way back to the conservatorio Tonio was visited by flashes of those confused moments, of those young men surrounding him, of the informal and friendly touch of their hands.
Before midnight, a young Sicilian nobleman came to tell him that the boy had packed up and fled. There was a contemptuous sneer on the swarthy young man’s face as he revealed this, without any other comment. And then hesitating in the stiffly decorated parlor of the conservatorio where he had been received, he asked Tonio to hunt with him some time soon. He and his friends went regularly into the mountains. They should welcome his company. Tonio thanked him for the invitation, without ever saying that he would accept.
And only a few days later Guido and Tonio went into the mountains south.
The weather was mild, and together they sought out one of those seaside towns that clung to the sheer cliffs above a water so purely blue and still it seemed the flawless mirror of heaven.
They dined on simple food in a little white piazza, and then summoned a band of rustic singers, shabby but spirited, who sang them barbarous and inventive melodies no trained musician would possibly attempt.
The night they spent in an inn, on a bed of straw, the window open to the sky.
And the next morning Tonio went out early, wandering alone into a great grassy place, sprinkled everywhere with the first spring wildflowers where once a Greek temple had stood.
Great wheels of fluted marble lay scattered in the green growth, but four columns stood yet against the sky, and as the clouds moved beyond, these columns appeared weightless and to be floating with some eerie motion of their own.
Tonio found the sacred floor. He walked its broken stones until he charted the whole, and then he lay down in the fresh grass that seemed everywhere to rise through crevices and cracks; and looking full into the blinding light, he wondered if he had ever known such serenity in all his life as he had known this past year.
It seemed the world was fragrant and full of unspoiled loveliness everywhere he looked. It held no hideous mystery for him. There was no draining tension day in and day out.
And he felt quieted with love, love for Guido, love for Paolo, love for all those who were his fast friends under the same roof, those boys who shared work and play and study and rehearsal and performance, those who were the only brothers he’d ever known.
And yet the darkness was there.
The darkness was always there. It waited only for Catrina’s letter, for the insult of that rash and inept Tuscan boy. But it had been so easy for so long to shut it out!
It seemed a wonder to him that he had ever counted upon hatred, bitterness, to sustain him until the children of Carlo numbered so many that he could go back and settle the old score.
Was he so flawed that he had forgotten the wrong done him, the world denied him, that he could have fallen so easily into this strange life in Naples which now seemed more real to him than any life in Venice he’d ever known? Was it weakness that he had not wanted to kill the Tuscan? Or could it have been something wiser and finer that he felt in those moments?
He had the appalling fear suddenly that the world would never let him know.
Yet it seemed unreal to him that he had ever lived in Venice. That he had ever seen the mist steal over those motionless canals the color of lead, or the walls rise up on either side so close they threatened to swallow the very stars.
Silvery domes, rounded arches, mosaics shimmering even through the rain, what was this place?
Shutting his eyes he tried to recall his mother. He tried to hear her voice, to see her whirling in the dance on that dusty floor. Had there ever been a day when seeing her at the window, he had crept up crying behind her? She was singing some common street song. Was she thinking of Istanbul? His hand went out for her. She turned to strike him. He felt himself falling….
Had any of this happened at all?
He was standing suddenly in the grass. The green land was laid open all around. Far off, he saw Guido’s dark form stranded amid a great drift of tiny flowers that streaked this vast and beautiful place like white traces of the clouds. And