to do it for the young man who had come down from the mountain. Yet he was afraid.
As soon as he raised his voice alone in the chapel, he would really be a castrato. That was it, wasn’t it? It was one great step beyond wearing a black tunic with a red sash. It was one immense step beyond blending his voice with others in a chorus. He would step forward in that moment; he would be fully illuminated for what he was.
It was like being stripped naked, and showing to all of them the mutilation that had been done. Inevitable, but coldly terrifying to him. And now reflecting silently on his height, on the long slender hand that was his as it lay on, the table, bent slightly to move these cards on the polished wood, he thought Will I sound like a boy anymore at all? Am I a boy? Or would I have been, by now, a man?
A man. He smiled at the brutal simplicity of that word and its great avalanche of meanings. And for the first time in all his life the word struck him as…as what? Coarse. Never mind. You deceive yourself, he half-whispered aloud. For all its vast abstraction, the word had but one fully understood meaning.
And he knew he was very young for that great natural change to have come about in him. But in a bedroom in another world a woman had teased him, saying that it would not be long. He had been proud then of those simple endowments, so utterly certain of them, and so miserable at the same time.
But that was another world.
He was a castrato and he would be a castrato in that chapel when he raised his naked voice.
And it was but the first exposure. There would come so many others, and that final moment: when he stepped out on the stage of some vast theater, alone. If he was fortunate enough! If he was good enough, if his voice was strong enough, and his discipline strong enough, and Guido’s teaching strong enough, yes, that was what he had to look forward to: the eunuch revealed to all the world.
He looked at Guido. And there seemed in him a fathomless innocence of all these dark and continuous things. He loved Guido. He would sing it for him.
And he remembered almost suddenly, unexpectedly, that when Guido had first spoken of it, he’d said, “It’s the first time anything of mine will be performed here.” Good God, had he been such a child that he had not even considered what this might mean to Guido? Had he been such a fool?
He had known all along that those splendid arias given him to sing at the end of the day were Guido’s own arias.
“It means a great deal to you that I sing it,” Tonio said, “because you’ve written it, isn’t that so?”
Guido’s face reddened, his eyes quivering slightly.
“It’s important because you are my pupil and you are ready!” he insisted.
But Guido’s anger flashed and died. Guido rested his elbow on the table with his chin on his hand.
“You asked me to tell you about your voice,” Guido said. “Maybe I’ve failed you in not telling you more about it, in being so very hard with you. Well, it was the only way I knew how to be….”
One of those silent wraithlike servants had ventured into the room with a flicker of blue satin and a hand descending into the soft airy light around the candles to pour some wine.
Guido watched the glass fill, motioning for the man to wait, and then he emptied it and watched it fill again.
“I’m going to speak plainly to you,” he said. “You are the finest singer I’ve ever heard, short of Farinelli. You could have sung this solo the first day you came to the conservatorio. You could have sung it in Venice.”
His eyes narrowed slightly as he studied Tonio. And there was about him an unusual combination of softness and intensity released by the wine.
“This solo was written for you,” he continued. “It was written for the voice I heard in Venice, for the boy singer whom I followed there night after night. I knew your range then, your power. I knew where you faltered when no one else would have noticed it. I knew what you had managed to learn on your own with just a little prodding from your teachers and I was amazed. The accuracy of pitch, the