He seated himself before an open score, and dipping his pen quickly, he lifted it to write.
For a long time, he stared at the marks on the parchment. He stared at the quill in his hand. Then he laid it down with a careful motion, as if he did not wish to disturb so much as the dust in the air.
His eyes moved over the objects of the room. And tightening his right arm around his waist, as if to fortify himself for some terrible assault, he rested his head against the back of the chair and closed his eyes.
5
TONIO WAS OUTSIDE the Cardinal’s door.
At the heart of this lay a painful conviction that he had brought it upon himself. He did not know why exactly, but he felt it was his own fault.
Even when old Nino had first come for him, saying His Eminence could not sleep, Tonio had felt an elusive excitement that the great man was calling for him.
There was something a little odd about the servant’s behavior, the manner in which he hastened to remove Tonio’s frock coat, offering him another of his more richly embroidered coats to put on. There had been a furtiveness to the old man’s gestures, as if he must walk on tiptoe to some purpose, as if he must hurry, as if neither of them were to be seen.
From his pocket he had drawn an old comb, uneven and broken, for Tonio’s hair.
Tonio had not realized at first he was in a bedchamber. He’d seen only the tapestries on the wall: antique figures moved through the Hunt with a score of those tiny animals woven into the flowers and the leaves. The candlelight showed oddly abstracted faces, men and women on horseback, gazing into time from the corner of an eye.
Next he had seen the harpsichord, a small, portable instrument, with its single manual of black keys. The Cardinal was beyond it, a collection of soft movements and sounds, clothed in a robe that was the same color as the darkness, hazy as it was from the few tapers that seemed embedded in the rich hangings of this room.
The Cardinal’s words had no beginning to them, no end. And there had been a pounding in Tonio, a sense of the forbidden, though he did not know why. The middle of a statement had penetrated to him, something about song, and the power of song, and it seemed he wanted Tonio to sing.
Tonio sat down. He touched the keys; the notes were short and exquisitely delicate and in tune. Then he commenced an aria, one of Guido’s sweetest and saddest, a meditation on love from a serenade which he had never publicly performed. This he liked more than the music he’d sung in Naples, more than the more tempestuous writing Guido had done for him of late. The words, from some unknown poet, used the yearning for the beloved as a yearning for the spiritual, and Tonio liked them very much.
Once as he was singing, he had looked up. He had seen the Cardinal’s face, its singularity, its almost carved perfection, infused with that immediately apparent feeling that made the man so visible and magnetic wherever he was. He was not speaking a word, yet his pleasure was obvious, and Tonio found himself trying to make this song as nearly perfect as he could. Some little memory was coming back to him, or if it was not memory he was experiencing a familiar feeling of well-being as he played alone in this room for this man.
He had paused at the end, thinking, What can I sing that will delight the Cardinal most? And when the Cardinal himself set a jeweled cup of Burgundy wine in front of him, it was then he realized they were completely alone.
“My lord, allow me.” He’d risen, seeing the Cardinal fill his own drink.
But when he had reached for the narrow-throated pitcher, the Cardinal had taken hold of him and brought him forward until they stood pressed against one another and he could feel the Cardinal’s heart.
All was confusion in him; he’d felt the man’s strength beneath his dark robe and the hoarseness of his breathing, and sensed that the Cardinal was in perfect torment as he let him go.
Tonio remembered backing away. He remembered that the Cardinal was then standing before the window looking out on distant lights. There was described there the nearby rise of