whole sheltered by a pair of old gnarled fig trees, and Tonio went there and ordered himself a bottle of Lagrima Christi, the Neapolitan white wine he’d come to love.
The leaves of the figs made huge hand-shaped shadows on the stones, and the warm air, caught here between narrow walls, seemed nevertheless to be always gently in motion.
In a minute he was drunk. It took no more than half a cup, and a spectacular happiness stole over him as he rested back against the rough little chair and watched the steady flow of those in the street. Naples had never seemed so beautiful to him. And despite all that he so disliked—the appalling poverty everywhere and the sheer idleness of the nobility—he felt himself a part of this place; he had come to understand it, on his own terms.
Maybe, too, anniversaries always evoked some celebratory feeling in him. In Venice there were so many and they were always festivals; it wasn’t just the way to measure life; it was the way to live.
And after the morning’s errands, this happiness was a quiet relief.
For hours he’d been imprisoned at the tailor’s. He couldn’t avoid the mirrors. And again and again the seamstresses reminded him of his increasing height. He was now six feet tall, and no one looking upon him could any longer think him a boy.
The bloom to his skin, the fullness of his hair, the innocence of his expression; these only combined with the long limbs to make it known to all the world now what he was.
And there were moments when all the compliments he received angered him; and some thin memory of an old man in an attic room came back to him, a man denouncing a world in which all was measured by taste. It was taste that kept such a shape as his fashionable; it was taste that made women send him tributes and confessions of adoration, when all he ever saw in the mirror was the ghastly ruin of God’s work. There was a horror to it, watching the scheme of creation so totally wrecked. He wondered sometimes if those who were gravely ill did not feel this—when they lost the feeling in their limbs, when some fever caused them to lose the hair on their heads. The gravely ill attracted him; freaks attracted him, the midgets and dwarfs he saw sometimes on the little stages about town, cripples, a pair of human beings linked together at the hip laughing and drinking wine as they occupied the same chair. These creatures magnetized him and tortured him; he counted himself one of them, secretly, beneath this magnificent disguise of brocade and lace.
He’d bought every fabric shown to him by the tailor; he’d bought a dozen handkerchiefs, cravats, gloves he didn’t need.
“All the better to render you invisible, tall one,” he’d whispered to the mirror.
Now as he felt this first delicious euphoria from the wine, that immediate alchemy of the spirits and the summer heat, he smiled. “You could be ugly as well, you know,” he said to himself. “You could have lost your voice as Guido did. So let it be.”
* * *
Yet the little torture chamber of the tailor’s shop had put him in mind of his recent arguments with Guido and the Maestro di Cappella, arguments that were not likely to stop. Guido had been very disappointed when Tonio refused the prima donna role in the school’s spring opera, stating again he would never appear in women’s dress. The Maestro had again sought to punish Tonio by giving him a small role. But Tonio had showed no regret.
If anything had disturbed him about the spring opera, it was that his fair-haired friend was not there. For some time now she had not been in chapel either. Nor had he seen her at the Contessa’s last ball. And this was disturbing him very much.
As for performing in female dress, his teachers weren’t going to leave him alone. They did not share his conviction he could make a life for himself playing only men’s parts. Centuries ago, the first castrati had been introduced to play women’s parts; and though women performed everywhere now outside of the Papal States, the castrati were still famous for these roles. But with all major parts in the opera written for high voices, everyone had to be ready for anything, women often playing male leads, too.
Finally, the Maestro di Cappella had called Tonio in.