and we’d even take that wicked old Signora Bianchi. Maybe Guido would bring that handsome Marcello, too. And in every city we’d get some sumptuous lodging, taking our meals together and quarreling together and going to the theater together, and in the days I’d paint and in the nights you’d sing. And if we liked this place better than another, we’d stay and maybe now and then go off in the country to be alone, all of us, and away from everything, as we grew all the more to love and understand one another. Imagine it, Tonio.”
“I should have run away with the opera,” he murmured softly. She bent forward, her golden eyebrows knitted in concentration, and when she saw he wouldn’t repeat it, she kissed his lips.
“We’d take the villa I showed you only a month ago, and that would be our real home. We’d come back when we were weary of foreign tongues, and how Italy would blaze around us! Oh, you can’t imagine how it would be! Guido could write sonatas in the evenings, and Paolo would grow up to be a marvelous singer. He’d make his debut in Rome.
“But we would all belong to each other. No matter what happened, we would have each other, as if we were a great family, a great clan. I’ve dreamed it a thousand times,” she said. “And if life could give you to me after all those dreams of girlhood, then this too can come true.
“What was it you said to Paolo when you took him from Naples?” She paused, watching him intently. “Paolo told me the story himself: you said to him that anything can happen, when you least expect it. And his life is like a fairy tale of palaces and riches and endless song. Tonio, anything can happen, you said it yourself.”
“Innocence,” he said. He bent forward to kiss her. He stroked her face, marveling at that ineffably soft and almost invisible down that covered her cheeks and he touched her lip with the tip of his finger. She could never be more beautiful than she was now.
“No, not innocence,” she protested. “Tonio, this is a choice.”
“Listen to me, beautiful one,” he said almost sharply, his voice a little harder than he wanted it to be. “You love me very much as I love you. But you’ve never really known the love of men; you don’t know their strength, their necessity, their fire. You speak of northern cathedrals, stone and stained glass, of different kinds of beauty: well, I can tell you with men it’s the same, a different kind of love. And in time you’ll come to know that the wide world holds secrets for you in the ordinary acts that others take for granted, the ordinary strength of any man. And don’t you see, when all is said and done, that is what was taken from both of us, that is what was taken from me?
“What do you think it means to me to know that I can never give you what any common laborer might give you, the spark of life inside of you, the child in which we two could be one? And no matter how you protest that you love me now, how can you say the day won’t come when you will see me for precisely what I am!”
He could see he was frightening her. He had hold of her shoulders, so fragile and exquisite, and her lips were trembling, her eyes almost incandescent on the edge of tears.
“You don’t know what you are,” she said, “or you would not say this to me.”
“I’m not talking about respectability anymore,” he countered. “I can believe you now when you say you don’t care for marriage, that it doesn’t matter to you if they talk about you, and vilify you for loving a eunuch singer. You’ve convinced me you’re strong enough to turn your back on that. But you don’t know what it’s like to hold a man in your arms, and do you think I could bear to see the look in your eyes when you were done with me, and ready for others….”
“Is it so wrong of me to find in you a gentleness uncommon in men!” she demanded. “Is it so strange I prefer your fire to another fire that might consume me? Can’t you see what it would be, our life together! Why should I want what anyone can give me when I can have you! After you,