the door quickly, and stood back in the darkness to watch the Count’s bravos pass.
Now the moment had come.
He entered the lower door of the palazzo and seeing a torch blazing on the landing, stood still looking up. The stairwell might have been a street, it was so neglected, so cold. And gazing at it, he let his mind empty of thought. He knew what thoughts would be there, too, if he let them in; that for three years, no, four, he had not held a woman in his arms, save this woman. And that he could not escape what lay ahead of him, though in truth he had no idea how it might end.
At one point, he told himself in a low humming inarticulate way that this would be a resolution. He would not find her beautiful; he would not find her sweet. He would be freed of her then.
Yet he did not move.
And he was quite unprepared when the door opened and two Englishmen entered, talking in their native tongue, who immediately greeted him in a convivial way. They seemed positively in awe of his height, though they themselves were slightly taller than Italians tended to be. He was mortified. They stared at him because he was hideous, he was perfectly sure of it, and coldly he watched them go up the stairs.
It occurred to him that if there had been a mirror near about he might have looked in it and found the overgrown child he saw now and then; or perhaps once and for all a monster. He was musing. Sadness was coming over him, weakening him, and it occurred to him that it would be so easy for him to go to the Count tonight and this girl, then finally insulted by him, would shun him from now on.
He was slightly amazed when he put his foot on the first step and went up.
The door to her studio was open, and the first thing that he saw was the firmament, a pure heaven of blackness and vivid stars.
The room itself was vast and barren and unlit, and there were these great windows reaching high above him, straight forward and to his right, and a broad slanted pane of glass set into the ceiling which opened up even more of the night.
His steps sounded hollow; and for a moment he felt himself losing the surety of his balance, as though the sky surrounding this little pinnacle of earth in the midst of Rome were moving as it might about a listing ship.
But the stars were wondrous to him. He could see the constellations in magnificent clarity, and he allowed himself in this long moment to breathe deeply of the cool fresh air which came from all about him, and to turn very slowly under the heavens, as if he had nothing to fear in the world, and he felt himself suddenly small and very free.
It was only after this that the objects of the room revealed themselves, a table, chairs, and paintings mounted on their easels with dark figures described against whiteness, and clusters of bottles and jars, the smell of turpentine cutting through ever so suddenly the deeper more delicious smell of painters’ oils.
And then he saw her, Christina, shrouded in shadow as she stood against the farthest corner of the windows, her head covered with the loose folds of a hood.
A fear gripped him, as debilitating as any he had ever known. And all the difficulties he had envisioned came to plague him: what would he say to her, how would they begin, and what was to pass between them, what was taken for granted, why were they both here?
He felt a tremor in his limbs, and glad of the darkness, he bowed his head. Sorrow was coming into this lofty open room; sorrow was walling it up and extinguishing the night itself. It seemed to him then this girl was too innocent and the memory of her beauty collected in his mind to form an almost ethereal shape.
But in reality a dark mysterious form approached him, and out of this hollow place came her voice saying his name.
“Tonio,” she said, as though some intimacy already connected them, and he found himself touching his own lip as he heard her speak, her voice low and almost sweet.
He could see her face now under the hood, and the hood itself struck some note of terror as if reminding him of those friars forever accompanying the