line of couples exactly as he’d done a thousand times before, but again and again he kept forgetting what he was doing!
Guido appeared, his brown eyes too big for his face.
And then he was leaning on Guido, saying something to someone, an apology, he must leave, he must get out of this place, he must be in his room, his own room, or they should go up now onto the mountain. Yes, go up on the mountain, this was the one thing he had been unable to admit to himself, it was unendurable.
“You are tired,” Guido said.
No, no, no, he shook his head. Impossible to tell anyone, but the thought that he could never again lie with a woman was unendurable. He would start roaring if he did not stop thinking of it. Where was she? He had never believed for a moment that Alessandro could really do it! He had thought his mother such a child, and Beppo, inconceivable. And Caffarelli, what had he really done when he got alone with them?
Guido was lifting him up into the carriage. “I want to go up on the mountain!” he said again furiously. “You leave me alone. I want to go, I know where I am going.”
The carriage was moving. He saw the stars above, felt the warm breeze on his face, and saw the leafy branches dipping down as though they meant to stroke him. If he thought of little Bettina now in the gondola, that soft nest of white limbs, that silky flesh inside her thighs, he would go mad. Banish him! He would never set foot there again, until…and when…
He fell against Guido. They were standing at the conservatorio gates, and he said, “I want to die.” Confide to you my pain, I’d rather die. And that voice spoke to him again, from inside himself, saying, Behave as if you are a man, and he was walking upstairs to bed as if he felt nothing.
4
IT WAS SOON CLEAR that whenever Tonio was too tired to work, Guido would have some reward for him. They would go out to the opera, or Tonio would be given some simple arias to enjoy. But Guido could not be foxed in this. He knew when his pupil could do no more, and one afternoon when Tonio was unusually discouraged Guido took him out of the practice room and down the hall to the conservatorio theater.
“Sit here; watch and listen,” he said, leaving Tonio in the back row of chairs where he might stretch his aching limbs unnoticed.
Tonio had been more than intrigued by the sounds issuing from this room.
And he was delighted to find it was as lavish a little theater as any he had ever seen in a Venetian palazzo. It had one tier of boxes all fitted with emerald-green curtains, and its proscenium arch was aglitter with gilded scrollwork and angels.
Some twenty-five musicians were at work in the pit, an awesome number it seemed, since the opera house had only that many for some performances, and all were working away on their private exercises oblivious to singers practicing their scales, and the student composer, Loretti, fuming that the production would never be ready for the first night two weeks from now.
Guido, pausing at the door, laughed shortly at this and told Tonio everything was going splendidly.
Tonio started, as if awakened from a dream, because from the milling cast on the boards he’d already picked out the figure of Domenico, that exquisite sylph of a boy, whom he’d seen of late only at the supper table.
He had never once thought of this room, or of the coming production, without thinking of Domenico.
But the composer was calling everyone to attention.
The rest period was over, and within minutes a silence fell over the little theater and the musicians struck up the overture.
Tonio was astonished at the richness of the sound; these boys were better than professionals he’d heard in Venice, and when the first singers appeared on the stage, he realized that these students were probably ready to perform anywhere in Europe.
Naples was surely the musical capital of Italy as everyone had always said, though Venetians sneered at those words, and in a moment of gentle calm, listening to this lovely, lively music, Tonio thought, Naples is my city.
A relief coursed through him. The pain in his legs from so many hours of standing was almost delicious. And leaning forward to the rounded back of the green velvet chair in front of him,