“Tonio, if you talk to him, he will do what you say.” Piero spelled it out. “I think he should go to Rome, but he won’t listen to me. He’ll be disappointed and humiliated if he keeps trying for a life in the opera.”
Tonio nodded. “All right, Piero,” he said. “I’ll talk to him.”
The fair-haired girl had disappeared. The dance had broken up. He couldn’t see her anywhere. And then he saw her from a great distance as she proceeded to the door, still on the arm of that elderly gentleman. She’s leaving, he thought, and he felt a sharp regret to see her go. Of course it wasn’t the same violet dress, just a dress of the same color, and it had such wide skirts, gathered with clusters of little flowers. She must love that color….
But Giovanni, what was he going to tell Giovanni? He would make Giovanni express the answer for himself, and then he would urge Giovanni to follow his own conviction.
There was in him some troubling sense of the responsibility given him. But more than that, he experienced a warm feeling for all the boys who were now turning to him often as some sort of leader. It seemed he was close to so many, and not only the castrati. Not long ago, the student composer Morello had given him a copy of his recent Stabat Mater with the note, “Perhaps some day you will sing this.” Twice recently, Guido had let him take over the instruction of the younger boys, and he had loved that too, seeing how much they looked up to him.
And what was it he had been thinking? Something about the chapel, the Contessa’s chapel, where was it? He’d let the wine go to his head. And the Contessa herself seemed to have disappeared. Of course any of the servants would know where the chapel was. Guido would know. And where was Guido? But he felt he must not ask Guido. “I am disgracefully drunk,” he whispered. And seeing his reflection in a glass, he said: “Your mother’s son!”
It seemed he was in an empty salon and knew that he must lie down. Yet when another servant approached him with the inevitable cool white wine, he drank it and, touching the servant’s arm, said: “The chapel, where is it? Is it open to the guests?”
Next he knew he was following the man up the broad central stairs of the house, and down a long corridor to a pair of double doors. A sense of intrigue quickened him. He watched the servant lift his candle to the sconces, and then Tonio stood in the dimly lit chapel by himself.
It was beautiful, rich, and full of wondrous details. There was gold everywhere as the Neapolitans loved it, etching arches and fluted columns, bordering the ceilings and the windows with gleaming arabesques. And the lifelike statues were dressed in real satin and velvet. And the altar cloth was encrusted with jewels.
Silently he went up the aisle. Silently he knelt on the velvet cushion at the communion rail, putting his hands together as if he meant to pray.
In the dim light, he saw the murals pulsing above him, and it seemed impossible that she could have painted these huge and splendid figures: the Virgin Mary ascending into heaven; angels with arched wings, gray-haired saints.
Robust, powerful, these figures seemed on the verge of life, and he felt a rush of love for her as he looked at them, imagining himself near to her, and in the midst of some low and passionate conversation in which he could hear, finally hear, her voice. Ah, if he could only pass close to her some night on the dance floor when she was talking to her partner, he could hear her voice. Above him, the Virgin’s dark hair flowed in ripples to her shoulders, her face a flawless oval, her lids half mast. Did she really paint this? It seemed suddenly too exquisite for anyone to have painted it. He closed his eyes.
He held his forehead with his right hand. A torrent of feeling threatened him. He was miserable and compelled in his mind to make some explanation to Guido of why he had come to this place. “I love only you,” he whispered.
And dizzy from the wine, and sick, he moved clumsily away from the altar towards the doors.
Had he not found a couch then in a small upstairs parlor, he might have been very ill.