eyes upon you, I said, ‘There is a man who has a reason to be alive.’ But I haven’t your faith, my lord, nor do I suffer from the lack of it, and I do not have your guilt.”
This seemed to agitate the Cardinal greatly, and he rose again and took Tonio’s head in his hands. The gesture disturbed Tonio, but Tonio did not move away. He felt the Cardinal press his thumbs softly into the flesh just beneath his eyes.
“Marc Antonio, there are men who believe in no god,” the Cardinal averred, “and yet would condemn what passed between us as unnatural, as calculated to bring ruin to us both.”
“My lord, why should it bring ruin!” Tonio demanded. He resented all of this terribly. He wanted for the Cardinal simply to send him away. “You are speaking a tongue foreign to me,” he said. “This brought pain to you because you had made your vow to Christ. But had there been no vow, what would it have mattered? Our union was sterile, my lord. I cannot procreate. You cannot procreate with me. So, what does it matter what we do with one another, the affection, the warmth we feel? It did not bring ruin to your day-to-day life. It certainly brought no ruin to mine. It was love finally, and what is the ruin in lover?”
Tonio was angry now, but he was not sure why.
He was vaguely aware that once, a long time ago, Guido had spoken words to him that echoed these same sentiments in a much simpler way.
And it was such a vast question that he could not feel the dimensions of it, and he did not like this. It put him painfully in mind of the fragility of all ideas.
There lingered in him a numbing sense of his mother’s loneliness, that empty bedchamber in which she’d spent her youth, paying for an exuberant passion that had brought him into the world. And there was in him a devastating anger against the old man who had shut her up there in the name of honor and right.
And it is I who paid the highest price for all of it, he thought. Yet even in his darkest moments he could not really condemn her lying in Carlo’s arms. And there were times when even in clearest rage, it tore at him like a vulture’s claw that he, Tonio, might one day drive her back into that empty room again. Widow’s black. He felt himself shudder and strained to conceal it, moving his eyes away.
To this very day he could be driven from a room by the common sight of a moth beating against a pane. He could not even bring himself to take it in his hands and free it, that moth, for thinking of her in that bedchamber alone.
But in the arms of others, he had known a healing satisfaction so powerful it had been for him his sanctifying grace.
Sin, that was malice. That was cruelty. It was those men in Flovigo annihilating his unborn sons.
But his love for Guido, his love for the Cardinal, no one would ever convince him this was sin.
Not even in that locked carriage with the toughened and dark-skinned youth had there been sin. Nor had there been sin in Venice in the gondola where little Bettina had put her head against his chest.
Yet he knew it was impossible for him to express these sentiments to a man who was a prince of the church. He could not unite two worlds: the one infinitely powerful and bound to revelation as well as tradition; the other inevitable and irrepressible, holding sway in every shadowy corner of the earth.
It angered him that the Cardinal asked him to do it. And when he saw the defeat and sadness in the Cardinal’s eyes, he felt cut off from the man as though they’d known each other intimately a long, long time ago.
“I cannot account for you,” the Cardinal whispered. “You once told me that music was to you something natural that God had loosed into this world. And you, for all your exotic beauty, seem natural, like the blossoms on the vine. Yet you are evil to me, and for you I would have damned my soul for all eternity. I do not understand.”
“Ah, then it is not from me that you seek answers,” Tonio said.
Something flared in the Cardinal’s eyes. He was staring at Tonio’s placid face.