the bowels of the house, when he fled to the neglected rooms of the lowest floor where no one could find him.
There, with taper in hand, he sometimes probed the heavy volumes of the old archive, marveling at these moldering records of his family's congested story. Even the raw facts and dates, pages crackling dangerously to the touch, fired his imagination: he would go to sea when he grew up, he would wear a senator's scarlet robes; even the chair of the Doge was not beyond a Treschi.
A dull excitement coursed through his veins. He went to further prowling. He tried latches that hadn't been turned in years, lifting ancient pictures from their damp corners to peer into alien faces. Here old storage rooms still smelled of spice, once brought from trade with the Orient when in olden times boats came to the very doors of the palazzo itself, unloading a fortune in rugs, jewels, cinnamon, silks. And there was the hemp rope still, in damp coils, bits of straw and those mingled fragrances pungent, enticing.
He stopped from time to time. His eerie little flame danced uneasily in the draft. He could hear the water beneath the house, the dull creak of the pilings. And far above, if he shut his eyes, he could hear his mother calling.
But he was safe from everyone here. Spiders tiptoed on the rafters, and with a sudden turn of his candle, he made a web appear, intricate, golden. A broken shutter gave to his touch, the gray light of the afternoon shone dingy through barred glass, and peering out he saw the rats swimming steadily through the debris that littered the sluggish water.
He felt sad. He felt afraid. He felt a misery suddenly, for which he didn't know the name, a dread that made the scheme of things devoid of wonder.
His father was so old. His mother was so young. And at the very core of all this, there seemed some unknown horror awaiting him. What was it he feared? He did not know. Yet it seemed he sensed secrets in the very air about him. Sometimes a name whispered and afterwards denied, some soft reference among the servants to past conflicts. He was uncertain.
And maybe in the end it was only that all of his life his mother had been so unhappy!
4
ONCE GUIDO HAD BEEN CHOSEN for the stage, it was grueling work from then on, with the dazzle of the opera house night after night where he observed, sang in the chorus if there was one, and left with a head full of applause and the scent of perfume and powder.
His own compositions were forgotten, shoved aside for endless exercises, and other men's arias of this season and the one after.
But these years were filled with such splendid intensity that not even the awakening of Guido's passion could turn him from his course.
And Guido had long resigned himself that he could feel no passion.
The celibate life actually attracted him. He believed the sermons preached to him. As a eunuch he would never be permitted to marry, as marriage was for the begetting of children. And the Pope had never granted a dispensation for a castrato. So he would live like a priest, the only life of goodness and grace allowed to him.
And seeing eunuchs as the high priests of music, he accepted this completely.
If he ever pondered for a moment the sacrifice he had made for this priesthood, it was with the mute confidence he would never comprehend the extent of it.
What's all this to me, he shrugged. He had an indestructible will, and singing was all that mattered to him.
But one night when he had come home late from the theater, he fell into an eerie dream in which he saw himself caressing a woman he'd glimpsed on the stage, a plump little singer. It was her naked shoulders he saw in the dream, the curve of her arms, and the point at which her pretty neck rose up from that sloping fullness. He awoke sweating, miserable.
In the following months he was to dream this twice more. He found himself kissing this woman, crooking her arm and kissing the tender fold there. And one night on awakening, he thought he heard sounds about him in the darkened dormitory, whispers, the padding of feet. There was a thin, recurrent laughter.
He pushed his head into the pillow. A series of pictures presented themselves to him: voluptuous eunuchs were these, or women?
In chapel after that he could not take his eyes off Gino's feet, as the boy stood beside him. It was the leather cutting into the high instep of Gino's foot that made Guido feel an odd catch in his throat. He watched the muscles move under Gino's tight stockings. The curve of the calf was beautiful to him, inviting. He wanted to touch it, and he watched in misery as the boy went up to the communion rail.
On the afternoon of one day late in summer, he could not sing at all, he was so distracted by the tight-fitting black coat of a young maestro who was standing before him.
This was a married teacher, with wife and children. He came by day to teach the poetry and enunciation all singers must learn thoroughly. And why, Guido growled to himself, am I staring at his coat like this?
But each time the young man turned around, Guido would look at that cloth pulled taut over the small of the back, the snug fit of the waist, and then the gentle flaring over the hips, again wanting to touch it. He felt something akin to a soundless and invisible wallop with every tracing of the pattern.
He shut his eyes. And when he opened them again he thought the teacher was smiling at him. The man had seated himself, and shifting in his chair, made a darting motion with his hand to arrange the burden between his legs more comfortably. His gaze was full of innocence when he looked at Guido. Or was it?
Again at supper their eyes met. And at the evening meal hours after that.
When darkness fell, slowly, languidly over the mountains, and the stained-glass windows were drained to a lusterless black, Guido found himself walking down an empty corridor past rooms long deserted.
As he reached the maestro's door, he saw the dim figure of the man out of the corner of his eye. A silvery light from an open casement fell on the man's folded hands, his knee.
