to be protracted forever. Gino’s skin was creamy and sweet; his mouth was strong and his fingers afraid of nothing. He played gently with Guido’s ears, he hurt the nipples of his chest just a little, and kissed the hair between his legs, only working with the greatest patience towards the more brutal emblems of passion.
In the nights after, Gino shared his new companion with Alfredo and then Alonso; and sometimes in the dark, they lay tangled two or three together. The embrace of one above and another underneath was not uncommon, and as Alfredo’s sharp jabs pushed Guido to the edge of pain, Alonso’s hard, ravenous mouth drew him into ecstasy.
But the day came when Guido was lured out of these exquisitely modulated encounters for the more violent and unloving thrusts of the “regular” students. He was not afraid of whole men, never guessing how much his menacing looks had always kept them at a distance.
Yet he did not like these hairy and grunting young men very much either.
There was something brutal and simple about them that was finally uninteresting.
He wanted eunuchs, toothsome and delicious experts of the body.
Or he wanted women.
And as might happen, or might not, it was with women he found the greatest approximation of satisfaction. It was approximate only because he did not love. Otherwise it was engulfing. Little girls of the streets, poor, never clever, these were his favorites, girls delighted with the golden coin, and very fond of his boyish looks and thinking his clothes and his manner splendid. He stripped them quickly in lodgings let for the purpose over local taverns, and they never cared he was a eunuch, hoping for a little tenderness perhaps; and if not, he never saw them again for there were always others.
But as his fame increased, doors opened to Guido everywhere. After suppers at which he’d sung, lovely ladies spirited him upstairs to secret chambers.
He grew accustomed to the silk sheets, the gilded cherubs cavorting above oval mirrors and frothy canopies.
And by his seventeenth year, he had a lovely contessa, twice married and very rich, for a secret and sometime mistress. Often her carriage collected him at the stage door. Or after hours of practice he would throw open the windows of his attic room, to see it lumbering below beneath the heavy tree branches.
She was old to him then, past her prime, but hot and full of tantalizing urgency. In his arms, she blushed scarlet to the nipples of her breasts, her eyes half mast, and he felt himself transported.
These were rich times, blissful times. Guido was almost ready for Rome and his first lead role there. At eighteen, he stood five feet ten inches tall, with the lung power to fill a vast theater with the chilling purity of his unaccompanied voice.
And that was the year he lost his voice forever.
8
THE PIAZZA, it was a small victory, but for the next few days Tonio was ecstatic. The sky seemed a limitless blue, and all up and down the canal the striped awnings were aflutter in the warm breeze, and the window boxes crowded with fresh spring flowers. Even Angelo seemed to enjoy himself, though he looked frail in his thin black cassock, and slightly uncertain. He was quick to point out that all Europe was pouring in for the coming Senza. Everywhere they turned, they heard foreign voices.
The cafés, sprawling out of their small shabby rooms into the arcades, were aswarm with rich and poor alike, the serving girls moving to and fro in their short skirts and bright red vests, their arms deliciously naked. One glimpse and Tonio felt a hardening passion. They were unspeakably lovely to him with their ribbons and curls, their stockinged ankles well exposed, and if ladies dressed like that, he thought, it would mean the end of civilization.
Each day he pushed Angelo to stay a little longer, to roam a little farther.
Nothing, it seemed, could match the piazza itself for common spectacle; there were the storytellers under the arches of the church gathering their attentive little crowds, patricians in full robes, while ladies, free of the black vesti they always wore to feast day church, roamed about in lavish printed-silk fashions; even the beggars had their dim fascination.
But there was also the Merceria, and pulling Angelo with him under the clock tower with the golden lion of San Marco, Tonio was soon hurrying through this marble-paved street where all the trades of Venice mingled. Here were the lacemakers,