Guido sat silently looking at Tonio, a delicious air washing over him from the open window. It was full of the scent of rain. And an odd thought came to him, random, beautiful, that the winter wind smelled as fresh suddenly as if he were far, far away from the decay of the city, in the open hills of Calabria where he had been born.
But in the grip of this moment, with all of his life before him, the past, the future, he could not speak. He had worked so hard, he was so tired. And his mind was too unaccustomed to such happiness.
Yet he knew he was answering Tonio with his eyes.
“We can do it now, can’t we?” came Tonio’s low whisper. “We can make a life for ourselves if we want it. It’s all there.”
“If we want it? If, Tonio?” Guido said.
The room was so cold. Guido found himself looking past Tonio, at the milky sky. The gray rain clouds appeared substantial and to have their own luminous, almost silver terrain.
“Why do you say ‘if’?” he asked gently.
Tonio’s face had become unspeakably sad.
But this may have been an illusion because when he looked up at Guido again he smiled.
His black eyes crinkled at the corners, and there was such a radiance to his expression that Guido found himself feeling an inevitable sorrow: he could never really merge with Tonio and become part of that beauty himself, forever.
“We’re going to Florence next.” Guido took both Tonio’s hands. “And then who knows where we’ll go? Dresden, maybe, maybe even London. We’ll go anywhere we want!”
And he could feel a tremor passing from himself into Tonio. Tonio was nodding, and it seemed this moment was too perfect really to endure. But Guido was silently and completely thankful for it.
Tonio was now in his own thoughts, and a stillness had settled over him, sealing him off, and what was left to Guido was the vision of his youth and that radiance.
And Guido realized that as he looked at him he was recalling an image of Tonio he had only lately seen, an image painted exquisitely on porcelain which had given him this same overwhelming and almost mysterious sense of Tonio.
He was seized with a small excitement. Almost tenderly, which was not usual for him, he kissed Tonio, and then he rose, and placing his feet on the chill floor, he walked silently across the room and, in the clutter of his desk, found that small porcelain portrait. It was oval in shape, framed in gold filigree, and he could not see it now in the dark. He hesitated, staring at the dim figure on the side of the bed.
And then he put the picture in Tonio’s hands.
“She gave it to me days ago to give to you,” he confessed, and he did not examine the pleasure it gave him now to present this little gift to Tonio.
Tonio looked at it, his neglected hair falling out of its ribbon so that it veiled his face.
“She’s captured you perfectly, hasn’t she? And from memory, completely.” Guido shook his head.
He stared down at the little image, the white face, the black eyes. It was a white flame burning in the center of Tonio’s open palm.
“She’ll be angry with me,” Guido said, “for having forgotten it.”
But he hadn’t forgotten it. He had only waited for a moment such as this when all was quiet and still, for once, and he did not know why it gave him this little satisfaction.
“And how has it been with her?” Tonio whispered. It had a thin sound to it as though he had drawn in his breath with the words, rather than letting it out. “Living alone in Rome, painting portraits.”
“Oh, she is quite the rage.” Guido smiled. “Though lately I think she has been spending much too much time at the opera.”
Guido watched as again Tonio lowered his eyes to the portrait.
At every curtain call it seemed Tonio looked up to Christina’s box and made her a low, graceful bow. And she, bent over the rail, beamed down at him, her hands in a little flurry of clapping.
“But how is it with her!” Tonio pressed. “Does no one look out for her! Does the Contessa not…? I mean…”
Guido waited for a moment and then he turned slowly and went to his desk. He sat down, looking off at the window and the sky that was brightening and changing its shape, devoid of stars, yet revealing