him as well as his voice. Even dressed and coiffed as a woman, he was steely and formidable and made others afraid. Ah, you should have watched the faces of the men and women in the audience when he sang. It is not hair on the chest nor a swaggering posture, this power. It is something which emanates from within. Domenico had it. Domenico wasn’t afraid of God or the devil. And you, my young one, have not begun to understand what a castrato can be.”
“I want to understand,” Tonio whispered. “But I never saw Domenico that way. I saw him as a sylph, maybe even at times an angel.” Tonio stopped. “Or maybe just a eunuch,” he confessed.
But this did not offend Guido.
Guido seemed absorbed in some little revelation. “A eunuch,” he whispered. “So you saw in him what you would become. And he saw in you his own style of beauty and strength. He always went for those who were most like him. But he was painfully lonely the last two years….”
“Was he?” Tonio asked. He would never lose the pain of disappointing Domenico, though Domenico might now have forgotten all of it.
“Yes, very lonely,” Guido went on. “Because he was better than everyone around him, and that is the worst loneliness of all. Everywhere he looked he saw envy, and fear. And then you came, and he set his sights on you. It was why Lorenzo taunted you, because Lorenzo loved Domenico and Domenico did not care.”
Tonio’s spirit was wasted. He was staring at the cards before him, the hard-eyed king and the hard-eyed queen. The queen had a Byzantine slant to her eyes. She was black-haired. She was the queen of spades.
“But don’t worry yourself over Domenico. If you wounded him as you say you did, then you taught him something which no one ever had before. It’s only in your elegance you resemble him. You have his fine bones, and that same hair that women love. But you are larger all over than he is; you’ll grow to greater height; and the features of your face, they are most unusual in that they are…“ And here Guido struggled, his eyes fixed on Tonio, his own mouth soft with his absorption. “They are all just a little farther apart from one another than one finds in most men. When you are on the stage you will be a blinding light; no one else on the boards will even be visible, including Domenico, your delicate shadow, if he were there.”
* * *
Tonio was silent as they returned to the conservatorio. They entered Guido’s rooms. Austere as they were, with only a few pieces of heavy furniture and a worn Turkey carpet, they were lavish for this place, and Tonio felt more than ever a part of Guido when he was with him here.
The heavy bed with its coffered roof was fitted with plain dark curtains for winter, and Tonio climbed up on the coverlet, resting against the paneled headboard as Guido lit the candles on the harpsichord, which meant that love would not come so soon.
In a small voice Tonio asked:
“How tall will I grow?”
“No one knows that. It depends on how tall you might have been. But you are growing fast.”
Tonio felt a black water coming up in his mouth as though he were going to be sick. It was now or never that he ask these questions, and for so long he had wanted merely to voice them if even to the roaring sea.
“What else is happening to me?”
Guido turned. Tonio wondered, did he remember that night in Rome, in that small garden, when Tonio, choking for breath, actually choking as if he were dying, had stretched out his hands to him, to that statue which glowed in the moonlight with a white light of its own.
“What’s happening to me!” he whispered. “All over. You know.”
How indifferent Guido seemed. His dark figure came between Tonio and the candles so that it lost its face.
“You will continue to grow tall. Your arms and legs will increase in length, but how much, again, no one knows. But remember they will always seem normal to you. And it is this flexibility of bone which gives you such power with your voice. Every day that you practice you increase the size of your lungs; and the elastic bones let those lungs grow. So that very soon you will have power in the upper register that no woman could ever