condemns me for my persecution, and yes, if I must know it, he has often thought it would have been better for his unfortunate brother, Tonio, if the surgeon had unwittingly caused some greater injury so that the boy were at rest.
“Why so?” I laugh. “What a dreadful thing to say. Why, he prospers remarkably by all accounts!”
“But what if he’s slain in some foolish sword fight?” he demands. “I am never without worry over him night or day.” He should never have sent you the swords you requested.
“Swords he can purchase anywhere,” I remark.
“My little brother, my little brother,” he says with such emotion it would wring tears from an audience. “Does anyone know what I have endured!” But then he turns from me as if he cannot confide in one so simpleminded and unsympathetic as myself the full extent of his various regrets!
But truly Tonio, I beg you to be careful and wise. If he hears more of your swordsmanship, he may well feel compelled to dispatch a pair of bravos to Naples for your protection. And I think you would find the company of such men confining, if not positively smothering. Tonio, be watchful and wise.
As for the stage, your voice, how can anyone begrudge you the gift God gave you? I hear your singing when I lie awake at night on my pillow. Would I could really hear it once again, and take you in my arms to show you how much I love you now as I have always. Your brother is a fool if he does not look to you to do great things.
This letter Tonio kept with him for a long time before he eventually committed it, as he had so many others, to the fire.
He was much amused by it, and strangely fascinated by it, and his hatred for Carlo was stoked by it to a new and hotter flame.
How well he saw his brother drinking of the cup of life that was Venice! How well he imagined that figure moving from the ballroom to the floor of the Senate, to the Ridotto, to a courtesan’s arms.
But all Catrina’s gentle warnings were lost on Tonio. He changed nothing in his own life.
He was as dedicated as ever in the fencing salon. And he perfected his aim with the pistol at targets when he had time for it. And alone in his room, increased his skill with the stiletto as much as anyone can without the luxury of sinking it regularly into other people’s flesh.
But he knew it was not belligerence or courage that had prompted him to take such a commanding manner with Giacomo Lisani, or pushed him to such obvious skill with weapons just now.
It was simply that he could not conceal from anyone what he was in any way.
More and more the glances of those he met told him they knew he was a eunuch. And the glances of the young Neapolitans told him that he had won their unqualified respect.
As for the stage—his being another Caffarelli, as Catrina had so generously put it—he wished for it and dreaded it so much that sometimes he was baffled by his own mind.
He was intoxicated by the applause, the paint, the glitter of the beautiful sets, and the moment when he heard his own voice ring clear over the others, weaving its elusive and powerful magic for all who wished to hear.
Yet to think of the great theaters filled him with an isolating and strangely exciting fear.
“Two children in two years!”
Sometimes it hit him with such clarity and force that he stopped in his tracks. Two children, both of them healthy sons!
Many a Venetian family had only that claim upon immortality.
And he wished, oh, how he wished with all his heart, that his mother and his father had given him just a little time!
14
TONIO WAS WALKING in the Via di Toledo amid a swarming crowd at high noon when he realized that as of this day. May I, he had been in Naples exactly three years.
It seemed impossible. And then it seemed he’d been here all of his life, and had never known any other world.
He stopped, stranded for a moment, though the crowd was unwilling to let him stand still, and then turning around he looked up at the perfect blue sky and felt the breeze so gentle and so warm that it was like an embrace.
A little tavern opened nearby with a handful of tables outside on the cobblestones, the