coat, he said, “But I have a letter for you, Tonio. I almost forgot. My mother would be so angry!” He put the letter in Tonio’s hands. “And your singing…” he started. “In the chapel. I wish, I wish I knew the language of music so I could tell you what it was like.”
“The language of music is only sounds, Giacomo,” Tonio answered. And without hesitation they embraced.
Guido was lighting the candles when he stepped into the room. And for a long moment, they stood locked in each other’s arms.
But the letter was in Tonio’s hand, and he couldn’t dismiss it from his mind. And when he drew away to sit down with it at the table, he saw for the first time the mingled concern and anger in Guido’s face.
“I know, I know,” Tonio whispered, tearing open the parchment envelope. It bore Catrina’s seal.
“Do you know?” Guido bore down on him, but despite the anger in his voice, his hands were caressing. And he pressed his lips to Tonio’s head. “Your brother sent him here to see to your spirit!” he whispered. “Couldn’t you have played the shy, diffident little student just this once?”
“Shy, diffident eunuch,” Tonio answered. “Say it, for that is what you mean. And I will not play it for anyone. I cannot! So let him go back to Venice and tell my brother what he will. Good God, he heard me singing with children and angels, did he not? He saw the obedient student, the obedient gelding, was that not enough?”
The letter was indecipherable before his eyes in the dim light. He had vowed a thousand times never to speak of these things to any living being, not to the priest in the confessional, not anyone, but had he been a fool to think that Guido had never guessed? And sitting still, the letter flat on the table beneath his hand, he could all but feel the weight of Guido’s unspoken words as he saw the shadow of Guido moving slowly back and forth across the room.
It seemed an age he sat there after he had finished.
Then he read it again. And when he was finished this time, he lifted it, holding it to the cool flame of the candle until the fire burned hotter, the parchment crackled, was consumed, and turned to ash.
Guido was watching him. Yet it seemed all the familiar furnishings of this room were alien to him. He felt contained and cold and part of nothing. And as he looked at Guido, it was as if he did not know this man with whom he’d only just been quarreling, this man whose lips he could still feel on his own. He did not know him, nor why they were both of them here.
He looked away, coldly aware of the effect of his expression on Guido, but he was looking now into his brother’s face. No, his father’s face, he thought with the thinnest smile. Father, brother, and beyond it a backdrop of unilluminated emptiness that was very simply the end of life.
And all the church bells of Naples were ringing, this was Christmas morning, and their lovely monotonous pealing came through the walls like the rhythm of a pulse. Yet he could feel nothing, he could taste nothing. He could want nothing, save suddenly that this time should come to its inevitable end.
Why had he let himself forget what lay ahead of him? How had he managed to live as others lived, to hunger, to thirst, and to love?
Guido had poured the wine. He had placed the glass at Tonio’s right hand. The fragrance of the grape filled the room, and Tonio, sitting back in the chair, looked dully from the corner of his eye at the letter gone to ashes and the food that lay undisturbed, the artifact of itself, on a silver plate.
He had married her.
Married her! That was what the letter had said.
Decorous, simple, hardly more than an announcement. He had married her! Tonio felt his teeth clench until he was in pain, and he saw nothing of this room anymore. Married his father’s wife, married the mother of his bastard son, married her before Doge and Council and Senate and lords and ladies of Venice. He had married her! And now he would breed those strong sons, my little brothers! Those Giacomos, those brothers, brothers, always beyond reach, as if the very idea of fraternity were some immense fiction. Others are part of it, others are locked