Rome only a few days now, returning before Christmas to spend the opera season here.
It was for Guido and Tonio that she was doing this, as she much preferred the south, and Guido was grateful for her decision to come.
But when he saw they might have no opportunity to be alone together today, he had become incensed. He was almost rude.
The Contessa, surprised at this but understanding, took him with her back to the palazzo where she was stopping as a guest. And once they were in bed, his hunger for her astonished them both.
They had never spoken of it, but it was she who led the way in their couplings. Fearless and loving with her mouth and hands, she had always enjoyed teasing Guido and hardening him for the act. In fact, she treated Guido exactly as if she owned him. She caressed him as if he were a child, possessively, with little gasps, as though he were infinitely enticing to her and someone of whom she hadn’t the slightest fear.
Guido liked the attention. Almost everyone else was afraid of him, and he didn’t care what she thought.
On some inarticulate level, he knew she was purely symbolic to him. She was woman, and Tonio was Tonio with whom he was miserably in love.
He reasoned it was always so with men and women, and men and men, and if he ever found himself thinking about it, he dismissed it at once from his mind.
But this afternoon, he behaved somewhat like an animal. And the new unfamiliar bedchamber, his odd behavior, and their brief separation from each other, all conspired to make the love play especially rich.
They did not get up right away. They drank coffee, a little liqueur, and they talked.
Silently, Guido wondered why he and Tonio were so at war. Their quarrel this morning over the question of a female role had reached an ugly climax, when Guido had produced the contract Tonio had signed with Ruggerio in which it was plainly stated Tonio had been hired as the prima donna. Tonio, shoving it aside, felt betrayed.
But Guido saw the first signs of defeat in him, only to be angered moments later when Tonio insisted that he would never take a stage name. He would be known to the audience as Tonio Treschi. They could call him Tonio if they must have a single name.
Guido was furious. Why such an irregularity? Tonio would be accused of haughtiness. Didn’t he realize that most people would never believe he was a Venetian patrician? They would think this an affectation on his part.
Tonio was clearly wounded.
After a long moment he said softly, “I don’t care what people believe. It has nothing to do with where I was born, or who I might have been. My name is Tonio Treschi. That is all.”
“All right, but you will perform the role I write for you,” Guido had said. “You are being paid as much as or more than experienced singers. You were brought here to play a female part. Your name, whether it’s Tonio Treschi or anything else, will be on the posters in big letters when you’re nobody. And it’s your youth and your looks as well as anything else that will bring them in. The audience expects to see you in female dress.”
He could not look at Tonio after these words were spoken.
“I don’t believe that,” Tonio had replied softly. “You have told me for three years the Romans are the strictest critics. Now you tell me they want to see a boy in skirts. Have you ever looked at those old engravings of torture instruments? Iron masks and manacles, veritable suits of pain? That is what female dress would be to me, and you say: ‘Put it on.’ I say I will not.”
Guido couldn’t understand any of this. He had performed female roles a dozen times before he was eighteen. But the complications of Tonio’s mind always discouraged him. He could only follow one path:
“You must give in.”
How could anyone love singing as Tonio loved it, how could anyone love performance as Tonio loved it, and not do everything that was required?
But he did not tell the Contessa these things.
He could not confide to her the worst part of it; his coldness to Tonio, and the recrimination of Tonio’s forbearance.
Instead, he listened to the Contessa, who had troubles of her own.
She had failed to persuade the widow of her Sicilian cousin, that pretty little English girl who painted so beautifully, to