he demanded. “What was it that drove you to do that? The loss of my voice? The voice you went to Venice to bring back with you! Well, I am flesh and blood as well as a voice!” he said. “And yet I’m neither man nor woman and it makes no difference whom I lie with, and so I turn myself into carrion.”
“Was it so wrong to lie with him!” Guido whispered. “Who was hurt by it, now that you are what you are, and he is what he is? Was it so wrong you sought some affection with each other?”
“Yes, it was wrong, because I despised him! And I lay with him as if I loved him, and I did not love him. And that is wrong for me. Even in this state, there are those things that matter!”
Guido stared straight forward. And then very slowly he nodded. “Then why did you do it?” he whispered.
“Because I needed him,” Tonio said. “I am an orphan in this place, and I needed him! I could not do it alone! I tried, I failed, and I am alone now, and this is worse than any pain I’ve ever known. I have looked it in the face a thousand times and sworn to endure it. But it’s sometimes more than I can bear, and he gave me the semblance of love and let me play the man, and so I took it.”
He turned his back on Guido. Oh, this was fine, wasn’t it? All his resolves washed away in the breaking of this dam, and all he could think of was that just for this moment he was pouring it out to another. And there was hatred here too, hatred and loathing just as surely as he’d felt it for Domenico.
“How can I endure it?” he asked. He turned slowly. “How can you endure it, every day of your life to work in such anger and such coldness! A voice that’s nothing but invectives. Good God, don’t you ever want just once to love those you instruct, to feel for those who struggle so hard to follow the merciless rhythm you beat for them!”
“Do you want love from me?” Guido asked softly.
“Yes, I want love from you!” Tonio said. “I would get down on my knees to have love from you. You are my teacher! You are the one who guides me and shapes me and hears my voice as no one else has ever heard it. You are the one who strives to make it better than I myself could ever make it. How can you ask me if I want you to love me? Can’t this be done in love? Isn’t that possible, that if you showed to me the slightest warmth, I would open to you like the flowers of spring, that I would strive for you until my past progress seemed like nothing!
“Sing this music you’ve written, if you loved me, I could do anything you believed I could do, if you would just give me love hand in hand with your harshest, truest judgments. Mingle the two, and give that to me, and I could get through this darkness, I could find my way out, I could grow in this damp, strange place where I am some creature whose name I can’t bear to speak. Help me!”
Tonio stopped. This was as terrible as he could ever have imagined it, and he was lost, utterly lost, and he did not even want to look at that brutal uncaring face, those eyes that seemed always afire with rage and so full of contempt for all pain and all weakness. He closed his eyes. He remembered that once in Rome what seemed like ages ago this man had embraced him, and he almost laughed aloud at the folly of all he’d said, but as the room swam in his vision, as the candle suddenly went out and he opened his eyes on a great obliterating darkness, he thought, Oh, these are just words, not actions. And somehow this will pass as all of it has passed, and tomorrow it will be the same as before, each of us in his own hell, and I will grow stronger yet, and more accustomed to it.
Because this is life, is it not? This is life, and years of this will pass, for this is what is meant to be, “Shut the doors, shut the doors, shut the doors.” And the knife that brought