as the carriage neared the Vatican. And then as if emerging from a thin nightmare which was never dispelled by the waking mind, the sign of a small shop came into view, its letters spelling out for all the world:
SINGERS FOR THE POPE’S
CHAPEL CASTRATED HERE
9
BY THE FIRST of December Rome was obsessed with the new opera. The Contessa Lamberti was to arrive any day, and the great Cardinal Calvino had taken a box for the season for the first time in his life. A great number of the nobility were solidly behind Guido and Tonio, but the abbati had commenced to talk.
And everyone knew it was the abbati who would pronounce the crucial judgment on opening night.
It was they who ruled on plagiarism with loud hisses; it was they who drove the unskilled and the unworthy scurrying from the stage.
Try as they might, the great families who governed the first and second tiers could not save a performance once the abbati had condemned it, and they were already voicing their passionate devotion to Bettichino. Bettichino was the singer of the season; Bettichino was better now than he had been in years past; Bettichino had been marvelous last year at Bologna; Bettichino was a marvel even before he had gone to the German states.
If they mentioned Tonio at all, it was to scoff at this upstart from Venice who let it out he was a patrician and insisted upon using his own name. Who believed all this anyway? Every castrato claimed family once he’d taken on the glow of the footlights, and gave out some foolish story as to why the operation had to be performed.
But then Bettichino’s pedigree was preposterous, too, really. Descent from a German lady and an Italian merchant, his voice preserved by virtue of an unfortunate attack in childhood by a pet goose?
Only snatches of this talk reached Guido, who was scribbling night and day. He went out only to attend to affairs at the Contessa’s villa, having given up all visits to the dilettanti as the day drew near.
But Tonio sent Paolo out to hear what he could.
Paolo, delighted to be free of his tutors, called on Signora Bianchi, who was hard at work on Tonio’s costumes, then hung about with those men working on the backstage machines. In the crowded coffeehouses, he moped about as if he were looking for someone as long as he could.
And when he at last returned, he was red-faced with anger and on the verge of tears.
Tonio did not see him as he came in.
He was engrossed in a letter from Catrina Lisani in which she told him that many Venetians had already left for the Eternal City with no other object than to see him on stage. “The curious will come,” she wrote, “and those who remember you with great love.”
This gave him a mild and thoroughly unpleasant shock. He was living in daily terror of the opening night; sometimes that terror was delicious and exhilarating. Other times it was torture. And now to learn that his countrymen were coming to see it as if it were a spectacle at carnival caused a coldness to creep over him even as he warmed himself by the fire.
Also, it surprised him. He tended to think of himself as having been extracted from the Venetian world as surely as if someone had lifted him out of it, the crowds closing indifferently to fill the space where he had been. And to hear that people were talking there of the opera, talking a great deal of it, gave him an odd feeling that he could not define.
Of course they were talking because Catrina’s husband, old Senator Lisani, had once again tried to have the decree of banishment against Tonio revoked. The government had only confirmed its earlier judgment: Tonio could never again enter the Veneto under pain of death.
But it was the last part of Catrina’s letter that cut rather abruptly to his heart.
His mother had begged to come to Rome. From the first moment she had heard of his engagement at the Teatro Argentina, she had begged to make the journey on her own. Carlo had adamantly refused, and Marianna was now ill and confined to her rooms.
“There is some truth in this matter of illness,” wrote Catrina, “but I trust you know it is illness of the soul. And for all your brother’s weaknesses, he has been most attentive to her; this is the first real rift between man and wife.”