gone on to a grand court appointment in one of the German states. And the boys at the conservatorio laughed to hear that he’d enjoyed an escapade with a count and his wife, playing the woman for one and the man for the other in the same bed.
Tonio listened to all this with relief. Had Domenico failed, he would never have forgiven himself. And he still could not hear the stage name “Cellino” without shame and something of grief. Guido was distraught over Loretti’s reception, muttering as always that the Roman audiences were the worst.
But Tonio was too caught up in his own life to think of much else.
* * *
Right after Christmas, he began visiting a French fencing master every chance he could. No matter what his other obligations, he managed to get out of the conservatorio at least three times a week.
Guido was furious. “But you can’t do this,” he insisted. “Practice all day, rehearse with the students all evening, the opera on Tuesdays, the Contessa’s on Friday night. And now you want to spend these hours in a salle d’armes, this is nonsense.”
But Tonio’s face took on an elongated and determined expression, complete with an icy smile. And he won out.
He told himself that there were times when after a day of music and high-strung bickering voices, he must be away from the school and among those who weren’t eunuchs, or he would go mad.
Actually the opposite was true. It was very hard for him to go to the fencing salon, hard for him to greet the Frenchman who instructed him, to take his place among the young men who were lounging about in their lace shirtsleeves, faces already glistening from earlier exertion, and quick to offer him a match.
He felt their eyes on him; he felt sure they laughed at him behind his back.
Yet coldly, he took his position, left arm crooked in the perfect arc, legs bent for the spring, and commenced thrusting, parrying, striving for ever greater speed and accuracy, his long reach giving him a deadly advantage as he moved towards an obvious ease and grace.
After others were spent, he carried on, feeling the tingle of hardening muscles in his calves and his arms, the pain melting into added strength, as with a strident energy he took the sport out of it for his partners, sometimes driving them right to the wall before the fencing master himself stepped forward to restrain him, whispering, “Tonio, come now, rest a while,” in his ear.
It was almost Lent before he realized no one ever jested in his presence; no one ever spoke the word “eunuch” when he was near.
And now and then the young men made their gestures. Would he join them in drinking after? Would he care to go hunting, or riding? And always he said no. But he could see he’d won a respect from these dark-skinned and often taciturn southern Italians, who surely must have known he wasn’t one of them. But that gave him scant warmth.
He shunned the company of young men, regular men, even the regular students of the conservatorio, who continued to defer to him as they had after Lorenzo’s death.
But crossing blades with a man? He forced himself to it. And he was soon good enough for almost anyone he took on.
Guido called it mania.
Guido couldn’t guess the cold flinty loneliness he felt in the midst of it, the relief he felt once he was back inside the conservatorio doors.
But he had to do it. He had to do it until he was so exhausted he might have dropped.
And when the awareness of his freakishness—of his increasing height and the inhuman gleam of his skin—when these things obsessed him, he took to stopping, to slowing his breath. Then he would move more slowly as he walked, or talked, or spoke; he would make each gesture graceful, languid. And that seemed to him less ridiculous, though no one had ever indicated to him that they found him ridiculous at all.
Meantime at the conservatorio, the Maestro di Cappella urged Tonio to take a small chamber near Guido’s rooms, on the main floor. The death of Lorenzo obviously worried him. He didn’t approve, either, of all this time spent with the sword. The students were looking up to Tonio, making something of a hero of him.
“But then I must admit,” he added, “you surprised everyone with that Christmas cantata. Music is the blood and pulse of this place, and if you did