"Guido!" he whispered from the dark.
This was dreamlike. Yet it was more pungent and clumsy than any dream had ever been, the sharp scrape of Guido's heels on the stone floor, the soft shutting of the door behind him.
Lights twinkled on the hill beyond the window, lost in the shifting shapes of the trees.
The young man stood up and snapped the painted shutters closed.
For a moment Guido saw nothing, and his own breath was hoarse and pounding, and then he saw again those luminous hands, gathering what was left of the light from everywhere as they opened the front of the man's breeches.
So the secret sin he had imagined was known and shared.
He reached out, as if his body wouldn't obey him. And dropping down on his knees, he felt the smooth hairless flesh of the maestro's belly before he drew the mystery of it all, that organ, longer, thicker than his own, into his mouth immed
iately.
He needed no instruction. He felt it swelling as he stroked it with his tongue and his teeth. His body was becoming his mouth, while his fingers pressed into the flesh of the maestro's buttocks, urging him forward, Guido's moans rhythmic, desperate, over the man's deliberate sighing.
"Ah, gentle..." breathed the maestro, "gentle." But with a thrust of his hips, he pressed against Guido all the mingled scents of his body, the damp curling hair, the flesh itself, full of musk and salt. Guido gave a guttural cry as he felt the dry, raw pinnacle of his own passion.
But at that moment, as he clung, weakened and reverberating from the shock, to the maestro's hips, the man's seed flowed into him. It filled his mouth, and he opened to it with an overpowering thirst as the bitterness of it, the deliciousness of it, threatened to choke him.
He bowed his head; he slumped down. And he realized that if he could not swallow it, in an instant, it would revolt him.
He had not been prepared for this so abruptly and totally to finish.
And then sickness did constrict him, causing him to pull away, struggling to keep his lips sealed against it.
"Here..." whispered the maestro. He tried to take Guido by the shoulders. But Guido had lain down on the floor. He had crawled under the harpsichord, his forehead pressed flat against the coldness of the stones, and the coldness was good to him.
He knew the maestro had knelt beside him. He turned his face away.
"Guido..." the man said gently. "Guido..." as if scolding him. When had he heard that same beguiling tone before?
And when he heard his own moan now, it was filled with such anguish it surprised him.
"No, no, Guido..." The maestro crouched by him. "Listen to me, young one," he coaxed.
Guido pressed his palms to his ears.
"Listen to me," the man persisted, his hand scratching the hairs of Guido's neck. "You make them kneel to you," he whispered.
And when there was only silence, the maestro laughed. It was low, soft, not mocking. "You'll learn," he said. He gathered himself to his feet. "You'll learn, when you hear those Bravos in your ears, when they're pelting you with tributes and flowers."
5
MARIANNA RARELY STRUCK Tonio anymore. At thirteen, he was as tall as she was.
He hadn't inherited her dark skin, nor her slanting Byzantine eyes; he was fair, but he had the same rich black curls and spry, almost feline, figure. When both of them danced, which they did all the time, they were twins, the light and the dark, she swinging her hips and clapping her hands, Tonio tapping the tambourine as he moved in rapid circles about her.
They did the furlana, the frenzied dance of the streets which the maids of the house taught them. And when the ancient church behind the palazzo held its annual sagra or fair, they hung out the back windows together to see the servant girls whirling in their short skirts, so they might learn to dance all the better.
And in their shared life, whether it was dancing or singing, games or books, it was Tonio who had become the leader.
Very early, he'd come to realize she was much more the child than he was, and that she'd never meant to hurt him. But she was helpless in her darker moods; the world collapsed upon her, and when he had clung to her, crying and afraid, he had terrified her.
Then had come the hot slaps, the growls, even objects pitched across the room at him as she raised her hands to her ears not to hear his wailing.
He learned now to mask his fears at such times, and strive to soothe her, distract her. He would draw her out if he could, he would entertain her.
The one infallible way was through music.
She'd grown up on music. An orphan shortly after birth, she'd been placed in the Ospedale della Pieta, one of the four famous convent conservatorios of Venice, whose choir and orchestra, made up entirely of girls, astonished all Europe. No less a man than Antonio Vivaldi had been the Maestro di Cappella there when she was small, and he had taught her to sing and to play the violin when she was only six and already exquisitely talented.
Vivaldi's scores lay in stacks in her rooms. There were vocalises in his own hand which he'd written for the girls, and she always sent out for the scores of his recent operas.
And from the first moment she'd realized Tonio had inherited her voice, she had showered him with a desperate and bitter affection. She taught him his first songs, and to play and sing anything by ear so his tutors could only marvel. And now and then admitted, "Had you been born tone deaf, I would have drowned you. Or drowned myself." And when he was little he'd believed it.
So even when she was at her worst, her breath rank from wine, her eyes glazed and cruel, he would appear light, whimsical, and lure her to the harpsichord.
