at the bowed head, at those thick dusty curls. And then he lifted Guido, who started and then moved slowly and clumsily towards his bed. Old Nino came quietly in and raised the cover over Guido after he had taken off his shoes.
Tonio stood staring at him, then he turned and went into his own rooms.
He shut his eyes and felt himself with his arms around the Cardinal, his face pressed to that lean and unyielding body, feeling the tumult in it, feeling that coarse though perfect skin. His mouth opened on its secrets again until he could stand this no longer and he commenced to pace the room.
A rhythm caught him up and took him in circles until finally he threw open the window and bent far out over the ledge of it so he could drink up the air. A perfectly round fountain sparkled below. And the pattern of the disruption of the water began to absorb him when he realized he could not hear the splash of it from here.
It would never be the same between him and Guido!
And surely Guido had known this; what had Guido done? He had lived in a locked room with his lover, and Guido had sent him out of it, Guido had opened the door. All that gentle complexity, that bruising tenderness had paled and left him with no savor; he could invoke nothing of it suddenly to quiet him and reassure him; it was old, it was remembered already as if some limitless time had passed. He had been too scorched by the Cardinal’s fire.
He would have wept now. But he was too tired and empty and full of some early morning chill for all the warmth of the brightening sun.
Rome seemed not a place so much as an idea as he knelt at the window, his forehead pressed against the sill. “What is the lesson in it?” the Cardinal had asked.
Well, for him, he knew the lesson. That he was losing Guido. And hungering for the Cardinal, hungering for that crushing passion, he knew he would do anything so that Guido would not know. The genius of it was to find Guido in the losing of him, and hold him forever in a new embrace.
6
HE HAD BECOME DROWSY since he sat down in this room. There was a fragrance here, and a quality of light that reminded him of some close place, full of fabric and paste jewels, where he had once been, and he’d been alone there and feeling some delicious warmth from the sun on his bare shoulders and his back.
But he wouldn’t allow himself to remember this. It was not important. What was important was to complete what had been begun.
And this woman was waiting for him, obviously thinking that she must assist him, her maids like blackbirds clustered on the edges of the room, their small brown hands full of business, gathering bits of ribbon or thread here, straightening a wig on its wooden head. It amused him suddenly that she expected him to strip off his male attire here and hold out his limbs for her as if she were his nurse.
He was leaning on his elbow, distracted slightly by his image in the shaded glass. His face looked so curiously blank to him most of the time, no matter how grotesque were his thoughts. It was as if the soft feminine flesh that had grown over it (pinch it between two fingers, it was as resilient as a woman’s) had robbed him of expression, made him eternally young.
But how am I to close this bodice, he was thinking, how am I to tie up these skirts? Take it all back to the Cardinal’s palazzo and give it over to that toothless old man who, even if he has fathered a dozen children in some narrow hovel on a back street, knows nothing of women’s dress?
It was hot in this room, the noises of Rome clattered and hummed beyond the shuttered windows, and light lay in bars over this immense silk skirt.
She seemed to have sensed his hesitation. She clapped her hands for attention and sent her women out.
“Signore…” She bore down on him, reaching for his cape. He felt its weight lifted from his shoulders. “I have dressed the most famous singers in the world,” she said. “I do not merely make clothes! I am a maker of illusions. Allow me to show you, Signore. When you look in that glass again you