natural sentiment.” He shook his head, drawing in his breath with a hiss.
“All I’m giving you is flexibility and strength.” He sighed. “In two years, you’ll have the skill to pick up any aria from any opera and know just how to ornament it and deliver it perfectly anywhere under anyone’s direction at any time. That’s all I’m giving you….” He paused. He looked away, and when he glanced back to Tonio again, his eyes were large and shadowed, and his voice was just a little deeper.
“But you have something else, Tonio, something beyond a voice,” he said. “Those singers who don’t have it almost never acquire it, and others who possess it haven’t your purity and power of tone. It’s this: some secret power that shocks people when they hear you, some power that enflames them so that they become absorbed with you and with you alone.
“When you sing in the church at Christmas, people will turn their heads to see your face, they’ll be drawn out of their petty thoughts and distractions, and when they go out they’ll ask for your name.
“Oh, for long years, I’ve tried to anatomize this, to figure exactly what it is. I had it when I was a boy. I know from within how it feels. But I cannot lay it all down. Perhaps it’s some subtle sense of timing, some infinitesimal and infallible hesitation, some instinct for knowing just when to increase the swell of a note, when to stop. And perhaps it’s bound up with the physical, with the eyes, with the face, with the way that the body holds itself as the voice rises. I don’t know.”
Tonio was engrossed. He was remembering that moment when Caffarelli stepped before the footlights in Venice; he was remembering the ripple of expectation that ran through the crowd. And how he, rushing down to the pit, had been magnetized by this eunuch even when Caffarelli was merely walking back and forth, not singing a note.
Could he do that to people? Was that possible?
“Now, there’s more,” Guido said. “You would have had this special fire in you even if you had been cut at the age of six as I was. But you were not cut then….”
Tonio felt a tensing, a sudden violent shock.
But Guido reached out and quieted him with the brush of his hand. “You were reared,” he went on, “to think and move and act like a man. And this adds its own strength to what you are, too. You haven’t the softness of some eunuchs. You haven’t that quality of being…well, neither sex.”
Guido hesitated. “But of course,” he went on slowly, as if speaking to himself now, “there are some eunuchs cut very young who have this power, too.”
“This might change,” Tonio whispered. He could feel a stiffening all over, especially in his face, and that tendency to smile coldly which had come over him at such moments in the past, but his voice went on, even, gentle. “When I look in the mirror, I see Domenico already.”
Yes, Domenico, he thought. And my old double in Venice, the master of the House of Treschi, smiling behind him to see us at last grown so far apart.
He felt himself light and airy, something unnamable finally for all the names it was given, sprung from the husk of the boy he’d been.
“Yes,” Guido was saying, “you will resemble Domenico very much.”
Tonio could not conceal his fear, his loathing. And Guido touched his hand. But an evanescent sense of Carlo confused Tonio, some broken memory of pressing his face to that rough and closely shaven beard, of a sigh coming out of his brother, husky and muted, carrying with it sorrow and weariness and the man’s inevitable and God-given strength.
“Domenico was beautiful,” Guido scolded. “And he had this masculine power, too.”
“Domenico?” Tonio answered. “Masculine power? He was a Circe,” he said. He would never forget those caresses, and was ashamed even now of that old desire.
But Carlo was with him. Carlo had invaded this room, this moment, this intimacy with Guido which he so treasured, the sound of Carlo’s laughter drifting through those hallways. He looked to Guido and felt love for him, and looking down saw that Guido’s fingers were touching him still. Domenico. Power. Guido was laughing softly, too.
“Maybe Domenico was a Circe in bed,” Guido was saying. “Unfortunately, I’ll have to take your word on that. But when he sang, he had this other power, and his beauty gave it to