Cardinal’s eyes often enough. And even more often there was sadness. He was in the grip of an “unholy” passion for Tonio. He was a man now divided against himself.
And Tonio could sense that in some way all of these pleasures—poetry, art, music, and their feverish coupling—were bound up with the Cardinal’s notion of those enemies of the soul: the world and the flesh.
Yet the Cardinal prodded him:
“Tell me about the opera, Marc Antonio. Tell me, what is good in it? Tell me why men go.”
How innocent he seemed at such a moment. Tonio could only smile. No one had to tell Tonio of the church’s long battle with the stage and its players, with any and all music that was not sacred, the horror of women performers which had engendered the castrati. All this he had always known.
“What is the value of it?” the Cardinal whispered with narrow eyes. Ah, Tonio thought, he thinks he has imprisoned here some emissary of the devil who will, somehow, guilelessly, tell him the truth. Tonio struggled not to appear defiant:
“My lord,” he said slowly, “I have no answer to your question. I only know the joy that singing has always given me. I only know that music is so beautiful and so powerful that at moments it is like the sea itself, or the sweep of the heavens. God created it surely. God loosed it like the wind into the world.”
The Cardinal was quietly astonished by the answer. He sat back in his chair.
“You speak of God as though you love Him, Marc Antonio,” he said wearily.
His anguish was close to him.
Love God, Tonio thought. Yes, I suppose that I did love Him; all my life whenever I was put in mind of Him I loved Him, in church, at mass, at night when I knelt by my bed with my rosary in my hands. But in Flovigo, three years ago? On that night I do not think I loved Him, nor did I believe in Him.
But Tonio made no answer. He saw the misery engulfing the Cardinal. He knew the night had ended.
And he knew, too, that the Cardinal could not endure this struggle for long. Sin was for the Cardinal its own punishment. And a sorrow came over Tonio when he realized these embraces were only for a short while.
Sooner or later would come the moment when the Cardinal forswore Tonio, and pray it would be done with grace, for if it were done with unkindness…But then Tonio could not conceive of that.
They left each other now in the midst of the dark and sleeping house.
Yet Tonio, impelled by an emotion he had never acknowledged before, stole back to catch the slight yielding figure of the Cardinal in his arms for one last lingering kiss.
And he was troubled by this afterwards, when he considered it, when he put his hand to his own lips. How could he feel affection for one who regarded him as an obscenity, one who saw a castrato as that thing upon which he might lavish all the passion he could not give to women, that thing for backstairs?
It did not matter finally.
In his heart, Tonio knew it did not matter at all.
Daily, he watched in silent awe as the Cardinal went to the altar of the Lord, to work the miracle of the transubstantiation for the faithful, while compounding sacrilege in his own soul. He watched the Cardinal on his way to the Quirinal. He watched him as he went to tend the sick and the poor.
It went to his soul that the man never faltered, no matter how great his secret passion. The man showed to all the love of Christ, the love of his brothers, as if, having conquered pride, he knew all this was eternal and infinitely greater than his own weakness, his own vice.
And soon there was not a single moment when seeing the Cardinal—either resplendent in his crimson robes or stranded in the riches of his rooms—that Tonio did not think only, Yes, for this time we have together, I love him, truly love him, and for as long as he desires me, I want to give him pleasure in every way.
If only it had been enough.
The fact was, incited by disconnected visions of the man who’d taken unavowed possession of him, Tonio belonged to whole men he did not know everywhere, strangers who passed him by day in the Cardinal’s corridors, even ruffians who shot their hot single-minded glances