"Come on, Mamma," he would say gently, as if nothing were amiss. "Come on, Mamma, sing with me."
Her rooms were always so pretty in the early sun, the bed draped in white silk, a procession of mirrors reflecting a wallpaper of cherubs and garlands. She liked clocks, all kinds of painted clocks, and they ticked on tables and chests, and on the marble mantel.
And there she was in the middle of it, her hair undone, the sour-smelling glass in her hand, staring at him as if she didn't know him.
He didn't wait. He uncovered the double row of ivory keys at once and began to play. It was Vivaldi often enough, or Scarlatti, or the more subdued and melancholy patrician composer Benedetto Marcello. And in minutes, he felt the soft crush of her on the bench beside him.
As soon as he heard her voice mingling with his he felt an exhilaration. His strong bright soprano rose higher, but hers had a richer, more fascinating color. She shuffled impatiently through the old scores for the arias she loved or, having him recite any bit of poetry he'd recently learned, made up a new melody for it.
"You're a mimic!" she'd say when he followed an intricate passage perfectly. She'd swell a note slowly, skillfully, only to hear his flawless echo. And clasping him suddenly with her warm and very strong hands, she whispered:
"Do you love me!"
"Of course I love you. I told you yesterday and the day before, but you forget," he teased. It was her most poignant, soulful little cry. She bit her lip; her eyes grew uncommonly wide, then narrowed. And he always gave her what she wanted then. But inside, he was suffering.
He knew every morning of his life when he opened his eyes whether she was happy or sad. He could feel it. And he reckoned the hours of study by how soon he might slip away to be with her.
But he didn't understand her.
And he was beginning to realize that his loneliness as a child, these silent and empty rooms, this vast and shadowy palazzo, was as much due to her shyness and her reclusiveness as to the age and old-fashioned severity of his father.
After all, why had she no friends when the Pieta was full of ladies of quality as well as foundlings, and so many married well into good families?
Yet she never spoke of the place; she never went out.
And when his father's cousin Catrina Lisani came to call, Tonio knew she made her visits brief out of kindness. Marianna was like a nun behind the grille. She wore black, kept her hands in her lap, her dark hair as sleek as satin. And Catrina, in gay printed silk with a great many yellow bows, made up the whole of the conversation.
Sometimes Catrina's "escort" was with her, a very proper and handsome cavalier servente, and a distant cousin, too, though Tonio could never remember the connection. But this was fun, because he wandered out into the Grand Salon with Tonio, chatting of what was in the gazettes, and what was happening at the theater. He wore shoes with red heels and a monocle on a blue ribbon.
But though a patrician, the man was an idler, spending his time in the company of women. And Tonio knew Andrea approved of no such person for his wife, and Tonio didn't approve of it either.
Yet, still, he thought if Marianna had an escort she would go out, she would meet others, and they would come home with her now and then, and the whole world would be different.
But the though
t of a cavalier servente so near to her, in the gondola, at table, at mass, repelled Tonio. He felt a hot and agonizing jealousy. No man had ever been close to her save Tonio.
"If I could be her cavalier servente..." He sighed. He looked in the mirror to see a tall young man with the face of a boy. "Why can't I protect her?" he whispered. "Why can't I save her!"
6
BUT WHAT DO YOU DO with a woman who, more and more often, prefers her bottle of wine to the light of day?
Illness! Melancholia! Those were the words they used for it. By the time Tonio was fourteen, Marianna never rose before late afternoon. Often she was "too tired" to sing, and he was glad to hear it, because the sight of her stumbling about the room was almost more than he could bear. She had sense enough most of the time to stay in bed, against a nest of white pillows, her face gaunt, her eyes bulbous and glittering, and listen to whatever concerts he wanted to make for her.
By twilight she was often quarrelsome and bizarre. Of course she didn't want to go out to the Pieta. Why would she want to go there? "Do you know," she said one evening, "that when I was there everybody knew me. I was the talk of Venice. The gondoliers said I was the best singer of all the four schools, the best they'd ever heard. 'Marianna, Marianna,' people knew that name in the drawing rooms of Paris and London; they knew me in Rome. One summer we went on a barge down the Brenta; we sang in all the villas; we danced afterwards if we wanted to; we had wine with all the guests...."
Tonio was shocked.
Lena washed and combed her as if she were a baby, pouring out the wine to calm her, and then took him aside.
"All the girls of the conservatorios are praised like that; it was nothing, don't be so foolish," she said. "And it's the same today. You talk to Bruno; the gondoliers love the girls, whether they are fine ladies destined to marry patricians, or merely nameless little girls. It's not the same at all as being on the stage, for the love of heaven, why do you look this way?"
"I should have gone on the stage!" Marianna said suddenly. She threw back the covers, her head wagging forward, her hair spilling in rivulets over her sallow skin.
"Hush now," Lena said to her. "Tonio, go out for a while."